The Manningtree Witches: A.K. Blakemore (2021)

Archive Review: Curiouser Books

‘England, 1643. Parliament is battling the King; the war between the Roundheads and the Cavaliers rages. Puritanical fervour has gripped the nation, and the hot terror of damnation burns black in every shadow.

In Manningtree, depleted of men since the wars began, the women are left to their own devices. At the margins of this diminished community are those who are barely tolerated by the affluent villagers — the old, the poor, the unmarried, the sharp-tongued. Rebecca West, daughter of the formidable Beldam West, fatherless and husbandless, chafes against the drudgery of her days, livened only by her infatuation with the clerk John Edes. But then newcomer Matthew Hopkins takes over the Thorn Inn and begins to ask questions about the women of the margins. When a child falls ill with a fever and starts to rave about covens and pacts, the questions take on a bladed edge. 

The Manningtree Witches plunges its readers into the fever and menace of the English witch trials, where suspicion, mistrust, and betrayal ran amok as the power of men went unchecked and the integrity of women went undefended. It is a visceral, thrilling book that announces a bold new talent.’

Dark and gritty from its opening pages, A.K. Blakemore’s debut novel The Manningtree Witches casts a cold, wicked eye on a period of history that has often evaded the notice of writers of historical fiction, charting the apocalyptic upheaval of the English Civil War between Charles I’s Cavaliers and the Roundheads of the Parliament. The novel dramatises the rise to prominence of Matthew Hopkins, the self-proclaimed Witchfinder General, a fervent Puritan believed to be responsible for the prosecution and execution of more than one hundred alleged witches between 1644 and 1646. In line with the contemporary novelistic impulse to branch out from the principal masculine or political drama of our collective histories and mythologies, Blakemore wanders to the margins of mid-seventeenth century England, imagining the lives and struggles of those on the periphery of the conflict, the women left at home in the village of Manningtree, Essex. The novel is both moving and mischievous, illuminating the boredom, humour, and resilience of women whose humanity has been overlooked for centuries by those who perceive them as irrelevant to the political and military struggles of the day as well as by those who would seek to reduce their complexity to the parameters of helpless victimhood, and to cast them as hapless innocents persecuted by the ignorance, intolerance, and superstition of their contemporaries. That being said, Blakemore also interrogates the ways in which societies under threat behave; who they target as perceived sources of corruption and disorder, and why. Anyone with access to Wikipedia can quickly learn that Matthew Hopkins did indeed purchase an inn in Manningtree, and that he initiated his brief but devastating witchfinding career in the same town. Consequently, readers are aware from the beginning of the novel that women lacking the protection of wealth, status, or male relatives are acutely vulnerable to the panic of a community that feels its religious, political, and social bedrock cracking; that feels all its inherited certainties and securities fragmenting; and that desperately needs someone or something to blame. The Manningtree Witches builds its narrative on jeopardy, intrigue, and injustice, delineating the power of rumour and prejudice in a time of upheaval and communal trauma in ways that will resonate with readers who have lived through the divisions and doubts triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic, and thereby posing uncomfortable questions about our own response to crisis and the threat of societal collapse. 

One of Blakemore’s masterstrokes in The Manningtree Witches is her decision to instal nineteen-year-old Rebecca West as her first-person narrator. As the daughter of Anne West, or the Beldam West, an outspoken widow who scrapes a living through laundry and mending services, Rebecca’s position is precarious from the outset. However, the novel eschews any simplistic binaries of persecution and victimhood by portraying this fractious filial relationship with unflinching realism, and by underpinning the narrative voice with all of the prejudices, beliefs, and suspicions of the day, as well as the protagonist’s own personal envies and affections. Rebecca’s opening description of her mother encapsulates the complex darkness of the novel as a whole, combining the young woman’s disgust at her parent’s physical appearance and drunken stupor with a sense of discomfort prompted by the vulnerability of a middle-aged, work-worn, sleeping woman: 

‘I take her apart now, while her repose affords me the opportunity, and consider her piece by piece. Her nose is long and set in crooked shape, having been broken. It was broken at least once, to my knowledge — four years ago, by a most wonderful right hook from Goody Rawbood as the two of them quarrelled in the herb garden on a late-spring afternoon. I do not remember what the substance of their falling out was, on that occasion, but I do remember the hooting of men gathered at the fence to watch. I remember the blow was struck. I remember how my mother tottered back into a rosemary bush with a hand clapped to her face, blood leaking sticky between her fingers, and raised a sweet fragrance as she tumbled down onto her cules amid the little blue flowers. I can barely keep myself from laughing aloud when I smell rosemary, to this very day. Goody Rawbood is dead, of course — as people who wrong my mother have a way of ending up. See how the smell and look of her leads me to other things, other places. Or else my understanding of other things and other places comes through the smell and look of her, and that is what it is to have a mother. But no more digressions. My mother’s cheeks are hollowed out, the skin stretched over them tight and brown. The unwary blade of sunshine from the window whites the down on her chin and her temple, and refines the thin lines age has lain at the corners of her eyes and around her mouth, like a cat’s whiskers. Her forehead is pink with sunburn. The skin around her neck is loose, as though those folds are easing into their good fortune at having been spared proximity to the cruel eyes and sharp tongue that so disfavour her among our neighbours; a neck like a fat hog’s wattles, baggy and discoloured and appalling. The mouth is the worst thing. She holds her thin lips slightly open as she sleeps, and they are raw and dry at the corners, where a sediment has gathered. Looking in through this red opening you can perceive her mouth’s interior satin, and see how her teeth are stained from chewing tobacco, how the wet root of her tongue jostles, as though she is dreaming a conversation. Or, more likely, a row. Here is my very unchristian thought: I wish I had something horrible to hand to put into her mouth. I imagine I am lowering a wriggling mouse between her lips by its pink tail, then clamping my hand down over it. Or no. A jar of hot horses’ piss, a fistful of rabbit droppings, blood — pigs’s blood — hot from the slice —’

This introduction to the Beldam West through her disapproving daughter’s eyes is worth quoting at length, as it signals crucial aspects of the narrative and its characters, as well as foreshadowing the violence of the story through the quasi-surgical, visceral description of a female body, the integrity of which will soon come under siege. At an earlier point, the Beldam is described as having a ‘mannish’ scent, and the opening pages underpin the subtle but undeniable significance attached to smell throughout the novel. This tactic has the dual impact of creating an accretive, heady, almost fetid prose, building an immersive, sensual world, as is the wont of the most accomplished historical fiction, while also evoking a link between the sense of smell and the actions of the witchfinder, or a more diffuse and generalised apprehension of social corruption and rot. The disdainful bluntness of Rebecca’s tone traces the outlines of her own character, that of her mother, and the contours of their relationship, as we are thrust into the cantankerous psyche of a bored, frustrated young woman with a mordant sense of humour and all the intolerance of adolescence towards the depredations of ageing. Rebecca’s antipathy towards her mother mirrors that of the local community at large, as the Beldam is portrayed as belligerent, outspoken, and somewhat masculine in her habits and behaviours, with an aura of witchiness that does not seem beyond the bounds of reality. The hostility of Rebecca’s portrait, and her description of men heckling the Beldam and Goody Rawbood, places her mother in a defensive social position from the outset, but also speaks to the usual tensions in relations between mothers and daughters, and therefore makes of these women complex, rounded-out, familiar characters, dismissing any false sense of beleaguered sisterhood.

The development of Rebecca’s voice is skilled, pinning down with amazing precision the tone of a snarky teenager who can be both callous and witty, while remaining faithful to historical nuance and context. Rebecca’s infatuation with the local clerk John Edes is key to her characterisation; the patterns of the crush itself will be familiar to all those who have charted the unsteady, breathless paths of adolescent romance, but Blakemore further complicates the portrait by tracing the shame and self-distrust linked to sexuality and desire in the Puritan mindset, a theme that grows in importance as the novel progresses. Rebecca’s longing for Edes resonates both comically and pitifully with readers, as his unremarkable nature jars with her idolisation, and it becomes clear that the Beldam is justified in ribbing her innocent, sheltered daughter for falling for the first eligible young man she sees. The frustration Rebecca feels in response to her mother’s description of Edes as a ‘coward’ who would ‘stick his Thing up a haddock if a Bishop told him not to’ perfectly captures an attitude of virginal prissiness, childish peevishness, and outraged romance that rings true to most mother-daughter relationships: 

‘I feel a great smoke of wrath rise in me then, a hatefulness. I resent that I am allowed nothing of my own, nothing that doesn’t bear the grub prints of her opinion. “Shame,” I mutter through my teeth. “You know not the first thing concerning —” “Mind thyself, girl,” she interrupts, wagging her finger in a warning way and fixing me with her eyes, “I know cowards, and I know men. And there’s many say once you know the former you know the latter just as well.” “Aye,” I say, with a private smile, passing my needle back through the fruit tree branch, “and enough of them have known thee, too, so they say.” Too far. Vinegar Tom yowls and spits as the candlestick crashes across the parlour, spraying sparks.’

There is an element of slapstick to this exchange, but more sinister implications are insinuated: Rebecca’s cattiness towards her mother is typical of her age and circumstances, but also demonstrates her internalisation of the community’s disdain for the Beldam as a woman of lax morals and loose tongue. The fury with which the Beldam responds to her daughter’s jibe seems disproportionate until readers recognise that she is only too aware of the danger she faces should the tide of local opinion turn from mere snooty disapproval to more malevolent intent, and the role her daughter could play in this scenario. The same shadowy gravity underpins Rebecca’s initial description of the Widow Clarke, a local ‘cunning woman’ whom the West women look after in their gruff fashion:

‘I have asked the Widow Clarke how old she is before, but she was not exactly certain. One need not look at her for long to conclude very. Old enough that time now seems beneath her notice, and she’ll spend a good deal of it doing whatever nonsense she pleases. She is in possession of the full complement of ailments that afflict the elder folk of Manningtree, though usually discretely: her little paw-like hands shake with a palsy, her runny eyes are clouded, and her mouth nearly toothless. She has even lost a leg, somewhere, somehow, someway. I have seen men crippled like that — those who went away to fight in France or the war in Scotland — but never a woman. I suppose that once a woman reaches a certain level of excessive superannuation her critical limbs might simply begin to give out and fall off, much as the teeth do, and as does the hair. Perhaps the Widow Clarke’s left leg is buried unmarked beneath a patch of scrub right there in that disorderly garden. Perhaps she simply stood up one evening to find the connective gristle that attached it to the rest of her worn to a thread, and threw it on the fire with the chicken bones, a hey-ho and a shrug. This is what I see, looking at the Widow Clarke — a withered and slatternly old woman. Other people must see her differently, though, because they think her cunning. The town maids go to Mother Clarke for tongues, charms and scratchings, to cast the shears and sieve and beg Saint Paul for the name of her husband, or know if the first babe she gets by him will be girl or boy. I think it is the Widow’s web-in-the-eye that makes people believe her cunning. Beyond the uncanny way it makes her look — like a fairy came along and rubbed the meats clean of spots — people get terribly superstitious about such things as cataracts, and choose to believe that God would not be so cruel as to rob an old woman of her earthly gaze without equipping her with a spectral one, to say sorry. You would think them unacquainted with Job. There is a rumour that tells that she was struck by lightning, once, on All Saints’ Day, and lived.’

As is the case with Rebecca’s description of the Beldam, her portrait of the Widow (or, sometimes, Mother) Clarke fleshes out her own narrative voice, full of wicked, intelligent humour, and flags important aspects of the local community. Rebecca’s youthful contempt for the trappings of old age tempers the crone-like description of the Widow Clarke, which would otherwise be overly heavy-handed, while indicating the insidious ways in which decrepit helplessness can translate to a mark of the occult. The confusion of beliefs mocked by Rebecca also belies the Puritanical certainty with which the age is associated, bearing poignant witness to the turmoil and upheaval facing those of fervent religious faith who were inundated with dramatic reversals of dogma and ritual for decades, and demonstrating the degree to which remnants of folklore and Catholicism continued to grip the imaginations of many in mid-seventeenth century England, despite the swing towards austere Protestantism. In addition, the local mythology surrounding Widow Clarke alluded to by Rebecca points to the hypocrisy that generally lurked beneath the surface of early modern witch-hunting: women of Widow Clarke’s ilk were tolerated and even petitioned for help due to their reputations as cunning or wise women with potentially supernatural qualities; it is not until the advent of religious fervour, social upheaval, local disaster, or some other factor extraneous to the ‘witch’ in question that the kind of violent, ugly menace associated with witch trials sets in. As a final word on Blakemore’s excellence in teasing out Rebecca’s narrative voice, which has already been shown to serve as an implicated and insightful historical lens as well as a wickedly funny adolescent companion to the events of the novel, I was floored by the maturation of the young protagonist as the text unfolds. The experiences Rebecca undergoes are deeply scarring, and Blakemore manages to convey the impact of such trauma on a young psyche without diluting the personality of her narrator. Rebecca is shaped and damaged by her suffering, but she retains her biting wit, her intelligence, and her capacity for anger while developing a measured sense of compassion and a keen insight into human behaviour and psychology, occasionally delivering staggering pieces of emotional analysis:

‘I wonder if there is any kind of intimacy with another person that isn’t also an indignity, and if some people enjoy this, or everyone just pretends to.’

Blakemore has been likened to Hilary Mantel, and the comparison is justified, as The Manningtree Witches is underpinned by an immersive realism as well as an acute consciousness of the material circumstances of its characters, and the importance of class and wealth as social signifiers in their community. The world of the novel is one of haves and have-nots, in which the latter scrape a subsistence living that is raw, tedious, and harsh, and in which untethered women of the lower social orders are particularly vulnerable. The rigid social stratification of Manningtree is stridently maintained despite, or perhaps because of, the upheaval and trauma of religious schism and civil war; the conflict is dealt with casually, as peripheral or at least habitual to the lives of the villagers, but its violence and instability are latent, simmering forces that produce a dangerous and desperate hyper vigilance among Blakemore’s characters. In this respect, as previously suggested, parallels can be drawn between the setting of The Manningtree Witches and our own experience of the COVID-19 pandemic, as a strange duality sets in between universal fear, panic, suffering, the threat of widespread social collapse and quotidian boredom and adaptive resilience, our capacity to develop and adjust to ‘new normals’. Rumour in this context, as the proliferation of disinformation and conspiracy theories in our own time proves, is particularly potent and dangerous, and Blakemore captures this threat with sinister precision, showing how gossip can grow wings among the bored and resentful, and among those looking for entertainment or a scapegoat. In a strange and beautiful chapter entitled ‘Divination’, Blakemore plays with the occult fascinations of teenage girls (which persist to the present day in sleepover games and rituals) to show how intense religious belief and an apocalyptic imagination make Rebecca doubt herself: 

‘I lie awake for a long time in the darkness, and I consider what it is I have seen, or thing I have seen — and what the practical difference between seeing something and thinking you have seen something really is. I am not superstitious — I am useful. I have taught myself to watch and listen. I have seen enough suffering in my life to know that the diseased mind is prone to invent all manner of phantoms that might hover over a person. Better to blame a sprite or a puck for the souring of the milk or the tangles in the horse’s mane than to concede that one’s own slovenly habits may have contributed to the situation. In think it is a vanity, in fact: all these Jezebels who think their beauty so great it might attract even the Devil’s notice, fabulating courts-full of demons to suck on their pretty tits, and all because their husbands never raise eyes from their beer mugs to look at them. No. Do not fancy yourself a witch. Do not fancy yourself at all. A little of pain and next to nothing of joy, wet stockings and cold beds, but your body works, Rebecca, your eyes are sharp, a man will have you in time, or will not, at least, say “no” —’

Rebecca’s self-awareness and contempt for superstitious credulity allows Blakemore to suspend anachronistic judgement as she charts the panicked attempt at self-assurance made by a young girl who believes she has just seen the Devil. Readers are compelled to recognise that the setting of the novel, for better or for worse, is one in which the veil between the natural and the supernatural is much more permeable than in our own world, and to sympathise with the eminently human impulse to dramatise insignificant events or to outsource culpability for misfortune for those whose lives are defined by the experience of poverty, hardship, fear, and helplessness. The world of The Manningtree Witches is also one in which death is always proximate, whether through violence or myriad poorly understood diseases, and one beset by astonishingly high rates of infant and maternal mortality, as well as heightened economic vulnerability to the vagaries of the weather. In this context, it is more than understandable that tall tales are spun to account for incomprehensible pain and tragedy, as evidenced by the cautionary, heartbreaking story circulated about a young woman in New England who seems to have been torn apart by post-natal depression and visions of predestined perdition: 

‘I remember a tale of a young wife from Maine, New England, that was passed along the back pews of St Mary’s a year or two hence. It sounded the way many stories that reach the parlours of Essex from the haunted pines of the New World do: our own domestic fancies dropping like a flock of grubby black pigeons on the barest scattering of truth. The girl, they said, was very young, and a simpleton, too. She found herself so transported and affrighted by the sermons of a local preacher that she resolved to throw her newborn babe down the well, and in broad daylight. Charged with killing the child, the Maine woman had said that as she was damned, and as she knew the babe was damned, too, there was little point in indulging either of them with such flummeries as earthly life. Had she not cleverly circumvented the cruelties inherent in God’s plan, while bringing about a conclusion that would no doubt satisfy Him, and with great expediency? All that remained was for the Justices to complete the job, which the simple Maine girl begged they would do with all haste. Duly they did. The girl was hung before the meeting-house, in a clearing amid the spruce, and her sad tale became a moral tract in a grubby pamphlet bought at the yard of St Paul’s in London and read aloud to a thrill of Essex virgins by a travelling messenger. A lesson against presumption.’ 

Rebecca’s thinly-veiled cynicism in this passage delineates the ways in which local gossip, rumour, and exaggeration, largely harmless in their own right, can be harnessed by higher authorities, and transmuted into mechanisms of social and religious control. 

The dissolution of war affects Manningtree in starkly gendered terms: most of the able-bodied men have enlisted, and the village is largely populated by those who fall into the various categories of womanhood — maidens, wives, and widows. As previously mentioned, inflexible social rankings are relentlessly policed and observed in Manningtree despite the apparent disintegration of the traditional patriarchal status quo, and the perceived threat of disorder and dissolution coalesces, in the minds of those with everything to lose, in the bodies of the women of the margins. There is a curious duality at play here, as these women are ostensibly the most vulnerable and burdensome members of society, whose lot nobody envies, even as they are feared as powerful agents of unrest and temptation:

‘There are many widows in Manningtree, and their number is growing. The general opinion concerning widows is that — once time has blunted the edge of their bereavement — they tend to fuss about and make unconscionable demands upon the commonweal. A knob of butter here, a loaf of bread there, just until I am able to get back on my feet, Goodwife. Some take to languishing abed while their homestead falls to ruin and their children, unattended, make a nuisance of themselves in the streets. Some of them, having lost their own husbands, cast about for other people’s, all heaving bosoms and wet doe eyes and please just hold me George it’s been so long since I felt the touch of a man. Yes, the left side of St Mary’s might be forced to concede, they can see how a woman like that, riven by emptiness, might find it consuming her. They can see how she might look for things to fill it with, set about stuffing the fissure with whatever ghostly shreds come to enwrap themselves about her shoulders at night. They say the Devil is a cunning trickster, a two-faced sweetheart. He dangles a patient ear as often as he does a pretty bauble. And women hate widows all the more because they are just a tumbling scaffold at the shipyard or a storm on the channel or a bullet from a hedgerow away from being one themselves.’

In a way, Blakemore seems to suggest that these women, the Manningtree witches, are indeed forces to be reckoned with. The novel is frank and clear-eyed in its depiction of the sheer hardship and manual toil these women undertake merely to survive, and their social position is always acknowledged as being precarious at best. However, the Beldam West, Widow Clarke, Liz Godwin, Margaret Moone, Helen Clark, Widow Leech, and Rebecca herself are fascinating women, who weather their plight while remaining practical, mischievous, bawdy, independent, courageous and, above all, funny. One of the most subtly radical aspects of Blakemore’s novel is her decision to endow her embattled protagonists with a defiant and caustic sense of humour: their wit may not line their pockets or save them from the depredations of their neighbours, but their ability to laugh in the face of misfortune gives them an unbending, furious dignity that distinguishes the novel from other accounts of witch trials. 

Blakemore is fastidious in her representation of the complex intertwining of feelings of shame, guilt, and disgust experienced by those who live in poverty, and those who feel its breath on their neck:

‘And that is it, poverty. A life slowly narrowing around you like the trick walls of a tomb. You have things and then the things fall to pieces, and then it begins to empty your body out as well, and your mind. No dreams, just hunger. A hole whose edges begin to fray, become undone.’

In the same way that the wives of Manningtree hate the widows because of the precariousness of their own husbands’ lives, these women are detested because of the economic deprivation they represent. As the novel acknowledges, the Puritan mindset made it all the more amenable to despise the poor, as material prosperity could be interpreted as a sign of divine favour, a reward for pious endeavour, while its lack served as evidence of idleness or moral dissolution. Spiritual shame also plays a key part in the persecution of women on the fringes, who are transformed in the communal consciousness into corporeal representations of evil. The figure of the Devil haunts the pages of The Manningtree Witches and the minds of its characters as a palpable threat that is difficult for modern readers to comprehend. Blakemore never punches down from the supercilious heights of rational modernity; she neither rules out the possibility of magic nor ridicules the earnestly-held beliefs and fears of her characters, and describes with chilling power the feverish psychological impact of feeling yourself teetering constantly on the edge of damnation:

‘They can imagine the Devil there, some great thing in the sky, or as a mist rolling in off the river, gathering the smoke of the scullery fires to himself. For later use. Or as the miasma that hovers over the marshes and flats, bringing the ague. A dark head crowned in slender red leaves of narrow dock, a moth with mouths both front and back. Cavorting in the autumn clouds that are like strips of flayed skin. The Devil minces and the Devil dances. He dances like a girl might, slender-hipped, hair falling wild around her shoulders. Inflamed. Now the nights grow longer, he might go from door to door of an evening in the guise of a swarthy pedlar, opening his coat to the wide-eyed goodwives and maids, and where there ought to be bobbins of silk ribbon and little pearl buttons, he shows to them his merchandise of sootkin and smooth-newt: this one here’s Prickeare, and this one Prettyman. And all the while a grey cat watches from the strawberry patch. The Devil is in the moist places of the forest, under fallen logs. He speaks to the centipedes and the toads, and they drag their soft bellies out over the rocks and mulch to lame the horse of a gentleman passing by on his way to Ipswich, or find a place to nestle warm between the parted thighs of some country lass, whereon she dreams of marriage to a Turk who uses his tongue down there. He spits rainbow. He slides a rainbow up inside you.’

The Devil is a wily fiend, and his evasion demands constant vigilance and self-scrutiny from the faithful, beset themselves by the human foibles of guilt, shame, and lust. Making heartbreaking use of Rebecca’s own misgivings and self-disgust, particularly concerning her sexuality, Blakemore shows the extent of the doubt and terror that springs from the self-alienation embedded in Puritanical doctrine. In an impasse that will be very familiar to those schooled in the contorted regime of Irish Catholicism, aspiring to salvation entails self-distrust, and total vilification of the body and its desires: the Manningtree ‘witches’ are painted as Satan’s handmaids by those desperate to externalise their mortal fear of the devil within. The characterisation of Hopkins himself contributes enormously to this complex argument. Dressed immaculately and entirely in black, with a pallid complexion and dark ‘he’d be handsome, if’ demeanour, Hopkins is unsettling from his introduction into the narrative, and Blakemore flirts with the temptation to align his characterisation with a representation of the devil incarnate. In a courageous authorial choice, however, she declines to take the easy route of making the witchfinder totemic of a strain of misogynistic evil. As much as Rebecca and readers alike may want to view Hopkins as an uncomplicated villain, his genuine conviction and imminent mortality preclude any such simplistic categorisation. Throughout the novel, Blakemore avoids portraying Hopkins as an opportunistic charlatan (although she does, in her afterword, describe him as ‘at best a serial bullshitter, at worst a compulsive liar’), opting instead for a subtle mirroring strategy between the witchfinder and Rebecca, investigating the ways in which Puritanical fervour and sexual repression can warp the human mind into justifying the most abhorrent of actions. In a moment of supreme dramatic tension, Blakemore creates an image of the witchfinder that speaks to this knotted complexity and devastating zealotry without diluting the menace of his presence or redeeming the violence of his campaign:

‘We hear the crowd fall hush as the dark figure of the Witchfinder emerges from the inn. An attentive silence, a soliciting silence. Those at the back of the ten-deep crowd, those from the neighbouring towns and villages, crane to get a better look at this champion of God. Is he as they expect? I wonder. Younger, probably, at twenty-five. Brittle and drawn as a scholar, his hair hanging black and uncombed around his shoulders. His long, rigid figure, held with cultivated grace, suggests a near-arachnoid watchfulness. He looks as though his heart has been many times broken. As if, beneath his black velvets, it quietly breaks at that very moment. Here is Matthew Hopkins, Witchfinder General, with the hard soul of a warrior and the famished cheeks of a saint.’

Stylistically, The Manningtree Witches is an accomplished debut from an acclaimed poet, and bodes well for Blakemore’s future prose work. The writing, as previously stated, is brilliantly immersive, and the narrative syntax is appropriate to the seventeenth-century setting without verging into ‘prithee sir and begorrah’ territory. Blakemore’s prose is unassuming but evocative, and is underpinned by a blunt, tough beauty, as in this description of Manningtree and its environs:

‘Manningtree and Mistley are two villages that together add up to something like a town, fitted tidy as pattens, left and right, tucked neatly by the waters of Holbrook Bay on the crook of the Stour. When the tide is in, the blue slice of water jostles with little fishing boats and the hoys of merchantmen, and their rigging makes a marvellous cutwork of the sky. By night, they say smugglers make use of the waterway to go inland, carrying braces of French pistols and pyxes and gilded prayerbooks in Latin, which is the black speech of the Pope. When the water draws out, it leaves behind wide beds of soft silver mud where sandpipers, curlews and godwits scratch slender trails in their digging about for worms. It smells good or bad, depending on your point of smell — of sea-scum, bird shit and wrack drying up in the sun, There is one long, narrow road that runs along the riverbank, from the little port of Manningtree and the white Market Cross to old St Mary’s Church in Mistley. Along this road is where the people live, for the most part, in some few dozen houses hunched along in various states of disrepair and flake, all mouldy thatch and tide-marked, half-tended gardens and smalls drying on lines that hang window to window across the muddy street. Smaller ways and alleys lead up away from the river from this one road, and into the rolling hills, and the fields where the true wealth of Essex chews cud in the fields: cows, warm golden and with fat udders so full with milk it makes your own tits ache just to look at them. Up in the fields is the world of the herds, as the valley and water is the place of the birds.’

The writing can, however, run to verbosity, and the book could have benefitted from a more ruthless editorial hand, as evidenced by the repetition of ‘in the fields’ in the passage cited above. It did cross my mind that the instances of overwrought prose might represent a deliberate strategy to match the overstrained imaginations of the characters who populate the novel’s pages, and there are indeed times when the ornate, poetic language can become sardonic in its richness:

‘It is clear from the opening formalities of the sermon that Minister Long’s auroral brush with Pandemonium has imbued him, in the eyes of his flock, with a certain glamour (Frances Hockett flutters a hand before her breast and declares she could just eat him up in a pie, which seems to me an excessively libertine pronouncement.’ 

Overall, the novel is imbued with a huge element of mischief, which defies the inevitability of violence and tragedy, while historical fatalism is thwarted by the use of the present tense throughout, the immediacy of the narrative sustaining its dramatic tension. As much as Blakemore’s prose can be biting and tricky, the novel is studded with immensely affecting and, indeed, upsetting scenes, such as the arrest of Widow Clarke, which are rendered all the more powerful by the cool, unflinching narrative style. The Manningtree Witches is a dark and unsettling book, and Blakemore is both humanising and merciless in her effort to make her characters as recognisable and comprehensible as possible to modern readers. The implications of this familiarity are deeply troubling and uncomfortable, and some passages leave readers in no doubt that Blakemore is setting a deliberate challenge:

‘Picture a crooked old woman dressed in rags, who labours through deep snow, alone. Now fray the hem of her gown and soak it in meltwater, cover her balding head with a thin shawl of worsted. She smells — you can smell her from an arm’s length away — of grease and chicken shit and mildew and embarrassment. The hair she has left, leave the matt and tangle in yellowing snarls and charm-knots. Choke the lucid blue of her eyes with a scum of cataract. Now hunch her over a walking stick, and set her to trudging. Slow. No — slower still than that. Perhaps a few crows rail at one another in the glassy hedgerows as she passes, but otherwise, all is silence. She is alone on the rolling fields of deep, uncompromising white. Now empty out her belly. Now decide. Will you offer to help her? Do you even want to touch her?’

As the old adage about Nazi Germany goes, we all like to think we would have behaved with courage, integrity, and kindness if we had been there, but history proves that the majority of us would have shunned this pitiable figure, and left her to the mercy of the witchfinder. Despite the menace in the narrative tone, there is no judgement in Blakemore’s stance, but rather an insistence that readers themselves refrain from judging the survival instinct of characters like Rebecca, and the force of their beliefs and circumstances. Expect to be bruised and appalled by The Manningtree Witches, but recognise that, as Hopkins himself might say, ‘such hardships bring us closer to God’ — it’s for your own good.