Judy Molland Interview: Writing The Making Of A Witch From The Witch's Point Of View

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Judy Molland was in her twenties, staying at her parents’ vicarage for a weekend away from London, when she found her own last name in a history book. The line said the last person sentenced to death for witchcraft in England, in 1685, was Alice Molland. She ran down the stairs to show her father, a vicar in the Church of England, because how often does that happen to anybody?

He read it, slammed the book shut, and said;

Don’t ever mention that woman’s name again. A witch in our family?

That is where The Making of a Witch starts, even though the novel would not exist for another forty years. We sat down with Judy for this episode, and what we got was less a book promo and more the story of someone chasing a ghost through archives, dreams, and a fairly significant change in what she believes.

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The following is an editorialized transcript of our weekly literary podcast. If you would like to listen to the podcast, click the play button above orlisten on your favorite platform with the links below.

The One Line of Court Record That Started a Novel

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Here is the part that stopped us cold. Judy did not have much research material on Alice Molland. She had one thing.

She tracked down the seventeenth century Assizes book where the sentencing was recorded, and the librarian showed her the page. The script was unreadable, partly Latin, full of curlicues that take an expert to decode. Judy asked where on the page it was. The woman pointed at the bottom, and that was the extent of the help on offer (librarian of the year, clearly).

She got a photocopy, found someone to translate it, and ended up with a single sentence: Alice was sentenced for witchcraft on the bodies of Joane Snowe, Wilmot Snowe and Agnes Firze. Small marks on the record indicated she was poor, owned no property, and was alone.

That is everything. That is the complete historical Alice.

And Judy says it turned out to be freeing, because one line means you are not writing biography anymore. You are writing a novel. She also cannot confirm Alice is her ancestor, and she is honest about that. She took a National Endowment for the Humanities grant to England, spent weeks going through Exeter city court records, and never found the name. Molland is unusual enough in England that she decided to claim her anyway.

The Dream That Would Not Go Away

About twenty years ago, Judy started having the same dream on repeat. She was walking through a horse chestnut forest. At the other end of the path stood a woman with long black hair and startling blue eyes, a cottage behind her, beckoning her forward. That was most of it. Same dream, over and over.

She knew it was Alice. She got emotional telling us about it, and honestly, so did we a little.

The novel took roughly eight years to write after that. Judy calls herself a planner rather than a pantser, so she mapped Alice’s whole life out in advance, then kept running into research that forced revisions. The book opens in 1656 with a ten-year-old Alice watching the execution of her mentor, the healer Goody Luscombe, who had taught her about mugwort, slippery elm and comfrey.

Alice becomes a healer herself, becomes popular, becomes the kind of woman people bring their problems to, and that popularity is exactly what puts her in the crosshairs. She flees Exeter, raises a son she names Tommy after her father, and the rest of her life gets cut short.

Meaghan put it best when she described reading it: knowing where historical fiction like this has to end and still rooting for a different outcome.

I was like, oh gosh, maybe, maybe she’ll be okay, and nothing will be that bad.

It does not work. You try anyway.

What the Witch Trial Records Actually Say

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Judy spent two summers reading seventeenth century court records, and the cases she remembers are the ones that make no sense at all.

A woman named Sif Coleman, around 1623, “overlooked” some pigs belonging to a man called William Searle. The pigs died about a week later. She went to court charged with killing them by looking at them. Another woman, a poor old widow with no food, went to a neighbor’s house and asked for something to eat. The neighbor refused. The following week the neighbor’s two children fell ill, and the week after that her husband did too, so the widow was charged with cursing the household.

A red bird landed on someone’s windowsill, so obviously a local woman had shapeshifted into it. Someone was seen with a toad, and toads were associated with witches, so she must be evil.

Not that she lives near a pond or a body of water.

Meaghan noted.

All of it hearsay. All of it taken seriously. Judy describes sitting in the record library thinking “this is horrible!” over and over. Not everyone accused was executed, but everyone accused was finished anyway, because once a court labels you a witch, your community is done with you.

In East Anglia, Matthew Hopkins (who gave himself the title Witchfinder General, which tells you plenty) paid a pound per accusation, and a pound was serious money then. Meaghan’s read on him:

I have to make sure that I have a reason to have a job. So somebody go accuse someone of witchcraft. Go on. Get to it.

Judy puts the figure at at least 50,000 killed across Western Europe, England and Scotland. Scotland strangled people first and burned them afterward, which she mentions with a very dry aside about hanging being the nicer option.

Wicca, Moon Worship, and the Thing She Did Not Plan

Twenty-five years ago, days after her father’s funeral, Judy passed through London and noticed a Pagan Federation conference was on. She went. She describes it as coming home, largely because Wicca has a male and a female deity, and the god she grew up with was her father’s god, entirely male.

She joined a coven in Devon.

I was the overseas member of the coven in Devon.

She told us, which is a sentence we enjoyed enormously. She also helped get the first plaque in England commemorating people accused of witchcraft, installed outside Exeter Castle in 1996, after seeing one in Edinburgh and realizing Scotland had a memorial and England had nothing.

None of that was in the plan for the novel. It walked in anyway. The moon rituals and full moon worship became a big part of the book, and they fill the gap in Alice where belief used to be. She cannot go to church and accept that god, so she finds something else, in secret, with people who feel like family. It is the one part of her life (other than Tommy) that gives her any peace.

The moon, the full moon, what could be more wonderful than that?

Writing the Seventeenth Century Without Judging It

Judy had one rule she kept repeating: no twenty-first-century person gets to look down on the seventeenth century.

You weren’t alive then, you don’t know what it was like. You can’t do that.

People genuinely believed witches were real, that they were the devil’s people, and that belief overrode everything, including evidence.

She has had both reactions to the book’s treatment of the church. Her piano teacher, a Christian, read it and came away angry at the institution and said she sees the same patterns today. Someone else left a nasty review asking what grudge Judy has against the church. Meaghan’s response:

Some people need to remove the rose colored glasses a little bit.

The mission underneath all of it is simple. Every account of the witch hunts Judy read was written by the winners, the rulers, the people with names and numbers and no interest in the accused as human beings. She wanted one told from the women’s side. She also wants the novel read as a parable, because she does not think the distance between then and now is as wide as we would like.

The sequel is coming, by the way. Tommy is seven when the first book ends, and Judy says it is going to be a novel of revenge.