Conspiracy on the Tyne: Fact, Fiction and the Newcastle witch trial of 1650

by A D Bergin

‘Margaret Brown beseeched God that some remarkable sign may be seene at the time of execution, to evidence their innocency, and as soon as ever she was turned off the ladder, her blood gushed out upon the people to the admiration of the beholders. Yet she was hunge unto death upon the Moore, along with the fourteene other.’

The Newcastle Witch Hunt (1650), Ralph Gardner

‘To the admiration of the beholders.’ Five minutes in to what was supposed to be a basic piece of background research, a quick check of Ralph Gardiner’s petition ‘England’s Grievance Discovered’, the main surviving source detailing the Newcastle witch trial, that curious phrase brought me up short.

What exactly is there to admire, in the bloody struggle of a public execution? What is Gardiner trying to say? Is this no more than the recording of a notably gruesome moment? Is it a hint at some additional prurience? Could it even suggest a strangely genuine admiration for a convicted witch.

Never mind, I thought. Read on. Just check that the 1650 trial provides enough of a background for my fledgling main character, damaged spy James Archer, slogging up the Great North Road seeking redemption. He’s the book’s centre, this is only a backdrop, just read on.

The problem was, reading on, turning back, checking and re-reading, that sense of strangeness only increased. So much in Gardiner’s account contradicts everything I had previously learned about early modern witch hunts.

First, there is the sheer scale of the proceeding, with thirty woman escorted down from Newcastle’s Newgate prison to the Quayside to stand trial in Guildhall. That dwarfs the eighteen presented by Witchfinder-General Matthew Hopkins at Bury St Edmunds in 1645. The infamous Pendle case involved only eleven. By contrast, the largely unknown Newcastle witch trial emerges as the largest in English history.

The events in Guildhall were not only extraordinarily big, but uniquely damning. Across seventeenth century England, three-quarters of accused witches were acquitted, the law imposing high burdens of proof. Even in the harsher environment of Scotland, contemporary acquittal rates hovered around fifty percent. In Newcastle, fully twenty seven out of the thirty accused were found guilty. Occasional high rates of condemnation do exist elsewhere, but only ever in small scale cases, even then all traceable to isolated communities where the full workings of the law could not be brought to bear. Never in one of the largest urban centres of the country; never before professional judges.

And then, another oddity. That disparity between twenty seven condemned but only fifteen hung is unheard of. In no other British witch trial did more than a very few receive such reprieve after judgement. To be pronounced guilty was to die.

Checking the dates of the full proceedings, yet another surprise. On both sides of the border, execution rapidly followed upon conviction. Few would dare question the judgement of the courts, for fear that they themselves might be brought into the hunt. None wanted condemned witches to linger in this life, fearing their diabolical vengeance. Again, the Newcastle case proves strikingly different. The first formal accusations may have been as early as March 1649, and were certainly in full swing throughout that year. Final judgement took place only at the June 1650 Assizes. Even after that, the condemned endured a further, desperate wait until the executions on the 21st August.

The largest ever witch trial, prosecuted over an extraordinary length of time, resulting in uniquely high levels of conviction, but where an unheard-of number of the condemned escaped execution. Just what was going on in Newcastle?

By now, the trial was no longer merely a backdrop for my book. It was James Archer who stepped back into the shadows which are his most comfortable habitat, Margaret Brown and her fellow victims, calling across more than 370 years, coming forwards to become its principal focus. But I was still no nearer knowing what had really happened.

The ordinary, usually horrifyingly terse, court records proved of no help. Much of the Newcastle corporation archive was destroyed by wartime bombing, including those judicial papers from the seventeenth century. A 1649 petition has survived, made by the citizens of the town to the corporation to investigate the practice of witchcraft. We also have one, single accusatory deposition linked to those hung on the Town Moor, although even this relates to a Janet, (perhaps Jane,) Martin from Morpeth, tried separately in that small market town and brought to Newcastle only for the purposes of execution. Finally, a paper held in the Durham archives serves as confirmation of the names on Gardiner’s death list, save for its inclusion of Janet Martin, and is also the document which dates the executions to the 21st August. All that was left was to turn back to the more opaque and anecdotal parts of Gardiner’s account.

His version of the sequence of events at least accords with the other fragmentary sources. Hearing that a highly active Scottish witch-pricker, John Kincaid, had just condemned ‘twentye false women’ at Berwick-upon-Tweed, the Newcastle authorities dispatched two of the town sergeants north to fetch the man back, promising him twenty shillings for each successful conviction, some thirteen times that which he was used to being paid in the Lowlands. It can’t have been a difficult decision for Kincaid to accept the commission and head to Tyneside accompanied by a pair of experienced assistants.

Upon the pricker’s arrival, the town bell-man was sent out through the streets, calling for all those suspected as a witch to be brought forward. Those so accused were held in Newcastle’s Newgate prison, with a suggestion that this round-up undertook several phases spread out over a period of months. There, they were worked upon by Kincaid, and subsequently brought in batches before grand juries, to be put forwards together for that full Assize trial in Guildhall, there to be condemned and sent back to the prison to await execution.

There is a woodcut illustration in the Gardiner pamphlet, reproduced at the head of this article, which aims to illustrate the whole affair. It shows the two mounted sergeants, the bell-man, some of the women still imprisoned behind a barred window, all framing a gruesome depiction of the hanging itself, with Kincaid receiving his pay, but still, it offers no further clue to explain the extraordinary features of the case.

What Gardiner’s text does offer is detail on the initial success and subsequent failure of the formidable Elinor Loumsdale, in her strenuous efforts to free the accused. Elinor, Gardiner tells us, organised practical help and support for the accused women tumbled together in the appalling conditions of Newgate. She also led an all-female campaign of petitioning, pamphleting and personal barracking of the leading men of the town. In the absence of court records and depositions, nothing can be certain, but Elinor seems to have achieved a great deal, at least initially. The Newcastle trial struggled with a dearth of common accusation, a lack of prosecution witnesses and, most unusually, a complete absence of confession. Herself threatened with the witch accusation, however, Elinor Loumsdale was ultimately forced to leave the town. Mistress Loumsdale may have been unusually, powerfully persuasive, but even that could not save the Newgate women.

 Because in the absence of clear accusation, corroboration or confession, the evidence of Kincaid’s pricking was brought to bear. In both prison and open court alike, the Scot and his assistants scoured the women’s bodies for warts, moles, or other blemishes, which would point them out as an agent of the Devil. Even where such normal bodily marks were missing or unclear, the pricker would move on to pierce the flesh of each accused with a sharp bodkin, declaring them as a witch when the blade came out clean of blood. “They were brought in…and stript, and then openly had pins thrust into their bodies, and most of them were found guilty”.

A witch pricking needle

Standing to make that twenty shillings per conviction, perhaps it is not so surprising that Kincaid’s work condemned so many, but Gardiner records one further suspicious detail. Before the whole court, in the midst of the public prickings, Lieutenant-Colonel Paul Hobson, deputy military governor of the town and its first Baptist Minister, made an extraordinary intervention. Facing down the stares of justices, jury and citizens alike, Hobson called for one fair young woman, who Kincaid had just stabbed and condemned, to be brought back and tested for a second time. Stating that she could be no witch, for the light of the Lord was present within her, Hobson required the Scot “to run the pin into the same place, and then it gushed out blood; and the said scot cleared her, and said she was no child of the devil”. The Lieutenant-Colonel had publicly exposed the falseness of Kincaid’s cruel work, almost certainly involving a retractable bodkin. Yet none of the others was freed. The jury and justices upheld twenty seven convictions by the evidence of pricking alone, while Hobson rapidly found himself removed from his official position and was forced to quit Newcastle.

Finally, and most beguilingly, there are the names preserved upon the death list. Names such as Anderson, Henderson, Maddison, Rogerson, Hunter, Copeland and Coulter. These seem at first like familiar northern surnames. You might still expect to find more than a few on a Newcastle or Sunderland team-sheet. Except that four hundred years ago, in a much smaller town, those names were far less common and much more closely defended. All find echo in the Newcastle apprentice-lists, among its corporation officers and guild members, even in the upper echelons of the company of Hostmen which defended the town’s lucrative coal monopoly. Name after name of those executed upon the Town Moor appears to be drawn from important families, wealthy families, influential families. More, the dead came from significant families on both sides of Newcastle’s burning Royalist – Puritan political divide.

Which is as far as the source material takes us. Suggestions, and gaps, and intriguing possibilities, but no definite answers. Such is the way of History.

But by now, I had my fiction, and James Archer’s purpose: a town, family and duty abandoned; a missing sister; a struggle for control of the coal monopoly; a set of female victims to a political struggle; even a title taken from the psalms, ‘The Wicked Of The Earth’. That  story of corruption, greed and doomed courage is only one fictional view. It is one which accommodates all of the evidence, and provides a way of reconciling its apparent contradictions, but fiction it remains.

The truth remains buried in an unmarked mass grave in the churchyard of St. Andrew, Newgate. The site is worth a visit. From there, it is an easy fifteen minute walk via the Castle Keep to the Guildhall, site of the earlier building in which Kincaid did his pricking and the women were condemned. But nowhere along this route or elsewhere in the town is there any memorial to the victims.

21st August, 2025 marks the 375th anniversary of the executions upon the Town Moor. A group of historians, heritage professionals and historical fiction writers are working together to develop a commemorative event on that date, intent upon raising awareness of the Newcastle witches and to be able to establish a permanent memorial. Keep watch for that, because the defiant courage of Elinor Loumsdale, Margaret Brown and so many other women is an extraordinary piece of North East History that echoes down the centuries, speaks of the very foundation of the world of class and commerce we recognise today, and surely deserves that wider recognition.

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A. D. Bergin was born in Northumberland and raised on Tyneside. He graduated from Cambridge University with a first class degree in History, since when he has worked as an archaeologist, historian, researcher, postman, roofer, builder and barman.

The Wicked of the Earth is available now at https://www.northodox.co.uk/product-page/the-wicked-of-the-earth-a-d-bergin. For more updates, you can find A. D. Bergin on X @adberginwriter.