This might seem like a controversial question, and your reaction will very much depend upon your upbringing and belief system. Over the years we have been lead to believe that witches are evil, that they dabble with devil worship, or worse, and they need to be destroyed — literally. Although the last woman to be executed for witchcraft in the UK was Janet Horne in 1727, the last woman to be convicted and imprisoned for witchcraft was considerably more recent, in 1944). It is impossible to know exactly how many women, and men, were convicted of witchcraft over the years, but the number is definitely in the tens of thousands.
So why were these people accused? Well, often the women accused used herbs and natural remedies to heal. They were also often the village midwife. It is easy to see then how easy it would be for people to have a grudge against them. Perhaps someone lost a baby, or their partner, after they had visited this woman for help. Suddenly it is all her fault that they died and they want revenge. That’s just one of many scenarios. Often these women were intelligent and even well read (which of course was not good for women’s delicate disposition), which made them a threat to the dominant patriarchal society at the time. They may have used the power of words to aid healing, it cannot be a coincidence that spelling and spell sound so similar, even though they apparently have different origins as…
