‘She did know and could tell all that was done in Mr Mayor's house’

In 1607 Anne Taylor and Susan Swapper were accused of witchcraft by civic magistrates in Rye, a cinque port on the border of Sussex and Kent. Anne had recently married a minor Kent gentleman but continued to live in the town with her mother, Anne Bennett, who was a renowned local healer and also widow of a wealthy butcher and freeman. Susan was the wife of a poor sawyer, as well as a neighbour and tenant of Bennett. The accusations came at a particularly telling moment in the endemic civic politics that characterised the port. Against the backdrop of a silting estuary and shrinking local economy, this politics centred on two rival factions: the brewers and the butchers. The brewers represented the entrepreneurial and aristocratic spirit of the town: an alliance of families that, until very recently, had at once prospered materially despite difficult circumstances and, in the process, secured an effective monopoly on civic office. The butchers, in contrast, were demonstrably poorer and also representative of the artisans and smaller tradesmen in the borough. Although the brewers had enjoyed a relatively long period of civic supremacy in the town, by 1607 their authority was precarious – not least because three of their leading burgesses had died in quick succession. It was in these circumstances that Anne Taylor became a focus for factional hostility.