Dominic Selwood
speaker
436 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 8 Sep
Dominic Selwood’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
So for ambitious magistrates like Noel, having a good witch trial was something of a career move.
Whether Janet was fully aware of what she's doing or not is very hard to get at because we don't have her words.
We have what the officials in the court thought of her.
And they thought that she was a wonderfully coherent, cogent witness.
But that's their view, so we're seeing her through the eyes of the clerk and the two judges, and with the knowledge that the jury then went on to convict based on her evidence.
But as a matter of common sense, does one really think that a nine-year-old would condemn the majority of their family to be hanged?
One really has to wonder.
It's very easy to conflate into ideas of witchcraft people who have practices that might seem slightly on the witchy side but actually when thought about in the historical context are no more than people using what's around them in beneficial ways for their communities.
And as to whether some of those people imbued or implied some sort of supernatural or unusual abilities that they were better than any of the next people, that must have gone on.
But that's different to admitting that it's what people think of or what people were tried of as witchcraft.
But it does massively complicate the picture.
People with spells or waxen images or pins or teeth of buried people is very much the fantastical, terrified vision of what a witch might be.
No doubt a lot of it down to hysteria and with no historical basis at all.
But of course, in rural communities, there were people who had skills with plants, with herbs, some basic chemical knowledge, who were able to use this for health, helping people, midwifery, various other skills that were very much necessary in early communities.
Did people pretend that they might have had heaven-sent powers or slightly supernaturally enhanced powers in order to gain a bit of competitive advantage over other people or to reassure their patients?
Almost certainly, but that's a very different thing to witchcraft the way it was seen in trials like the Pendle or Salem trial.
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