The man they could hang

By Laura Joint
BBC Devon

A section of the 1610 court document detailing Richard Wilkyns' case

Poor old Richard Wilkyns, it seems he got the blame for everything.

Old court documents, stored away since 1610, show that Wilkyns, a labourer from Exeter, was the only man in Devon to be tried and hanged as a witch.

Wilkyns was found guilty of eight charges of witchcraft, killing two people, seriously harming three others, and killing a cow, gelding and 10 pigs.

He was hanged in Magdalen Street, Exeter, on 12 July 1610, according to the parish registers of St Sidwells.

The 399-year-old documents were found at the Devon Record Office by Professor Mark Stoyle while he was doing research about that era. The pages were all in Latin and written in a scrawl so took some translating - but here's an extract of the charge:

"...being moved and seduced by the instigation of the devil, wickedly and feloniously practice and exercise certain hateful arts and diabolic enchantments, called in English Witchcraftes & Sorcerye...did wickedly and feloniously kill and murder that Richard Seward..."

The original Latin documents are stored in the Devon Record Office

Prof Stoyle now hopes to do some digging into the case, to find out more about Wilkyns' story.

During his research, Prof Stoyle also stumbled on another witchcraft case, that of Joanna Brice, who, in 1602 was found guilty at Exeter of killing three people through "dark means".

However, although sentenced to be hanged, there is no record of her execution, leading to a theory that she might have escaped.

The discovery of the new cases brings to six the number of known convictions of witchcraft in Devon during the witchhunts of the late 1500s and 1600s.

The others are the famous case of the Bideford Witches - Temperance Lloyd, Susanna Edwards and Mary Trembles, who were hanged in 1682 - and Alice Molland, who was sentenced to death in 1685 and was reputedly the last witch to be hanged in England.

But it's the discovery of the first male case which has excited Prof Stoyle: "There were more male witches in England than people imagine," he said. "Probably about 15% to 20% of witches were men.

"But we've never come across a male witch who'd been hanged in Devon before.

Occasionally there were some people who claimed to be witches because they enjoyed the notoriety Prof Mark Stoyle

"It was quite lucky really - finding anything in the records office is like looking for a needle in a haystack.

"I was going through a series of documents about all sorts of legal cases. It was all in Latin, so I got a friend to translate it.

"It's so difficult to find new witch cases. There were fewer than 1,000 executed for witchcraft in England so this is a rare find."

The documents detail the charges and outcome, but it's the story behind the court case which Prof Stoyle now wants to discover: "All we have are the bare bones.

"Occasionally there were some people who claimed to be witches because they enjoyed the notoriety. But usually they were just scapegoats on jumped-up charges."

The Devon Records Office at Sowton, Exeter has thousands of documents dating back to the 1400s - so the chances are there are more hidden gems tucked away somewhere - it's just a case of knowing where to look.

An article by Prof Stoyle about the witchcraft cases will appear in the Devon and Cornwall Notes and Queries in the New Year.