Witch Craze

Dead Funny History: Witch Craze. Join historian Greg Jenner for a fast-paced, funny and fascinating journey through the Witch Craze, a terrifying period in European history when thousands were accused of witchcraft, and many paid the ultimate price. This episode of Dead Funny History is packed with jokes, sketches and sound effects that bring the past to life for families and Key Stage 2 learners. From the infamous Malleus Maleficarum to King James I’s witch-hunting book Daemonologie, Greg explores how fear, superstition and social upheaval led to over 45,000 executions across Europe. Discover how people were accused of witchcraft for talking to animals, having freckles, or simply being old and female. Learn about bizarre “tests” like swimming with thumbs tied to toes, and how pets named Satan could land you in trouble. There’s even a spoof gameshow, a parody beauty vlog, and a goat who’s tired of being scapegoated. The episode also highlights real historical figures like Agnes Waterhouse, England’s first woman executed for witchcraft, and Matthew Hopkins, the self-appointed Witchfinder General who tortured victims during the English Civil War. It’s a dark chapter of history, but told with humour, empathy and a clear message: justice should never be based on fear or prejudice. Expect musical parodies, sketch comedy, and a quiz to test what you’ve learned. It’s history with heart, humour and high production value. Perfect for curious kids, families, and fans of You’re Dead To Me. Written by Gabby Hutchinson Crouch, Athena Kugblenu and Dr Emma Nagouse Host: Greg Jenner Performers: Mali Ann Rees and John-Luke Roberts Producer: Dr Emma Nagouse Associate Producer: Gabby Hutchinson Crouch Audio Producer: Emma Weatherill Script Consultant: Professor Suzannah Lipscomb Production Coordinator: Liz Tuohy Production Manager: Jo Kyle Sound Designer: Peregrine Andrews A BBC Studios Production

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:10Greg Jenner?

  Hello and welcome to Dead Funny History. I'm Greg Jenner. I'm a historian and I want to tell you about something a bit horrible, actually. Do you have a favourite witch? Mildred Hubble? Elphaba from Wicked?

• 1:24Speaker 04

  Everyone deserves the chance to fly.

• 1:27Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, we love witches, much more than wizards. I bet you can't even name me more than thirty-seven wizards. Go on.

• 1:35Greg Jenner?

  See? It's really hard. The idea of witches has been around for ages, but I want to talk about a time when people believed they were especially dangerous. Between the years 1450 and 1750, about ninety thousand people were accused of witchcraft. And one of the most famous witch trials was at Salem in America. But all over Europe as well, suspected witches could be put in shackles, put on trial, tortured, and worse. Around forty-five thousand people were executed for witchcraft in those three hundred years. But why? It's not as if people were suddenly flying around on broomsticks.

• 2:17Speaker 04

  I'll defy gravity.

• 2:20Greg Jenner?

  Because flying brooms aren't real.

• 2:23Speaker 04

  Ow! My bum!

• 2:25Greg Jenner?

  But people really thought they were real. So why did people get especially worried about witches? Well, this was a period of huge social and religious change. There were huge wars, a mini-climate crisis, and bad harvests. And during hard times, people often look for a scapegoat.

• 2:45Speaker 05

  An escaped goat?

• 2:47Greg Jenner?

  No, a scapegoat, an innocent person who's easy to blame for stuff. And if you believed in witches, instead of saying something like...

• 2:55Speaker 04

  The socio-political situation's left me economically vulnerable to the weather ruining my crops, and I'm powerless against it. Bother!

• 3:04Greg Jenner?

  Instead, people could just say...

• 3:06Speaker 04

  That weird old woman cursed my turnips. Get her!

• 3:10Greg Jenner?

  In 1486, a book was published by the German monk Heinrich Kramer, called The Malleus Maleficarum. That means "The Hammer of Witches". It was basically a witch-hunting guide for dummies. A century later, even the poshest man in Britain was obsessed with witches. King James I of England, who was also King James VI of Scotland, even wrote his own book about them, called Demonology, another bestseller. But then again, he was a celebrity author. At least he wrote it himself, probably.

• 3:41Speaker 04

  So, King James, usually when a celeb pitches us a book idea, we get a ghostwriter to do it?

• 3:49Speaker 00

  You get a ghost to write it? Witchcraft! Burn this publishing house to the ground!

• 3:57Greg Jenner?

  So then, how, according to these official witch-finding guides, did you actually find a witch? Well, mostly, it boiled down to this.

• 4:07Speaker 04

  You have reached 1-800-SNITCH-O-N-A-WITCH. File one: if you got sick and there's an old woman you hate. Down two, if your cow died and there's an old woman you hate. Or down three, if there's an old woman who talks to herself or to animals and you hate her. For any other old woman you hate based incidents, press the star key.

• 4:34Greg Jenner?

  One of the first women in England to be executed for witchcraft was Agnes Waterhouse in 1566. Her daughter, Joan Waterhouse, was also accused, but her testimony saved her by condemning both Agnes and Agnes's sister Elizabeth. Getting both your mum and auntie executed must have made Christmas dinner pretty awkward. Joan, see if your mum and auntie want more gravy. Oh, wait, you can't. You got them killed. One reason the English authorities killed Agnes was because she said that she had a cat called Satan, who would apparently do anything for milk or a drop of blood. But pets will do anything for a treat. I know a cat that jumps up and down for salami.

• 5:19Greg Jenner?

  And if she called her cat Satan, so what? If your pet's name summoned that person to be on your side in a fight, I'd get a cat named Dwayne the Rock Johnson. Hey, little Dwayne, here's a bit of salami for you. From the start, there was a stereotype that witches were older, often unmarried or widows, and heaven helped someone if they talked to animals, like I just did. So-called witch hunters could claim any nearby animal was a witch's familiar, and they weren't just black cats.

• 5:50Speaker 04

  I'm going to ask you one last time. Did Janet say good morning to you at oh nine hundred hours? Ribbit. Witnesses refusing to cooperate. Get him, lads. Ribbit, ribbit, ribbit, ribbit, ribbit, ribbit. Oh, ribbit, ribbit.

• 6:11Greg Jenner?

  People thought witches got their powers through a diabolic pact with demons.

• 6:18Greg Jenner?

  Or even with the devil himself, the boss level demon. Oh, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. Although it was generally accepted that witches could be any age or gender, it was believed that women were more susceptible to evil influences. Of course, today, we know that this is nonsense. Although it might explain why I know so many women who love true crime podcasts.

• 6:41Speaker 00

  His tongue was never found.

• 6:45Greg Jenner?

  Cool. In the British Isles, between 75 and 85% of people accused of witchcraft were women and girls, especially women over 45. Thank goodness that group doesn't get carted off anymore whenever there's bad weather, otherwise all of a bonus would go straight out of business. However, over in Iceland, 92% of accused witches were men. At least Icelanders were ahead of their time when it came to gender inequality.

• 7:15Speaker 00

  What do we want? To be born at the Stike. When do we want it? Now!

• 7:24Speaker 05

  Ow! Ah! Ow!

• 7:27Speaker 00

  Hashtag, you're welcome!

• 7:29Speaker 05

  Ow! Ow!

• 7:36Greg Jenner?

  Because witchcraft was often made a criminal offence, witch trials became official legal proceedings, requiring, you know, like, actual evidence. Generally, European courts needed at least two witnesses to prove a crime had been committed. Sounds fair, right? Yeah, you can't be found guilty of witchcraft unless two people witness you doing magic. Except, people often said...

• 8:01Speaker 00

  But you see, the only reason nobody witnessed it is the devil covers up these witches' crimes using more witchcraft. Double witchcraft!

• 8:14Greg Jenner?

  So instead, the authorities would get accused witches to, ahem, confess to these accusations by torturing them. Accused witches were stretched on the rack, or had their limbs crushed, or were burnt on iron chairs. It was horrible. But King James's book, Demonology, suggested a different approach to proving someone was a witch.

• 8:39Speaker 00

  Welcome back to Witch or Woman? The game show where we find out if a woman is a witch by making them swim. Oh, that sounds nice. By throwing them into a river with their thumbs tied to their toes. Wait, uh, what?

• 8:57Greg Jenner?

  Yep, if a person floated, they said the water was rejecting them, so they were a witch. And if the lady sank, they were innocent.

• 9:05Speaker 00

  The bad news is, she drowned. The good news is, she was innocent! Wahoo! Another normal woman! Wow, we are on a 100% winning streak here! Wow!

• 9:19Speaker 05

  What was my mum?

• 9:24Greg Jenner?

  Prosecutors would also claim that marks on the body could be from the devil's touch. Even a mole, or skin tag, or freckle. Impossible beauty standards are women are bad enough these days. Back then, it was murder.

• 9:38Speaker 04

  Hey, today on Beauty Blog, I'm gonna show you how to hide all those unsightly blemishes before an angry mob of your neighbours ties you up and kills you. So, you take this handy stick, and you poke another woman with it, chatting, "I got the witch, right here", and then, hopefully, they kill her for having a mole instead.

• 10:04Greg Jenner?

  So far, so awful.

• 10:06Speaker 00

  Hey, what about me?

• 10:08Greg Jenner?

  Oh yeah, in the 1640s, there was another awful rotter called Matthew Hopkins.

• 10:14Speaker 00

  I'm the Witchfinder General.

• 10:17Speaker 04

  Says who?

• 10:18Speaker 00

  Says me.

• 10:20Speaker 04

  So you just made it up?

• 10:21Speaker 00

  Oh, so you know my mind, do you? Like some sort of... Witch!

• 10:27Speaker 04

  Oh, no, no, no, no, you carry on, Mr. Witchfinder General.

• 10:33Speaker 04

  Sir.

• 10:34Greg Jenner?

  Matthew Hopkins would get accused witches to confess by Wake up, come on, wakey wakey. Not letting them sleep. Boop boop boop. His first victim that we know of was an eighty year old lady called Elizabeth, who he kept awake for days before he claimed that he saw her summon her animal familiars. But poor Elizabeth was probably just talking to herself because no sleep had made her brain go funny. Matthew Hopkins tortured and killed loads of people, riding from town to town, making use of the chaos of the English Civil Wars to make money from scapegoating the vulnerable. Eh eh eh. I said scapegoating. Eh. People executed for witchcraft weren't always burned.

• 11:15Greg Jenner?

  In England and Wales, they were mostly hanged because doing harm by witchcraft was treated as a legal crime, like murder. In Scotland, however, it was seen as a religious crime, so accused witches were burned as heretics.

• 11:29Speaker 00

  You're under arrest for the religious crime of witchcraft. Prepare to burn.

• 11:37Speaker 04

  Ah, but my, my feet are over the English border.

• 11:40Speaker 00

  Fine, you're under arrest for the legal crime of witchcraft. Prepare to hang.

• 11:47Speaker 04

  You know what? That's probably not as bad.

• 11:49Greg Jenner?

  In Scotland, they weren't always burned alive.

• 11:51Speaker 00

  They're not monsters in Scotland. We'd strangle you first.

• 11:56Speaker 04

  Thanks.

• 11:58Greg Jenner?

  However, it wasn't the same everywhere. Despite the German states having very high rates of executions, one German town called Rothenburg Obde Tauber had really low numbers. Why? Well, because not only did they investigate accused witches, they also tortured the accusers to make sure they weren't lying, just to ruin their enemies' reputations. And weirdly, it seems that fewer people said, That old woman cast my bratwurst. When there was a chance that they would be treated as badly as the person that they had accused.

• 12:32Speaker 00

  Oh wait, it was in me lederhosen the whole time.

• 12:36Greg Jenner?

  Also, communities could sometimes fight back, especially if they really liked someone accused of witchcraft. A historical document from Dorset in England from 1606 shows a neighbourhood signed a petition saying that a woman named Joan Guppy was not a witch. You can't kill Joan. Who else is going to bring jam tarts to next week's feet? I really hope it worked. Usually neighbourhood petitions can't even get potholes filled in. However, ridiculous accusations were still easy to make. In Lew in 1671, an unnamed writer claimed a woman he had arrested had used witchcraft to— Make the English navy lose a battle, stop the Queen having babies, and make an MP get killed by a bull.

• 13:21Greg Jenner?

  And his proof? She was seen near some bouncing cats. And yeah, the poor lady was arrested. Maybe the cats were just bouncing around her because they wanted salami.

• 13:31Speaker 04

  Down, Dwayne the Rock Johnson!

• 13:34Greg Jenner?

  Much like Gangnam Style, thankfully, all bad things must come to an end. One of the last known people executed for witchcraft was Anna Goldie in Switzerland in 1782. That is just 126 years before they invented the Toblerone. Really makes you think. Despite having once been supported by the law, the church, and a literal king with a book deal, the witch craze thankfully petered out, as most crazes do. And that really gives me hope that one day we'll all stop wearing Crocs. So, how much do you remember from today's speedy history lesson? Let's find out! Pencils at the ready! Here comes question one. What was the name of Heinrich Kramer's bestselling handbook on how to hunt witches?

• 14:19Speaker 04

  Malleus Malificarum, which meant ‘The Hammer of Witches’.

• 14:26Greg Jenner?

  Question two. Roughly 90,000 people were accused of witchcraft during the European witch craze, but how many were executed?

• 14:34Speaker 00

  Forty-five thousand.

• 14:37Greg Jenner?

  And question three. Who was the last person in Europe to be executed for witchcraft in 1782 in Switzerland?

• 14:47Speaker 04

  Anna Goldie.

• 14:50Greg Jenner?

  Well done. Join us next time for another snappy history lesson. And if you're a grown up and want to learn more about the witch craze, listen to our episode of You're Dead to Me with Professor Suzannah Lipscomb. Thank you for listening. Bye. This was a BBC Studios audio production for Radio 4. Dead Funny History was written by Gabby Hutchinson-Crouch, Athena Kugblenu and Dr Emma Nagouse. It was hosted by me, Greg Jenner, and performed by Malian Rees and John Luke Roberts. The script consultant was Professor Suzannah Lipscomb.

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