The Witches of the Forest

Bloodlines, Belief, and the Fear of Women.

Newhall, Fewston — once home to the Pulleyne, Neville, and Fairfax families. It was here that Edward Fairfax wrote A Discourse of Witchcraft and lived until his death in 1635. The site now lies beneath the waters of Swinsty Reservoir.

“When men fear women, they call it righteousness.”

In 1621, Edward Fairfax of Newhall, Fewston — poet, translator, and loyal servant to the Crown — accused six women from the nearby villages of Timble and Fewston of witchcraft. He claimed they had bewitched his daughters, echoing the same anxieties that haunted King James I’s Daemonologie (1597): purity, control, and the punishment of women who refused to conform.

Fairfax’s accusations were not the ravings of a fanatic but the reflections of a learned man, one who believed he was defending order against chaos. He recorded his charges in A Discourse of Witchcraft, a manuscript now preserved in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. The accused: Margaret Waite, Jennet Dibb, Elizabeth Dickenson, Ellinor Bill, Ann Foster, and Mary Pannell, were ordinary women of the Forest of Knaresborough. They were mothers, healers, and neighbours. But in a world ruled by superstition and patriarchy, their independence and knowledge were enough to condemn them.

Although the women were acquitted at the York Assizes (held at York Castle — the same courthouse and prison where, more than two centuries later, James Atkinson would await trial), Fairfax never recanted. His writings reveal a mind shaped by the same royal and religious forces that governed England at the time. The Fairfax family would later stand as Royalists during the English Civil War, seeking favour with the Crown and defending the sanctity of hierarchy, both political and moral.

Those beliefs left a long shadow. The fear of moral disorder and female agency took root in Yorkshire’s rural communities, carried through sermons, superstition, and silence. It was not just a fear of witchcraft, but of women who spoke too freely, loved too deeply, or refused to bend.

What makes this history deeply personal is that several of the women accused by Fairfax (Waite, Dibb, Dickenson, and Foster), appear within my own family tree. They lived within the same bounds of the Forest of Knaresborough as Mary-Jane Skaife would, more than two centuries later. Fairfax himself lived at Fewston Lodge in Norwood, less than half an hour’s walk from Stumps Lane, where Mary-Jane’s story begins. Across that narrow valley, the past seems to echo itself: the same soil, the same sermons, the same suspicion of women who dared to speak or simply be seen.

The same landscape that once condemned women for witchcraft would later judge them for disobedience, independence, or desire. Generations changed, but the fear of female voice endured, carried in the air, the pulpit, and the silence of the moor.

That legacy still haunts Sweetheart: Angel of the Moor. Mary-Jane’s death in 1858 feels less like an isolated tragedy and more like the last breath of a centuries-old story, one born in fear, fed by control, and written on the same Yorkshire earth.

✦ The Fairfax Legacy and the Witches of Timble

In the years that followed, those same royalist ideals of order and control echoed closer to home. The Fairfax family of Norwood, less than thirty minutes’ walk from Stumps Lane, were fervent supporters of the Crown and active in pursuing witchcraft within the Forest of Knaresborough. As recorded in local histories of Timble and the forest, women accused of witchcraft were drawn from nearby villages, many sharing the same family names still found across the dale today.

Their persecution reflected the same patriarchal fear of female agency that shaped both Shakespeare’s Macbeth and the world Mary-Jane Skaife was born into two centuries later. The Fairfaxes’ loyalty to the Crown — and their pursuit of royal favour under King James I, the author of Daemonologie (1597) — reveals how belief, politics, and fear could intertwine to justify control over women’s lives.

The echoes are impossible to ignore. The hysteria that once condemned “witches” for knowledge or defiance became, by the nineteenth century, a quieter but no less destructive force, silencing women like Mary-Jane under the weight of social expectation and male authority. Through Sweetheart: Angel of the Moor, that long shadow of fear and superstition becomes visible again, showing how inherited ideas about obedience and power still haunt the present.

References (Harvard Style)

Grainge, W. (1895) The History and Topography of the Townships of Little Timble, Great Timble, and the Forest of Knaresborough. Harrogate: R. Ackrill. Available at: https://archive.org/details/historytopograp00graigoog/page/n72/mode/1up (Accessed: 6 October 2025).

Firth, C.H. (1990) The Memoirs of the Fairfax Family: Royalists and Parliamentarians in the English Civil War. Oxford: Clarendon Press.