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

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These accounts articulate an intense social discomfort around women who seem to subvert the principles of domesticity and motherhood – and it is this very subversion that has made them tantalising subjects for art.

There is a direct link between the atrocities committed by Hopkins and those perpetrated decades later in the New England colonies. Crucial to the proceedings is a grimly fascinating depiction of Hopkins, and one that strips away the aggrandisements of popular myth to show us an etiolated zealot who can’t decide what offends him most – the baseness of his own nature or the knowledge that a woman has seen and understood it.Over the next 24 hours (or longer) these women were starved, deprived of sleep, mentally harangued and verbally abused. It dates back to at least the 17th century and according to local legend is one of the inns where ‘witchfinders’ Matthew Hopkins and John Stearne met with local accusers to plan their persecutions. Beldam West (Anne West) was accused and tried for sending familiars to trouble Sir Thomas Bowes, his embellished and expanding story really the result of his drunken reverie.

This short walk on the Stour Estuary between Essex and Suffolk is inspired by the 17th century East Anglian witch trials. For most in Manningtree the loss of a healthy steer or a good milker ranks among the greater calamities. Amisa provokes repulsion and allure in equal measure, and the home she shares with her daughter and “sister” – a mysterious spirit medium – is a viscerally rendered hothouse of maternal rivalry and resentment.What changes do the characters go through during the novel, and how are these expressed on the page? Much of it — accusations of penis-stealing and insatiable lusts — was clearly displaced neurosis over sexual desires that interfered with celestial communion. But coming at it from poetry, I had a decent sense in writing of aesthetics and a cinematic, graphic way of composing scenes in my mind.

Sometimes directly in the first person, sometimes with Rebecca imagining or recounting scenes she hears about but does not participate in, and sometimes in more of a third party narrator style. She knows to keep these icily exact impressions to herself, but her instinct for self-concealment is tested by youthful desire. Here are some questions that you might like to consider or discuss with friends, family and fellow members of the Book Club as you make your way through the book. 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.Well-meaning and hopelessly curious, born into a world of brawling and sweet cider, to a bereaved mother and a life of slender means. Rebecca’s mother has thin lips; she observes “how her teeth are stained from chewing tobacco, how the wet root of her tongue jostles. That success led to an explosion of persecution and death, particularly at the hand of Hopkins and his cohorts. This novel is a fictionalised account of the witch trials that took place in Essex between 1645 and 1647.

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. But then newcomer Matthew Hopkins takes over the Thorn Inn and begins to ask questions about the women of the margins. Blakemore’s clear agenda is to give these silenced women a voice, and in fiction, she can thrust herself into Rebecca’s consciousness.We can however imagine that this path was regularly walked by some of the accused women, like Anne Leech who lived at Mistley and her daughter Helen Clark from Manningtree. More significantly, it prescribed that guilt in such cases was no longer to be decided by the ecclesiastical courts but by the courts of the common law. Winter lays down hard frosts, vitrifying the roads and the rooftops, enforcing seclusion and imposing fasts. But then newcomer Matthew Hopkins, a mysterious, pious figure dressed from head to toe in black, takes over The Thorn Inn and begins to ask questions about the women of the margins.