Witches by Tracy Borman, review Between 1450 and 1750, around 100,000 people, most of them women, were tried for witchcraft in Europe. The list of their supposed crimes was bewilderingly varied. Almost any natural event could be interpreted as evidence of supernatural activity. In Germany, 63 women were executed for supposedly causing a violent hailstorm, while a Norfolk farmer complained that thanks to the mysterious powers of a local witch, his boar "could not cry or grunt as beforetime." The treatment of those charged with witchcraft was appalling. Torture was commonplace, including starvation, sleep deprivation, stabbing the witch's body to search for a devil's mark and forcing her into a stagnant pond or cesspool to see if she floated (guilty) or drowned (exonerated but dead). If brought to trial, she would be denied legal representation and heckled if she tried to defend herself. And if found guilty, she would hope to be one of the lucky ones who were slowly strangled on the gallows, rather than joining the confused and battered ranks of those condemned to be burned alive. One of the most terrifying things about the whole process was its randomness. Anyone could be accused by a neighbour with a grudge, and in small village communities, where memories were long and tongues as sharp as scythes, the witch-finder could easily be employed as a form of human pest control. Equally terrifying was the regular use of physical examinations as a cover for sadistic sexual exploitation, or simply to suck up to King James, whose dark obsession with witchcraft meant he rapidly became "one of the leading authorities on the subject." To anyone who bothered to read his crazy tract Daemonologie, it would have been obvious that this was roughly equivalent to becoming a leading authority on unicorns, but anyone hoping for the king's favour knew to keep such rational thoughts to himself. In 1619, Joan Flower and her two daughters were arrested on suspicion of witchcraft and taken to Lincoln for interrogation. Disgruntled former employees of Francis Manners, the owner of Belvoir Castle and one of the nation's richest men, they had been accused of causing both his sons to sicken and die. It was a standard story of wealth and influence stamping on the poor with the same ending as all such stories. Joan Flower died in captivity, but her daughters were found guilty and hanged. Borman's meticulous unpicking of these tangled events produces plenty to admire. She is good on the hypocrisy that allowed three women to be prosecuted for witchcraft, while Manners himself was free to employ a physician famous for an alchemical remedy known as "essence of gold." Borman's examples also expose the catch-22 logic of witch trials, which tried to bully the accused into pleading guilty, but saw denial and silence as equally valid signs of guilt. If the woman wanted to defend herself, she was damned if she did and damned if she didn't. Unfortunately, some of the same logic seems to have rubbed off on Borman's writing. The subtitle promises "Sorcery, Scandal and Seduction," which has a certain alliterative allure, but doesn't really stand up to scrutiny. The principal suggestion appears to be that James I's favourite, Buckingham, who was the fiancé of Manners's loving but dim daughter, had good financial reasons to want both sons dead, and may have hastened the end of the second child. But there's no proof of this, and certainly no reason to believe the jacket blurb's claim that Buckingham was the "mastermind" of "a conspiracy that would remain hidden for centuries." There are strange echoes here of witch trials in which a lack of evidence was put down to the cunning of the accused. However, when it is not straining for effect, this is an entertaining piece of research that brings back to life three women who had the misfortune to live during a period that was terrified of the unknown and sought to tame that fear by turning it into a handful of dust. Witches: a Tale of Sorcery, Scandal and Seduction by Tracy Borman 320pp, JONATHAN CAPE, Telegraph offer price: £18 (PLUS £1.35 p&p) 0844 871 1515 (RRP £20, ebook £20)