Doctor Who Series 11: 10 Huge Questions We Are Asking After The Witchfinders

All the major talking points after the eighth episode of Doctor Who series 11.

Doctor Who The Witchfinders
BBC

Incredibly, this is episode eight of ten and we are on the home stretch of Chris Chibnall’s first series at the helm. In most areas the production has maintained a consistently high standard, but it’s been somewhat hit and miss on the acting and writing front. This week few of those cracks were showing as Doctor Who worked its own brand of magic again, taking us back in time to 17 Century rural Lancashire as folklore meets fantasy.

It should be clear by now that Chris Chibnall’s preferred style is best suited to stories set in Earth’s past, with the three stand out episodes so far being Rosa, Demons of the Punjab and The Witchfinders. With Victorian England being such a perennial BBC favourite, in recent years the series has barely scratched the surface when it comes to exploring our rich history. This has been a welcome shift in focus that will hopefully continue into next series and beyond.

The storytelling continues to be refreshingly stripped back to bare essentials, with a heavy focus on characterisation as a result, but that’s not to say that each episode isn’t throwing plenty of questions our way.

10. How Accurate Was The HIstory?

Doctor Who The Witchfinders
BBC

Unless it really did get wiped from the history books, the aptly named Bilehurst Cragg is an entirely fictional place. Graham recognises the nearby Pendle Hill which is indeed a Lancashire Landmark famous for the witch trials of 1612.

Most of those on trial were women, but not exclusively so. Among their alleged crimes were murder, bewitching horses, stealing from the dead, possessing familiars, and specific displays of magic – one, for instance, was accused of charming milk into butter. Such specific charges are not mentioned in the episode, but Becka Savage does claim to have culled the horses because they had been possessed by the devil. Behind many of the allegations were family feuds so it was an authentic touch to have landowner Becka related to Willa and her grandmother.

The ducking stool was actually used to try women for dishonouring their husbands, with witches instead being tied up and thrown into the water. The principle behind both methods was the same. If the accused didn’t drown it meant that the waters of baptism were rejecting them.

Another method for identifying witches was to prick a skin blemish to see if it bled. A pricker, as carried by King James, was one of the tools of the witch finders. It was rigged of course. They often had two needles – one sharp and the other blunt.

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Paul Driscoll is a freelance writer and author across a range of subjects from Cult TV to religion and social policy. He is a passionate Doctor Who fan and January 2017 will see the publication of his first extended study of the series (based on Toby Whithouse's series six episode, The God Complex) in the critically acclaimed Black Archive range by Obverse Books. He is a regular writer for the fan site Doctor Who Worldwide and has contributed several essays to Watching Books' You and Who range. Recently he has branched out into fiction writing, with two short stories in the charity Doctor Who anthology Seasons of War (Chinbeard Books). Paul's work will also feature in the forthcoming Iris Wildthyme collection (A Clockwork Iris, Obverse Books) and Chinbeard Books' collection of drabbles, A Time Lord for Change.