The Witches of Warboys

There is no more dramatic story in the annals of English witchcraft than that of The Witches of Warboys. On a foggy November day in 1589, when one of the five daughters of Robert and Elizabeth Throckmorton suddenly fell sick, no one in the small English village of Warboys could have predicted the terrifying events that would follow. Or envisaged that four years later, in April 1593, the Throckmortons' neighbors Alice, Agnes and John Samuel, would be dragged before a country court on charges of sorcery, enchantment and murder. With a rich and colorful cast of characters, and a potent mixture of tension and pathos to match anything in the later Salem witch trials, their story is told here in full for the first time . A conflict about honor and truth between two families in a close-knit Elizabethan village, at the heart of the narrative coils a dark account of possession by demons, of malevolent spirits, of trust broken and of children accursed. What really happened in Warboys in the late sixteenth century, to drive this unremarkable rural community into such frenzy? Philip Almond leads us into a half-forgotten world of horror and crime, of victims and victimizers, of spectres, sex with the devil and "scratching" the witch: a macabre and dangerous world where nothing is as it seems, where evil begets evil, and where innocence is betrayed.