Witch Hunting
Imagine for a few minutes you're a peasant in 17th-century Europe: a widow who lives in the small abode your husband left in his will. You tend a small plot of land on which you grow a number of root vegetables as well as a few herbs that have traditional medicinal properties. You're a God-fearing woman who attends church as regularly as your old bones allow and you believe in the devil even if you don't put much stock in the stories of witches who attend to Satan in the woods at night, smearing their backs with 'devil's ointment' and putting hexes on valuable livestock.
Recently you've seen people from your community being led away by the bishop's men to the courthouse, accused of paganism, if the village gossip is to be believed. You don't think you have anything to fear. That is, until armed men garbed in the bishop's colours turn up at your house one morning to take you away for questioning. You comply without so much as a word of verbal resistance; it's all a mistake, of course. This will soon be cleared up, you think, as you're taken through the village's main thoroughfare, past
