convincing proofs upon record of the prevalence of witchcraft. When
men wish to construct or support a theory, how they torture facts into
their service! The lying whimsies of a few sick children, encouraged by
foolish parents, and drawn out by superstitious neighbours, were
sufficient to set a country in a flame. If, instead of commissioners as
deeply sunk in the slough of ignorance as the people they were sent
amongst, there had been deputed a few men firm in courage and clear in
understanding, how different would have been the result! Some of the
poor children who were burned would have been sent to an infirmary;
others would have been well flogged; the credulity of the parents would
have been laughed at, and the lives of seventy persons spared. The
belief in witchcraft remains in Sweden to this day; but, happily, the
annals of that country present no more such instances of lamentable
aberration of intellect as the one just cited.
In New England, about the same time, the colonists were scared by
similar stories of the antics of the devil. All at once a fear seized
upon the multitude, and supposed criminals were arrested day after day
in such numbers, that the prisons were found too small to contain them.
A girl, named Goodwin, the daughter of a mason, who was hypochondriac
and subject to fits, imagined that an old Irishwoman, named Glover, had
bewitched her. Her two brothers, in whose constitutions there was
apparently a predisposition to similar fits, went off in the same way,
crying out that the devil and Dame Glover were tormenting them. At
times their joints were so stiff that they could not be moved, while at
others, said the neighbours, they were so flexible, that the bones
appeared softened into sinews. The supposed witch was seized, and, as
she could not repeat the Lord's Prayer without making a mistake in it,
she was condemned and executed.
But the popular excitement was not allayed. One victim was not enough:
the people waited agape for new disclosures. Suddenly two hysteric
girls in another family fell into fits daily, and the cry of witchcraft
resounded from one end of the colony to the other. The feeling of
suffocation in the throat, so common in cases of hysteria, was said by
the patients to be caused by the devil himself, who had stuck balls in
the windpipe to choke them. They felt the pricking of thorns in every
part of the body, and one of them vomited needles. The case of these
girls, who were the daughter and niece of a Mr. Parris, the minister of
a Calvinist chapel, excited so much attention, that all the weak women
in the colony began to fancy themselves similarly afflicted. The more
they brooded on it, the more convinced they became. The contagion of
this mental disease was as great as if it had been a pestilence. One
after the other the women fainted away, asserting, on their recovery,
that they had seen the spectres of witches. Where there were three or
four girls in a family, they so worked, each upon the diseased
imagination of the other, that they fell into fits five or six times in
a day. Some related that the devil himself appeared to them, bearing in
his hand a parchment roll, and promising that if they would sign an
agreement transferring to him their immortal souls, they should be
immediately relieved from fits and all the ills of the flesh. Others
asserted that they saw witches only, who made them similar promises,
threatening that they should never be free from aches and pains till
they had agreed to become the devil's. When they refused, the witches
pinched, or bit, or pricked them with long pins and needles. More than
two hundred persons named by these mischievous visionaries, were thrown
into prison. They were of all ages and conditions of life, and many of
them of exemplary character. No less than nineteen were condemned and
executed before reason returned to the minds of the colonists. The most
horrible part of this lamentable history is, that among the victims
there was a little child only five years old. Some women swore that
they had seen it repeatedly in company with the devil, and that it had
bitten them often with its little teeth, for refusing to sign a compact
with the Evil One. It can hardly increase our feelings of disgust and
abhorrence when we learn that this insane community actually tried and
executed a dog for the same offence!
One man, named Cory, stoutly refused to plead to the preposterous
indictment against him. As was the practice in such eases, he was
pressed to death. It is told of the Sheriff of New England, who
superintended the execution, that when this unhappy man thrust out his
tongue in his mortal agony, he seized hold of a cane, and crammed it
back again into the mouth. If ever there were a fiend in human form, it
was this Sheriff; a man, who, if the truth were known, perhaps plumed
himself upon his piety--thought he was doing God good service, and
"Hoped to merit heaven by making earth a hell!"
Arguing still in the firm belief of witchcraft, the bereaved people
began to inquire, when they saw their dearest friends snatched away
from them by these wide-spreading accusations, whether the whole
proceedings were not carried on by the agency of the devil. Might not
the great enemy have put false testimony into the mouths of the
witnesses, or might not the witnesses be witches themselves? Every man
who was in danger of losing his wife, his child, or his sister,
embraced this doctrine with avidity. The revulsion was as sudden as the
first frenzy. All at once, the colonists were convinced of their error.
The judges put a stop to the prosecutions, even of those who had
confessed their guilt. The latter were no sooner at liberty than they
retracted all they had said, and the greater number hardly remembered
the avowals which agony had extorted from them. Eight persons, who had
been tried and condemned, were set free; and gradually girls ceased to
have fits and to talk of the persecutions of the devil. The judge who
had condemned the first criminal executed on this charge, was so
smitten with sorrow and humiliation at his folly, that he set apart the
anniversary of that day as one of solemn penitence and fasting. He
still clung to the belief in witchcraft; no new light had broken in
upon him on that subject, but, happily for the community, the delusion
had taken a merciful turn. The whole colony shared the feeling; the
jurors on the different trials openly expressed their penitence in the
churches; and those who had suffered were regarded as the victims, and
not the accomplices of Satan.
It is related that the Indian tribes in New England were sorely puzzled
at the infatuation of the settlers, and thought them either a race
inferior to, or more sinful than the French colonists in the vicinity,
amongst whom, as they remarked, "the Great Spirit sent no witches."
Returning again to the continent of Europe, we find that, after the
year 1680, men became still wiser upon this subject. For twenty years
the populace were left to their belief, but governments in general gave
it no aliment in the shape of executions. The edict of Louis XIV. gave
a blow to the superstition, from which it never recovered. The last
execution in the Protestant cantons of Switzerland was at Geneva, in
1652. The various potentates of Germany, although they could not stay
the trials, invariably commuted the sentence into imprisonment, in all
cases where the pretended witch was accused of pure witchcraft,
unconnected with any other crime. In the year 1701, Thomasius, the
learned professor at the University of Halle, delivered his inaugural
thesis, "De Crimine Magiae," which struck another blow at the falling
monster of popular error. But a faith so strong as that in witchcraft
was not to be eradicated at once: the arguments of learned men did not
penetrate to the villages and hamlets, but still they achieved great
things; they rendered the belief an unworking faith, and prevented the
supply of victims, on which for so many ages it had battened and grown
strong.
Once more the delusion broke out; like a wild beast wounded to the
death, it collected all its remaining energies for the final
convulsion, which was to show how mighty it had once been. Germany,
which had nursed the frightful error in its cradle, tended it on its
death-bed, and Wurzburg, the scene of so many murders on the same
pretext, was destined to be the scene of the last. That it might lose
no portion of its bad renown, the last murder was as atrocious as the
first. This case offers a great resemblance to that of the witches of
Mohra and New England, except in the number of its victims. It happened
so late as the year 1749, to the astonishment and disgust of the rest
of Europe.
A number of young women in a convent at Wurzburg fancied themselves
bewitched; they felt, like all hysteric subjects, a sense of
suffocation in the throat. They went into fits repeatedly; and one of
them, who had swallowed needles, evacuated them at abscesses, which
formed in different parts of the body. The cry of sorcery was raised,
and a young woman, named Maria Renata Sanger, was arrested on the
charge of having leagued with the devil, to bewitch five of the young
ladies. It was sworn on the trial that Maria had been frequently seen
to clamber over the convent walls in the shape of a pig--that,
proceeding to the cellar, she used to drink the best wine till she was
intoxicated; and then start suddenly up in her own form. Other girls
asserted that she used to prowl about the roof like a cat, and often
penetrate into their chamber, and frighten them by her dreadful
howlings. It was also said that she had been seen in the shape of a
hare, milking the cows dry in the meadows belonging to the convent;
that she used to perform as an actress on the boards of Drury Lane
theatre in London, and, on the very same night, return upon a
broomstick to Wurzburg, and afflict the young ladies with pains in all
their limbs. Upon this evidence she was condemned, and burned alive in
the market-place of Wurzburg.
Here ends this frightful catalogue of murder and superstition. Since
that day, the belief in witchcraft has fled from the populous abodes of
men, and taken refuge in remote villages and districts too wild,
rugged, and inhospitable to afford a resting-place for the foot of
civilization. Rude fishers and uneducated labourers still attribute
every phenomenon of nature which they cannot account for, to the devil
and witches. Catalepsy, that wondrous disease, is still thought by
ignorant gossips to be the work of Satan; and hypochondriacs,
uninformed by science of the nature of their malady, devoutly believe
in the reality of their visions. The reader would hardly credit the
extent of the delusion upon this subject in the very heart of England
at this day. Many an old woman leads a life of misery from the
unfeeling insults of her neighbours, who raise the scornful finger and
hooting voice at her, because in her decrepitude she is ugly, spiteful,
perhaps insane, and realizes in her personal appearance the description
preserved by tradition of the witches of yore. Even in the
neighbourhood of great towns the taint remains of this once
widely-spread contagion. If no victims fall beneath it, the
enlightenment of the law is all that prevents a recurrence of scenes as
horrid as those of the seventeeth century. Hundreds upon hundreds of
witnesses could be found to swear to absurdities as great as those
asserted by the infamous Matthew Hopkins.
In the Annual Register for 1760, an instance of the belief in
witchcraft is related, which shows how superstition lingers. A dispute
arose in the little village of Glen, in Leicestershire, between two old
women, each of whom vehemently accused the other of witchcraft. The
quarrel at last ran so high that a challenge ensued, and they both
agreed to be tried by the ordeal of swimming. They accordingly stripped
to their shifts--procured some men, who tied their thumbs and great
toes together, cross-wise, and then, with a cart-rope about their
middle, suffered themselves to be thrown into a pool of water. One of
them sank immediately, but the other continued struggling a short time
upon the surface of the water, which the mob deeming an infallible sign
of her guilt, pulled her out, and insisted that she should immediately
impeach all her accomplices in the craft. She accordingly told them
that, in the neighbouring village of Burton, there were several old
women as "much witches as she was." Happily for her, this negative
information was deemed sufficient, and a student in astrology, or
"white-witch," coming up at the time, the mob, by his direction,
proceeded forthwith to Burton in search of all the delinquents. After a
little consultation on their arrival, they went to the old woman's
house on whom they had fixed the strongest suspicion. The poor old
creature on their approach locked the outer door, and from the window
of an upstairs room asked what they wanted. They informed her that she
was charged with being guilty of witchcraft, and that they were come to
duck her; remonstrating with her at the same time upon the necessity of
submission to the ordeal, that, if she were innocent, all the world
might know it. Upon her persisting in a positive refusal to come down,
they broke open the door and carried her out by force, to a deep
gravel-pit full of water. They tied her thumbs and toes together and
threw her into the water, where they kept her for several minutes,
drawing her out and in two or three times by the rope round her middle.
Not being able to satisfy themselves whether she were a witch or no,
they at last let her go, or, more properly speaking, they left her on
the bank to walk home by herself, if she ever recovered. Next day, they
tried the same experiment upon another woman, and afterwards upon a
third; but, fortunately, neither of the victims lost her life from this
brutality. Many of the ringleaders in the outrage were apprehended
during the week, and tried before the justices at quarter-sessions. Two
of them were sentenced to stand in the pillory and to be imprisoned for
a month; and as many as twenty more were fined in small sums for the
assault, and bound over to keep the peace for a twelvemonth.
"So late as the year 1785," says Arnot, in his collection and
abridgment of Criminal Trials in Scotland, "it was the custom among the
sect of Seceders to read from the pulpit an annual confession of sins,
national and personal; amongst the former of which was particularly
mentioned the 'Repeal by Parliament of the penal statute against
witches, contrary to the express laws of God.'"
Many houses are still to be found in England with the horse-shoe (the
grand preservative against witchcraft) nailed against the threshold. If
any over-wise philosopher should attempt to remove them, the chances
are that he would have more broken bones than thanks for his
interference. Let any man walk into Cross-street, Hatton-Garden, and
from thence into Bleeding-heart Yard, and learn the tales still told
and believed of one house in that neighbourhood, and he will ask
himself in astonishment if such things can be in the nineteenth
century. The witchcraft of Lady Hatton, the wife of the famous Sir
Christopher, so renowned for his elegant dancing in the days of
Elizabeth, is as devoutly believed as the Gospels. The room is to be
seen where the devil seized her after the expiration of the contract he
had made with her, and bore her away bodily to the pit of Tophet: the
pump against which he dashed her is still pointed out, and the spot
where her heart was found, after he had torn it out of her bosom with
his iron claws, has received the name of Bleeding-heart Yard, in
confirmation of the story. Whether the horse-shoe still remains upon
the door of the haunted house, to keep away other witches, is
uncertain; but there it was, twelve or thirteen years ago. The writer
resided at that time in the house alluded to, and well remembers that
more than one old woman begged for admittance repeatedly, to satisfy
themselves that it was in its proper place. One poor creature,
apparently insane, and clothed in rags, came to the door with a
tremendous double-knock, as loud as that of a fashionable footman, and
walked straight along the passage to the horse-shoe. Great was the
wonderment of the inmates, especially when the woman spat upon the
horse-shoe, and expressed her sorrow that she could do no harm while it
remained there. After spitting upon, and kicking it again and again,
she coolly turned round and left the house, without saying a word to
anybody. This poor creature perhaps intended a joke, but the
probability is that she imagined herself a witch. In Saffron Hill,
where she resided, her ignorant neighbours gave her that character, and
looked upon her with no little fear and aversion.
More than one example of the popular belief in witchcraft occurred in
the neighbourhood of Hastings so lately as the year 1830. An aged
woman, who resided in the Rope-walk of that town, was so repulsive in
her appearance, that she was invariably accused of being a witch by all
the ignorant people who knew her. She was bent completely double; and
though very old, her eye was unusually bright and malignant. She wore a
red cloak, and supported herself on a crutch: she was, to all outward
appearance, the very beau ideal of a witch. So dear is power to the
human heart, that this old woman actually encouraged the popular
superstition: she took no pains to remove the ill impression, but
seemed to delight that she, old and miserable as she was, could keep in
awe so many happier and stronger fellow-creatures. Timid girls crouched
with fear when they met her, and many would go a mile out of their way
to avoid her. Like the witches of the olden time, she was not sparing
of her curses against those who offended her. The child of a woman who
resided within two doors of her, was afflicted with lameness, and the
mother constantly asserted that the old woman had bewitched her. All
the neighbours credited the tale. It was believed, too, that she could
assume the form of a cat. Many a harmless puss has been hunted almost
to the death by mobs of men and boys, upon the supposition that the
animal would start up before them in the true shape of Mother * * * * *.
In the same town there resided a fisherman,--who is, probably, still
alive, and whose name, for that reason, we forbear to mention,--who was
the object of unceasing persecution, because it was said that he had
sold himself to the devil. It was currently reported that he could
creep through a keyhole, and that he had made a witch of his daughter,
in order that he might have the more power over his fellows. It was
also believed that he could sit on the points of pins and needles, and
feel no pain. His brother-fishermen put him to this test whenever they
had an opportunity. In the alehouses which he frequented, they often
placed long needles in the cushions of the chairs, in such a manner
that he could not fail to pierce himself when he sat down. The result
of these experiments tended to confirm their faith in his supernatural
powers. It was asserted that he never flinched. Such was the popular
feeling in the fashionable town of Hastings only seven years ago; very
probably it is the same now.
In the north of England, the superstition lingers to an almost
inconceivable extent. Lancashire abounds with witch-doctors, a set of
quacks, who pretend to cure diseases inflicted by the devil. The
practices of these worthies may be judged of by the following case,
reported in the "Hertford Reformer," of the 23rd of June, 1838. The
witch-doctor alluded to is better known by the name of the cunning man,
and has a large practice in the counties of Lincoln and Nottingham.
According to the writer in "The Reformer," the dupe, whose name is not
mentioned, had been for about two years afflicted with a painful
abscess, and had been prescribed for without relief by more than one
medical gentleman. He was urged by some of his friends, not only in his
own village, but in neighbouring ones, to consult the witch-doctor, as
they were convinced he was under some evil influence. He agreed, and
sent his wife to the cunning man, who lived in New Saint Swithin's, in
Lincoln. She was informed by this ignorant impostor that her husband's
disorder was an infliction of the devil, occasioned by his next-door
neighbours, who had made use of certain charms for that purpose. From
the description he gave of the process, it appears to be the same as
that employed by Dr. Fian and Gellie Duncan, to work woe upon King
James. He stated that the neighbours, instigated by a witch, whom he
pointed out, took some wax, and moulded it before the fire into the
form of her husband, as near as they could represent him; they then
pierced the image with pins on all sides--repeated the Lord's Prayer
backwards, and offered prayers to the devil that he would fix his
stings into the person whom that figure represented, in like manner as
they pierced it with pins. To counteract the effects of this diabolical
process, the witch-doctor prescribed a certain medicine, and a charm to
be worn next the body, on that part where the disease principally lay.
The patient was to repeat the 109th and 119th Psalms every day, or the
cure would not be effectual. The fee which he claimed for this advice
was a guinea.
So efficacious is faith in the cure of any malady, that the patient
actually felt much better after a three weeks' course of this
prescription. The notable charm which the quack had given was
afterwards opened, and found to be a piece of parchment, covered with
some cabalistic characters and signs of the planets.
The next-door neighbours were in great alarm that the witch-doctor
would, on the solicitation of the recovering patient, employ some means
to punish them for their pretended witchcraft. To escape the
infliction, they feed another cunning man, in Nottinghamshire, who told
them of a similar charm, which would preserve them from all the malice
of their enemies. The writer concludes by saying that, "the doctor, not
long after he had been thus consulted, wrote to say that he had
discovered that his patient was not afflicted by Satan, as he had
imagined, but by God, and would continue, more or less, in the same
state till his life's end."
An impostor carried on a similar trade in the neighbourhood of
Tunbridge Wells, about the year 1830. He had been in practice for
several years, and charged enormous fees for his advice. This fellow
pretended to be the seventh son of a seventh son, and to be endowed in
consequence with miraculous powers for the cure of all diseases, but
especially of those resulting from witchcraft. It was not only the poor
who employed him, but ladies who rode in their carriages. He was often
sent for from a distance of sixty or seventy miles by these people, who
paid all his expenses to and fro, besides rewarding him handsomely. He
was about eighty years of age, and his extremely venerable appearance
aided his imposition in no slight degree. His name was Okey, or Oakley.