said, he would waive repeating the evidence, to prevent any mistake,
and told the jury, there were two things they had to inquire into.
First, Whether or not these children were bewitched; secondly, Whether
these women did bewitch them. He said, he did not in the least doubt
there were witches; first, Because the Scriptures affirmed it;
secondly, Because the wisdom of all nations, particularly our own, had
provided laws against witchcraft, which implied their belief of such a
crime. He desired them strictly to observe the evidence, and begged of
God to direct their hearts in the weighty concern they had in hand,
since, to condemn the innocent and let the guilty go free, are both an
abomination to the Lord.
The jury then retired, and, in about half an hour, returned a verdict
of guilty upon all the indictments, being thirteen in number. The next
morning the children came with their father to the lodgings of Sir
Matthew Hale, very well, and quite restored to their usual health. Mr.
Pacey, being asked at what time their health began to improve, replied,
that they were quite well in half an hour after the conviction of the
prisoners.
Many attempts were made to induce the unfortunate women to confess
their guilt; but in vain, and they were both hanged.
Eleven trials were instituted before Chief-Justice Holt for witchcraft
between the years 1694 and 1701. The evidence was of the usual
character; but Holt appealed so successfully in each case to the common
sense of the jury, that they were every one acquitted. A general
feeling seemed to pervade the country that blood enough had been shed
upon these absurd charges. Now and then, the flame of persecution burnt
up in a remote district; but these instances were no longer looked upon
as mere matters of course. They appear, on the contrary, to have
excited much attention; a sure proof, if no other were to be obtained,
that they were becoming unfrequent.
A case of witchcraft was tried in 1711, before Lord Chief Justice
Powell; in which, however, the jury persisted in a verdict of guilty,
though the evidence was of the usual absurd and contradictory
character, and the enlightened judge did all in his power to bring them
to a right conclusion. The accused person was one Jane Wenham, better
known as the Witch of Walkerne; and the persons who were alleged to
have suffered from her witchcraft were two young women, named Thorne
and Street. A witness, named Mr. Arthur Chauncy, deposed, that he had
seen Ann Thorne in several of her fits, and that she always recovered
upon prayers being said, or if Jane Wenham came to her. He related,
that he had pricked the prisoner several times in the arms, but could
never fetch any blood from her; that he had seen her vomit pins, when
there were none in her clothes or within her reach; and that he had
preserved several of them, which he was ready to produce. The judge,
however, told him that was needless, as he supposed they were crooked
pins.
Mr. Francis Bragge, another witness, deposed, that strange "cakes" of
bewitched feathers having been taken from Ann Thorne's pillow, he was
anxious to see them. He went into a room where some of these feathers
were, and took two of the cakes, and compared them together. They were
both of a circular figure, something larger than a crown piece; and he
observed that the small feathers were placed in a nice and curious
order, at equal distances from each other, making so many radii of the
circle, in the centre of which the quill ends of the feathers met. He
counted the number of these feathers, and found them to be exactly
thirty-two in each cake. He afterwards endeavoured to pull off two or
three of them, and observed that they were all fastened together by a
sort of viscous matter, which would stretch seven or eight times in a
thread before it broke. Having taken off several of these feathers, he
removed the viscous matter with his fingers, and found under it, in the
centre, some short hairs, black and grey, matted together, which he
verily believed to be cat's hair. He also said, that Jane Wenham
confessed to him that she had bewitched the pillow, and had practised
witchcraft for sixteen years.
The judge interrupted the witness at this stage, and said, he should
very much like to see an enchanted feather, and seemed to wonder when
he was told that none of these strange cakes had been preserved. His
Lordship asked the witness why he did not keep one or two of them, and
was informed that they had all been burnt, in order to relieve the
bewitched person of the pains she suffered, which could not be so well
effected by any other means.
A man, named Thomas Ireland, deposed, that hearing several times a
great noise of cats crying and screaming about his house, he went out
and frightened them away, and they all ran towards the cottage of Jane
Wenham. One of them he swore positively had a face very like Jane
Wenham's. Another man, named Burville, gave similar evidence, and swore
that he had often seen a cat with Jane Wenham's face. Upon one occasion
he was in Ann Thorne's chamber, when several cats came in, and among
them the cat above stated. This witness would have favoured the court
with a much longer statement, but was stopped by the judge, who said he
had heard quite enough.
The prisoner, in her defence, said nothing, but that "she was a clear
woman." The learned judge then summed up, leaving it to the jury to
determine whether such evidence as they had heard was sufficient to
take away the prisoner's life upon the indictment. After a long
deliberation they brought in their verdict, that she was guilty upon
the evidence. The Judge then asked them whether they found her guilty
upon the indictment of conversing with the devil in the shape of a cat?
The sapient foreman very gravely answered, "We find her guilty of
that." The learned judge then very reluctantly proceeded to pass
sentence of death; but, by his persevering exertions, a pardon was at
last obtained, and the wretched old woman was set at liberty. In the
year 1716, a woman and her daughter,--the latter only nine years of
age,--were hanged at Huntingdon for selling their souls to the devil,
and raising a storm by pulling off their stockings and making a lather
of soap. This appears to have been the last judicial execution in
England. From that time to the year 1736, the populace raised at
intervals the old cry, and more than once endangered the lives of poor
women by dragging them through ponds on suspicion; but the philosophy
of those who, from their position, sooner or later give the tone to the
opinions and morals of the poor, was silently working a cure for the
evil. The fear of witches ceased to be epidemic, and became individual,
lingering only in minds lettered by inveterate prejudice or brutalizing
superstition. In the year 1736, the penal statute of James I. was
finally blotted from the statutebook, and suffered no longer to
disgrace the advancing intelligence of the country. Pretenders to
witchcraft, fortune-tellers, conjurors, and all their train, were
liable only to the common punishment of rogues and
impostors--imprisonment and the pillory.
In Scotland, the delusion also assumed the same phases, and was
gradually extinguished in the light of civilization. As in England the
progress of improvement was slow. Up to the year 1665, little or no
diminution of the mania was perceptible. In 1643, the General Assembly
recommended that the Privy Council should institute a standing
commission, composed of any "understanding gentlemen or magistrates,"
to try the witches, who were stated to have increased enormously of
late years. In 1649, an act was passed, confirmatory of the original
statute of Queen Mary, explaining some points of the latter which were
doubtful, and enacting severe penalties, not only against witches
themselves, but against all who covenanted with them, or sought by
their means to pry into the secrets of futurity, or cause any evil to
the life, lands, or limbs of their neighbours. For the next ten years,
the popular madness upon this subject was perhaps more furious than
ever; upwards of four thousand persons suffered for the crime during
that interval. This was the consequence of the act of parliament and
the unparalleled severity of the magistrates; the latter frequently
complained that for two witches they burned one day, there were ten to
burn the next: they never thought that they themselves were the cause
of the increase. In a single circuit, held at Glasgow, Ayr, and
Stirling, in 1659, seventeen unhappy creatures were burned by judicial
sentence for trafficking with Satan. In one day, (November 7, 1661,)
the Privy Council issued no less than fourteen commissions for trials
in the provinces. Next year, the violence of the persecution seems to
have abated. From 1662 to 1668, although "the understanding gentlemen
and magistrates" already mentioned, continued to try and condemn, the
High Court of Justiciary had but one offender of this class to deal
with, and she was acquitted. James Welsh, a common pricker, was ordered
to be publicly whipped through the streets of Edinburgh for falsely
accusing a woman of witchcraft; a fact which alone proves that the
superior court sifted the evidence in these cases with much more care
and severity than it had done a few years previously. The enlightened
Sir George Mackenzie, styled by Dryden "the noble wit of Scotland,"
laboured hard to introduce this rule into court--that the confessions
of the witches should be held of little worth, and that the evidence of
the prickers and other interested persons should be received with
distrust and jealousy. This was reversing the old practice, and saved
many innocent lives. Though a firm believer both in ancient and modern
witchcraft, he could not shut his eyes to the atrocities daily
committed under the name of justice. In his work on the Criminal Law of
Scotland, published in 1678, he says, "From the horridness of this
crime, I do conclude that, of all others, it requires the clearest
relevancy and most convincing probature; and I condemn, next to the
wretches themselves, those cruel and too forward judges who burn
persons by thousands as guilty of this crime." In the same year, Sir
John Clerk plumply refused to serve as a commissioner on trials for
witchcraft, alleging, by way of excuse, "that he was not himself good
conjuror enough to be duly qualified." The views entertained by Sir
George Mackenzie were so favourably received by the Lords of Session
that he was deputed, in 1680, to report to them on the cases of a
number of poor women who were then in prison awaiting their trial. Sir
George stated that there was no evidence against them whatever but
their own confessions, which were absurd and contradictory, and drawn
from them by severe torture. They were immediately discharged.
For the next sixteen years, the Lords of Session were unoccupied with
trials for witchcraft; not one is entered upon the record: but in 1697,
a case occurred, which equalled in absurdity any of those that
signalized the dark reign of King James. A girl, named Christiana Shaw,
eleven years of age, the daughter of John Shaw of Bargarran, was
subject to fits, and being of a spiteful temper, she accused her
maid-servant, with whom she had frequent quarrels, of bewitching her.
Her story, unfortunately, was believed. Encouraged to tell all the
persecutions of the devil which the maid had sent to torment her, she
in the end concocted a romance that involved twenty-one persons. There
was no other evidence against them but the fancies of this lying child,
and the confessions which pain had extorted from them; but upon this no
less than five women were condemned, before Lord Blantyre and the rest
of the Commissioners, appointed specially by the Privy Council to try
this case. They were burned on the Green at Paisley. The warlock of
the party, one John Reed, who was also condemned, hanged himself in
prison. It was the general belief in Paisley that the devil had
strangled him, lest he should have revealed in his last moments too
many of the unholy secrets of witchcraft. This trial excited
considerable disgust in Scotland. The Rev. Mr. Bell, a contemporary
writer, observed that, in this business, "persons of more goodness and
esteem than most of their calumniators were defamed for witches." He
adds, that the persons chiefly to blame were "certain ministers of too
much forwardness and absurd credulity, and some topping professors in
and about Glasgow." [Preface to "Law's Memorials," edited by Sharpe.]
After this trial, there again occurs a lapse of seven years, when the
subject was painfully forced upon public attention by the brutal
cruelty of the mob at Pittenween. Two women were accused of having
bewitched a strolling beggar, who was subject to fits, or who pretended
to be so, for the purpose of exciting commiseration. They were cast
into prison, and tortured until they confessed. One of them, named
Janet Cornfoot, contrived to escape, but was brought back to Pittenween
next day by a party of soldiers. On her approach to the town, she was,
unfortunately, met by a furious mob, composed principally of fishermen
and their wives, who seized upon her with the intention of swimming
her. They forced her away to the sea shore, and tying a rope around her
body, secured the end of it to the mast of a fishing-boat lying
alongside. In this manner they ducked her several times. When she was
half dead, a sailor in the boat cut away the rope, and the mob dragged
her through the sea to the beach. Here, as she lay quite insensible, a
brawny ruffian took down the door of his hut, close by, and placed it
on her back. The mob gathered large stones from the beach, and piled
them upon her till the wretched woman was pressed to death. No
magistrate made the slightest attempt to interfere, and the soldiers
looked on, delighted spectators. A great outcry was raised against this
culpable remissness, but no judicial inquiry was set on foot. This
happened in 1704.
The next case we hear of is that of Elspeth Rule, found guilty of
witchcraft before Lord Anstruther at the Dumfries circuit, in 1708.
She was sentenced to be marked in the cheek with a redhot iron, and
banished the realm of Scotland for life.
Again there is a long interval. In 1718, the remote county of
Caithness, where the delusion remained in all its pristine vigour for
years after it had ceased elsewhere, was startled from its propriety by
the cry of witchcraft. A silly fellow, named William Montgomery, a
carpenter, had a mortal antipathy to cats, and, somehow or other, these
animals generally chose his back-yard as the scene of their
catterwaulings. He puzzled his brains for a long time to know why he,
above all his neighbours, should be so pestered; at last he came to the
sage conclusion that his tormentors were no cats, but witches. In this
opinion he was supported by his maid-servant, who swore a round oath
that she had often heard the aforesaid cats talking together in human
voices. The next time the unlucky tabbies assembled in his back-yard,
the valiant carpenter was on the alert. Arming himself with an axe, a
dirk, and a broadsword, he rushed out among them: one of them he
wounded in the back, a second in the hip, and the leg of a third he
maimed with his axe; but he could not capture any of them. A few days
afterwards, two old women of the parish died, and it was said that,
when their bodies were laid out, there appeared upon the back of one
the mark as of a recent wound, and a similar scar upon the hip of the
other. The carpenter and his maid were convinced that they were the
very cats, and the whole county repeated the same story. Every one was
upon the look-out for proofs corroborative: a very remarkable one was
soon discovered. Nanny Gilbert, a wretched old creature of upwards of
seventy years of age, was found in bed with her leg broken; as she was
ugly enough for a witch, it was asserted that she, also, was one of the
cats that had fared so ill at the hands of the carpenter. The latter,
when informed of the popular suspicion, asserted that he distinctly
remembered to have struck one of the cats a blow with the back of his
broadsword, which ought to have broken her leg. Nanny was immediately
dragged from her bed, and thrown into prison. Before she was put to the
torture, she explained, in a very natural and intelligible manner, how
she had broken her limb; but this account did not give satisfaction:
the professional persuasions of the torturer made her tell a different
tale, and she confessed that she was indeed a witch, and had been
wounded by Montgomery on the night stated--that the two old women
recently deceased were witches also, besides about a score of others
whom she named. The poor creature suffered so much by the removal from
her own home, and the tortures inflicted upon her, that she died the
next day in prison. Happily for the persons she had named in her
confession, Dundas of Arniston, at that time the King's
Advocate-general, wrote to the Sheriff-depute, one Captain Ross of
Littledean, cautioning him not to proceed to trial, the "thing being of
too great difficulty, and beyond the jurisdiction of an inferior
court." Dundas himself examined the precognition with great care, and
was so convinced of the utter folly of the whole case that he quashed
all further proceedings.
We find this same Sheriff-depute of Caithness very active four years
afterwards in another trial for witchcraft. In spite of the warning he
had received, that all such cases were to be tried in future by the
superior courts, he condemned to death an old woman at Dornoch, upon
the charge of bewitching the cows and pigs of her neighbours. This poor
creature was insane, and actually laughed and clapped her hands at
sight of "the bonnie fire" that was to consume her. She had a daughter,
who was lame both of her hands and feet, and one of the charges brought
against her was, that she had used this daughter as a pony in her
excursions to join the devil's sabbath, and that the devil himself had
shod her, and produced lameness.
This was the last execution that took place in Scotland for witchcraft.
The penal statutes were repealed in 1756, and, as in England, whipping,
the pillory, or imprisonment, were declared the future punishments of
all pretenders to magic or witchcraft.
Still, for many years after this, the superstition lingered both in
England and Scotland, and in some districts is far from being extinct
even at this day. But before we proceed to trace it any further than to
its legal extinction, we have yet to see the frightful havoc it made in
continental Europe from the commencement of the seventeenth to the
middle of the eighteenth century. France, Germany, and Switzerland were
the countries which suffered most from the epidemic. The number of
victims in these countries during the sixteenth century has already
been mentioned; but, at the early part of the seventeenth, the numbers
are so great, especially in Germany, that were they not to be found in
the official records of the tribunals, it would be almost impossible to
believe that mankind could ever have been so maddened and deluded. To
use the words of the learned and indefatigable Horst, [Zauber
Bibliothek. Theil 5.] "the world seemed to be like a large madhouse for
witches and devils to play their antics in." Satan was believed to be
at everybody's call, to raise the whirlwind, draw down the lightning,
blight the productions of the earth, or destroy the health and paralyse
the limbs of man. This belief, so insulting to the majesty and
beneficence of the Creator, was shared by the most pious ministers of
religion. Those who in their morning and evening prayers acknowledged
the one true God, and praised him for the blessings of the seed time
and the harvest, were convinced that frail humanity could enter into a
compact with the spirits of hell to subvert his laws and thwart all his
merciful intentions. Successive popes, from Innocent VIII. downwards,
promulgated this degrading doctrine, which spread so rapidly that
society seemed to be divided into two great factions, the bewitching
and the bewitched.
The commissioners named by Innocent VIII. to prosecute the witch-trials
in Germany, were Jacob Sprenger, so notorious for his work on
demonology, entitled the "Malleus Maleficarum," or "Hammer to knock
down Witches," Henry Institor a learned jurisconsult, and the Bishop of
Strasburgh. Barnberg, Treves, Cologne, Paderborn, and Wurzburg, were
the chief seats of the commissioners, who, during their lives alone,
condemned to the stake, on a very moderate calculation, upwards of
three thousand victims. The number of witches so increased, that new
commissioners were continually appointed in Germany, France, and
Switzerland. In Spain and Portugal the Inquisition alone took
cognizance of the crime. It is impossible to search the records of
those dark, but now happily nonexisting tribunals; but the mind recoils
with affright even to form a guess of the multitudes who perished.
The mode of trial in the other countries is more easily ascertained.
Sprenger, in Germany, and Bodinus and Delrio, in France, have left but
too ample a record of the atrocities committed in the much-abused names
of justice and religion. Bodinus, of great repute and authority in the
seventeenth century, says, "The trial of this offence must not be
conducted like other crimes. Whoever adheres to the ordinary course of
justice perverts the spirit of the law, both Divine and human. He who
is accused of sorcery should never be acquitted unless the malice of
the prosecutor be clearer than the sun; for it is so difficult to bring
full proof of this secret crime, that out of a million of witches not
one would be convicted if the usual course were followed!" Henri
Boguet, a witch-finder, who styled himself "The Grand Judge of Witches
for the Territory of St. Claude," drew up a code for the guidance of
all persons engaged in the witch-trials, consisting of seventy
articles, quite as cruel as the code of Bodinus. In this document he
affirms, that a mere suspicion of witchcraft justifies the immediate
arrest and torture of the suspected person. If the prisoner muttered,
looked on the ground, and did not shed any tears, all these were proofs
positive of guilt! In all cases of witchcraft, the evidence of the
child ought to be taken against its parent; and persons of notoriously
bad character, although not to be believed upon their oaths on the
ordinary occasions of dispute that might arise between man and man,
were to be believed, if they swore that any person had bewitched them!
Who, when he hears that this diabolical doctrine was the universally
received opinion of the ecclesiastical and civil authorities, can
wonder that thousands upon thousands of unhappy persons should be
brought to the stake? that Cologne should for many years burn its three
hundred witches annually? the district of Barnberg its four hundred?
Nuremberg, Geneva, Paris, Toulouse, Lyons, and other cities, their two
hundred?
A few of these trials may be cited, taking them in the order of
priority, as they occurred in different parts of the Continent. In 1595
an old woman residing in a village near Constance, angry at not being
invited to share the sports of the country people on a day of public
rejoicing, was heard to mutter something to herself, and was afterwards
seen to proceed through the fields towards a hill, where she was lost
sight of. A violent thunderstorm arose about two hours afterwards,
which wet the dancers to the skin, and did considerable damage to the
plantations. This woman, suspected before of witchcraft, was seized and
imprisoned, and accused of having raised the storm, by filling a hole
with wine, and stirring it about with a stick. She was tortured till
she confessed, and was burned alive the next evening.
About the same time two sorcerers in Toulouse were accused of having
dragged a crucifix about the streets at midnight, stopping at times to
spit upon and kick it, and uttering at intervals an exorcism to raise
the devil. The next day a hail-storm did considerable damage to the
crops, and a girl, the daughter of a shoemaker in the town, remembered
to have heard in the night the execrations of the wizards. Her story
led to their arrest. The usual means to produce confession were
resorted to. The wizards owned that they could raise tempests whenever
they pleased, and named several persons who possessed similar powers.
They were hanged, and then burned in the market-place, and seven of the
persons they had mentioned shared the same fate.