THE WITCHING TIDE

“We got no witches in Cleftwater. Leastways, we had none, until the witch man came.” A woman accused of witchcraft sums up the situation in Meyer’s fraught tale of misogyny, prejudice, and mob rule in 1640s England.

Martha Hallybread, an aging and mute servant in the household of her beloved master, Kit, uses her knowledge of botanicals and herbs to help generations of villagers in the East Anglian town of Cleftwater through pregnancy, childbirth, and illness. When Cleftwater is visited by the reign of terror caused by the itinerant “witch man” and the hideous methods he employs to prove women’s status as witches, Martha is overwhelmed by conflicting loyalties: to her master, to her fellow servants, to fellow villagers, to herself, and to the fading memory of her Mam and the opaque legacy she left for Martha. (Among the few cherished keepsakes she has from her mother is a small wax doll—a poppet—which acts as a talisman and comfort and, ultimately, source of mystical power for the beleaguered Martha.) Perhaps the most corrosive of these conflicts is the one within Martha herself as she struggles to reconcile aspects of her own nature with blunderbuss accusations raised against women struggling to survive in an environment of poverty and ignorance. As witch-hunt mania overcomes the village, the tide of public opinion turns against Martha and other village women, and they are forced to defend themselves against increasingly barbaric methods of interrogation, coerced confession, and execution. Based on records of an actual period of witch hunts in East Anglia during the years of the English civil war, Meyer’s saga of prejudicial ignorance and the horrors that result from innuendo campaigns is replete with period and chilling atmospheric detail.

Meyer’s narrative illuminates a dark historical period (and cautions against its re-creation).