Why did the prosecution of witches

cease in England?
Clive Holmes
Published by
The Historical Association
59a Kennington Park Road
London SE11 4JH

Why did the prosecution of witches cease in England? – The Historical Association 2
 Contents
5 Why did the prosecution of witches cease in England?
6 Statistics
9 Scepticism
12 The Devil
17 Proof
21 Conclusion
23 References
27 Timeline
29 Bibliography

Why did the prosecution of witches cease in England? – The Historical Association 3
About the author
Clive Holmes studied History at Cambridge University. Upon completion of his Ph.D. in
1969, he moved to Cornell University in Upstate New York. He taught there until 1988
when he returned to England and took up a post as Fellow and Tutor in History at Lady
Margaret Hall, Oxford. He retired in 2011.

He has published extensively on the English Civil War and Interregnum; his book, Why
was Charles I executed? (Continuum, London; 2006) provides a good survey of his work in
this field. He has worked on the localities and local government in the seventeenth century
and on the culture and political role of the gentry in early modern England – see his book,
co-authored with Felicity Heal, The Gentry in England and Wales, 1500-1700 (Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 1994). His articles on other themes include studies of law and legislation, of fen
drainage and of witchcraft. His work on this last subject began at Cornell, where the library
contained an exceptional collection of relevant materials.

His central interest as a historian is in the dialogic relationships between the central
authority and the peripheries it governs, and between elites and the populace. Witchcraft
prosecution provides splendid examples of both relationships, and also of a third dialogue
– that of gender.

Dr Holmes has been highly commended on the excellence of his teaching, both at Cornell
and at Oxford, and is the recipient of several prestigious teaching prizes.

© Clive Holmes , 2013

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Why did the prosecution of witches cease in England? – The Historical Association 4
 Why did the prosecution of witches
cease in England?
In December 1602, The Chief Justice, Sir Edmund Anderson, was presiding at the trial
of an accused London witch, Elizabeth Jackson. He snarled at those who had suggested
that the witch’s alleged victim, Mary Glover, was either faking the symptoms of a diabolic
possession which had been attributed to Jackson’s malice or was suffering from a disease.
‘The land,’ he insisted:

...is full of witches, they abound in all places, I have hanged five or six and twenty of
them....They have on their bodies divers strange marks, at which (as some of them
have confessed) the Devil sucks their blood, for they have forsaken God, renounced
their baptism, and vowed their service to the Devil .... Their malice is great, their
practices devilish, and if we shall not convict them without direct proofs, where the
presumptions are so great, and the circumstances so apparent, they will, in short time,
overrun the whole land.1

The passage contains a number of interesting points.

1 Anderson’s no doubt imprecise but not implausible statistical recollection.

2 The context in which he spoke: he was contemptuously dismissing the scepticism
about the victim’s condition by an eminent doctor, a man whose intervention had
been sought on behalf of Jackson by the Bishop of London.
3 The Chief Justice’s belief that witches obtained their powers from a relationship with
Satan.
4 Anderson’s discussion of the problems and possibilities of proving an accusation.

This essay will examine each of these four points in relation to our central question,
concerning the falling number of witchcraft prosecutions in England.

Why did the prosecution of witches cease in England? – The Historical Association 5
 Statistics
Anderson was an experienced judge in criminal cases. Twice each year the judges of the
central courts rode out to hear serious cases in each of the counties, which were grouped
together in six assize circuits.2 Anderson began serving as an assize judge in 1578, and by
1602, his service split between three of the circuits, would have travelled to 294 county
meetings. He had also served as judge on Special Commissions. The thin surviving
documentation for the trials at which he presided indicates that he sentenced a Derbyshire
witch for harming a boy in 1597 to the statutory penalty of a year’s imprisonment (she
died in gaol), and released an accused Nottingham woman the next year; the only witch
we know whom he condemned was another Londoner in 1599. But his figure of 25/26-
witches hanged on his watch is perfectly possible. If Anderson had served on the Home
Circuit, the only one for which we have reasonably full records, he would have improved
his score. Forty-five witches were executed for killing in the 1578-1602 sessions of the
assize courts. A further 12 of the accused were reprieved though convicted by the juries;
60 witches accused of killing were found not guilty. Thirty-six people were accused of
damaging stock or interrupting agricultural processes; 25 of harming people, either with
mysterious diseases or through diabolic possession of their minds and bodies; 11 were
accused of both stock damage and personal harm. Of these 72 accused, 28 were convicted
and sentenced to the statutory penalty of a year’s imprisonment with four appearances in
the pillory.
Anderson’s tenure coincided with one of the most active periods of English witch-trials.
The prosecution of witches had been made possible by a Parliamentary statute passed
in 1563. Villagers and townsfolk began to employ it vigorously against the witches who
troubled their communities in the mid-1570s; hence the high figures of accusation and
conviction for the years 1578-1602 on the Home Circuit. In 1604 Parliament passed a new
statute, which toughened the older legislation. It made harming people by witchcraft a
capital offence. And it introduced a new crime: death was to be the penalty for those who
‘shall consult covenant with entertaine employ feede or rewarde any evill and wicked Spirit’.
We will return to this seemingly incongruous addition. Anderson served on the committee
which drafted the new law, and it almost certainly embodied his experience of our initial
case of Elizabeth Jackson in 1602. Found guilty, she had merely been imprisoned despite
the horrible mental and physical torments she had allegedly wrought on her victim.
From 1604-1640 the number of accusations, and the proportion of convictions to
not guilty verdicts declined in the Home Circuit despite the revised legislation, and the
fact that the new king, James I, had been a vigorous witch-hunter in Scotland and had
published a work insisting on the reality of witchcraft. The fall became precipitate in the
period after 1615 and prior to the breakdown of Charles I’s government in 1640. Between
1604 and 1614 thirty accusations for offences bearing the death penalty produced fifteen
guilty verdicts, with two of those convicted reprieved by the judges. From 1615 to 1640
thirty-six accusations led to six guilty verdicts with four reprieves.
The descent into Civil War led to a temporary weakening of the central government’s
ability or inclination to oversee local justice. The result was the toleration of the activities of

Why did the prosecution of witches cease in England? – The Historical Association 6
the loathsome Matthew Hopkins, self-styled ‘Witchfinder General’, in fact an enterprising
entrepreneur, lacking any official credentials, selling his expertise to local communities,
and pursuing a very personal and prurient agenda focused on witches as devil worshippers
enjoying sexual relations with Satan. Official records, newsbooks and tracts allow us to
track Hopkins’s peregrinations through East Anglia to the borders of Huntingdonshire and
Northamptonshire in 1645-47. Overall statistics are not easily constructed, but it is clear
that his crusade generated an unprecedented numbers of accusations: in Suffolk we know
that 124 witches were accused. There was also a very high rate of conviction and execution.
Hopkins’s side-kick, John Stearne, wrote of 68 executions in Suffolk. In Essex, site of the
first group of trials, 36 witches were accused, and only three were acquitted; nine were
reprieved after conviction; four died in gaol.3
The Home Circuit records of the Interregnum governments (1649-60) show another
falling away after the swathe cut by Hopkins. Oliver Cromwell showed no interest in
prosecution – it was not an aspect of the ‘godly government’ that his regime sought to
promote. And the situation under Charles II quickly reverted to the pattern in the reign
of his father. From 1660 to 1681 there were 24 trials for the offences punishable by death
in the 1604 statute – two for the possession of imps; 18 for killing; four for harming. Only
one of the accused was convicted (of harm) and she was reprieved. From 1686 to 1711 a
smattering of accusations led to acquittals. Then, in 1712, the Hertfordshire Assizes saw the
final conviction for a capital offence under the 1604 Statute in England: Jane Wenham was
accused on an odd indictment for ‘conversing familiarly with the Devil in the Shape of a
Cat’; she was found guilty by the jury, and had to be reprieved by the judge.4
After the Restoration the courts of the Home Circuit were faster than some other areas
to abandon witch prosecution. The Western Circuit saw the last execution in England,
probably that of Alice Molland in 1684, though the record is not categorical. Certainly
three witches convicted at the Devon Assizes in the summer of 1682 were hanged.
Western Circuit assize courts were also the scenes of some of the last attempts at large-
scale prosecution, though these were unsuccessful. In 1665 Robert Hunt, Justice of the
Peace, investigated a ‘whole clan of those hellish confederates’ in Somerset, but only one
of his suspects was brought to trial, and she subsequently died in prison.5 In 1671 the
town governors of Malmesbury (Wiltshire) arrested 14 suspects. A local gentleman, also
a Justice of the Peace, persuaded them that only four of their cases were in proper form
and worth pursuing, and warned them that their actions, if not properly grounded, would
draw on them the derisive censure of the ‘Reverend Judges, the learned Counsayle..., the
persons Ecclesiastique and the Gentry of the body of the county’, who would be massed at
the Salisbury Assizes. The Malmesbury authorities retreated, sending only four women for
trial, two of whom were found guilty and executed. 6
The decline of the number of accusations and the growing proportion of ‘not guilty’
verdicts; the final English execution in 1682 or 1685; the final conviction in 1712: this
was a world very different from that of which Chief Justice Anderson spoke with such
confidence in 1602. Ninety-four years after Anderson’s insistent affirmation at the Old
Bailey, it was reported that Lord Chief Justice Holt, sitting at the Devon Assizes, ‘seem’d...
to believe nothing of witchery at all’.7 And in 1736 the 1604 Act was finally repealed: it was
no longer possible to prosecute witches in England (or Scotland – for the new Legislation
post-dated the Act of Union and also repealed the Scots 1563 Act ‘Anentis Witchcrafts’).

Why did the prosecution of witches cease in England? – The Historical Association 7
 Let us return to our title: Why did the prosecution of witches cease?

Not because a belief in witchcraft was generally abandoned; not because accusations
of witchcraft did not continue to be made. In 1808 the minister of a Huntingdonshire
village denounced those of his parishioners who had been persuaded that Ann Izzard had
bewitched a local girl, a ‘notion’ he found ‘wild and irrational’. In early May some of the
villagers, with the connivance of the constable, dragged the accused woman naked from
her house, beat her, and gashed her arms with pins. Another violent attack followed next
day. A couple of days later an attempt was made to ‘swim’ the witch, but she fled to the
security of the minister’s house.8 Newspaper and periodical accounts from the century
after 1736 provide plentiful evidence of similar activities. Journalists, smug in metropolitan
complacency, denounced the beliefs and actions of ‘the unmerciful and unthinking vulgar’,
‘very stupid’ yokels, ‘full of ignorance and superstition’,9 who sought to prove charges of
witchcraft, usually by ‘swimming’ the accused, or to break the witch’s spell by drawing
her blood. Both tactics, as in the Izzard case, doubled as communal punishments after
the withdrawal of formal criminal sanctions. And they could result in serious injury or
even death. The courts heard a number of cases against the perpetrators of such violent
assaults.10 In 1751 Thomas Colley from Tring, one of the organisers of a mob that had
‘swum’ a husband and wife accused of witchcraft and had killed the old woman in the
process, was convicted of murder. At his execution, carefully stage-managed by the
authorities, Colley solemnly recited a rote lesson repudiating his actions and the ideas
on which they were founded: ‘I do not believe there is such a thing in being as a witch’,
to argue the contrary was ‘absurd and wicked’. But the rustics who attended the occasion
were not converted, ‘grumbling and muttering that it was a hard case to hang a man for
destroying an old wicked woman that had done so much mischief by her witchcraft.’11

Why did the prosecution of witches cease in England? – The Historical Association 8
 Scepticism
The scepticism that increasingly emerged in the trials is clearly the key element in the end
of witch prosecution, which must be analysed and explained in relation to our question.
But first we must recognise that doubts were no novelty in the late seventeenth century.
Anderson’s aggressive insistence on the reality of the power of witches to kill, harm
and damage was pronounced in the face of an already potent opposition in the case of
Elizabeth Jackson.
In the last two decades of the sixteenth century the Church of England was assailed
on two fronts. It was challenged by a group of Catholic missionaries who sought to revive
and reinvigorate the traditional religion. It was also attacked by Puritans, who argued that
the ‘reform’ of the church had not gone anything like far enough – its doctrine was opaque
on key issues, and the required rituals and vestments still smacked of popery. And both
groups criticised the established church in relation to its handling of diabolic possession,
where the mind and body of the victim was believed to be tormented by demons, often,
in England, at the instigation of a witch. The Church of England, arguing that the age of
miracles had ceased, questioned and derided the Catholic practice of exorcism12 as an
appropriate therapy in cases of alleged possession. Puritans were equally scornful of the
fraud of Catholic exorcism, but recognised that the priests had a powerful evangelical
weapon in their ability to defeat the demons – ‘the simple everie where noted it as a great
discredit to the Ministers of the Gospel that they do want this power’.13 So they sought to
develop a scripturally founded practice, relying on fasting and prayer as recommended
by Christ, to beg God’s assistance in ousting the possessing demons. Both Catholics and
Puritans were tempted to use the success of their very divergent practices as a stick with
which to beat the established church, which responded with punishment, denunciation
and mockery. Official investigation had shattered a group of priests based in the environs
of London involved in evangelical exorcism in 1586, and another more rustic manifestation
a decade later. In 1596-97 the Puritan minister John Darrell, who had pursued a successful
career as an organiser of dispossessions, was investigated and eventually degraded by
the ecclesiastical authorities for encouraging a boy to ape the symptoms of possession,
and then using the fraud to boost his own reputation, and that of the faction to which he
adhered, by ostensibly casting out the demons by fasting and prayer. Behind these ripostes
stood Richard Bancroft, chaplain to the Archbishop of Canterbury and then Bishop of
London. In 1602 he was called into action again.
In April 1602 Mary Glover fell ill. Her symptoms mystified her doctors, and one
of them suggested that they might be supernaturally caused. This was a diagnosis with
which Glover’s godly family eventually concurred, as Mary’s fits grew more violent and
frightening in the course of the summer – unconsciousness; convulsions; ventriloquism;
insensitivity to pain – and were increasingly associated with the presence of a woman,
Elizabeth Jackson, with a local reputation as a witch. After the Recorder of London had
visited Glover and been convinced that she was possessed, Jackson was indicted as a witch,
and tried at the Old Bailey on 1 December 1602. She was found guilty of harming Glover
and sentenced, under the 1563 Statute, to a year’s imprisonment and four appearances

Why did the prosecution of witches cease in England? – The Historical Association 9
in the pillory. A couple of weeks later a group of Puritan ministers and godly lay folk,
employing the techniques of prayer and fasting, dispossessed the girl. Bancroft was a
shadowy, clearly malign, presence throughout this affair. In November Jackson – or more
likely someone writing on her behalf – petitioned the Royal College of Physicians against
the doctors who had supported accusations of witchcraft against her. The issue divided
the college, but the majority concurred that Glover was ‘not bewitched but afflicted by
some natural disease’. At the trial, two eminent doctors, Edward Jorden and John Argent,
testified to the same effect: it was Jorden’s contribution that so enraged Chief Justice
Anderson. 14 The conviction of Jackson and the subsequent successful dispossession moved
an infuriated Bancroft into overdrive. Ministers involved were berated and imprisoned;
godly laymen arrested and interrogated. In the next months a number of official preachers
attacked the doctrine of possession in their sermons; one referred directly to the Glover
case and ‘spake much to the taxing of the judge, jurie and witnesses, and clearinge
or acquittinge the Witch’.15 And Bancroft also patronised a number of heavyweight
publications. Dr Jorden produced a treatise, A Briefe Discourse of a Disease called the
Suffocation of the Mother, in which he ‘sought earnestly, to make the case a meere naturall
disease’.16 And Samuel Harsnett, Bancroft’s chaplain, almost simultaneously published his A
Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures.
Harsnett had already employed his talent for bitter invective in his official account of
the Darrell affair. In the 1603 work his ostensible targets were the 1586 Catholic exorcisms,
and Harsnett had great fun ridiculing the charlatanism, manipulative and prurient, of
Father Weston and his acolytes. But a collateral target was the London Puritans involved
with Glover, who sought, like the priests, to mould her symptoms and use her illness to
advance their own religious agenda. These ‘devil-finders and devil-puffers, or devil-prayers’
were as contemptible, as guilty of self-serving dissimulation, as the Catholic exorcists.
Their lay supporters were dismissed as ‘a route, rable, and swarme of giddy, adle, lunaticke
illuminate spectators of both sexes, but especially a Sisternity of mimpes, mops, and idel
holy women’.17
For Harsnett the possessed were certainly frauds, perhaps sick, who allowed themselves
to be manipulated by clerics with agendas hostile to the worship of the Church of England
and self-serving claims to charismatic authority. But Harsnett took his critique a stage
further. In most Puritan dispossession cases the victim was alleged to have been assailed
through the immediate agency of a witch, as was Glover. So Harsnett went on to dismiss
contemporary beliefs about witches. Chapter 21 of his work ostensibly concerns ‘the
strange formes, shapes, and apparitions of the devills’. Harsnett begins by arguing that the
Catholic image of the devil, ‘ with ougly hornes on his head, fire in his mouth, a cowes
tayle in his breech, eyes like a bason, fangs like a dogge, clawes like a Beare, a skinne like
a Neger, and a voice roaring like a Lyon’ is a laughable amalgam of paganism and folklore.
He then moves on to discuss the similar origin of the ‘Idaea of a Witch’, and explains how
the scapegoating of poor, old, ill-educated women becomes the popular explanation for
a series of misfortunes – ‘a sheepe sicke of the giddies, or an hogge of the mumps, or an
horse of the staggers’ . This list of misfortunes attributed to witchcraft terminates in alleged
possession, which is seen as originating in the attention-seeking games of ‘idle’, ‘knavish’
adolescents. Here Harsnett introduces the exorcist, who will eagerly make capital out of
this tissue of nonsense and fraud.18 The direct source of all this was the first great work of

Why did the prosecution of witches cease in England? – The Historical Association 10
scepticism in English, indeed, the first demonological work written in English, the Kentish
gentleman, Reginald Scot’s, 1584 Discoverie of Witchcraft. Much of Harsnett’s language was
lifted verbatim from Scot, and the tone and rhythm of chapter 21 was equally derivative.
There are other borrowings from Scot throughout the tract.19 Scot’s argument, presented
with coruscating irony, emphasised that witchcraft theory was a ragbag of notions derived
from classical paganism and from popular belief, sanctioned by the Catholic Church
for its own self-interested purposes. A truly Reformed England would have abandoned
this farrago of nonsense. Scot also attacked the central pillars of demonological theory.
He argued that the biblical passages cited by the demonologists were irrelevant or
mistranslated; that the confessions of the witches were extorted by torture or social
pressure; that events attributed to witchcraft, when they were not palpably untrue, were
explicable naturally, without invoking the instrumentality of witches or demons.
Scot’s magnum opus was reprinted in 1651 and 1665 and his arguments were repeated
with growing intensity after the Civil War.20 These later authors emphasised different
aspects of the case against demonology, but all owe a debt – sometimes acknowledged – to
Scot, though none of them achieved the panache of Scot’s initial exposition.
Scot can appear a lonely, marginal figure until the Civil War period, a whipping-boy
for the orthodox. But two points need to be emphasised in relation to his influence. First,
as Harsnett’s flattering plagiarism makes clear, Scot was not the only sceptic. Nor was
scepticism unique to isolated intellectuals. In the dedication of his work, Scot praises
his relative, Sir Thomas Scot, who, as a magistrate, had examined ‘manie poore old
women’ accused of witchcraft. None of these cases went forward to trial.21 We meet other
practical exponents of scepticism in the Elizabethan period. There are the Derbyshire
magistrate, Godfrey Foljambe, who threatened John Darrell at an early stage in his career
in dispossession with prison for falsely accusing a witch, and the ‘supposed friend’ who
interrogated the possessed Thomas Darling, and insisted ‘there was no witches’.22 We meet
with the Norfolk gentleman, Augustine Styward, who secured the release of an accused
witch, in ‘present misery’ having been long imprisoned on the testimony of a servant-maid
because, Styward thought, of the magistrates’ neglect of ‘the ordinary means to know the
truth’. In 1593 the eminent lawyer, Sergeant Thomas Harris, insisted that image-magic was
‘a vain and fond conceit’.23
Second, Scot’s polemic against the weakness of the popular belief in witches was
well-founded, and some of those who joined in the excoriation of his work recognised,
uneasily, that his analysis was right. Henry Holland denounced Scot, but echoed his views
on ‘the ignorant people’, ‘the rude people’, ‘blockish Christians’, whose actions bespoke
their ‘brutish ignorance’, their ‘fonde opinions’.24 Gifford dismissed Scot’s intellectual
arguments as ‘frivolous’, but the villagers he portrayed in his A dialogue concerning witches
and witchcrafts, the farmer Samuel, and, particularly the robust, opinionated ‘Good wife R’,
shared many characteristics that Scot attributed to the rustics.25 In 1627 Richard Bernard,
writing his influential manual on the proper procedures and considerations in evaluating
accusations of witchcraft, made no comment on Scot’s scepticism, but simply enlisted him
as an ally in his attack on popular failures to understand divine providence, on the use of
charms, and reliance on the legerdemain of the ‘white witch’.26

Why did the prosecution of witches cease in England? – The Historical Association 11
 The Devil
We must now examine the third point of interest derived from Anderson’s tirade: ‘they
have forsaken God, renounced their baptism, and vowed their service to the Devil.’
Anderson’s view here is entirely orthodox. From the perspective of Catholic priests or of
Puritan ministers, witches acquired their power to harm (or to do good) from a covenant
with Satan. The theology of witchcraft as it was enunciated in the sixteenth century was
clear and simple. A witch was a person who had made a covenant with the devil, selling his
or her soul, in return for secret knowledge or illicit power. The first witchcraft treatise in
English – in fact a translation of a work by the eminent Genevan divine, Lambert Daneau
(1575) – insisted that ‘they learn from the devil…and have a league and agreement with
the devil.’27 Witchcraft , wrote the great Elizabethan interpreter of Calvinist theology
in England, William Perkins, ‘is not an art, neither doth it flow from the skill of the
sorcerer….but is derived wholly from Satan’. Perkins denies that witchcraft can be a subject
of academic study into which the neophyte can be inducted (so much for Harry Potter’s
Hogwarts school), and he has no truck with the popular notion that witchcraft is a ‘power
in the blood’, a matter of inheritance. ‘The very ground-work of their practices,’ he insists,
‘is their league with the devill.’28 The intellectual conceptualisation of witchcraft is nicely
set out in Act 1 scene 5 of Marlowe’s play, Dr Faustus, where Faustus covenants with the
devil, Mephistopheles. He stabs his arm, then writes in blood ‘in a manner of a deed of
gift’ contracting his soul to Satan; in return he receives magical powers and the services of
Mephistopheles.
Those who sought to answer Scot in the half-century following the publication of his
work objected chiefly to his radical re-interpretation of scripture, which they believed
would subvert all religious truths. His ‘damnable opinions’, ‘that there can be no such
thing as witchcraft’, his ‘denying of spirits’ so upholding ‘the old error of the Sadducees’29,
made him one of the two major targets of the 1597 Daemonologie of King James VI, soon
to be James I of England.30 Thomas Cooper, arguing in 1617 that the denial of the satanic
covenant was atheism, wrote baldly in the marginal comment, ‘Scot’.31 The post-Civil War
defenders of the traditional theories of witchcraft had a greater number of targets, and
new fears. Radical scriptural exegesis had been steadily reinforced by the rationalism and
materialism of Hobbes and the Cartesians. For the defenders of orthodoxy the attacks of
the sceptics, the ‘Saducees’, the ‘sons of the Atheistical Leviathan’,32 on the classical theology
of witchcraft (and on ghosts and poltergeists) was the thin end of the wedge. John Gaule
wrote in 1646, ‘Hee that will needs persuade himself that there are no witches, would as
faine be perswaded that there is no Devill, and ere long believe there is no God.’33 Joseph
Glanvill agreed: those who ‘are sure there are no Witches nor Apparitions...are prepared
for the denial of Spirits, a Life to come, and all other Principles of Religion.’34 The debate
raged over a series of refined theological fields: the translation and interpretation of
scripture; pneumatology; eschatology.35 But throughout the debate sceptics sneered, as had
Scot, at the degree to which English witchcraft belief, for all its intellectual subtlety and
ostensible Biblical foundation, was firmly rooted in popular superstition. The combination
of high theory and folklore was deeply problematic. And Gaule acknowledged that the

Why did the prosecution of witches cease in England? – The Historical Association 12
demonologists’ readiness to incorporate ideas tainted with the absurd credulity of the
‘ruder conditioned’, was ‘a maine cause’ of the sceptics’ ‘Infidelity’.36
Lord Chief Justice Anderson’s insistence in 1602 that a diabolic covenant was the
essential element of a witch’s power to harm was asserted in a context in which the whole
edifice of witchcraft belief was under challenge, both in terms of high theology but also
by virtue of the unstable amalgam of that theology with folklore. This latter dimension
deserves further discussion. If the orthodox were correct, the sceptics sneered, then they
had to explain what they thought Satan was doing, and why he might seem to be wasting
his time with trivia.
In abstract the theological emphasis on diabolic covenant was fine. But once, in
1563, when a felony was created by statute, cases began to emerge from local societies
into the courts it became clear that popular belief bore no relation to the theories of the
intellectuals. There were virtually no magi like Faustus; the devil scarcely appeared in
the trial evidence. What did emerge was a number of poor, old women, feared by their
neighbours for their possession of powers to harm. The damage that victims reported to
the courts made the devil responsible for some pretty limited, even derisory interventions:
butter would not churn; brewing went wrong; an ox choked on a turnip. Such incidents,
often recalled from many years past, were offered as evidence as late as in the great
Massachusetts witch-hunt in 1692. The minister, Cotton Mather, writing his defence of
the trials, acknowledged that these ‘things in themselves were Trivial’.37 Writing a century
before, George Gifford poured scorn on this aspect of popular belief: was it to be supposed,
he asked, that Satan had become ‘so lazie and idle...that he mindeth no harme, but when an
angrie woman intreate him to goe kill a cow?’38 By the end of the seventeenth century this
kind of malefic action was no longer emphasised in formal indictments, but it emerges, as
at Salem and in a series of late prosecutions from England,39 as a potent substrate in case
reports.
The origins of these powers to harm scarcely concerned the nervous villagers, but the
evidence that emerged suggests that English folklore

• recognised malefic power as largely a female attribute that was inherited in the
female line
• believed that it was bound up with an intimate relation with the animal world.

In the records of the assizes of the Home Circuit, from 1564 to 1701, 468 people are
accused of harming by witchcraft and 91 per cent of them are women – a percentage
only exceeded in Western Europe by the bishopric of Basle. Also note that, where we
can determine the outcome of the trial, 47.3 per cent of the 366 women were found
guilty, compared with only 27 per cent of the 37 men. Women far exceeded men as the
focus of English accusations, and, though we cannot provide statistics, it is clear that the
greater number of these women were both poor and old. This gave the sceptics another
opportunity to raise the issue of the very odd, here even self-destructive, behaviour that
had to be attributed to Satan. Why did the devil recruit his legions from such inferior
human material? ‘What an unapt instrument is a toothles, old, impotent ... woman?’ Scot
jeered; ‘Truelie the divell little needs such instruments to bring his purposes to passe’.40
From Scot onwards sceptics hammered relentlessly at this point. Wagstaffe’s irony is

Why did the prosecution of witches cease in England? – The Historical Association 13
particularly effective: he argued that the witches of the bible were ‘the wise men of this
world’, but incongruously their modern counterparts were:

...poor silly contemptible people, for instead of such as King Manasses and Queen
Jesebel, we now hear talk of this old Gammer and that old Goodwife. It seems the
Kingdom of darkness is quite altered in its Politicks, and the Devil is not so wise as
some men make him.41

Thus challenged, the theorists were obliged to provide apologetic rationalisations for a
phenomenon that made little theological sense, but which ‘from experience it is found to
be true’.42
So how do they do it? Perkins is succinct: women ‘being the weaker sexe, is sooner
intangled in the devills illusions’, a statement backed by the obligatory reference to Eve.43
King James took the same line:44:

The reason is easy, for as that sex is frailer then man is, so it is easier to be entrapped
in these gross snares of the devil, as was over-well proved to be true by the serpent’s
deceiving of Eva at the beginning, which makes him the homelier with that sex
sensine.45.

The theme of female frailty is embroidered by witch theorists into a litany of

misogynistic propositions, constructed out of biblical examples and Aristotelian biological
theory. But the issue left even the most apparently confident commentators uneasy. Sir
John Harrington records a conversation with James in 1607. The king was at his most
bumptious, displaying his vast erudition over a number of topics; he then raised ‘the power
of Satane in matter of witchcraft’, and asked why Harrington thought that the devil ‘did
worke more with ancient women than others’. Harrington side-stepped the question with
a vulgar joke – scripture teaches us ‘that the devil walketh in dry places’ – but the king’s
uneasiness is significant.46
That the majority of witches were poor old women was anomalous, and pushed witch
theorists on to the defensive. But in this respect English commentators could find some
security in numbers and employ the arguments of European demonologists, where female
witches, if not in the same high proportion as in England, predominated. A greater
anomaly was presented to them by the folkloric insistence on the witch’s relationship with
the animal world, where the English evidence was almost unique.
In all the early trials, almost exclusively from Essex, for which detailed records survive
the witch has an animal associated with her power. In 1566 Elizabeth Francis confessed
that she was assisted by a white spotted cat, called Sathan, which she had been given by her
grandmother, and subsequently passed on to her sister, Mother Waterhouse, where the
creature was fed on bread and milk and housed in a pot lined with wool. In 1579 Ursley
Kemp confessed that she had four spirits, two like cats, Tittey and Jack; a toad, Piggin; and
a white lamb named Tiffin. This menagerie she kept in a pot and fed on beer, white bread
and cake. The cats assisted her by killing her victims; the toad and the lamb harmed people
and damaged stock. In 1589 Joan Cunny confessed that having invoked Satan 20 years ago,
she received two black frogs, Jack and Jill (See cover picture), which she kept in a box and

Why did the prosecution of witches cease in England? – The Historical Association 14
fed on white bread and milk. It is worth noting the high standard of living – white bread
and cake were luxury commodities.47
So demonologists anticipated the Devil – and found a toad. Joseph Glanvill, defending
witchcraft theory in the 1670s acknowledged that this presented a problem: the activities
of the animals/spirits that emerged in the trials were, he conceded, ‘odde performances’.48
And the presence of the animal assistants gave ammunition to the sceptics, who were
helped by the fact that these creatures were very much an English phenomenon. ‘I meet
with little mention of imps in any country but ours’ sniffed the agnostic Hutchinson in the
early eighteenth century.49
The animals were anomalous, but they were there, so the demonologists, challenged
by the jibes of the sceptics, sought to incorporate them into their intellectual edifices.
A process of cultural interaction began in which demonological theory and folklore
interacted to create an uneasy and profoundly unstable syncretist doctrine.
The animals become ‘familiars’, a term with biblical provenance; they were incorporated
as agents of Satan who co-operated in the seduction of the witch. But there is still a
problem, which was nicely posed by a believer in witchcraft, George Gifford. Satan and
his minions are described in scripture as ‘mightie, terrible spirits, full of power, rage and
crueltie’; why then are they masquerading as ‘such paltrie vermin, as Cats, Mise, Toads
and Weasils’? A telling question! But Gifford has the answer. ‘It is even of subtletie’. The
devils, he argued, and he was followed in this by other English demonologists, seek to
persuade their dupes that ‘they ...be but meane fellowes’ occupied with ‘trifles’, with ‘base
and sleight matters’, to conceal the full horror of their power and their design, which would
frighten off prospective clients.50 Another demonologist, Richard Bernard, developed this
line of argument suggesting that the devil undertakes sophisticated consumer research.
To the rich, self-assured, educated, he takes human form to establish the covenant. To the
‘base, sordid, filthy, nasty and blockish...he commeth in the baser formes’.51 So Faust gets
Mephistopheles; Joan Cunny gets her pair of toads.
The dialogue of demonology and folklore created a series of anomalies and, in relation
to ‘familiars’ a very unstable amalgam. The abstract neatness of demonological theory
looked less and less credible as it intersected with and was obliged to accommodate,
popular belief. And as it incorporated those beliefs it became an easy target for the ridicule
of the sceptics.
The evidence from early cases also produced other testimony concerning the animals
that left high theorists uneasy. The witches’ familiars had expensive tastes – cake and white
bread– as we have seen. But in several cases they were also fed or rewarded by a blood-
gift from the witch. So in 1566 after Mother Waterhouse’s cat had accomplished her evil
purposes, it was rewarded with a chicken, plus a drop of blood; Waterhouse drew the blood
by nicking her hand or face, which was then sucked by the cat. From a demonological
perspective not blood nor chicken nor white bread makes any sense: the devils require
no sustenance. The sucking of the witch’s blood was, acknowledged Glanvill, ‘so strange
an action’ – a phrase for which he was pilloried by Webster.52 But, again, strange or not,
it figures in depositions and confessions and so it is incorporated. In a local modification
of continental theory, the divines explain the blood-gift: the witch enters a covenant
with Satan who, as on the continent, draws blood to sign or signify the contract. He
then (English deviation) provides her with a familiar, who regularly sucks blood from

Why did the prosecution of witches cease in England? – The Historical Association 15
the resulting wound. This inverted Eucharist is designed to remind her of the original
transaction ‘the more to aggravate the witch’s damnation’.53
The familiars and their activities created a series of difficulties for orthodox
theologians. But, incongruously, their attempts to incorporate them did provide some
assistance for those wrestling with the last of Anderson’s concerns: the problem of proving
guilt in a witchcraft accusation.

Why did the prosecution of witches cease in England? – The Historical Association 16
 Proof
Witch-trials, as Anderson recognised, presented a major problem of proof,54 given the
English prohibition on the use of torture to secure a confession. Basically a witchcraft
accusation took a simple form: she cursed me/I suffered. This might be confirmed by:

• the results of a slew of confirmatory counter-magics hallowed by tradition, such as

boiling the urine or burning the clothes of the afflicted. The intention of these was
‘to torment the witch’ and to force her to reveal herself.
• the denunciation of a white witch, who had been consulted to nominate the woman
guilty of causing the affliction;
• ‘common fame’, essentially hearsay concerning the local reputation of the accused
and her family.

The first two, because both involved the practice of illicit magic themselves, were deeply
troubling to the demonologists: Bernard denounced the boiling and burnings as ‘execrable
sacrifices made to the divell’.55 Gifford was scathing in his comments on charms and on
white witches, but was also dismissive of the probative status of common fame, even when
reported by ‘grave, honest men’. It was, like many of the accusations themselves, ‘grounded
upon imaginations’.56 Lawyers and divines searched for a form of irrefutable proof. This
took a number of directions. One was the short experiment with witch-swimming in
England. It was recommended by King James in his Daemonologie and first practised in
1612. Ministers, lawyers and doctors were all troubled by its use: it lacked any scientific
credentials and, as a supernatural appeal without any scriptural warrant, appeared too
close to witchcraft. It was finally abandoned as an approved element of forensic technique
in 1646 after Hopkins’s over-enthusiastic employment of it in the first stages of his East
Anglian peregrinations. Despite the early doubts and its lack of clear official sanction
after 1646, swimming was swiftly grafted on to the other popular techniques of witchcraft
discovery in the seventeenth century, and, as we have seen, survived the repeal legislation
in 1736.57
A more generally approved form of proof than the water ordeal was already
in use by the late sixteenth century. It was given an implicit statutory warrant in the
new legislation in 1604, and was still being employed in the early eighteenth century.58
Anderson glances at it in the trial of Elizabeth Jackson: ‘they have on their bodies divers
strange marks, at which (as some of them have confessed) the Devil sucks their blood.’ The
English version of the ‘Witch’s Mark’, employed as a probative tool, combines two of the
anomalies already remarked upon, the predominance of women and the animal familiar, to
create a third uneasy, incongruous element in demonological theory.
On the continent, the notion of the Faustian diabolic pact had given rise to a form of
proof. The devil, on making the covenant with his new disciple, cut or scratched the latter
to draw blood with which the contract was signed. This left a brand or scar on the witch,
which was insensible. By the seventeenth century, the discovery of this brand became a
key element in the conviction of witches in many European jurisdictions. In Scotland it
spawned a group of experts, so-called ‘witch-prickers’, who sought with long lancets to

Why did the prosecution of witches cease in England? – The Historical Association 17
discover any insensible points on the witches’ bodies.59
In England this idea was modified in the light of the popular tradition of animal
familiars incorporated and diabolised, as we have seen, by the theorists. The original
wound became a point at which the familiar – the cat; the toad – sucked the witch’s blood.
As a result of sucking, the original wound became a teat. If the teat – the witch’s mark –
can be found then we have proof. This test was intermittently employed in the sixteenth
century, but became a key aspect of forensic practice after the new Jacobean legislation.
The Elizabethan statute had made ‘Invocations or Conjurations of evill and wicked Spirites’,
a capital offence. In 1604 the additional clause already noted was added ‘or shall consult
covenant with entertaine employ feede or rewarde any evill and wicked Spirit’. ‘Feed’, and,
to a lesser extent, ‘entertaine’ and ‘rewarde’ referred to the kinds of activities that had
emerged in the trials. It was these which legitimised the English form of the body search.
The latter was recommended by the minister Richard Bernard in his 1627 work, in which
he distilled information from most of the available published accounts of trials. In 1630 it
was sanctioned by the leading manual of practical and legal advice for local magistrates.
Michael Dalton, author of The Countrey Justice, incorporated Bernard’s suggestions
wholesale into a much-extended section on witchcraft in the fourth edition of his work.
Marks or teats are ‘maine points to discover and convict’ witches, Dalton insisted: his
authority ensured that the bodily search became a usual aspect of trial procedure. Fortified
by Dalton’s pronouncement, magistrates dealing with accusations of witchcraft would
employ ‘juries’ or ‘committees’ of women, ‘according to the 118th Chapter of Dalton’, to
conduct the search. However, the downloading from Bernard to Dalton involved a key
mis-transcription. Bernard had noted, as a result of his survey of the published accounts,
that the search must be careful and thorough: the mark might be anywhere, but would
probably be in ‘very hidden places’. Dalton transcribed this as ‘in their secretest places’ –
and as a consequence of this creative misreading the search tended to concentrate on the
genital area.60
The development of this practice provided a further target for sceptical writers. The
search had no warrant in scripture. Natural marks – warts, piles, tears associated with
childbirth - could easily be mistaken for sucked teats. Ady rehearsed both arguments, and
concluded that the theory of the Devil’s mark was ‘A phantastick Lye, invented by the Devil
and the Pope’.61 The English search also invited the mockery of the post-Restoration wits.
So the playwright Shadwell has his ‘simple justice’, Sir Jeffrey Shacklehead, ‘pretending to
great skill in witches’, pruriently gloat over a prospective body search: ‘I warrant she has
biggs or teats a handful long about her parts that shall be nameless.’62
The incident on which Shadwell ostensibly based his play, the Lancashire witch
prosecution of 1634, raised another issue emphasised by the sceptics: the likelihood of
serious, even fatal, misreading of the ‘evidence’ discovered in the search. At the assizes
four men and 17 women were found guilty of witchcraft.63 The case rested on the testimony
of a ten-year-old boy from Pendle, who claimed to have witnessed a coven of 60 witches
engaged in their diabolic rituals. He claimed that he recognized some of the participants,
mostly women who already had a local reputation as witches. His evidence was confirmed
by one of the accused, a sad old woman who appears to have confessed to every suggestion
that was made to her. Additionally, the women were subjected to a body-search, and
incriminating marks were discovered on 13 of them; in 11 of these cases the marks were

Why did the prosecution of witches cease in England? – The Historical Association 18
found in the genital area.
The judges were troubled by these convictions; execution was stayed, and the matter
forwarded to the Privy Council. The latter acted expeditiously, referring the case to
the Bishop of Chester, and instructing him to report on the testimony of the principal
witnesses. The bishop’s report suggests his scepticism concerning the charges and
considerable sympathy for the accused. He argued that the confessing witch was mentally
unstable. He highlighted suggestions that the boy and his father had run a protection
racket, naming people as present at the great coven unless they would offer substantial
bribes. Upon receipt of this report, the Council ordered that four convicted witches,
their youthful accuser, and his father, should be brought to London. Father and son were
interrogated, and the boy finally confessed that he had made up the story. His mother
had told him to drive home the family’s cows, but he had gone off to play with other
children and had forgotten to do it. He feared punishment, so he invented the story of
being kidnapped and carried off to the witches’ coven. Prior to this the physical evidence
had been reviewed. The convicted witches were re-examined at Surgeons’ Hall by seven
surgeons, headed by the King’ surgeons, Baker and Clowes, and ten midwives of whom five
signed, rather than marked, the report. Presiding over the team was William Harvey, the
great anatomist, appointed by Charles I himself. They reported that one of the women had
unusual, but explicable, marks on her body; the other three, all found to have at least one
witch-mark by the Lancashire searchers, had ‘nothinge un naturall neyther in theire secrets
or any other partes of theire bodyes, nor any thing like a teat or mark, nor any sign that any
such thing had ever been’.64
Despite the devastating finding of Harvey’s team, the body-search continued, and
became the default practice for magistrates dealing with an accusation of witchcraft. There
were few trials in the remainder of Charles’s reign, but, with the breakdown of government
in the Civil War, England experienced its major witch-hunt in Matthew Hopkins’s tour
through East Anglia. Obliged to abandon the water-test by the criticisms of, as he piously
put it,65 ‘able divines whom I reverence’, Hopkins placed absolute reliance on the skills
of his body searchers. His entourage on his travels included three Essex women, who in
each locality were reinforced by a local group of ‘ancient, skilfull matrons and midwives’.
These embodied an infallible expertise upon which he and his side-kick, John Stearne,
insisted.66 But these confident assertions were made in the face of serious challenges., first
in 1646 by John Gaule, a Puritan minister roused to action by Hopkins’s proffer of his
services to Gaule’s own parishioners.67 More pointed questions were asked formally at
the very public forum of the 1647 spring Norfolk assizes; did the devils need sustenance?
How could Hopkins distinguish diabolic teats from natural marks?68 Stearne’s subsequent
defensive survey suggests that he and Hopkins had to withstand a ground-bass of objection
on the issue of teats, and further argued that searching had been given a bad reputation
by the practice of mercenary hirelings who lacked the proper experiential knowledge that
legitimised the practice of the Hopkins team.69
In their search for irrefutable evidence to nail down an accusation of witchcraft
Bernard had asserted and Dalton had concretised the viability of the search for the
teats sucked – ‘so strange an action’, indeed – by animal familiars. But the attempts to
institutionalise these suggestions in 1634 and a decade later produced only confusion.
Confusion and incoherence mark many of the later cases. In 1650 an Essex JP appointed

Why did the prosecution of witches cease in England? – The Historical Association 19
eight women to search the body of Dorothy Naylor, long suspected for witchcraft; their
ambiguous and contradictory findings hardly reinforced confidence in the probative value
of the exercise. Three of the searchers deposed that they saw a suspicious mark ‘somewhat
like a teate in her private parts’; two women, one the village midwife, deposed that they
had seen marks unlike others they had ever seen – though the midwife further qualified
her testimony, adding she ‘knoweth not what to make of it’; two women thought the marks
natural and saw no reason for suspicion; one woman claimed she had never been in a
position to see what the others were arguing about.70 An initial search of the body of the
accused witch Joan Peterson in March 1652 came up with nothing. A week later she was
re-arrested and searched again by four women hand-picked by the prosecutors of the case;
this was done in ‘a most unnatural and Barbarous manner’ and ‘a teate of fleshe in her
secret parts more then other women usually had’ was allegedly found. She was committed,
tried and condemned. Doctors who examined her the day before her execution declared
that the teat was ‘natural and lesse than in many other women’.71 In New England, where
the records are fuller, there is yet richer evidence of the problems created by the automatic
employment of the body search. In 1653 in macabre scenes beneath the gallows at Fairfield,
a group of women handled the corpse of an executed witch, pulled at the alleged teats,
and argued fiercely over their status: one of them unwisely insisted ‘if these be teats, these
are no more teats than I myself have, or any other woman’.72 In the great Salem witch-
hunt 40 years later, even though familiars and thus teats were almost wholly irrelevant to
the charges, searches were undertaken and produced only disputes and uncertainty. The
initial finding of the jury of women, that Rebecca Nurse had a ‘preternaturall Excresence
of flesh between the pudendum and the anus’, was considerably modified upon a second
examination; further, the ‘Moaste Antient skillfull prudent person’ among the searchers
suggested that the marks might ‘Arise from a Naturall cause’.73

I think that in the shambles of attempts to find a categorical proof of a witch’s guilt, we
have the key to our question: Why did the prosecution of witches die out?

Why did the prosecution of witches cease in England? – The Historical Association 20
 Conclusion
In his great study Religion and the Decline of Magic, which inaugurated the modern
study of witchcraft, Keith Thomas wrote that the decline of witchcraft belief was ‘the
most baffling aspect of this difficult subject’.74 As Thomas knew, witchcraft belief and
informal accusation continued into the nineteenth century. Popular belief in the reality of
witchcraft and the very real powers of its practitioners remained vigorous and lay behind
the post-1736 attacks – to the scratching, assaults, ‘swimmings’ and occasional murders
that pepper the records. The change of attitude occurs among the elite, among the men
who passed the legislation, who tried the cases brought under it as judges and jurors, who
encouraged or restrained prosecution at the level of the parish as landowners, ministers
and constables. The shift of attitude among this group did not have to be either numerically
large or involve a huge intellectual leap. From the first, as we have seen, there were practical
sceptics who were critical of the dominant discourse. By the late seventeenth century their
numbers and their influence had risen, and lay behind the sharply falling numbers of
prosecutions and of executions long before the repeal statute of 1736.
In his analysis of the transformation, Thomas considered a number of intellectual
shifts, some involving new understandings of the natural world, some in theology.
Defenders of orthodoxy, like Glanvill, denounced the subversive mockery of the ‘Deriders’,
seen as the ‘looser Gentry and small pretenders to Philosophy and Wit’, which they
attributed to their misunderstood and second-hand acquaintance with the philosophies
of Hobbes and Descartes, and with the new scientific method.75 This seems little more
than a rhetorical construct; a straw man impossible to pin down: but the development of
medical opinion was important. The work of Dr Jordan on Hysteria, that so antagonised
Chief Justice Anderson, was followed up by post-Restoration doctors like Thomas
Willis and Thomas Sydenham, who both argued that there were physiological, natural
explanations for some of the behaviours that had been usually attributed to possession.
Willis’s Physiology of the Brain was cited by Zachary Taylor in his attack on the alleged
dispossession of Richard Dugdale in 1690. The ‘Judicious’ Sydenham’s work on ‘the
Hysterical Illness’ was very effectively employed in an anonymous demolition of the case
against Jane Wenham.76 Perhaps more influential is a theological shift: the move away from
the dominant Calvinist orthodoxy of the pre-Civil War period with its ‘hidden God’ who,
with his ‘hangman’ Satan, interfered capriciously in human affairs. Arthur Wilson, steward
of the Puritan Earl of Warwick, was horrified by the Chelmsford trials and executions
orchestrated by Hopkins. He went beyond criticising the incongruities of the particular
case – the accused were a pack of poor, old, melancholic women – to a more fundamental
point: for him ‘it did not consist with the infinite goodness of the Almightie God to let
Satan loose in so ravenous way’. The local physician who wrote against the conviction of
Jane Wenham in 1712 asked a similar question: was God’s allowance of Satan’s horrible
activities in witch-cases compatible with his ‘Divine Love to Mankind’?77 Such views did
not challenge the possibility of witchcraft in abstract, but it did raise questions concerning
its English manifestation.
This raises another of Thomas’s suggestions: ‘the decline in formal prosecution was a
consequence of their [the ‘educated classes’] increasing scepticism about the possibility of

Why did the prosecution of witches cease in England? – The Historical Association 21
the offence, or at least about the possibility of proving it.’ The possibility of proving it brings
us to what I think is the crux of the issue. As we have seen, witchcraft accusation entailed
the interweaving of two distinct frameworks – elite demonology and folklore. The result
was an unstable amalgam which raised ever more questions, even as its proponents sought
to solve them. Why were witches poor, old women? What was the status of the witch’s
animal accomplices? Why did they need food, and in particular why did they require the
blood-gift? Did their sucking produce obvious and incontrovertible marks that could then
be a litmus of guilt? Thomas argues that the hypothesis of witchcraft ‘cracked under its
own weight’: I would add that the weight was increased with every attempt to fit the local
manifestations into the demonological framework. The problem of credible proof became
insurmountable.
This was not an ineluctable process. The cautious and agnostic concerns of the Caroline
court elite, expressed, as in the 1634 Pendle incident, by bishops, by judges, by doctors, had
little social depth. They were swept aside by the rip-tide of popular opinion so effectively
orchestrated by Hopkins. The opportunities to prosecute, unavailable under Charles,
were seized enthusiastically by the villagers, and juries readily confirmed their suspicions.
But after the Restoration doubts were resurrected on the judicial bench and among the
magistrates, and seem to have penetrated deeper into the social fabric towards the turn of
the century. Some magistrates remained ready to give a favourable hearing to accusers;78
juries could still assert their independence in the face of, and perhaps because of, the role
played by a deeply unsympathetic judge.79 But the drastic fall in the number of cases which
came to trial and the predominance of not-guilty verdicts indicate a shift in elite views.
This shift, I would argue, turned fundamentally on the problem of proving the truth of an
accusation.
In 1711 and 1712 Addison and Steele published a magazine, the Spectator, designed
to educate its readership in good taste, in sophisticated wit, in polite manners, in urbane
values. In the summer of 1711 Addison wrote of his fictional protagonist, Mr Spectator,
paying a visit to rural Worcestershire. There he met a poor old beggar woman, Moll White,
with the reputation of a witch. He was nauseated by the cruelty and credulity of the rustics,
‘who would be tossing her into a Pond, and trying experiments with her every day’. From
this fate she was protected by the paternalist landowner and magistrate, Sir Roger de
Coverley, though he shared some of the concerns of the yokels. On several occasions he
had considered committing Moll White, but his chaplain had ‘with much ado’ persuaded
him against so doing. Mr Spectator also sets out his own, typically diffident and moderate,
position on witchcraft: ‘I believe in general that there is and has been such a thing as
Witch-craft; but at the same time can give no Credit to any Particular Instance of it.’80 The
position that Addison described and sought to promote among his readers increasingly
appears to be the dominant framework in the early eighteenth century. It smoothly avoids
any expression of the freethinking radical scepticism which triggered denunciations of
atheism by the orthodox. It emphasised the difficulty of giving credence to any particular
accusation, to the problem of proof. The bombastic certainties expressed by Chief Justice
Anderson in 1602 were no longer current.

Why did the prosecution of witches cease in England? – The Historical Association 22
 References
1 C. L’Estrange Ewen, Witchcraft and Demonianism (1933), p. 127.
2 The six circuits were the Norfolk, Midland, Western, Northern, Oxford and Home:
Anderson had travelled on the first three in the course of his 24 years of service. The
Home circuit, which will figure much in this discussion because the very full survival
of its records, comprised Kent, Sussex, Surrey, Hertfordshire, and Essex.
3 Ewen, Witchcraft and Demonianism, pp. 281 (Suffolk); 262 (Essex); C. L’Estrange Ewen,
Witch Hunting and Witch Trials (1929), Appendix 1 [between pp, 230-31] (Essex).
4 Mark Knights, The Devil in Disguise: Deception, Delusion and Fanaticism in the Early
English Enlightenment (Oxford, 2011), pp. 220-28.
5 Jonathan Barry, Witchcraft and Demonology in South-West England (Basingstoke, 2012)
ch. 2, provides the fullest account of this incident.
6 Ewen, Witchcraft and Demonianism, pp. 355-57; The Gentleman’s Magazine, 1832, part
1, pp. 490-91.
7 Archdeacon Blackburne to the Bishop of Exeter, 14 Sept. 1696, quoted in Barry,
Witchcraft and Demonology, p. 123. Sir John Holt, the judge at Exeter, was Chief Justice
of the King’s Bench; Anderson had served as the Chief Justice of Common Pleas.
8 Owen Davies, Witchcraft, Magic and Culture, 1736-1951 (Manchester, 1999), pp. 45, 49-
50, 111-12. Some details from Isaac Nicholson, A sermon against witchcraft (1808), pp.
i-ix, 36.
9 The Public Advertiser, January 1761, quoted in W.C. Sydney, England and the English in
the Eighteenth Century, vol. 1 (New York, 1891), p. 286; The Midwife, vol. 2, no.2 (1751),
p. 68; The Norwich Gazette, Sept. 1752, quoted in J. L’Estrange (ed.), Eastern Counties
Collectanea (Norwich, 1875), p. 208.
10 In general, see Davies’s study, Witchcraft, Magic, and Culture, chs. 1 and 2.
11 James Sharpe, Instruments of Darkness: witchcraft in England 1550-1750 (1996) pp.
1-4, provides a good account of the incident. Further details from The Gentleman’s
Magazine, vol. 21 (1751), p. 378.
12 Exorcism is a ritual sanctioned by the Catholic Church in which the priest, employing
sacred objects and formal incantation, commanded the devil to abandon his hold on
the victim.
13 Jesse Bee (ed. John Denison), The most wonderfull and true storie of a witch named Alse
Goodridge (1597), p. 26.
14 This narrative is derived from Michael Macdonald’s ‘Introduction’ to his Witchcraft and
Hysteria in Elizabethan London (1991), pp. ix-xv.
15 Lewes Hewes, Certaine Grievances or the errours of the Service-Booke Plainely Laid
Open (1641), pp. 14-15; John Swan, A True and Briefe Report of Mary Glover’s Vexation
(1603), pp. 5, 61: Swan’s tract is reprinted with the original pagination in Macdonald’s
Witchcraft and Hysteria.
16 Stephen Bradwell, ‘Mary Glovers Late Woeful Case’ (this manuscript account is
transcribed, and separately paginated, in Macdonald, Witchcraft and Hysteria), p. 27.
17 The quotation from Harsnett’s Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures is taken
from F.W. Brownlow’s transcription, Shakespeare, Harsnett and the Devils of Denham
(Newark, 1993), pp. 191-415, quoting p. 331.
18 Ibid., pp. 304,
Why did306,
the308.
prosecution of witches cease in England? – The Historical Association 23
19 In his footnotes to pp. 304-11 of the Declaration, Professor Brownlow lists the specific
borrowings from Scot.
20 The major works are: Sir Robert Filmer, An Advertisement to the Jury-men of England,
Touching Witches (1653); Thomas Ady, A candle in the dark: or a treatise concerning
the nature of witches and witchcraft (1656); John Wagstaffe, The Question of Witchcraft
Debated (1669; extended edn 1671); John Webster, The Displaying of Supposed
Witchcraft (1677); Francis Hutchinson, An historicall essay concerning witchcraft (1718;
extended edn 1720)
21 Reginald Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), second dedicatory epistle.
22 Marion Gibson, Possession, Puritanism and Print (2006), p. 27; Bee, Wonderfull and
true storie, pp. 15-16.
23 Report on the Manuscripts of the Family of Gawdy (Historical Manuscripts Commission:
1885), p. 71; Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (1973), p. 693.
24 Henry Holland, A treatise against witchcraft (Cambridge, 1590), sigs A3-B1v, E2.
25 Gifford attacked Scot in his A Discourse of the subtill Practices of Devills by Witches
and Sorcerers (1587), title page, sig. A2. He is silent on Scot in his later A dialogue
concerning witches and witchecrafts (1593), in which he targets popular errors.
26 Richard Bernard, A Guide to Grand Jurymen (1627), pp. 6; 134, 177, 188, 189; 146.
27 Lambert Daneau, A dialogue of witches (1575), sig. [C verso].
28 William Perkins, A discourse of the damned art of witchcraft (Cambridge, 1608), p. 12.
29 The Sadducees were a group among the Jews at the time of Christ. Among their beliefs
they denied the immortality of the soul or of the existence of spirits – hence the
application of the term to those sceptics who challenged the power of witches.
30 James VI of Scotland, Daemonologie (Edinburgh, 1597), reprinted in Lawrence
Normand and Gareth Roberts (eds), Witchcraft in Early Modern Scotland (Exeter,
2000), pp. 353-425, at p. 353.
31 Thomas Cooper, The Mystery of Witchcraft (1617), pp. 17-18.
32 For the first characterisations, see John Gaule, Select cases of conscience touching
Witches and Witchcrafts (1646), p. 1. The second is used by Richard Bovet, see [Richard
Bovet], A narrative of the Demon of Spraiton (1683), sig. A2.
33 Gaule, Select Cases , pp. 1-2.
34 Joseph Glanvill, Saducismus Triumphatus (3rd edition, 1700), the second part, p. 2.
35 Pneumatology is the branch of theology concerned with role of spirits as intermediaries
between God and humans. Eschatology is concerned with the elucidation of God’s plan
for the ultimate destiny of humans and the world.
36 Gaule, Select Cases, pp. 7-8.
37 Cotton Mather, The Wonders of the Invisible World (1693), in G.L. Burr (ed.), Narratives
of the Witchcraft Cases, 1648-1706 (New York, 1914), p. 239.
38 Gifford, Dialogue, sig. K.
39 For this see Clive Holmes, ‘Women: Witnesses and witches’ in Past and Present, no. 140
(1993), pp. 49-50.
40 Scot, Discoverie, p. 13.
41 Wagstaffe, Question, p. 78.
42 Bernard, Guide, p. 91
43 Perkins, Discourse, p. 168.

Why did the prosecution of witches cease in England? – The Historical Association 24
44 James VI, Daemonologie, p. 392.
45 Sensine: old Scots – ‘from that time onwards’.
46 Thomas Park (ed.), Nugae Antiquae (2 vols, 1804), 1, pp. 368-69.
47 The tracts from which this information is taken are conveniently reproduced in Marion
Gibson (ed.), Early Modern Witches: Witchcraft Cases in Contemporary Writing (2000),
pp. 17, 18, 19 (1566); pp. 83-84, 85 (1579); 131-32 (1589).
48 Joseph Glanvill, Some philosophicall considerations touching the being of witches and
witchcraft (1667), p. 19.
49 Hutchinson, Historical Essay (1720 edn), p. 77.
50 Gifford, Dialogue, sig. C2, [C2v]; Thomas Cooper, The Mystery of Witchcraft (1617), p.
80.
51 Bernard, Guide, pp. 107-108.
52 Glanvill, Philosophicall considerations, p. 17; Webster, Displaying, p. 81.
53 Matthew Hopkins, The Discovery of Witches (1647), p. 3.
54 A theme which is the focus of a recent book bu Orna Alyagon Darr, Marks of an
Absolute Witch (Farnham, 2011): see also the more focused essay by Malcolm Gaskill,
‘Witchcraft and Evidence in Early Modern England’ in Past and Present no. 198 (2008),
pp. 33-70.
55 Bernard, Guide, p. 213.
56 Gifford, Dialogue, sigs [L3v], L4.
57 Davies, Witchcraft, Magic and Culture, pp. 86-100 is excellent on witch-swimming.
58 Darr, Marks of an Absolute Witch , p. 113 – though the case of Jane Wenham (1712) is
not the last reported official search: that is the 1717 Leicestershire Assizes case: Ewen,
Witch Hunting, p. 316.
59 Darr, Marks of an Absolute Witch, pp. 120-21; Christina Larner, Enemies of God: the
witch-hunt in Scotland (Oxford, 1983), pp. 110-112
60 Holmes, ‘Women: witnesses and witches’, pp. 70-71: the magistrates who (twice: 1675
and 1679) intoned Dalton’s authority were those of Lower Norfolk county, Virginia;
Burr, Narratives, p. 436.
61 Ady, Candle, p. 129. And see Darr, Marks of an Absolute Witch, pp. 126-27.
62 Thomas Shadwell, The Lancashire Witches and Tegue o Divelly (1691), p. 9.
63 The documents for this case are surveyed by Ewen, Witchcraft, pp. 244-51.
64 Holmes, ‘Women: witnesses and witches’, p. 66
65 Hopkins, Discovery, p. 7.
66 Ibid., Discovery, p. 3.
67 For Gaule, see Malcolm Gaskill, Witchfinders: a Seventeenth Century English Tragedy
(2005), pp. 219-28; also Darr, Marks of an Absolute Witch, p. 134.
68 Gaskill, Witchfinders, p. 238.
69 Malcolm Gaskill analyses the Ely court records and emphasises local debate and
confusion surrounding the searches – ‘Witchcraft and Evidence in Early Modern
England’, p. 58. See also John Stearne, A Confirmation and Discovery of Witchcraft
(1648), pp. 42-50.
70 Holmes, ‘Women: witnesses and witches’, pp. 74-75.
71 A declaration in answer to several lying pamphlets (1652), pp. 3-6.
72 David D. Hall (ed.), Witch-Hunting in Seventeenth Century New England (Boston,

Why did the prosecution of witches cease in England? – The Historical Association 25
 Mass., 1991), pp. 79-81.
73 Bernard Rosenthal (ed.), Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt (Cambridge, 2009),
documents 271, 294, 340.
74 Thomas, Witchcraft and the Decline of Magic, p. 681.
75 Ian Bostridge, Witchcraft and its Transformations c. 1650-c.1750 (Oxford, 1997), pp. 73-
77.
76 Zachary Taylor, The Surey Imposter (1697), p. 28; The Case of the Hertfordshire
Witchcraft Consider’d (1712), pp. 43-44.
77 Gaskill, Witchfinders, pp. 119-31 is excellent on Wilson: but he fails to see the
significance of the passage I have cited – taken from Wallace Notestein, A History of
Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 (Baltimore, 1911), p. 173; A full confutation of
witchcraft, more particularly of the depositions against Jane Wenham (1712), p. 15
78 The support that Sir Thomas Lane gave to the alleged demoniac, Richard Hathaway,
was severely criticised by Lord Chief Justice Holt in 1702: Knights, Devil in Disguise
(Oxford, 2011), pp, 218-219.
79 Knights, Devil in Disguise, pp. 227-28.
80 The Spectator, no. 117 (July 14 1711): see the keen analysis of this incident in Bostridge,
Witchcraft and its Transformations, pp. 128-32.

Why did the prosecution of witches cease in England? – The Historical Association 26
 Timeline
1563: Legislation ‘against Conjurations, Inchantments and Wichcrafts’ is approved by
Parliament.
1584: Reginald Scot publishes the sceptical The Discoverie of Witchcraft.
1593: George Gifford publishes A dialogue concerning witches and witchecrafts
1596-97: dispossessions in Lancashire and the Midlands, orchestrated by John Darrell;
followed by an investigation of his activities by the church authorities.
1597: James VI of Scotland publishes Daemonologie in Edinburgh; a number of
editions are published in London in 1603-04.
1602: the case of Mary Glover, alleged to have been possessed by the devil at the
instigation of a witch, Elizabeth Jackson.
1603: publication of two important works questioning diabolic possession: Edward
Jorden, A Briefe Discourse of a Disease called the Suffocation of the Mother, and
Samuel Harsnett, A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures.
1604: New legislation, re-defining the crime and enhancing the penalties, is passed by
Parliament.
1627: Richard Bernard publishes A Guide to Grand Jurymen.
1630: 4th edition of Michael Dalton’s The Countrey Justice, in which he employed
Bernard’s findings to advise magistrates to use body search for the discovery of a
witch’s marks.
1634: the Privy Council of Charles I intervenes in the second Pendle witchcraft trial,
and a group of experts – surgeons and midwives – challenge the reliability of the
witch’s marks as a probative technique.
1645-47: Matthew Hopkins pursues his career as self-styled ‘Witchfinder General’ in the
eastern counties.
1646: John Gaule publishes Select cases of conscience touching Witches and Witchcrafts:
an attack on Hopkins’s activities, while seeking to affirm the reality of witchcraft.
1669: John Wagstaffe publishes The Question of Witchcraft Debated: an extended
edition was published in 1671.
1681: posthumous publication of Joseph Glanvill’s Saducismus Triumphatus, edited by
his friend and fellow demonologist, Henry More. By 1726 four editions of this
work, each with some new material, had been published.
1682: Conviction and execution of Temperance Lloyd, Susannah Edwards and
Mary Trembles at the Devon Assizes (the last English execution - that Alice
Molland who was convicted at the Devon Assizes in 1684 was executed is not

Why did the prosecution of witches cease in England? – The Historical Association 27
 categorically certain).
1692-93: trials and executions in Massachusetts; the ‘hunt’ began in Salem village, and
then spread to other communities in the colony.
1711-12: the trial, conviction and reprieve of Jane Wenham (last English conviction).
1718: Francis Hutchinson publishes An historicall essay concerning witchcraft: an
extended edition appeared in 1720 .
1736: Parliament passes a Statute repealing the legislation of 1604.
1751: the trial and execution of Thomas Colley for murdering an old woman alleged
to be a witch in a ‘swimming’ test.

Why did the prosecution of witches cease in England? – The Historical Association 28
 Bibliography
Works cited directly in this study are marked **

The modern study of witchcraft in England owes its inception to Sir Keith Thomas’s
seminal Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971)**[I have cited the more accessible
Penguin Books edition of 1973]. This was a work with a broader remit, examining
a series of ‘irrational’ beliefs – astrology; ghosts and fairies – besides witchcraft.
Thomas’s perspective was much influenced by British anthropology, and he sought to
demonstrate the deployment of these ideas as mechanisms to enable believers to cope
with the world.

Thomas’s work was hugely influential, though his instrumental reading of witchcraft
has been challenged. But most subsequent work on the subject – much of it by his
students – has acknowledged a substantial debt to the agenda he established.

Recent books have taken a number of directions – examining regional experience,

specific cases and key topics.

Regions:

Jonathan Barry, Witchcraft and Demonology in South-West England (Basingstoke, 2012)

a work which examines witch-related phenomena in the region both before and after
the repeal of the 1604 Act.

Alan Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England (1970) – a microstudy of

witchcraft in Essex.

Case studies:

Philip Almond, The Witches of Warboys (2008) – possession and witchcraft in

Cambridgeshire, 1589-93.

Marion Gibson, Possession, Puritanism and Print (2006)** – the activities of John
Darrell, a Puritan expert in dispossession, 1586-98.

Michael Macdonald, Witchcraft and Hysteria in Elizabethan London (1991)**– the case
of Mary Glover, 1602.

James Sharpe, The Bewitching of Anne Gunter (1999) – a possession case from
Berkshire, 1605-06.

Malcolm Gaskill, Witchfinders: a Seventeenth Century English Tragedy (2005)** – the

activities of the ‘Witchfinder General’, Matthew Hopkins 1645-48.

Why did the prosecution of witches cease in England? – The Historical Association 29
Gilbert Geis and Ivan Bunn, A trial of witches (1997) – possession and witchcraft in
Lowestoft, tried in 1662 before Sir Matthew Hale.

Mark Knights, The Devil in Disguise: Deception, Delusion and Fanaticism in the Early
English Enlightenment (Oxford, 2011)** – the case of Jane Wenham, 1711-1712.

There have also been a number of studies of particular aspects of witch belief and
prosecution:

• On the law of evidence concerning witchcraft, see Orna Alyagon Darr, Marks of an
Absolute Witch (Farnham, 2011).**

• On the very high proportion of women accused in England, a subject rather

neglected by Thomas, see two works which acknowledge a considerable debt to
feminist theory, Deborah Willis, Malevolent Nurture (1995) and Diane Purkiss, The
Witch in History (1996).

• On the later history of witch belief and accusation, see Ian Bostridge, Witchcraft and
its Transformations c.1650-c.1750 (Oxford, 1997).**

Owen Davies, Witchcraft, Magic and Culture, 1736-1951 (Manchester, 1999).**

The best overview of the subject, besides the section in Thomas dedicated to the
witchcraft theme, is James Sharpe, Instruments of Darkness: witchcraft in England 1550-
1750 (1996).**

For an easily accessible modern edition of a number of the contemporary tracts, several
of which are used here, see Marion Gibson (ed.), Early Modern Witches: witchcraft cases
in contemporary writing (2000).**

For a very full discussion of recent historiography and bibliography on the topic of
Witchcraft, see Jonathan Barry and Owen Davies (eds), Palgrave Advances in Witchcraft
Historiography (Basingstoke, 2007).

Why did the prosecution of witches cease in England? – The Historical Association 30