Historical breakthrough as England’s last convicted witch may have survived | History | News

Witches and witchcraft are one of the key symbols of Halloween – applied to harm brought upon others through the use of supernatural or occult powers. 

A belief in malevolent witchcraft has been found across many societies throughout recorded history. Sometimes witches are believed to act alone and at other times to operate in tandem with other witches, often as part of a conspiracy opposed to the moral norms of their communities.

In many places, those accused of witchcraft have been ostracised, punished, and sometimes killed, including in the UK. 

The last person known to be executed for witchcraft in England is believed to be Alice Molland, who was hanged in Exeter in 1685. 

However, new research by a University of Southampton historian, Professor Mark Stoyle, suggests that Alice may in fact have been released from jail, avoided the gallows and instead lived on for many years.

Alice Molland was sentenced at Exeter Castle, Devon, in 1685 for “bewitching” three of her neighbours. She was assumed to have been executed in the city’s Heavitree area in the same year.

For over a century, historians have largely agreed that Alice was England’s last executed witch and a plaque commemorating hers, and the fate of three other women (Temperance Lloyd, Susannah Edwards and Mary Trembles)  – the so called “Bideford witches” – who were definitely hanged in Exeter in 1682,  can now be found near the spot where she was condemned.

However, Alice has remained an elusive and mysterious character. All that is known about her is the fact that she was sentenced to death. 

Now, newly uncovered evidence suggests it may not have been “Alice” Molland who was condemned to execution at all, but actually a woman called “Avis” Molland. 

Prof Stoyle thinks a clerical error could have caused this confusion. Court records from the 17th-century were written in Latin and in this form, a single mis-stroke of the clerk of the court’s pen would transform “Avicia” (Avid) into “Alicia” (Alice), he explained. 

While historians have often stated that Alice was the last person to be executed in England, Prof Stoyle told Express.co.uk, “no other evidence has ever been discovered about this unfortunate woman – and it’s not even certain that she was, in fact, hanged.  

“So, when I stumbled across a reference to a certain Avis Molland in a document written in Exeter just three months after the date of Alice Molland’s trial, I immediately wondered whether two women with such similar, and unusual, names might possibly be one and the same. And, if they were, had ‘Alice’ in fact escaped the noose?”

Prof Stoyle noted that independent of his investigations, fellow historian Peter Elmer had also noted this possibility in an article footnote, which spurred him to try to find out more. 

After a meticulous search of local court records, registers of births, deaths and marriages, and tax documents, Prof Stoyle uncovered several references to Avis. She was married to a man named Cornelius Molland in Exeter Cathedral in 1663 and went on to have several children. One was a baby girl named Elizabeth, born in 1667. 

In the same year, the couple was brought before city magistrates accused of enticing a boy to steal tobacco, but the case was dismissed. It is possible this alleged crime was due to the family struggling to make ends meet because although Cornelius was a freeman of the city, the family were listed among the poorest. Over a period of ten years, three of their children died and at some point, Cornelius also died, leaving Avis a widow.

By the time of the 1685 trial, Avis Molland was a poor, middle-aged widow, who was burdened with loss – precisely the kind of woman who was likely to be accused of witchcraft in early modern England, explained the professor. 

There is also circumstantial evidence connecting Avis with imprisonment at Exeter Castle. She is noted in court records in 1685 testifying against a woman accused of predicting an uprising of 2,500 weavers in a civil rebellion spreading across the West Country. It is possible Avis overheard this woman boasting about the insurrection while visiting her husband who was imprisoned in the Castle for rioting. If this is the case, then it places Avis in jail there around the time of ‘Alice’s’ trial.

Avis died in 1693, with the parish register recording her passing on the 26 November – outliving her unintended alias by eight years. If Alice was a simple misspelling of Avis, this means neither were England’s last executed witch and that this title instead falls to one of the Bideford three, executed in 1682.

“I’m thrilled to think that, if Avis was indeed ‘Alice’, then we have finally tracked down the mysterious woman who has eluded us for so long – and, in the process, begun to recover the life story of the individual who has long been known as ‘England’s last executed witch’,” Prof Stoyle told Express.co.uk. “As an Exeter man myself, I’m also fascinated by the possibility that the woman who has long enjoyed a certain renown in the history of English witchcraft may also have been an inhabitant of my own home city.”

If the two women are the same person, “then we would have to move the date of the last-known witch execution in England back, from 1685 to 1682. This, in turn, would mean that we would need to acknowledge that scepticism about the supposed crime of ‘witchcraft’ among English judges was even stronger than we had previously thought during the 1680s”. 

He did warn, however, that despite his diligent searching, we may never know for sure whether history as got it wrong. 

“Whatever the case, I hope that my research will arouse still more interest in the story of ‘England’s last executed witch’ – and perhaps lead to the discovery of new evidence which will establish Molland’s true identity – and her true fate – once and for all!”

Professor Mark Stoyle’s full article “In Search of Alice Molland: An English Witchcraft Will o’ the Wisp” is due for publication in the November edition of The Historian, the magazine of the Historical Association.