I HEAR that Chelmsford City Council is thinking of installing a memorial to the first woman executed for witchcraft.

Agnes Waterhouse was actually a resident of Hatfield Peverel, but was hanged in 1566 in the area of the city’s later Shire Hall.

There is already a memorial to Colchester’s witch trial victims (more than 200 of them were incarcerated in the castle), but surprisingly there is nothing here in Maldon.

Looking back over my notes, I first started researching and writing about Maldon’s witches in 1988 and have been fascinated ever since.

There is clear evidence that our townsfolk (and those in the wider district) suffered persecution during those terrible times.

As well as a contemporary pamphlet of 1579, all of their names can be found in the Assize records of the time, in the Essex Quarter Sessions, the Ecclesiastical Courts, and the Maldon Borough Court prosecutions.

These are reproduced in later studies – including in CL Ewen’s Witch Hunting and Witch Trials (Kegan Paul 1929) and Alan Macfarlane’s Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England (Routledge 1970).

Most of our parishes feature – Woodham Mortimer (had two cases), Purleigh (also two cases), Great Totham (three), Tolleshunt Knights (another three), Bradwell (two), Creeksea (two) and Tollesbury, Little Totham, Stow Maries, Cold Norton and Goldhanger (each with one).

There were three cases in Burnham and here, in the town of Maldon itself, there were six.

The Maldon trials start in the same year as that Chelmsford execution (of 1566) and concerned “the wife of Nethersall”.

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In the September she was described as “a pauper of the parish of St Peter”.

She vehemently denied being a witch and had eight people who stood witness to her good character.

The next case is dated March 17, 1574, and involved a seamstress – “Alice, the wife of John Chandler”.

She was indicted for “bewitching a child to death” – eight-year-old Mary, the daughter of Francis Cowper (a fletcher).

Alice had also allegedly put a curse on weaver Robert Brisco and his daughter, aged just five.

Continuing in the 1570s, in ‘Hilary Session’ 1579 (that is between January and April), Ellen Smith also stood trial for witchcraft – this time for putting a fatal curse on her father-in-law, inflicting pains on John Eastwood and causing the death of “Goodwife Webb’s little girl”.

Even Ellen’s son gave evidence against her – that she kept three “familiars” in bottles (which had mysteriously disappeared).

Both Alice Chandler and Ellen Smith were duly sent to Chelmsford in the April of 1579, where they were found guilty and hanged.

A year later, in May 1580, it was the turn of a man. Humphrey Poles was “apprehended for conjuring”.

Then another man, Edmund Hunt, a hitherto respected freeman of the borough, was examined in March 1591 for “searching for lost treasure at Beeleigh Abbey”.

It was said that he had “consulted Thomas Collyne, who suggested that he took a piece of earth to Dr John Dee” (the great conjurer of the age, well known for his curious arts).

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Hunt also had “a parchment with magical drawings on it”, which he revealed to others in the White Hart, at Maldon’s Fullbridge.

By “conjuration, magic signs and words of power”, he thought that demons might be compelled to reveal the secrets of the earth.

But it didn’t do him any good, he was bound over in £20 to appear at the next Sessions. Sadly, the sequel to that intriguing story has since been lost.

The last known Maldon case was in May 1592, involving Margaret Wiseman of Beeleigh.

Seven men and five women appeared as witnesses against Margaret. She was accused of “the wicked art of witchcraft, sorcery and charming, to the great offence and terror of many”.

She even had a “magical broom which swept on its own” (a forerunner to the vacuum cleaner perhaps!).

Thankfully, Margaret was successful in her defence and the case was eventually dismissed, albeit she was expected to “behave herself” in the future.

They were strange and frightening times, fuelled by a lethal potion of superstition, ignorance and hysteria.

As well as those staged trials, Maldon even had its own ducking stool – located over the common sewage outfall at the Hythe (not far from the Queens Head).

When all was said and done, the town preacher, George Gifford (c.1540-1600), concluded that “whilst witches really did exist, they were no more than the instruments by which the Devil enticed people into wicked arts”.

That evil, he concluded, was “as much in the things people did to witches” as in their alleged sorcery.

It was a long overdue turning point in what is one of the bleakest chapters in our local history.