Devonshire Witches

In the winter of 1682, three women from the small town of Bideford, Devon were hanged for witchcraft. Their names were Temperance Lloyd, Susanna Edwards, and Mary Trembles. Paul Q. Karkeek's meticulous historical account resurrects their story from the archives, reconstructing the accusations, coerced confessions, and trial proceedings that led to their deaths. The book immerses readers in a world where marshland mists harbored rumors of compact-making with the devil, where neighbors denounced neighbors, and where the judicial system bent to the fevered superstitions of the community. Through surviving witness testimonies and court records, Karkeek reveals not just the tragedy of three individual women, but the entire machinery of fear that allowed their execution. The landscape itself becomes a character: the remote moors, the fishing villages cut off from centers of power, the economic anxieties that made outsiders into scapegoats. This is essential reading for anyone interested in the dark underside of English history, the persistence of superstition in supposedly civilized society, and the names we have forgotten.