The main focal point of this highly informative book is a witchcraft prosecution in the port town of Rye in the first decade of the seventeenth century. Annabel Gregory uses the records of this well-documented case as a window into the economic, social, and religious divisions that prevailed in the town.

The witchcraft trials of Susan Swaffer in 1607 and Anne Taylor in 1609 were unusual in both the copiousness of the judicial record, which ran to about twenty thousand words, and their conduct in the town court of Rye, rather than at the county assizes (where the overwhelming majority of English witchcraft prosecutions took place in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries). The trial venue was based on a privilege granted to the Rye magistrates in the fifteenth century to try all cases of felony at its own sessions of the peace rather than at the Sussex assizes. The prosecution began after Swaffer, the wife of a poor sawyer and a newcomer to the town, allegedly saw spirits that directed her to dig in the garden of her neighbor, Anne Taylor, a godly woman of higher social status who was married to the gentleman and wood merchant George Taylor. The spirits first told Swaffer to plant sage in the garden to cure her of malaria but then instructed her to search for treasure in the same garden. Such digging was technically illegal, but Mistress Taylor insisted that she had a moral right to the treasure, which was allegedly guarded by a group of fairies.

When Swaffer and Taylor were indicted for witchcraft, Taylor forfeited bail and fled to Kent, while the court convicted Swaffer of violating the witchcraft statute of 1604 on the grounds that she had consulted with evil spirits in order to acquire treasure. Although Swaffer was sentenced to death, her execution was postponed on the grounds that she was pregnant, and during this delay, a jurisdictional dispute arose between the Rye magistrates and the Warden of the Cinque Ports, who had the support of some prominent common lawyers, over the Rye council's claim of jurisdiction in the upcoming trial of Anne Taylor, who had subsequently returned to Rye and had been imprisoned with Swaffer. In the depositions taken for this second trial, Taylor was accused of causing the death of two people, one of them being Thomas Hamon, the mayor of Rye, by means of witchcraft. These charges of maleficum were considered more serious than those preferred against Swaffer. At her trial in 1609, Taylor, who refused to plead but was not subsequently subjected to the brutal procedure of peine forte et dure, was acquitted, while Swaffer was pardoned the following year.

From a legal perspective, the prosecutions of Swaffer and Taylor are of scholarly interest only to the extent that they have more in common with trials on the Continent in which local jurisdictions were not subject to central control, than in England, where the judges of the common law courts at Westminster presided at the assizes. Gregory's achievement, however, is to show how different attitudes toward the accused witches corresponded to divisions between the two factions to which the freemen of the town belonged. These factions tended to reflect socioeconomic divisions between the merchants and chief retailers, on the one hand, and artisans and smaller tradesmen, on the other, the latter belonging to the “middling sort.” These divisions, which corresponded for the most part with religious divisions between moderate and “godly” Protestants, were accentuated by the changing fortunes of the town as it faced a series of economic challenges, especially in the 1590s.

The attention given to the changing nature of factionalism in Rye Spirits indicates that the book is about much more than witchcraft. Although part 1 of the book, titled “The Story,” includes material on the suspicion of Swaffer and Taylor, the conduct of their prosecution, and a chapter setting the episode in the broader context of European witchcraft, there isn't enough material on the case itself to fill an entire volume. In fact, this first part, which constitutes almost the entire book, includes background chapters on the social, economic, and religious history of the town, including one chapter on the history of religious reform stretching back to the early sixteenth century and another on the economic crisis of the 1590s and its effect on the fortunes of Thomas Hamon. Gregory also provides background material on a broad range of topics, including the practices of cunning women, searching for buried treasure, religion in the Kentish Weald, the unhealthiness of Rye's climate, the use of banishment as a method of social control, and popular beliefs regarding fairies, angels, familiar spirits, and astrology.

A longer digression from the witchcraft story occurs in part 2 of the book, which consists entirely of a twenty-five-page essay on the subject of mirth and godliness in Reformation England. This interesting essay, which has only tangential relevance to either witchcraft or factionalism in Rye, concludes with an “afterword” comparing sixteenth-century Puritanism with early twentieth-century Islamic fundamentalism. The content of this essay, when taken together with Gregory's emphasis on the godliness of the middling sort and her exploration of popular views regarding spirits and fairies, suggests that the enduring value of Rye Spirits is its contribution to our understanding of English religious culture rather than the character of English witchcraft or the composition of the political factions in this port town in the early modern period.