Gateway Chronicle 2021

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(infant death being common in this era) and a sheep
acting strangely ‘skipping … on its head’ around
her.
Wenham knew her rights and dismissing the accusations
of witchcraft that traduced her, obtained
a warrant from the local Justice of the Peace to
fight slander. She was awarded a shilling in compensation,
suggesting those who were learned,
using reason rather than rumour, were on her side.
Wenham’s dismissiveness of the paltry sum and
sly asides that ‘she would get justice elsewhere’
suggests she knew how to play on the superstitions
of her accusers and frighten them more. Wenham
played the only strengths the underdog role had
given her. She was a nuisance: she was poor and
asked for assistance. This placed a burden on a
small community like Walkern’s. Such vagrancy
and vagabondage was not uncommon in this era of
population growth, when climate change reduction
in global mean temperatures meant there were fewer
crops and less food to go around.
The situation between Wenham and one of her
previous accusers, Anne Thorn, did not settle. It
is easy to understand personal slights continuing:
people bear grudges and Wenham comes across as
feisty and relentless. Thorn continued acquiesce
to Wenham’s request for firewood: speedily vaulting
gates, despite her dislocation injury, claiming
she was still bewitched. Only this, she said, could
explain her ability as she was temporarily ‘crippled.’
However, the trial records show a crowd of
the entire village following her as she completed
her task and helped her finish it, egging her on. If
the whole village was involved, might it suggest
Wenham’s widespread need for charity was wellknown
and resented. Might Anne Thorn’s final act,
in front of a dwindling crowd of two, of trying to
drown herself, be the coup de grâce of a drama in
which her personal animosity with Wenham was
about to be won? Teenage resentment sometimes
has few boundaries when the melodrama is in full
swing!
Henry Chauncy, the local notable, issued a warrant
for Wenham’s arrest on charges of felony
and witchcraft, to await trial at the assizes in three
weeks’ time and yet inexplicably the constable broke
into Wenham’s home and took her to Anne Thorn’s
residence. The anthropologist historian should be
rightly suspicious that a legal writ was not carried
out lawfully and that she was taken to her principle
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accuser who then proceeded to scratch at her face
fiercely, yet mysteriously ‘without drawing blood.’
Though this adds to the litany of strange charges
against Jane Wenham, the only sensible reasons one
can conclude for doing this is that the constable was
trying to get the pair to resolve their differences
peacefully and without the need for a courtroom;
here were two rivals who would not back down. I
wonder if Jane Wenham really believed the charges
had any substance. If they did, she would surely
have been more contrite and to drop the charges,
making up with Thorn as if her life depended upon
it. As it was she appears sensible enough not to
fight back.
Therefore, one should conclude Jane Wenham was a
brave woman who believed the reason and logic of
the law would save her, just as it had when she won
her slander case. Her feisty response when taken to
apologise to Anne Thorn also reflects her sense of
pride and self-worth. Just because she was poor was
no reason to cast aspersions upon her.
At her trial, Wenham was accused of being unable
to say the Lord’s Prayer after several attempts but
perhaps this is exaggeration. Wenham was bodily
searched and found to have no marks of the devil.
She offered to undergo the swimming test for
proving she was not a witch but had been refused
by her accusers: far better for them to take her to
trial against the whole village, steeped as it was, in
prejudice. Her accusers did not want her competing
Right:
Henry
Chauncy,
the notable
who issued
a warrant
for
Wenham’s
arrest