So about those burning witches...

When I mentioned in the first post that witches in England were hanged rather than burned, I had a couple of messages along the lines of: Wait — really?

Which is fair enough. I’d assumed the same thing myself for years.

If you grow up on Hammer Horror, Hollywood films, and lurid illustrations in history books, it feels like a law of nature that witch trials must end with a bonfire. I fully expected to write one into To Snare a Witch when I started sketching out the series. Big flames, smoke, screaming crowds — the usual grim business. Then the research got in the way.

It turns out that in England, witchcraft wasn’t treated as a religious crime but a civil one. That meant no purification by fire. If you were convicted, you went to the gallows, like any other felon. No spectacle of cleansing flames, just a rope and a very public ending.

I’ll admit I was both surprised and slightly annoyed. Fire feels… theatrical. Hanging is much plainer, much more matter-of-fact. But the more I thought about it, the more unsettling it became. There’s something particularly chilling about executions taking place in familiar spaces, carried out by neighbours, under the banner of keeping order.

And that discovery opened the floodgates. If that much of what I thought I knew was wrong, what else was?

Quite a lot, as it happens. Men were accused as well as women. Not all the condemned were old crones. And even in Europe, where burning did happen, many victims were killed before the flames were lit — which rather undermines the imagery we’ve all absorbed.

These little historical jolts are one of my favourite parts of writing in this period. They don’t just correct the record; they change the feel of the world you’re writing about.

And for horror, texture is everything.

Did any of this surprise you? And are there other widely accepted historical “truths” you’ve discovered aren’t true at all?