{"title":"Books","description":"\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003eHistories and Castles publishes history built on evidence, not ceremony. These three books share a single method: take an institution or a belief system that most people only know through myth, and put it on trial.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eNo Law for the Poor\u003c\/em\u003e examines how justice actually worked in medieval England and Wales, and who it was built to exclude. \u003cem\u003eThe Pendle Witch Conspiracy\u003c\/em\u003e reconstructs the legal and political machinery behind the 1612 witch trials, and the child whose testimony sent her own family to the gallows. \u003cem\u003eThe Truth Behind Welsh Myths and Legends\u003c\/em\u003e looks past the fairies and folklore to the social function they served in a country that largely avoided the witch hunts sweeping its neighbours.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003eRead individually, each book is a case file. Read together, they form an argument: that the forces which shaped ordinary medieval life were rarely the ones written into the official record.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"no-law-for-the-poor-book","title":"No Law For The Poor","description":"\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003eIn medieval England and Wales, the law was not a shield. It was a weapon, and it was rarely pointed in your favour unless you already held wealth, land, or standing before God and king.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eNo Law for the Poor\u003c\/em\u003e is an investigative account of how justice actually worked for ordinary people between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries. Not the version taught through royal charters and cathedral architecture, but the version experienced by the villein who could not read the writ served against him, the widow stripped of her inheritance the moment she remarried, and the accused who faced trial by ordeal because he had no coin for a proper defence.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003eAcross seventeen chapters, this book traces the machinery of medieval law: manorial courts that answered to the lord rather than the crown, the doctrine of coverture that erased a married woman's legal identity, the forest laws that turned subsistence hunting into a capital offence, and the ecclesiastical courts that judged sin and debt with equal severity. It argues that access to justice in this period was not a right extended to all subjects, but a privilege rationed by class, gender, and proximity to power.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003eThis is not a romanticised tour of medieval Britain. It is a case file, built from statute, court roll, and chronicle, on a system that called itself justice while serving the few.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003eWritten for readers of medieval history, legal history, and social history who want the evidence behind the myth of a fair and orderly Middle Ages.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eFormat:\u003c\/strong\u003e Paperback | \u003cstrong\u003ePublisher:\u003c\/strong\u003e Histories and Castles | \u003cstrong\u003eLanguage:\u003c\/strong\u003e English\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Amazon","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":58576623403340,"sku":null,"price":10.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1028\/3869\/8316\/files\/No_Law_for_the_Poor_Cover.jpg?v=1787736093"},{"product_id":"the-pendle-witch-conspiracy","title":"The Pendle Witch Conspiracy","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eThe Pendle Witch Conspiracy: The True Story Behind England's Most Notorious Witch Trials\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eStrip away four centuries of folklore and the Pendle witch trials stop looking like a tale of black magic and start looking like something far more calculated: a legal system turned against people who had no way to defend themselves.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn August 1612, ten people from the villages surrounding Pendle Hill were hanged for murder by witchcraft, on evidence built almost entirely from the testimony of a nine-year-old girl. Jennet Device's words condemned her own mother, brother, and sister. Simon A. Williams reconstructs how a single accusation on a Lancashire road grew into a prosecution shaped as much by poverty, religious suspicion, and political ambition as by any belief in sorcery.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis is not another retelling of cursed cattle and clay dolls. It is an examination of who held power in Jacobean Lancashire, who stood to gain from the trial's outcome, and how a court could accept a child's word as sufficient grounds for execution. The book follows the case to its final, bitter turn: twenty years later, the same Jennet Device stood accused of witchcraft herself, was acquitted, and still died in the dungeon of Lancaster Castle because she was too poor to pay for her own release.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe Pendle Witch Conspiracy is for readers who want the machinery behind the myth: the law, the fear, and the men who used both.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eFormat\u003c\/strong\u003e: Paperback | \u003cstrong\u003ePublisher\u003c\/strong\u003e: Histories and Castles | \u003cstrong\u003eAuthor\u003c\/strong\u003e: Simon A. Williams | \u003cstrong\u003eLanguage\u003c\/strong\u003e: English\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Amazon","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":58577681809740,"sku":null,"price":8.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1028\/3869\/8316\/files\/Pendle_Witch_Conspiracy_Cover.jpg?v=1787742950"},{"product_id":"the-truth-behind-welsh-myths-and-legends","title":"The Truth Behind Welsh Myths and Legends","description":"\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eThe Truth Behind Welsh Myths and Legends: Fear, Folklore and Everyday Belief in Medieval Wales\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003eWales is small. Its mythology is enormous. This book sets out to explain why.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003eWhile England and Scotland were burning suspected witches by the hundred, Wales largely did not. Simon A. Williams argues the reason was not tolerance but the Tylwyth Teg, the Fair Family, and a wider system of supernatural belief that already did the work a witch trial was meant to do. Every fairy encounter, every cursing well, every death omen functioned as social technology: a way of enforcing behaviour, explaining misfortune, and controlling a community without ever needing a courtroom.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003eThe book moves through the figures that shaped everyday belief in medieval Wales. Rhiannon, falsely accused and never broken, endures as one of the most quietly devastating stories in the Mabinogion. The Plentyn-newid, the changeling child, gave grieving parents a framework for a transformation medicine could not explain. Beneath Cardigan Bay lies the drowned kingdom of Cantre'r Gwaelod, its church bells said to still ring beneath the waves, a myth that recent archaeology has connected to genuine submerged evidence.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003eThis is not a collection of quaint stories for children. It is an argument that Welsh mythology was functional: a set of beliefs that ordinary people used to make sense of illness, injustice, and the unpredictable world around them, and to hold their neighbours to account without appealing to a court that rarely served them.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eFormat:\u003c\/strong\u003e Paperback | \u003cstrong\u003ePublisher:\u003c\/strong\u003e Histories and Castles | \u003cstrong\u003eAuthor:\u003c\/strong\u003e Simon A. Williams | \u003cstrong\u003eLanguage:\u003c\/strong\u003e English\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Amazon","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":58578049794380,"sku":null,"price":12.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1028\/3869\/8316\/files\/Truth_Behind_Welsh_Myths_and_Legends_Cover.jpg?v=1787746670"}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1028\/3869\/8316\/collections\/Three_books.jpg?v=1787747345","url":"https:\/\/historiesandcastles.com\/collections\/books.oembed","provider":"Histories and Castles","version":"1.0","type":"link"}