Making the point that women have always been especially vulnerable to popular prejudice and state victimisation, Lucy Mangan writes “there have never been … mass trials of … impoverished men who can be accused of supernatural crimes and put to death without evidence” (Witches of Essex review, 14 October).
Well, maybe not. But much more recently than the witchcraft trials, six agricultural labourers from Tolpuddle, who came together in 1833 to form a society to fight for better wages, were prosecuted on the evidence of two informers who had witnessed the men swearing a solemn oath of mutual solidarity to the Friendly Association of Agricultural Labourers while standing blindfolded before a crude representation of a skeleton.
The lurid imagery evoked by the account of the clandestine oath ceremony could hardly have failed to trigger thoughts of witchcraft and necromancy in the superstitious minds of a 19th-century Dorset jury and contribute to the guilty verdict and the men’s transportation to the penal settlements of Australia. Not all witch-hunts required witches.
Mike Hine
Kingston upon Thames, London
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