EAST ANGLIAN WITCHES AND WIZARDS By Michael Howard

In 1643 several men and women appeared in court at Chelmsford, Essex, charged with practicing the curious combination of ‘conjuration, magic and lechery’. The chief witness was a servant woman, Martha Hurrell, who claimed that she and a group of other people met regularly in various country houses to practice magic, together with a ‘conjuror’ or summoner of spirits described as a man ‘in black apparel with brown hair and a blackish beard.’ She was carried into the hall where the conjuror and other men ‘had the use of her body.’ The man in black ‘took up their coats’ and the women lay on top of him, saying afterwards that ‘he did them some good’. Hurrell also described how the group conjured up spirits by drawing a circle on the floor in their master’s hall and burning three candles, after which the group feasted and danced to the music of a fiddler. These rites, according to Hurrell, were ‘all of high and low order mingled together.’ As much as it was a place of witchcraft, East Anglia