Wallington extract
A 350-year-old notebook which describes the execution of innocent women for consorting with the Devil, has been published online by The University of Manchester's John Rylands Library. Puritan writer Nehemiah Wallington wrote passages on his attitudes to life, religion, the civil war as well as the witchcraft trials of the period. By 1654 Wallington catalogued 50 notebooks, of which only seven are known to survive. Each is unique, and the Tatton copy documenting battles and skirmishes of English Civil War period and the disturbing violence of the 1640s in which dozens East Anglian women were killed. There are also 4 in the British Library, 1 in the Guildhall Library, 1 in the Folger Library, Washington DC, and 1 at Tatton Park in Cheshire. Last year, a team of experts from the John Rylands' Centre for Heritage Imaging and Collection Care (CHICC) team funded by JISC, spent a week at Tatton Park, Cheshire, to capture the document on camera. Wallington tells how a supposed coven of witches was found in the Suffolk village of Manningtree.
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