Portrait of a 17th century English Village House

Following on from Sandra's post about domestic interiors in Holland, I am lucky enough to live in an English village which has many houses still in existence dating from the 17^th century. The evidence for this is written above the doorways in “datestones”, the initials of the original occupier and his wife, thoughtfully carved in stone along with the date. 

In North Lancashire most houses were built of cruck (oak arch) frames with wattle and daub infill, and thatched with straw, or even bracken if you were poor. The average house consisted of four bays (the space between the cruck arches), but some as few as one. Chimneys slowly appeared in the 17^th century, at first as a mere projection from the gable end to keep smoke and fire from the thatch. 

Cruck buildings survived until the Victorian Era -
The Blacksmith's 

The Mourholme Local History Society has done much work to uncover the history of the village and has trawled through Wills and probate inventories, and in my research for The Gilded Lily I referred often to their book “How it was – A North Lancashire Parish in the 17^th Century” which gives details of these bequests.

In the first half of the century the position of rooms in a house was defined by their relationship to the main room, known as the firehouse or the bodystead. In the second half of the century side-rooms are defined by name as buttery (a place for keeping, not making, butter) kitchen, bed-chamber, wash-house. The main room was later described as the parlour or bower. The increase in this standard of living had come earlier in the south but was much slower to spread northwards.

Most village houses were furnished simply. Items mentioned in inventories include

Bedstocks or beadsteads with chaff or feather mattresses.These were mostly 'tester' beds with curtains that could be drawn to provide warmth and privacy.

Tables – surprisingly these feature only in 21% of inventories in the first half of the century, rising to 60% in the second. There were however “trests” – a trestle with a board that could be erected and removed to save space. (The idea of the board survives in the English language as the expression "Bed and Board" or 'boarding house' and even 'boarding school.')

Tableware – from pewter or wood, with wood or horn spoons.

Chairs, stools and ‘formes’ – simple wooden furniture. When I say simple, the construction was simple, but often decoration was added afterwards by the householder resulting in quite elaborately carved items.

An Ark storage box

A man's chair, women's chairs had no arms
so they could knit and sew

Arks – mentioned in half of the inventories were bins made of split wood and pegged together.They were used for storing flour or meal, and could be taken apart for cleaning.

Almeryes – a type of cupboard with a pierced door. Thomas Greenwood who lived in the village had what he called a ‘Cat Mallison’ to keep meat and cheese in. As a maleson meant a curse, we assume it was to keep the cat from the meat!

Brandreth and cauldron – a brandreth was an iron trivet to set over the fire. The cauldron could be set on this, or on rackencrooks (an adjustable hanger from the ceiling).The fires burned peat turves cut from the local marshes, most inventories include stocks of peat for burning.

Quishons (cushions) and other soft furnishings are mentioned frequently; beds were usually draped four posters with bolsters and pillows, though very few inventories mention curtains – I can only assume shutters were employed against the weather.

From these simple rural surroundings in rural Westmorland Ella and Sadie Appleby, the two sisters in The Gilded Lily, are on the run. They set off for London, with only vague ideas that it might be some sort of promised land of milk and honey, that there would be glamour and fortune awaiting them there. For Charles II had returned to the throne and London was at its most glittering and fashionable. What better way to see 17th century London than through their amazed eyes. As a writer I wanted to know how they would cope, and even more intriguingly, how London would change them.

The Lady’s Slipper is out now. The Gilded Lily will be released in the UK Sept 13^th and the US Nov 26^th 2012. www.deborahswift.blogspot.com

furniture pictures from www.periodoakantiques.com and www.onlinegalleries.com

The Pendle Witches and Their Magic: Part Two

Blacko Tower, a Victorian folly (ca 1890) near Malkin Tower Farm, Lancashire



The crimes of which Mother Demdike and her fellow witches were accused dated back years before the 1612 trial. The trial itself might have never happened had it not been for King James I’s obsession with the occult. Until his reign, witch persecutions had been relatively rare in England compared with Scotland and Continental Europe. But James’s book Daemonologie presented the idea of a vast conspiracy of satanic witches threatening to undermine the nation. Shakespeare wrote his play Macbeth, which presents the first depiction of a witches’ coven in English drama, in James I’s honour.

To curry favour with his monarch, Lancashire magistrate Roger Nowell of Read Hall arrested and prosecuted no fewer than twelve individuals from the Pendle region and even went to the far fetched extreme of accusing them of conspiring their very own Gunpowder Plot to blow up Lancaster Castle. Two decades before the more famous Matthew Hopkins began his witch-hunting career in East Anglia, Roger Nowell had set himself up as witchfinder general of Lancashire.

What do we actually know about Mother Demdike? At the time of her trial she appears as a widow and matriarch, living in a place called Malkin Tower with her widowed daughter Elizabeth Device, and her three grandchildren, James, Alizon, and Jennet. Her clan was very poor and supported themselves by a combination of begging and by the family business of cunning craft. The trial transcripts mention that local farmer John Nutter of Bull Hole Farm near Newchurch hired Demdike to bless his sick cattle. Interestingly John Nutter chose not to testify against her family in the trial.

Demdike’s family at Malkin Tower had a powerful rival in the form of Chattox, another widow and charmer, who lived a few miles away at West Close near Fence. Chattox allegedly bewitched to death her landlord’s son, Robert Nutter of Greenhead, for attempting to rape her daughter, Anne Redfearne. For social historians it’s interesting to see how having a fearsome reputation as a cunning woman could be the only true power a poor woman could hope to wield.

Unfortunately this could also backfire as it did with Demdike’s granddaughter, Alizon Device, who exchanged angry words with a pedlar outside Colne in March, 1612. Moments later the pedlar collapsed and suddenly went stiff and lame on one half of his body and lost the power of speech. Today we would clearly recognise this as a stroke. But the pedlar and several witnesses were convinced that Alizon had lamed her victim with witchcraft. Even she seemed to believe this herself, immediately falling to her knees and begging his forgiveness. This unfortunate event triggered the arrest of Alizon and her grandmother. Alizon wasted no time in implicating Chattox, her grandmother’s rival, and Chattox’s daughter, Anne Redfearne.

The four accused witches were interrogated by Roger Nowell, and then force-marched to Lancaster Castle, walking over fells and moorland. Both Demdike and Chattox, whose real name was Anne Whittle, were frail and elderly. It was amazing they survived the journey. In Lancaster they were handed over to the sadistic Thomas Covell, the gaoler who reputedly slashed the ears off Edward Kelly, friend of John Dee, when he was arrested on the charge of forgery. The women were chained to a ring in the floor in the bottom of the Well Tower. Although torture was officially forbidden in England, gaolers were allowed to starve and beat their prisoners at will. Being chained to a ring in the floor and kept in constant darkness would certainly feel like torture for those who had to endure it.

On Good Friday following the arrests, worried family and friends met at Malkin Tower to discuss what they would do in regard to this tragic situation. Constable John Hargreaves came to write down the names of everyone present and later Roger Nowell made further arrests, accusing these people of convening at Malkin Tower on Good Friday for a witches’ sabbat, something he would have read about in Daemonologie. The arrests didn’t stop until he had the mythical thirteen to make up the alleged coven. Twelve were kept at Lancaster and one, Jennet Preston who lived over the county line in Gisburn, Yorkshire, was sent to York. Apart from Chattox and Demdike and their immediate families, none of these newly arrested people had previous reputations as cunning folk. It seemed they were just concerned friends and neighbours who were caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Kept in such horrible conditions, Demdike died in prison before she came to trial, thus cheating the hangman. The others experienced a different fate.

The first to be arrested, Alizon was the last to be tried at Lancaster in August, 1612. Her final recorded words on the day before she was hanged for witchcraft are a moving tribute to her grandmother’s power as a healer. Roger Nowell, the prosecutor, brought John Law, the pedlar she had allegedly lamed, before her. Again Alizon begged the man’s forgiveness for her perceived crime against him. John Law, in return, said that if she had the power to lame him, she must also have the power to heal him. Alizon regrettably told him that she wasn’t able to, but if her grandmother, Old Demdike had lived, she could and would have healed him.

Mother Demdike is dead but not forgotten. By the mid-17th century, Demdike’s name became a local byword for witch, according to John Harland and T.T. Wilkinson’s Lancashire Folklore. In 1627, only fifteen years after the Pendle Witch Trial, a woman named Dorothy Shaw of Skippool, Lancashire, was accused by her neighbour of being a “witch and a Demdyke.”

History is a fluid thing that continually shapes the present. Long after her demise, Mother Demdike and her fellow Pendle Witches endure, their story and spirit woven into the living landscape, its weft and warp, like the stones and the streams that cut across the moors. Enthralled by their true history, I wrote my novel, Daughters of the Witching Hill, dedicated to their memory. Other books have been written about the Pendle Witches, but mine turns the tables, telling the story from Demdike and Alizon Device’s point of view. I longed to give these women what their world denied them—their own voice. Their voices deserve to finally be heard.

Sources:

Owen Davies, Popular Magic: Cunning-folk in English History (Hambledon Continuum)
Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400-1580 (Yale)
Malcolm Gaskill, Witchfinders: A Seventeenth Century English Tragedy (John Murray)
John Harland and T.T. Wilkinson, Lancashire Folklore (Kessinger Publishing)
King James I, Daemonologie, available online
Jonathan Lumby, The Lancashire Witch-Craze (Carnegie)
Margaret Murray, The Witch Cult in Western Europe, available online
Edgar Peel and Pat Southern, The Trials of the Lancashire Witches (Nelson)
Robert Poole, ed., The Lancashire Witches: Histories and Stories (Manchester University Press)
Thomas Potts, The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster, available online
Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (Penguin)
John Webster, The Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft (Ams Pr Inc)
Emma Wilby, Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits (Sussex Academic Press)
Benjamin Woolley, The Queen’s Conjuror: The Life and Magic of Dr. Dee (Flamingo)

The Pendle Witches and Their Magic: Part 1

In 1612, in one of the most meticulously documented witch trials in English history, seven women and two men from Pendle Forest in Lancashire, Northern England were executed. In court clerk Thomas Potts’s account of the proceedings, The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster, published in 1613, he pays particular attention to the one alleged witch who escaped justice by dying in prison before she could come to trial. She was Elizabeth Southerns, more commonly known by her nickname, Old Demdike. According to Potts, she was the ringleader, the one who initiated all the others into witchcraft. This is how Potts describes her:

She was a very old woman, about the age of Foure-score yeares, and had been a Witch for fiftie yeares. Shee dwelt in the Forrest of Pendle, a vast place, fitte for her profession: What shee committed in her time, no man knows. . . . Shee was a generall agent for the Devill in all these partes: no man escaped her, or her Furies.

Quite impressive for an eighty-year-old lady! In England, unlike Scotland and Continental Europe, the law forbade the use of torture to extract witchcraft confessions. Thus the trial transcripts supposedly reveal Elizabeth Southerns’s voluntary confession, although her words might have been manipulated or altered by the magistrate and scribe. What’s interesting, if the trial transcripts can be believed, is that she freely confessed to being a healer and magical practitioner. Local farmers called on her to cure their children and their cattle. She described in rich detail how she first met her familiar spirit, Tibb, at the stone quarry near Newchurch in Pendle. He appeared to her at daylight gate—twilight in the local dialect—in the form of beautiful young man, his coat half black and half brown, and he promised to teach her all she needed to know about magic.

Tibb was not the “devil in disguise.” The devil, as such, appeared to be a minor figure in British witchcraft. It was the familiar spirit who took centre stage: this was the cunning person’s otherworldly spirit helper who could shapeshift between human and animal form, as Emma Wilby explains in her excellent scholarly study, Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits. Mother Demdike describes Tibb appearing to her at different times in human form or in animal form. He could take the shape of a hare, a black cat, or a brown dog. It appeared that in traditional English folk magic, no cunning man or cunning woman could work magic without the aid of their spirit familiar—they needed this otherworldly ally to make things happen.

Belief in magic and the spirit world was absolutely mainstream in the 16th and 17th centuries. Not only the poor and ignorant believed in spells and witchcraft—rich and educated people believed in magic just as strongly. Dr. John Dee, conjuror to Elizabeth I, was a brilliant mathematician and cartographer and also an alchemist and ceremonial magician. In Dee’s England, more people relied on cunning folk for healing than on physicians. As Owen Davies explains in his book, Popular Magic: Cunning-folk in English History, cunning men and women used charms to heal, foretell the future, and find the location of stolen property. What they did was technically illegal—sorcery was a hanging offence—but few were arrested for it as the demand for their services was so great. Doctors were so expensive that only the very rich could afford them and the “physick” of this era involved bleeding patients with lancets and using dangerous medicines such as mercury—your local village healer with her herbs and charms was far less likely to kill you.

In this period there were magical practitioners in every community. Those who used their magic for good were called cunning folk or charmers or blessers or wisemen and wisewomen. Those who were perceived by others as using their magic to curse and harm were called witches. But here it gets complicated. A cunning woman who performs a spell to discover the location of stolen goods would say that she is working for good. However, the person who claims to have been falsely accused of harbouring those stolen goods can turn around and accuse her of sorcery and slander. This is what happened to 16th century Scottish cunning woman Bessie Dunlop of Edinburgh, cited by Emma Wilby in Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits. Dunlop was burned as a witch in 1576 after her “white magic” offended the wrong person. Ultimately the difference between cunning folk and witches lay in the eye of the beholder. If your neighbours turned against you and decided you were a witch, you were doomed.

Although King James I, author of the witch-hunting handbook Daemonologie, believed that witches had made a pact with the devil, there’s no actual evidence to suggest that witches or cunning folk took part in any diabolical cult. Anthropologist Margaret Murray, in her book, The Witch Cult in Western Europe, published in 1921, tried to prove that alleged witches were part of a Pagan religion that somehow survived for centuries after the Christian conversion. Most modern academics have rejected Murray’s hypothesis as unlikely. Indeed, lingering belief in an organised Pagan religion is very difficult to substantiate. So what did cunning folk like Old Demdike believe in?

Some of her family’s charms and spells were recorded in the trial transcripts and they reveal absolutely no evidence of devil worship, but instead use the ecclesiastical language of the Catholic Church, the old religion driven underground by the English Reformation. Her charm to cure a bewitched person, cited by the prosecution as evidence of diabolical sorcery, is, in fact, a moving and poetic depiction of the passion of Christ, as witnessed by the Virgin Mary. The text, in places, is very similar to the White Pater Noster, an Elizabethan prayer charm which Eamon Duffy discusses in his landmark book, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400-1580.

It appears that Mother Demdike was a practitioner of the kind of quasi-Catholic folk magic that would have been commonplace before the Reformation. The pre-Reformation Church embraced many practises that seemed magical and mystical. People used holy water and communion bread for healing. They went on pilgrimages, left offerings at holy wells, and prayed to the saints for intercession. Some practises, such as the blessing of the wells and fields, may indeed have Pagan origins. Indeed, looking at pre-Reformation folk magic, it is very hard to untangle the strands of Catholicism from the remnants of Pagan belief, which had become so tightly interwoven.

Unfortunately Mother Demdike had the misfortune to live in a place and time when Catholicism was conflated with witchcraft. Even Reginald Scot, one of the most enlightened men of his age, believed the act of transubstantiation, the point in the Catholic mass where it is believed that the host becomes the body and blood of Christ, was an act of sorcery. In a 1645 pamphlet by Edward Fleetwood entitled A Declaration of a Strange and Wonderfull Monster, describing how a royalist woman in Lancashire supposedly gave birth to a headless baby, Lancashire is described thusly: "No part of England hath so many witches, none fuller of Papists." Keith Thomas’s social history Religion and the Decline of Magic is an excellent study on how the Reformation literally took the magic out of Christianity.

However, it would be an oversimplification to state that Mother Demdike was merely a misunderstood practitioner of Catholic folk magic. Her description of her decades-long partnership with her spirit Tibb seems to draw on something outside the boundaries of Christianity.

Although it is difficult to prove that witches and cunning folk in early modern Britain worshipped Pagan deities, the so-called fairy faith, the enduring belief in fairies and elves, is well documented. In his 1677 book The Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft, Lancashire author John Webster mentions a local cunning man who claimed that his familiar spirit was none other than the Queen of Elfhame herself. The Scottish cunning woman Bessie Dunlop mentioned earlier, while being tried for witchcraft and sorcery at the Edinburgh Assizes, stated that her familiar spirit was a fairy man sent to her by the Queen of Elfhame.

All Hallows Eve in Old Lancashire

Come Halloween, the popular imagination turns to witches. Especially in Pendle Witch Country, the rugged Pennine landscape surrounding Pendle Hill, once home to twelve individuals arrested for witchcraft in 1612. The most notorious was Elizabeth Southerns, alias Old Demdike, cunning woman of long-standing repute and the heroine of my novel Daughters of the Witching Hill.

How did these historical cunning folk celebrate All Hallows Eve?

All Hallows has its roots in the ancient feast of Samhain, which marked the end of the pastoral year and was considered particularly numinous, a time when the faery folk and the spirits of the dead roved abroad. Many of these beliefs were preserved in the Christian feast of All Hallows, which had developed into a spectacular affair by the late Middle Ages, with church bells ringing all night to comfort the souls thought to be in purgatory. Did this custom have its origin in much older rites of ancestor veneration? This threshold feast opening the season of cold and darkness allowed people to confront their deepest fears—that of death and what lay beyond. And their deepest longings—reunion with their cherished departed.

After the Reformation, these old Catholic rites were outlawed, resulting in one of the longest struggles waged by Protestant reformers against any of the traditional ecclesiastical rituals. Lay people stubbornly continued to hold vigils for their dead—a rite that could be performed without a priest and in cover of darkness. Until the early 19th century in the Lancashire parish of Whalley, some families still gathered at midnight upon All Hallows Eve. One person held a large bunch of burning straw on a pitchfork while the others knelt in a circle and prayed for their beloved dead until the flames burned out.

Long after the Reformation, people persisted in giving round oatcakes, called Soul-Mass Cakes to soulers, the poor who went door to door singing Souling Songs as they begged for alms on the Feast of All Souls, November 2. Each cake eaten represented a soul released from purgatory, a mystical communion with the dead.

In Glossographia, published in 1674, Thomas Blount writes:

All Souls Day, November 2d: the custom of Soul Mass cakes, which are a kind of oat cakes, that some of the richer sorts in Lancashire and Herefordshire (among the Papists there) use still to give the poor upon this day; and they, in retribution of their charity, hold themselves obliged to say this old couplet:

God have your soul,
Bones and all.

Other All Hallows folk rituals invoked the power of fire to purify and ward. In the Fylde district of Lancashire, farmers circled their fields with burning straw on the point of a fork to protect the coming crop from noxious weeds.

Fire was used to protect people from perceived evil spirits active on this night. At Longridge Fell in Lancashire, very close to Pendle Hill, the custom of ‘lating’ or hindering witches endured until the early 19th century. On All Hallows Eve, people walked up hillsides between 11 pm and midnight. Each person carried a lighted candle and if the flame went out, it was taken as a sign that an attack by a witch was impending and that the appropriate charms must be employed to protect oneself.

What do these old traditions mean to us today?

All Hallows is not just a date on the calendar, but the entire tide, or season, in which we celebrate ancestral memory and commemorate our dead. This is also the season of storytelling, of re-membering the past. The veil between the seen and unseen grows thin and we may dream true.

Wishing a blessed All Hallows Tide to all!


Source: Ronald Hutton, The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain


Links:

Soul Cake Recipes

Souling Songs

Excerpt from Daughters of the Witching Hill

At Hallowtide, Liza insisted on walking up Blacko Hill, as we’d always done, for our midnight vigil on the Eve of All Saints. Under cover of darkness we crept forth with me carrying the lantern to light our way and John following with a pitchfork crowned in a great bundle of straw.

Once we reached the hilltop, after a furtive look round to make sure no one else was about, John lit the straw with the lantern flame so that the straw atop the pitchfork blazed like a torch. With him to hold the fork upright and keep an eye out for intruders, Liza and I knelt to pray for our dead. In the old days, we’d held this vigil in the church, the whole parish praying together, the darkened chapel bright as day with the many candles glowing on the saints’ altars. Now we were left to do this in secret, stealing away like criminals in the night, as though it were something shameful to hail our deceased. I prayed for my mam and grand-dad, calling out to their souls till I felt them both step through the veil to bring me comfort.

In my heart of hearts, I did not believe my loved ones were in purgatory waiting, by and by, to be let into heaven. There was no air of suffering or torment about them, only the joy of reunion. My mam, young and pretty, worked in her herb garden. She hummed a lilting tune whilst her earth-stained fingers pointed out to me the plants I must use to ease Liza’s birth pangs. Grand-Dad whispered his old charms to bless me and Liza and John.

A long spell I knelt there, held in the embrace of my beloved dead, till the straw on the pitchfork burned itself out, falling in embers and ash to the ground. Our John helped my pregnant daughter to her feet, then we made our way home through the night that no longer seemed so dark.

Under the Spell of the Pendle Witches

Since I'm embarking on my book tour, this post is dedicated to my favourite 17th century firebrand, Mother Demdike, the heroine of my new novel, Daughters of the Witching Hill.

The wild, brooding landscape of Pendle Hill, my home for the past seven years, gave birth to my new novel, Daughters of the Witching Hill, which tells the true story of Elizabeth Southerns, cunning woman, more commonly known by her nickname, Mother Demdike.

In 1612, seven women and two men from Pendle Forest were hanged as witches. Yet Mother Demdike, the most notorious of the accused, the ringleader who initiated all the others into witchcraft, cheated the hangman by dying in prison. This is how Thomas Potts describes her in The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster:

She was a very old woman, about the age of Foure-score yeares, and had
been a Witch for fiftie yeares. Shee dwelt in the Forrest of Pendle, a vast
place, fitte for her profession: What shee committed in her time, no man
knows. . . . Shee was a generall agent for the Devill in all these partes: no
man escaped her, or her Furies.

Not bad for an eighty-year-old lady! Reading the trial transcripts against the grain, I was amazed at how her strength of character blazed forth in the document written expressly to condemn her. When interrogated by her magistrate, she freely admitted to being a healer and a cunning woman. Mother Demdike was so frightening to her foes because she was a woman who embraced her powers wholeheartedly.

As I sought to uncover the bones of her story, I was drawn into a new world of mystery and magic. Every stereotype I’d held of historical witches and cunning folk was dashed to pieces. Mother Demdike became a true presence, a shining light in my life. An ancestor of my heart, if not my blood. Her life unfolded almost literally in my backyard.

Once in a place called Malkin Tower, there lived a widow, Bess Southerns, called Demdike. Matriarch of her clan, she lived with her widowed daughter and her three grandchildren, the most promising one being Alizon Device, a young woman who showed every promise of becoming a cunning woman as mighty as her grandmother. What fascinated me was not that Bess was arrested on witchcraft charges but that the authorities only turned on her near the end of her long, productive career. She practiced her craft for decades before anybody dared to interfere with her.

Cunning craft—the art of using charms to heal both humans and livestock—was Bess’s family trade. Their spells, recorded in the trial documents, were Roman Catholic prayer charms—the kind of folk magic that would have flourished before the Reformation. Yet she also drew on an even older source of power: Tibb, her familiar spirit, who appeared to her in the guise of a beautiful young man.

Other books have been written about the Pendle Witches—both fiction and nonfiction, nuanced and lurid. Mine is the first to tell the tale from Bess’s point of view. I longed to give Bess Southerns what her world denied her—her own voice.

As a writer, I am obsessed with history and place, how the true stories of our ancestors haunt the living landscape. No one in Pendle can remain untouched by the witches’ legacy. As contemporary British storyteller, Hugh Lupton, has said, if you go deep enough into the old tales and can present them in a meaningful way to a modern audience, you become the living voice in an ancient tradition. Mother Demdike’s voice deserves to be heard. I hope you will be as moved by her story as I am.



Take a sneak peak of the novel

Who were the Pendle Witches of 1612?

Read what the critics are saying

Join me on my traditional and virtual book tour

Watch my docudrama of the Pendle Witches, filmed live on location around Pendle Hill

Read Mary Ann Grossmann's interview with me in the Saint Paul Pioneer Press

Learn the charms of the Pendle Witches

Enter the Daughters of the Witching Hill Reader Review Contest

Learn more about Historical Cunning Folk and Wisewomen

Thank you for being a part of this book!

On making the 17th Century Book Video

An increasing number of authors are creating video trailers to promote their books. Historical fiction gives an added depth and flavour to the process, a chance to show off your period garb or highlight the elements of history that your book draws out.

I was very fortunate that my publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, arranged for me to create such a trailer for my forthcoming novel, Daughters of the Witching Hill. The history of the Pendle Witches is so rich in its own right, it's just crying out to be filmed.

My marketing director arranged for me to work with London filmmaker Callum Macrae of Outsider Television. Callum is a seasoned veteran who has filmed in war zones, done documentaries, and worked for programmes such as Panorama. He has also recently started doing "Lit Vids"--literary videos. Here is a link to the trailer he did for Tom Levenson's nonfiction book, Newton and the Counterfeiter.

First, Callum and I worked out a draft script by email. Callum had many brilliant ideas. What we ended up aiming for was something quite ambitious--more like a mini-docudrama than the typical promotional video.

Callum drove up on a Thursday with his assistant camera woman, the beautiful and brilliant Livvy Haydock. The first day we discussed the script while driving around various locations in the Pendle region. The rugged landscape proved to be as indispensible for the filming as it was for the actual storytelling. You could just picture the characters emerging from the misty moorland.

We shot on location at my stables with scenes of me on horseback since riding my horse around the Pendle region was such an instrumental part of my creative process. I had considered riding in costume, but, alas, I never learned to ride side-saddle. Callum actually thought it was better that I just ride as Mary in the twenty-first-century, and so that's what I did, less-than-flattering-riding-helmet and all. Booshka, my Welsh Section D mare, was impeccably well-behaved, even though she couldn't understand why we wanted her to keep walking back and forth over and over again in front of the camera for over half an hour.

I had never realised how many "takes" you need to get a scene just right.

After Miss Boo got her treats and was turned out to play in the field with her friends, we drove on to Malkin Tower Farm, where the owners, Rachel and Andrew Turner, gave us a warm welcome and showed us what are believed to be the ruined foundations of what was once Malkin Tower, home to my protagonist Mother Demdike and three generations of her family.

Malkin Tower Farm has a number of lovely, inviting holiday cottages in an area of outstanding natural beauty. If you ever visit Pendle, it's the perfect place to stay. They welcome walkers and cyclists, and have two very friendly and engaging dogs.

I crouched down near the stones, explaining their significance to the camera, while camera assistant Livvy donned historical costume and did a sequence in the background, walking down the steep slope around the ruins, as Mother Demdike's granddaughter, Alizon Device. Callum filmed another sequence of Livvy as Alizon walking through gnarled winter trees. With her long blond hair and porcelain skin (she wore no make up for the filming), Livvy was hauntingly perfect as Alizon.

Since we were so pressed for time, having to do all the filming on one day in the fleeting winter daylight, we put the historical costumes on over our modern clothes. So, in the costume sequences, I was wearing a long skirt over my riding breeches and tall boots. In the non-costume sequences, I wore my 17th century bodice and chemise-like blouse and corset under my winter jacket. I spent the entire day in my corset, rode my horse in my corset, even mucked out in my corset. How is that for historical authenticity?

After Malkin Tower Farm, we drove on to the old quarry outside the village in Newchurch in Pendle. It was while walking past this quarry at daylight gate--twilight in the local dialect--that Mother Demdike, called Bess in my novel, first met Tibb, her familiar spirit. In traditional English folk magic, no cunning woman could work her spells without a familiar, or otherworldly ally. So the day she met Tibb was really the turning point of her life, when she first came into her powers. A fanciful Victorian stonemason carved a man's head on the quarry stone to commemorate the legends of Tibb.

In the quarry I discussed all this for the camera before changing into costume and reciting an excerpt from the novel, in character as Mother Demdike, describing the moment when she first met her familiar spirit, who appeared to her in the guise of a beautiful young man. Callum wanting me speaking, not reading, so I had to learn all the passages by heart.

The light in the quarry kept changing dramatically. At once point we were enveloped in dense fog before it lifted to dazzling evening sunlight. Then, off down the valley, mist lifted off the damp green fields like plumes of rising smoke.

By the time we finished the filming, daylight gate was closing. It was getting dark and we'd finished filming all the outdoor sequences just in the nick of time.

We drove back to the stable where we turned an empty stall into a witch's cottage with dried herbs hanging on the wall, an old fashioned willow broom, candles, and even sheep skulls for ambiance. Callum also had a smoke machine going to create an eerie atmosphere.

Our props included facsimile editions of the two historical books my novel draws on as primary sources, The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witchcraft in the Countie of Lancaster, by Thomas Potts, the official transcripts of the 1612 Pendle Witch Trial, and Daemonologie, written by King James I, a witch-hunter's handbook that his magistrates were expected to read. I found jpegs of the original, historical title pages of these documents on the internet and then Callum printed them out at home and treated them with tea stains and coffee grounds until they resembled yellowing, crumbling old manuscript pages.

In our "witch's cottage," I discussed the significance of the historical documents and then recited some more passages from the novel, in costume and in character as Mother Demdike. My chosen excerpt was from the opening of the novel, when Mother Demdike, her daughter Liza, and granddaughter Alizon confront churchwarden Richard Baldwin who has refused to pay Liza for the work she's done carding wool for him. According to the primary sources, Baldwin tried to drive the women away with a horse whip, calling them whores and witches. He is recorded as saying, "I will burn the one of you and hang the other."

To punctuate these scenes of conflict between Mother Demdike and the authorities, we used a braided leather whip, purchased from a London joke shop. Callum cracked the whip on the floor while Livvy filmed close up shots.

I was worried that the noise might spook the horse in the next stall, so I went out to check. The horse in question merely nuzzled my pockets for treats, so he didn't seem too traumatised.

A dog club was meeting at the stable grounds that night, so our audio takes had the odd bark and howl in the background which added to the aura of mystery.

We weren't finished at the stable until nearly 9:00 at night, by which time the fog outside was so thick, it made the smoke machine redundant.

Back at my home, we finished the voiceover takes.

I can hardly wait to see the finished product, which Callum and Livvy will edit. After the publisher has approved it, the short film should go live on sites like Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com. Watch this space.