New historical research shows how the city of Exeter hunted down accused witches while the rest of the country relented. Its prosecution of benign local sleuths shows how far the authorities were willing to go
Christian Thorsberg | Daily Correspondent
November 2, 2026 2:47 p.m.
The exact details surrounding the theft of a purse nearly 400 years ago in Exeter, England, are still murky. Surviving evidence from 1642 suggests that it contained 13 shillings and one sixpence when it was taken. A woman named Anne King, the wife of a local weaver, was hired to track down its whereabouts.
King’s sleuthing methods were unorthodox. With a sieve and a pair of shears, she whispered the names of several possible perpetrators. The sieve rotated only when one specific name was uttered—that of Marie Matthews—leading King to mark her as guilty.
In a dramatic twist of fate, however, King herself was reported, arrested and put on trial for witchcraft. She was eventually released on bail and likely escaped with a warning.
Her fate was fortunate. By the 1640s, while witchcraft prosecutions were increasingly rare in most of England, Exeter had a reputation for being particularly intolerant of all kinds of magic. It continued executions for witchcraft into the 1680s.
New research into cases like King’s suggests that Exeter was abnormally hostile even to so-called “service magicians,” or “cunning folk,” who used magic for relatively benign purposes, like finding lost goods or investigating petty crimes.
“There were no private investigators back then, but if you suspected someone or a group had stolen your purse or made off with your silver spoons, you could go to a local service magician and give them the name of the suspects,” Mark Stoyle, a historian at the University of Southampton and author of Witchcraft in Exeter, 1558-1666, tells the BBC’s George Thorpe.
Across most of England, service magicians went about their business while authorities turned a blind eye. But King’s story is not standalone in Exeter, according to Stoyle’s new archival research, which combines centuries-old court records, manuscripts, birth and death certificates and other primary accounts to reveal Exeter’s unusually hostile views toward magic in the 16th and 17th centuries.
Stoyle also highlights the case of Christabel Robyns, a widow who in 1629 was tried for witchcraft after using magic to find missing spoons and a pewter jug. Robyns was only saved by the intervention of the chief justice of the Court of the King’s Bench, a high-ranking legal official who referred her case to a higher court, away from Exeter.
“In the early 1600s the Crown and senior judges were becoming increasingly skeptical and lenient towards cases of witchcraft, and by 1630 prosecutions were generally very rare in most of England,” Stoyle says in a statement. “In Exeter, however, this was a different story. It was the last place in England to execute people for witchcraft and local Justices of the Peace took a hard line against accused individuals, including the relatively benign service magicians.”
Tens of thousands of people throughout Europe were killed for practicing witchcraft from the 1400s through the 1700s. In England, a majority of these victims were women, a phenomenon that some scholars have explained by the predominance of women in occupations—including as cunning folk—that that left them exposed to accusations of witchcraft.
Women tended to work in community settings, unlike men, who worked in fields or workshops. “Many accusations stemmed from simply being present around the time of another’s misfortune,” Philippa Carter, a historian at the University of Cambridge, said in a statement in 2023 upon the publication of her own research into the links between gender, work and witchcraft in 17th-century England.
She added: “Women often combined multiple income streams, working in several households to make ends meet: watching children, preparing food, treating invalids. They worked not just in one high-risk sector, but in many at once. It stacked the odds against them.”
Did you know? Europe’s last witch
The last person to be executed as a witch in Europe was a Swiss servant named Anna Göldi. She was beheaded in 1782 after she was accused of bewitching a child of her wealthy employer.
Men, too, faced accusations of witchcraft, including Exeter’s John Blachett, a service magician who was attempting to find a missing hood. Blachett told his client that the hood was in a neighbor’s house, but when a search uncovered nothing, the client reported Blachett. He was put on trial for “certain devilish and hateful arts called in English Witchcraft, Inchantment, Charme and Sorcerie,” per the statement, but was not convicted by a jury.
Exeter was known for its hardline approach to witchcraft. According to Stoyle, the city hosted the both the country’s first and last witch executions, in the 1560s and 1680s, respectively. One magistrate named Ignatius Jurdain, a man of “unbending religious zeal,” particularly exemplified the city’s attitude, Stoyle tells the BBC.
“The city witnessed a long succession of indictments and prosecutions at this time, resulting in many unlucky women and men being banished, imprisoned or sent to the gallows,” Stoyle says in a statement. “The plight of the service magicians underlines just how deeply rooted these feelings ran and the lengths to which some local authority figures would go to tackle witchcraft in their city.”
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Source: Smithsonian Magazine · Christian Thorsberg
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