Suranne Jones: Investigating Witch Trials: Why were so many women accused of witchcraft?

Ever since she spent her childhood summers at the Headland Hotel in Cornwall – the location for 1990 film The Witches which was based on Roald Dahl’s classic children’s book – she has become obsessed with all things supernatural. So although this new two-part show for Channel 4 may appear as an unusual move for Manchester-born star, it is somewhat of a passion project for the star.

In Suranne Jones: Investigating Witch Trials, the 45-year-old star of Vigil, Doctor Foster and Gentleman Jack is embarking on a journey to investigate the most infamous witch trials in history.

She wants to find out why so many women were accused of witchcraft and what their story means today.

Suranne begins her atmospheric and gripping trip tonight about 25 miles from her birthplace of Oldham, in Pendle, Lancashire, where she uncovers the real story behind one of the most notorious mass executions for witchcraft in English history.

The witch trials, which took place there in 1612, saw 12 people accused, two of whom were men.

We see Jones striding along the lonely path down which these dirt-poor souls would have been shoved, dragged and chivvied to detention in an unlit underground cell, and then to their deaths, by hanging.

“The Pendle witch trials are part of my history,” she said in a recent interview with The Telegraph. “They are part of women’s history, and I want people to think of something else when they hear the lazy phrase ‘witch hunt’ applied to a politician, or the word ‘witch’ hurled at a woman in the public eye who fails to conform. There’s still a misconception that the women of Pendle were midwives, which wasn’t true.

“It’s easier for us to say they were herbalists or healers and could therefore be linked, however tenuously, to things that can go wrong when people are in labour or pregnant, to give the story some kind of legitimacy. But the truth is, if you were old or unmarried, childless or different, people viewed you with suspicion.

“Even going through the menopause would’ve been frightening to witness; a woman who suddenly flushes deep red or breaks out in a sweat or has any kind of brain fog could easily have been construed as dangerous.”

From Lancashire, Suranne then flies over to Bamberg in southern Germany, the epicentre of the brutal witch trials that swept through Europe 400 years ago.

She finds out more about the shadow this historical horror story has cast over women’s lives for hundreds of years, and how some women are now reclaiming the title ‘witch’.

In next week’s second and concluding part, Suranne’s investigation takes her to the site of the most infamous witch trials of all – the Massachusetts town of Salem.

She explores why accusations of witchcraft spread here with such devastating consequences 300 years ago and how the same mass hysteria overtook American society during senator McCarthy’s communist witch hunts in the 1950s.