The documentary is about the witch hunt fever of the 16th century, so not Medieval.
Although, like so often, the middle ages seem to be connected to the subject and gets blamed for the burning of witches a lot.
But it was the modern era lot who are to blame!
It is fascinating to hear individual stories of the healers and local wise folk who had been part of life for centuries.
As rational and down to earth as I like to think I am, I will try this curse, draw an eye, stab it & the thief you're looking for will have eye pain!
Some of the objects in the Boscastle Witchcraft museum @witchmuseum are truly terrifying, so much inspiration for horror movies.
It is amazing how King James himself became so obsessed he interrogated Agnes Sampson the healer himself.
Putting staged re-enactments in documentaries is a risky thing to do, after all it only works when done really well.
I think the scenes here look pretty good.
It's still insane to me that people believed for such a long time that torture for confession worked, sadly some still do.
Scotland executed 2500 people for witchcraft, a higher proportion of its population than almost any other European country!
This graph is pretty shocking;
This King James fellow, has he been cancelled yet?
What a nasty piece of work.
The story of Alison Device, of the Pendle witches, is pretty horrific, her poor sister Jennet, 9 years old, giving evidence that resulted in the hanging of her family.
Whatever became of her?
There's a bit about a recent archaeological dig in Cornwall is very exciting.
They've found pits with what appear to be ritual offerings.
That white bit, that's a skinned swan...
This is how scary films begin...
Pins, fabric, human finger nails...
More than 40 of these pits have been found so far, often lined with animal skin.
One is lined with a skinned cat.
The last one dates to... the 1970s...
So it seems that witches have survived all the horrors of their persecution, good for them.
A few days ago I complained about a Guardian article using a bad photo from a film in an article about Joan Clarke, a Bletchley Park code breaker, but... something much worse might have happened...
I don't think this photo they used is of Joan...
@TeaKayB pointed this out to me and I was stunned, surely not, that would be extraordinary sloppy.
So I looked into it, of course.
For starters the image they used is flipped, here's the full picture as it should look:
Time to look at another photo album in my collection, a tiny one this time with one picture on each page, showing us the adventures of some Dutch girl scouts in the early 1930s.
This Friday the game 'Manor Lord' is coming out, it's a medieval city builder that I've made a modest contribution to as a historical consultant and beta tester for.
I've been very excited about it for a long time and I'm not the only one, it's creating quite a buzz and has ended up on a lot of wishlists.
What I love about it most is that it tries to depict the middle ages in an accurate way, behind the scenes historians, experts & history addicts have been debating the tiniest details.
I think the result is one of the most historically accurate medieval games I've ever played.
#Manorlords
So let's have a sneak peek at it shall we?
First, here's an official video:
Before you start you set up your profile and design your own family crest, look familiar?
This bit alone is SUCH fun, you can fiddle and play with this editor for ages till you get exactly what you want and then you'll see it on the banners in the game!
SUCH FUN!
Sigh.
An account with half a million followers just tweeted that long debunked 'life in the 1500s' nonsense, 2.2 million people have seen it.
So here we go again...