Caliban & the Castle

For Heritage Open Days 2026, Colchester Castle opened its doors free of charge for one day. I took along a copy of Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch and read several passages from it inside the Castle. The audio from this is available as Season 2, Episode 12, of the Minor Compositions podcast. Colchester Castle is usually remembered through much longer histories: Roman Camulodunum beneath it, the Norman keep built above, siege and civil war, and eventually its transformation into a museum. But for centuries the Castle was also a prison. In 1645 it became one of the sites of the East Anglian witch persecutions. Matthew Hopkins used the Castle as a base for interrogating women accused of witchcraft; Colchester Museums records that thirty-five women from north-east Essex were brought there and questioned as part of the persecutions commonly associated with the “Manningtree witches.” Some of those imprisoned in the Castle never survived confinement.

Hopkins himself does not appear in Caliban and the Witch, nor does Colchester Castle. But Essex does – and in a way that makes reading the book here particularly appropriate. Federici writes that “most of the witch trials occurred in Essex, where by the 16th century the bulk of the land had been enclosed.” From there she asks us to understand the witch hunt not simply as an eruption of superstition or religious fanaticism, but alongside profound changes in how people lived: enclosure and the privatisation of land, the destruction of customary rights, growing poverty, the spread of wage dependence, and the breaking apart of collective forms of life. This changes what we see when we look at the figure of the “witch.” Federici stresses that those accused were disproportionately poor women: cottars, labourers, widows and people dependent upon increasingly fragile networks of assistance. Their accusers, meanwhile, were often wealthier neighbours, employers or landlords. What appears retrospectively as an extraordinary story of demons, familiars and supernatural powers was also rooted in thoroughly ordinary conflicts over food, property, labour, debt, charity and survival.

That seems especially worth thinking about during a Heritage Open Days festival organised this year around the theme of Everyday Histories. The history of witch hunting is certainly a history of spectacular violence. But it is also an everyday history: of who could use land, who depended upon whom, who was expected to give assistance to a neighbour, whose knowledge was valued, whose anger could be expressed safely, and whose presence had come to be regarded as troublesome or threatening. For Federici, this history is part of the violent creation of a new social order. The enclosure of commons was accompanied by other forms of enclosure: of bodies, knowledges, relationships with nature and possibilities for collective autonomy. Practices associated particularly with women – as healers, midwives, diviners and custodians of forms of popular knowledge – were increasingly recoded as dangerous, irrational or demonic. In one of the book’s most memorable formulations, “The world had to be ‘disenchanted’ in order to be dominated.”

Reading those words in Colchester Castle makes the argument unusually tangible. This is not simply somewhere from which we can look backwards at a strange and distant episode called “the witch trials.” It is one of the actual infrastructures through which persecution took place: somewhere people were confined, interrogated and made available to the machinery of accusation and punishment. There is perhaps a small additional resonance in entering the Castle on its one free day of the year in order to read a book so concerned with enclosure. Heritage is often imagined as the preservation of buildings and objects from the past. But it can also mean reopening the conflicts contained within them: asking whose lives made these places, whose stories have been obscured, and what histories become visible when access is opened up. So this reading is less about remembering “witches” than remembering the people who were made into witches – and asking what the history of their persecution tells us about enclosure, poverty, gender, knowledge and power in Essex and beyond.