The Wansdyke & District Forums

I have left the vanished-village thread alone, as I promised, but a thought will not leave me and it belongs on this board if anywhere. The vill drops out of the record after about 1605. I have always treated that date as chance. Lately I am less sure. 1605 is the Gunpowder year, the year the country lost its head over plots and hidden enemies. The Witchcraft Act had passed the twelvemonth before, making the craft a hanging matter without benefit of clergy. The King had written a book on the subject and hunted witches in Scotland before ever he came south. The whole machinery of finding-out was sharpened to a point in those exact years. A small, inward, old-fashioned community, with a reputation, in 1605. You see where my mind runs. Did they not die, but scatter, ahead of an accusation?

It is a sound instinct, Edmund. The church court records of that period are thick with it, presentments for "witchcraft and sorcery," most of it spite and a bad harvest, but a few that ended at the rope. A community that got wind of a coming visitation might well have melted away before it landed. It happened more than the histories like to say. I can look through the deanery books around 1605 if you wish.

Please do. And yet here is what stops me. A witch-scare explains the people going. It does not explain the paper going. A frightened village leaves its houses and its dead behind; the church remains, the churchyard remains, the demolition and the regrant of the manor are all set down in due course, as they always are. Here there is none of it. The people may well have fled the fear. But somebody, afterwards, took very great care that the place left no trace at all, and a fleeing village does not tidy up after itself. That is the part no witch-scare will account for. It is a piece of the thing. It is not the thing.

or its a village that emptied in a bad year and the registers rotted in a damp vestry, which is what registers do. youve got a hole and youre filling it with king james. half the parishes in england have a witch story and a gap in the books, it dont make every one of em a conspiracy selwood. sometimes a gap is just a gap.