Last of Britain's Witches

Hellish Nell

One of the last criminal trials using the 1735 Witchcraft Act was, improbably, in London in 1944. The accused was Helen Duncan, a middle-aged Scotswoman. This is her extraordinary story. 
 
Helen Duncan - known since childhood as 'Hellish Nell', for her uncontainable nature - was one of the most popular mediums of the twentieth century, holding seances around the country where she was believed to manifest the spirits of the dead. 
 
What happens when we die? It was the question of the age for a generation which had endured one world war and now was living through another. Mrs Duncan's seances offered an answer. But when she started foretelling naval disasters, she also attracted the unwelcome attention of the secret service. And so just weeks before the Normandy landings, absurdly, anachronistically, she was prosecuted for witchcraft and jailed. Was Nell a conjurer, a martyr or a security risk? 
 
Hellish Nell was first published in 2001 to widespread acclaim. It remains in this revised edition a fascinating window into the unsettled spiritual and psychological mood of the times: a sensational tale of spectacle, credulity and cruelty, and of Britain's last witch.

Malcolm Gaskill’s brilliant book ... not only offers an indelible account of a paranoid country at war with enemies tangible and supernatural, but teasingly invites us to take our own position on witchcraft, and its unlikely practitioner.

A great strength of Malcolm Gaskill&rsquo;s book is that it provides ... a piece of working-class history: he makes Spiritualism comprehensible in the context of the utter bleakness of the lives he describes.

Malcolm Gaskill has researched the whole story of Helen Duncan&rsquo;s life with exemplary thoroughness: his account sparkles with dry humour, but it is not without sympathy too.

Full of quirky detours into Spiritualism&rsquo;s uniquely odd hall of fame. But its chief fascination, I think, lies in the way it shows how the Spiritualist movement, for a certain group of women, proved to be more liberating than winning the vote.

Malcolm Gaskill&rsquo;s book is full, admirably researched, and in parts reads as if it had been dictated from the other world.

Extremely readable ... full of trenchant phrases and vivid analogies. It is balanced, fair and a salutary reminder, in our secularised society, that belief in the supernatural is still endemic.

A tremendous story ... The human relationship with magic is one in which tragedy and farce are constantly intermixed, and Malcolm Gaskill shows how vividly this was true in early twentieth-century Britain.

The colourful story of Britain’s last witch trial ... Superbly researched, densely written but mostly entertaining.

Malcolm Gaskill is Emeritus Professor of Early Modern History at the University of East Anglia. One of Britain's leading experts in the history of witchcraft, his works include the highly acclaimed Witchfinders, Between Two Worlds and Sunday Times bestseller The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World.

Life and Death in the New World

The Ruin of All Witches

*THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER* 
*SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOLFSON HISTORY PRIZE* 
*A TIMES, SUNDAY TIMES AND BBC HISTORY BOOK OF THE YEAR* 
 
'A bona fide historical classic' Sunday Times 
 
'Simply one of the best history books I have ever read' BBC History 
 
In the frontier town of Springfield in 1651, peculiar things begin to happen. Precious food spoils, livestock ails and property vanishes. People suffer fits and are plagued by strange visions and dreams. Children sicken and die. As tensions rise, rumours spread of witches and heretics, and the community becomes tangled in a web of spite, distrust and denunciation. The finger of suspicion falls on a young couple struggling to make a home and feed their children: Hugh Parsons the irascible brickmaker and his troubled wife, Mary. It will be their downfall. 
 
The Ruin of All Witches tells the dark, real-life folktale of witch-hunting in a remote Massachusetts plantation. These were the turbulent beginnings of colonial America, when English settlers' dreams of love and liberty, of founding a 'city on a hill', gave way to paranoia and terror, enmity and rage. Drawing on uniquely rich, previously neglected source material, Malcolm Gaskill brings to life a New World existence steeped in the divine and the diabolic, in curses and enchantments, and precariously balanced between life and death. 
 
Through the gripping micro-history of a family tragedy, we glimpse an entire society caught in agonized transition between supernatural obsessions and the age of enlightenment. We see, in short, the birth of the modern world. 
 
'Gaskill tells this deeply tragic story with immense empathy and compassion, as well as historical depth' The Guardian 
 
'As compelling as a campfire story ... Gaskill brings this sinister past vividly to life' Erica Wagner, Financial Times 
 
Sunday Times bestseller, November 2022

A bona fide historical classic ... Historical writing of the very highest class, impeccably researched and written with supreme imagination and wisdom.

Unforgettable ... Whether you read The Ruin of All Witches for a startling insight into another age, or see its portrait of mob hysteria and witch-hunts as darkly analogous to our own uneasy times, this is one of those rare history books that stays with you and haunts you long after you have turned the last page. Superb.

The genius of Gaskill's book lies in his meticulous piecing together of daily life in New England ...  Gaskill tells this deeply tragic story with immense empathy and compassion, as well as historical depth. A compelling study that offers a chilling insight into human nature in an age of superstition.

Breathtaking ... a great story, exquisitely told. I had to reread certain sentences aloud, just to savour their insight and cadence ... This book is history at its illuminative best.

The narrative is as compelling as a campfire story ... This is deeply atmospheric writing, carefully sourced ... As with the best history, the lessons of Springfield's past may serve to inform the citizens of a still-divided and conflicted nation.

Evocative right from the start, the reader is drawn in and excited in both body and mind ... It's a feast ... a valuable gift to every reader of history.

A portrait of a community during one of the first Puritan witch panics in the New World - and a timeless study of how paranoia, superstition and social unrest fuel fantasies ... Mr Gaskill's immersive approach brings the fate of his subjects movingly to life.

Simply one of the best history books I have ever read ... His deeply imaginative, empathetic and yet empirical exploration of a past moment of crisis is history at its finest.

A rich and beautifully written microhistory ... a work of remarkable historical reconstruction.

Malcolm Gaskill shows us with filmic vividness the daily life of the riven, marginal community of Springfield, where settlers from a far country dwell on the edge of the unknown. The clarity of his thought and his writing, his insight, and the immediacy of the telling, combine to make this the best and most enjoyable kind of history writing. Malcolm Gaskill goes to meet the past on its own terms and in its own place, and the result is thought-provoking and absorbing.

A surefooted and gripping narrative ... Gaskill's Springfield joins Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie's Montaillou, Tony Wrigley's Colyton and other places of little intrinsic importance which for one reason or another have been immortalised by modern historiography...  There is currently no memorial for Hugh and Mary Parsons in Springfield like those which have been erected in other places where witches were hunted. Perhaps they will get one now.

Reads with the fluency of a novel ... Crucially, Gaskill writes to make us see the world as those early Puritans saw it; how their own psychological fears, of financial ruin, of neighbours, of Native Americans and the hostile elements, could seed the first accusations of witchcraft.

An impressively researched account, bringing to life the fears and preoccupations of obscure and humble people, and setting them in the context of their time and place.

Powerfully evocative, a grimly compelling morality tale with more than one unexpected twist ... an outstanding achievement, haunting, revelatory and superbly written - a strong contender for the best history book of 2021.

A pulsating history of sorcery and superstition ... an academic feat but reads like a Stephen King thriller - and it's just right for our conspiracy-laden times.

A riveting micro-history, brilliantly set within the broader social and cultural history of witchcraft. Drawing on previously neglected source material, this book is elegantly written and full of intelligent analysis.

Malcolm Gaskill is Emeritus Professor of Early Modern History at the University of East Anglia. One of Britain's leading experts in the history of witchcraft, his works include the highly acclaimed Witchfinders: A Seventeenth-Century English Tragedy and Between Two Worlds: How the English Became Americans.

In the frontier town of Springfield in 1651, peculiar things begin to happen. Precious food spoils, livestock ails and property vanishes. Children sicken and die. As tensions rise, rumours spread of witches and heretics, and the community becomes tangled in a web of spite, distrust and denunciation. The finger of suspicion falls on a young couple struggling to make a home and feed their children: Hugh Parsons the irascible brickmaker and his troubled wife, Mary. It will be their downfall. 
 
The Ruin of All Witches tells the dark, real-life folktale of witch-hunting in a remote Massachusetts plantation. These were the turbulent beginnings of colonial America, when English settlers' dreams of founding a 'city on a hill', gave way to paranoia and terror, enmity and rage. Drawing on uniquely rich source material, Malcolm Gaskill brings to life a New World existence steeped in the divine and the diabolic, in curses and enchantments, and precariously balanced between life and death. 
 
Through the gripping micro-history of a family tragedy, we glimpse an entire society caught in agonized transition between supernatural obsessions and the age of enlightenment. We see, in short, the birth of the modern world.

Malcolm Gaskill

Phenomenal... Part biography, part social history and part travelogue, the book is a testament to the power of dogged research and to those twists and turns of memory which, however unstable, illuminate and inform the present

In this rich, engrossing book, Gaskill succeeds in his aim of writing ‘a story that in good conscience feels real’... As I finished his book, I began to see my own family’s past through his glass mountain, spurred by a throwaway remark in the penultimate chapter detailing the lives and fates of the soldiers Ralph encountered in Italy

Gaskill's account is as much about what cannot be known about the past as what can still be reconstructed, even as the last witnesses to the Second World War pass from sight... his ability to explore the overgrown byways of history almost as a form of travel writing is again winningly on show here... The book borrows its title from a symbol in Austerlitz by the German writer WG Sebald, a prism through which the past can be glimpsed but not grasped. Writing history is often like that. The past remains tantalisingly out of reach and, as Gaskill acknowledges, what we can comprehend of it can make it more complicated

Praise for The Ruin of All Witches

A bona fide historical classic... recreating a brooding, dangerous landscape with supreme imagination and wisdom

Simply one of the best history books I have ever read... a thrilling narrative

Unforgettable ... one of those rare history books that haunts you long after you have turned the last page

History at its finest... a perfectly rendered story of greed and paranoia

As compelling as a campfire story... deeply atmospheric

Filmic vividness... Malcolm Gaskill goes to meet the past on its own terms, and the result is thought-provoking and absorbing

Escape and Discovery in Wartime Italy

Malcolm Gaskill knew two things about his great-uncle Ralph’s wartime adventures: he’d been a prisoner in Italy, and he’d cut his way out of a train with a knife and fork. Apart from that, he’d faded into family folklore, lost to view. Until, one hot afternoon in an English country garden, a chance conversation set Gaskill on his uncle’s trail… 
 
What Ralph really did in the war was, he discovers, even more extraordinary than the exaggerations of family myth. From last-ditch fighting in the Libyan desert and incarceration in a Puglian prisoner-of-war camp, to desperate, dramatic escapes and the assuming of an entirely new identity among the peasants and partisans of the Italian Alps, Gaskill traces a life transformed by conflict, while lifting the curtain on a long-forgotten episode of the Second World War. 
 
Yet The Glass Mountain is about more than war: it’s a haunting exploration of what it means to encounter the past, and how we remember, forget and recover it. As he follows his uncle’s path through dusty archives and the landscapes, towns and villages of present-day Italy, Gaskill finds himself confronted by questions that go to the heart of how we think about the people who came before us: Why do stories matter? How much of the past can ever be true?

Malcolm Gaskill

Praise for The Glass Mountain

Phenomenal... Part biography, part social history and part travelogue, the book is a testament to the power of dogged research and to those twists and turns of memory which, however unstable, illuminate and inform t ...

In this rich, engrossing book, Gaskill succeeds in his aim of writing ‘a story that in good conscience feels real’... As I finished his book, I began to see my own family’s past through his glass mountain, spurred b ...

Gaskill's account is as much about what cannot be known about the past as what can still be reconstructed, even as the last witnesses to the Second World War pass from sight... his ability to explore the overgrown b ...

Phenomenal... Part biography, part social history and part travelogue, the book is a testament to the power of dogged research and to those twists and turns of memory which, however unstable, illuminate and inform t ...

In this rich, engrossing book, Gaskill succeeds in his aim of writing ‘a story that in good conscience feels real’... As I finished his book, I began to see my own family’s past through his glass mountain, spurred b ...

Gaskill's account is as much about what cannot be known about the past as what can still be reconstructed, even as the last witnesses to the Second World War pass from sight... his ability to explore the overgrown b ...

Phenomenal... Part biography, part social history and part travelogue, the book is a testament to the power of dogged research and to those twists and turns of memory which, however unstable, illuminate and inform t ...

In this rich, engrossing book, Gaskill succeeds in his aim of writing ‘a story that in good conscience feels real’... As I finished his book, I began to see my own family’s past through his glass mountain, spurred b ...

Gaskill's account is as much about what cannot be known about the past as what can still be reconstructed, even as the last witnesses to the Second World War pass from sight... his ability to explore the overgrown b ...

Books by Malcolm Gaskill

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