Witchland: A Deadly Moral Panic in Seventeenth-Century Britain

The captivating, compassionate account of a moral panic that swept across Britain in the decades before the Salem Witch Trials, leaving hundreds of so-called witches dead in its wake, by acclaimed historian and bestselling author Marion Gibson.

During the English Civil War of the 1640s, a series of witch trials began in southeast England and Lowland Scotland. Fueled by religiosity, misogyny, and the economic stresses of war, the trials soon grew into a mass panic that transformed the nation—and led to the deaths of over three hundred people during a ten-year span.

Drawing on newly discovered historical documents, Gibson gives voice to the accused, whose stories were previously lost to time. Moving across England and Scotland, Witchland shows how the chaos and economic deprivation of wartime can exacerbate existing divides within communities, leaving those already without power particularly vulnerable—especially, during this time, impoverished women dependent on the goodwill of their neighbors. With each chapter focused on a different town and the lives and deaths of the people within it, Witchland is a historical drama that plays out both on the small scale of the town square and the large scale of the nation.

Sweeping, intimate, and dramatic, Witchland is a gripping story of polarization, persecution, and a country ripped apart by fear.