The Manningtree Witches: 'the best historical novel... since Wolf Hall'

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It is 1643, the time of the English Civil War. In the town of Manningtree in Essex, men are scarce as the young and fit are off fighting. Rebecca West and her widowed mother are among the women who live on the margins of society, looked down on by the respectable matrons of the town for the crimes of being poor and husbandless. But when Matthew Hopkins arrives in town bringing his Puritanical ideas regarding witches, suddenly these women are seen as a threat – the cause of any ill which may befall one of the town’s worthy residents. And when Matthew Hopkins decides to style himself Witchfinder, the women find themselves in danger… We also get a sense of many other characters through a close third-person narration, in places, including several chapters about Matthew Hopkins.

Rebecca’s ability to read and write is important, and not only in serving Blakemore’s goals. She loves words, and the echoes of her reading appear in her vocabulary. But she also sees that what Hopkins is asking her for are simply words, words she can speak without believing them. Whether she will speak them, and what they would signify, becomes another theme of the novel. Among its perverse delights is the employment of the language of witch-hunting manuals (“inspissated,” “deliquesce”) to drive home the bodily obsessions of the trials. They are more [talkative], and less able to hide what they know from others, and therefore in this respect, are more ready to be teachers of Witchcraft to others, and to leave [their teachings] to children, servants, or to some others, than men. I wish freely to embrace the deliciousness of sin. To sin with abandon is, after all, the only prerogative of the damned.”This was a book I have been wanting to read since my friends in the Mookse group tipped it for some of last year's prize lists - it also won the Desmond Elliott Prize for first novels. It is not Blakemore's first book, because she was already a published poet.

Here's Professor Alison Rowlands: "That’s something which usually gets missed out of the local story because it’s very hard to think that your community actually invested a lot of effort in trials. I think somehow it’s easier to say, 'Oh it was Hopkins'. He’s an easy villain and you see that in other parts of Europe where it’s nice to blame one villainous person. Actually you can’t have a trial unless there’s somebody willing to make an accusation. So every single person who was tried, somebody from their community has accused them of causing harm through witchcraft."

AK Blakemore is also a poet, and The Manningtree Witches has been praised for its “poetic” writing style.

Essex: Town is happy to be small wonder". Echo Newspapers. 7 November 2007 . Retrieved 24 September 2010. [ dead link] Manningtree features in Ronald Bassett's 1966 novel Witchfinder General and in A.K. Blakemore's 2021 novel The Manningtree Witches.

Witch hunts took flight during years which saw popular revolts, epidemics and war. In the mid sixteenth century, treatise on witchcraft began to multiply across Europe. After 1550, there were laws and ordinances legalising the persecution of witches and making witchcraft a capital offence. In The Manningtree Witches, the women’s accusers are Puritans, but across Europe both the Catholic Church and its Inquisition and Protestant nations, countries who were at war with each other, united in their persecution of witches. What follows must be hinted at with care, since Blakemore here spans a historical void, but it is persuasive and satisfying. Crucial to the proceedings is a grimly fascinating depiction of Hopkins, and one that strips away the aggrandisements of popular myth to show us an etiolated zealot who can’t decide what offends him most – the baseness of his own nature or the knowledge that a woman has seen and understood it. What he denounces as sin, Rebecca tells him at a climactic moment, is “the filth you like to play in”. There are people, and then there are men. The author conveys brilliantly the tensions, petty jealousies, long-held resentments and class/gender biases of the town which of course form the soil in which the accusations and insinuations of witchcraft can be planted and allowed to flourish.

Many of the buildings in the centre of the town have Georgian facades which obscure their earlier origins. Notable buildings include Manningtree Library, which was originally built as 'a public hall for the purposes of corn exchange' and was later used around 1900 for public entertainment, [7] and the Methodist church located on South Street, completed in 1807. [8] Collitt, Andrea (17 April 2009). "Manningtree: Threat to Mayor". Harwich and Manningtree Standard. Archived from the original on 4 October 2011.

Manningtree is on Holbrook Bay, part of the River Stour in the north of Essex. It is the eastern edge of Dedham Vale. In her new novel, “The Manningtree Witches,” A.K. Blakemore explores the consequences of that chaos for a group of village women through the viewpoint of a narrator named Rebecca West. West, a true historical figure, was among those prosecuted in Essex. Blakemore’s novel adheres to these events but fills in the lacunae in the documents. My dad lives in Manningtree so it was an area I knew quite well. The process of the writing began when I was in a fallow period of writing poetry. I was messing around with prose, just to have something to write, and the story just really sort of jumped out at me,” Blakemore said. The novel dramatises brilliantly how the civil war created social tensions, breeding suspicions among previously amicable neighbours. It also tells how political tensions combined with famine to create a strain on community bonds. The elderly widow who relies on her neighbours for survival becomes an unwanted burden, and is transformed by their guilt into a perceived threat. Diverse fears coalesce around the character of Matthew Hopkins. Recently arrived in Manningtree, Hopkins is burying his own sense of weakness and failure beneath a desire to play God and to punish unruly women. He believes himself to be the servant of God, but it is he who brings evil to Manningtree. Today, with the 18th century development of Mistley Quay nearby, we're not far from urban development.Three hundred years ago this would have been a much wilder area, a feral forest outside the confines of the town. It’s not hard to imagine this as a place to hide and seek sanctuary from the fear and loathing, accusation and uncertainty happening in the streets.