Witchland: A Deadly Moral Panic in Seventeenth-Century Britain

"It’s incredible, reading the histories Gibson has assembled, to recognize how puny, how obscure, were these men who kick-started a persecution that would spread across Europe and the Atlantic—and which arguably persists today." —The New York Times Book Review

From the bestselling author of Witchcraft, the captivating, compassionate account of a moral panic that swept across Britain during the English Civil War, leaving hundreds of so-called witches dead in its wake.

Predating the Salem witch trials by decades—though linked by ideology and, in some cases, by ancestry—these trials began in southeastern England and the Scottish Lowlands in the early 1640s and spread rapidly through Britain. 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.

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. Drawing on newly discovered historical documents, Gibson gives voice to the accused and defenseless—telling stories that have been hidden for centuries. With each chapter focusing on a different town and the lives and deaths of the people within it, Witchland is a gripping historical drama that plays out on both the small scale of the town square and the large scale of the nation.