I was really excited by this premise and I greatly enjoyed some of the prose (although there were some cringe ass lines, like "He wants to fuck something, the world probably. It’s not hard to imagine this as a place to hide and seek sanctuary from the fear and loathing, accusation and uncertainty happening in the streets. Out in the yard, one of the hens takes a considered step, her head held askew, like a woman in marvellous skirts stopping to check the tread of her boot for a stone. Rebecca’s mother has thin lips; she observes “how her teeth are stained from chewing tobacco, how the wet root of her tongue jostles.

In reading historical fiction, which for you is the most important factor: the facts or the fiction, and why? But what the book is really about (as the author says in the Afterword) is the “fears, hopes, desires and insecurities of the women who scratched out their existence on the very edges of society, and who have otherwise gone voiceless, or else been muted by victimhood. This book was recently included on a very impressive longlist for the Desmond Elliott Prize for Debut fiction which prompted me to read it. The women in church “fan themselves with their handkerchiefs, churning up bemingled emanations of rosewater perfume, womb-clot, sweat and cinders.The novel dramatises brilliantly how the civil war created social tensions, breeding suspicions among previously amicable neighbours. I answer that her aches and pains might have more to do with the Edwards’ small-beer than anticipation of honest labour. For all its whimsy, Oreo, written at the height of the Black Power movement in the US, is also a meditation on racial identity – and Helen’s shrewd reflections on a mean, ridiculous and ridiculously mean world shape her daughter’s quest for belonging. It is commonly thought that a tendency to the heresy of witchcraft is passed from mother to daughter.

The Puritans, like many societies of the 1600s, also believed that women were culturally inferior to men. The Ascension, by John Constable, which now hangs in Dedham church, was commissioned in 1821 for the altarpiece of the early seventeenth century church on the High Street, demolished in 1967. The mechanism of persecution was not spontaneous but required official administration and organisation.Given the entrenched misogyny, together with religious zealotry sanctioned by both Church and State in the 1640s, there was little hope for any woman accused of being a witch. If you love beautifully written historical fiction, I’d definitely recommend giving this one a read. Contemporary woodcut depicting Matthew Hopkins with witches and their familiars (“imps”), published 1647. Today, with the 18th century development of Mistley Quay nearby, we're not far from urban development. The JPs asked Steame to help some of the investigations and then Matthew Hopkins got involved as well.

Manningtree is known as the centre of the activities of Matthew Hopkins, the self-appointed Witchfinder General, who claimed to have overheard local women discussing their meetings with the devil in 1644 with his accusations leading to their execution as witches. Rarely does their ambition for the power granted to them seem to extend beyond the home, the village. The title ‘witchfinder general’, with its military associations, was created by Hopkins himself as an act of self-aggrandisement. It’s almost certain that Hopkins, Stearne, the accusers and the JPs met in pubs, because that’s where men of standing got together - in a meeting room in an inn.According to historical records, 92 witnesses testified against these women and 15 others during their trial.