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

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It isn't a clear cut, good guys/bad guys novel. Some characters are more sympathetic than others, but none of them are the sort of self-assured caricatures that often populate with trial fiction. Even the characters we hate because of their certainty have occasional doubts. Trees like these hold a double meaning in our story of the witch trials. They represent both sanctuary for those fleeing their accusers and persecution; the branch of a sturdy tree was sometimes used for hanging those found guilty. And lastly, because where [women] think they can command, they are more proud in their rule, and more ready in setting such work on whom they may command, than men. And, therefore, the Devil works mostly to make them Witches: because they, upon every light displeasure, will set him on work, which is that which [Satan] most desires Richard Bernard (1627) A Guide to Grand Jury Men, Divided in two books.

O’Donnell, Paraic (12 March 2021). "The Manningtree Witches by AK Blakemore review – a darkly witty debut". the Guardian . Retrieved 1 September 2022. This beautifully written historical novel won the Desmond Elliott Prize and explores the witch trials of 17th century East Anglia with a humane grace. Sandra Newman said it was ‘not just the best debut novel I’ve read in years, it’s the best historical novel I’ve read since Wolf Hall ’. Inspired by David Copperfield, Kingsolver crafts a 21st-century coming-of-age story set in America’s hard-pressed rural South. She mutters something I do not hear, and presses her hand to her temple. She groans. “Never get old, Rebecca,” she says. “Mind me, girl. I am all filled up with aches and pains before the work of the day is so much as thought of.”Known as Old Knobbley, this ancient, gnarled oak tree is thought to be around 800 years old. Over the centuries it has born witness to wars, famines, even a mini Ice Age as well, of course, as the 17th century witch hunts. This is a fictionalised account of a dark period in English history – the actions of the so-called “Witchfinder General” Matthew Hopkins, who for a brief period in an East Anglia convulsed by the Civil War, effectively revised the idea of witchcraft trials, widely quoted as being responsible in just 2-3 years for as many executions from witchcraft as seen in England in the previous 150 years. I wish freely to embrace the deliciousness of sin. To sin with abandon is, after all, the only prerogative of the damned.”

A.K. Blakemore's 2021 novel, The Manningtree Witches, is set in the town. [13] The novel won the Desmond Elliott Prize 2021, being described by the judges as "a stunning achievement." [14] Notable people [ edit ] The author does examine what might have caused the actions of Hopkins as well as those that encouraged or at least did not hinder him.How would you describe the other key characters of the community? What are their relationships to each other, and how do these help to drive the story? 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.

An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored. The Ascension, by John Constable, which now hangs in Dedham church, was commissioned in 1821 for the altarpiece of the early seventeenth century church on the High Street, demolished in 1967. [9] Governance [ edit ] The reading experience is visceral, immersive and multi-sensory: you are really placed in the mind and body of the narrator; and in the smells, sights, touch, sounds of 1740s Essex. The book tells the story of the witch trials during the English Civil War through the story of a group of women in Manningtree. Most of the stranger elements are taken from historical records, but Blakemore makes it more personal by making its narrator a young woman Rebecca West, also a real person, whose mother was one of the victims and who was also suspected of witchcraft, but whose ultimate fate was not recorded. Apart from the victims, the other main character is the notorious Matthew Hopkins, self-styled Witchfinder General, who lived in the village.Manningtree is on Holbrook Bay, part of the River Stour in the north of Essex. It is the eastern edge of Dedham Vale. AK Blakemore is also a poet, and The Manningtree Witches has been praised for its “poetic” writing style. By 1616, Manningtree was prosperous enough to build for itself a new church; one featuring a monument to Thomas Osmond, who had been martyred in the town a century earlier. Osmond was revered in this part of the country; a member of the Protestant Christian sect that had separated from the Church of Rome during the Reformation of the early 1500s. His legacy of heresy against church authority was to be carried yet further in the late 16th century with a new reform movement, Puritanism.