This chapter considers how and in what contexts the reasonable person standard was applied by the selected colonial courts of the British Empire. The key question is whether the reasonable person imported from England remained English in substance – whether it continued to resemble a man on the Clapham omnibus – or the courts tailored the standard to the specific circumstances before them. As the first section shows, there are many cases in which the reasonable person was equated with an Englishman. This suggests that the standard was static in nature. However, the second section of the chapter complicates this conclusion by introducing numerous cases and settings in which the standard was adapted to specific, local contexts – sometimes so successfully that local variants of it developed. Drawing together the first two sections, the final part considers the nexus between a standard’s resemblance to the people to whom it is applied and the authority of law.

The trial of Alice Kyteler in Kilkenny, Ireland, in 1324 took place as the result of charges made against this business woman by members of her own family. Richard Ledrede, bishop of Ossory, was keen to obtain her condemnation for demonic association, on the charges listed in this excerpt from the account of her trial which include sacrifices and the boiling of disgusting potions.

This chapter argues that the growth of litigation after 1550 is not an indicator of a decline of enmity among the social elite. In fact, the opposite is the case: social change generated new enmities which were fought using legal writs. The late sixteenth-century explosion of violence was not an indicator of ‘backwardness’ but a consequence of status anxiety as Renaissance ideas about merit and worth challenged traditional ideas about hierarchy and virtue. In the sixteenth century a great deal of conflict was generated by anxiety over reputation and the requirement to prove one’s status and place in the social order. The literature on the culture of enmity in Germany is arguably the richest in any European language. This is largely because south-west Germany and the Rhineland were the epicentres of the European witch craze. The ubiquitous recourse to magic was not just to snare a lover or restore health but also to take revenge. The records generated by witch hunts shed light on village disputes and the politics of enmity more widely. This chapter sets out to establish the parameters of the culture of enmity, to discuss some of its rituals and practices, and to show the ways in which the social elite attempted to distinguish itself from ordinary folk by adopting new forms of dispute resolution.

Chapter 6 examines the role of mobility in Veracruz’s distinctive social and cultural landscape, focusing on how individuals moving between Veracruz and other ports established intercolonial networks and developed informal religious communities. In a series of case studies based on investigations of the Mexican Inquisition, the chapter considers border-crossing associations of free-black women, using their cases to demonstrate both Veracruz’s remarkable religious diversity and the occasionally surprising mobility of its residents. While heterodoxy was undoubtedly common in the early modern Atlantic, I demonstrate how the Mexican-Caribbean world conditioned particular religious practices in Veracruz. Describing Veracruz as a spiritual borderland, I argue people from a variety of backgrounds understood the city as a place where the ability to come and go with relative ease created overlapping systems of power and, consequently, space to articulate distinctive ideologies.

This book is about magic and people. Magic, in one form or another, is a constant in all societies across the world and throughout time. The place it inhabits in society, and how those who practise it are treated, are the variables; the fact of its presence is rarely a novelty. Despite this, the study of magic has largely been quartered separately from other lines of historical inquiry, as a strange outlier to the mainstream of political, social, economic, or archival discourse. This is an inaccurate and unhelpful interpretation of a fundamental part of human lived experience.

This chapter drills into the parish records of Little and Great Clacton to reveal new information about the Selles family, accused of witchcraft as tensions around child-rearing and illegitimacy reached a peak in a second village. It shows how parish records are vital to an understanding of the life circumstances of ordinary villagers and how much a name, a relatuonship or a life event can tell us about the processes of witch accusation.

This chapter ranges over the St Osyth lndscape, mapping its haunted spots and the location of key encounters with familiar spirits, particularly those said to belong to Elizabeth Bennet, Margerie Sammon, Ales Hunt and Joan Pechey. It introduces further key figures from the wider Darcy estate and shows how more suspects were drawn into the witch hunt. It argues that the history and features of a landscape can tell us much about the origin of local witchcraft fears.

This chapter tells the story of the witch hunts arrival in Little Oakley and Beaumont cum Moze, and reconstructs the life of the sole suspect there, Annis Herd. Using parish and manorial court records, and the records of the archdeaconry court, it shows how Annis interacted with the churchwardens of several parishes, her inter-related neighbours and the Beaumont Rector, Richard Harrison, leading to her accusation.

This chapter examines how the witch hunt that began in St Osyth spread east to the three Soken villages, Thorpe, Kirby and Walton. It draws on manorial court records of these linked villages to reveal new information about the suspects and their accusers and it discusses their economic rivalries over resources and land.

Magic is a constant across the world and throughout time. The place it inhabits in society and how those who practise it are treated are the variables; its presence is never a novelty. While witchcraft is recognised as a phenomenon of the medieval and early modern periods, service magic – performed to a useful end in exchange for a fee, and more common than witchcraft – has been overlooked. This book gathers over 700 instances of magic use in England between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries to demonstrate the entrenched nature of service magic in premodern society, and explore how it was perceived and incorporated into daily life. Service magic was well established by the time of the witch trials, and was recognised as a useful tool from at least the fourteenth century. It was used to meet needs that nothing else could address, like healing the chronically sick, finding lost goods, ending poverty by locating buried treasure, and kindling love. Though its use was technically illicit, first treated as a moral crime and then a secular one from the mid-sixteenth century, for most people magic was an accepted and even welcome aspect of everyday life.

This chapter examines the origin of the St Osyth witchcraft accusations in the strained relationship between Grace Thurlowe, a servant at St Osyth Priory, and the cunning woman Ursley Kempe. It reconstructs the network of magical healers in the locality, suggesting that competition and sensitivities around child-rearing and illegitimacy were important in sparking suspicion, as well as several recent deaths of key players in the village.

An emotive, haunting story of a community torn apart, the Essex witch accusations and trial of 1581-2 are, taken together, one of the pivotal instances of that malign and destructive wave of misogynistic persecution which periodically broke over early modern England. Yet, for all their importance in the overall study of witchcraft, the so-called witches of St Osyth have largely been overlooked by scholars. Marion Gibson now sets right that neglect. Using fresh archival sources – and investigating not just the village itself, but also its neighbouring Elizabethan hamlets and habitations – the author offers revelatory new insights into the sixteen women and one man accused of sorcery while asking wider, provocative questions about the way history is recollected and interpreted. Combining landscape detective work, a reconstruction of lost spaces and authoritative readings of newly identified key documents, Gibson skilfully unlocks the poignant personal histories of those denied the chance to speak for themselves.

This chapter explores the trial of the St Osyth witches and the witches from surrounding communities, and follows them to their judgement and - in some cases - their deaths. It examines the creation of the news pamphlet that recounted the story of the witch trial, and suggests an author for that famous account, showing how it shaped the story of the St Osyth witches that has been handed down to modern readers.