Yorkshire Witches by Eileen Rennison

THE TRUE YORKSHIRE WITCH...

We no longer believe in witches as our ancestors once did. However, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, any unforeseen or unexplained events were likely to be attributed to witchcraft. The stories of the individuals within this book show how superstition and prejudice played an important and powerful part in the lives of the populace of Yorkshire from the Middle Ages right through to the nineteenth century.

Eileen was born in 1927 in a North Riding village and still lives in Yorkshire today. She is interested in all things Yorkshire and is editor of The Yorkshire Dialect Society magazine Summer Bulletin. She qualified as a teacher of Art at the then College of Ripon and York St John (now the University of York St John) returning later and ending her teaching career as a lecturer there. She gave up teaching in the 1970s and started to write.

When researching for a Halloween article for a small local magazine she felt that the witches of Yorkshire deserved more – hence this book. Her previous publications include In Search of the Unusual in Ryedale and the North York Moors (Hutton Press Ltd, 1993), In Search of the Unusual in East Yorkshire and the Yorkshire Coast (Hutton Press Ltd, 1997), and North Yorkshire: Off the Beaten Track (Countryside Books, 2003).