George Burnham Ives

“ A belief so universal as that in witchcraft must clearly be founded upon positive phenomena. It will not serve our purpose to discuss what yet unknown supernormal powers might be attained under special conditions, or how much more there may be to discover beyond X-rays and wireless telegraphy. For while old ideas as to imps and devils, brooms and black cats, were manifestly ridiculous, and although the abnormal powers, whatever they may have been, could work no rescue in the hour of need, there may be many things in heaven and earth undreamed of in our present state of knowledge. ”

“ It has been said that imprisonment is not mentioned in Anglo-Saxon laws as a punishment; it is, however, referred to in the laws of Æthelstan thus: “For murder let a man forfeit his life, if he will deny it and appear guilty at the threefold ordeal let him be 120 nights in prison; afterwards let his relations take him out and pay the king 120 shillings and to his relatives the price of his blood....” ”

“ Woe to the man, and still more to the woman, who lived alone, who kept a black cat, or who was found to carry birthmarks on her body, or to be the least out of the normal in physical structure! Woe to the person who was eccentric, subject to fits or trances, or who might be in any way deranged or of weak intellect! ”

“ But we know that, to our present power of comprehension, the mind can only function through the body. How it first formed, and if it can yet rekindle, are vital questions which may never be answered; at any rate they lie beyond our range. ”

“ In the thirteenth century the king’s justices wield a wide ‘common law’ power of ordering that an offender be kept in custody. They have an equally wide power of discharging him upon his making a fine with the king.”
In Henry III.’s reign “The wrongdoer but rarely goes to prison, even for a moment. [119] On the plea roll the custodiatur which sends him to gaol is followed at once by ‘Finem fecit per unam markam’ (or whatever the sum might be) , and then come the names of those who are pledges for the payment. The justices do not wish to keep him in prison; they wish to make him pay money.” ”

“ But although just a century had gone by since Innocent launched his Bull from the Papal throne, many poor people, some at that time unborn, were destined still to suffer trial and torture. And more than another century had to pass before the law would leave “witches” alone; before afflicted, half-mad, or unpopular old women could throw crumbs to the sparrows upon the snow, or keep a cat, without danger of death. King James, as a young man, fell foul of both Scot and Wier in 1597. ”

“ These severe rules, which, coming from the archbishop, [449] were, of course, repeated by all the prelates, resembled the penal systems of discipline which reached their maximum of cruelty in the nineteenth century.
But there seems good reason to believe that the Church’s treatment of its prisoners remained, on the whole, mild and humane. The clergy were not hardened prison officials; their calling was spiritual rather than military. They were dealing with men belonging more or less to their own order, and were prone to class loyalty. ”

“ TREATMENT OF THE INSANE As the abnormal and the rationally eccentric were considered witches, and held to have been disciples of the devil, so the more obviously sense-bereft were thought to be controlled by the fiends within them. Both witches and lunatics were held to be beneath the sway of infernal powers, but the former as willing agents of the devil, and the latter as involuntary victims, who were deemed to be possessed. ”

“ Hopkins reveals the spirit of his time, for it has been wisely observed that every society has the criminals it deserves. His kind remain with us still as spies and blackmailers, traitors and “friendly natives” of the tribe of Judas generally. But they derive their power to harm from the community in which they live. Parasites need a proper “host” to flourish in. A dark and superstitious age it must have been to countenance this man; for he was a professional “discoverer,” or, as he was sometimes called and styled, Witch-Finder General. ”

“ And it is precisely upon this knowledge that the government and discipline of such establishments are based. Hence no theories of criminal irresponsibility should be permitted to relax the security and strictness of the detention of dangerous offenders, whether sane, or partially insane, or wholly mad. And it is important to observe that the treatment and condition even of mad murderers should not be made attractive to others outside.” But the hard scientific facts persisted. Injustice and cruelty, practised upon the weak and helpless, do not, alas! ”

“ At first the work awakened only controversy and condemnation—a stage in advance, however, since the most wronged are generally undefended, and pass to their doom in silence and with no one to speak for them. ”

“ With faces protruding through the strong beams, and with hands through two holes, secured and helpless, they were made to stand defenceless before the crowd as targets for any missiles that might be thrown. ”

“ But prisons as places for the reception of “ordinary” (as distinct from state or political) criminals for definite terms only evolved in England many centuries afterwards [2] ; whilst imprisonment as a punishment in itself, [3] to be endured under rules made expressly punitive and distressful, may be described as essentially modern, and reached its worst phase in the nineteenth century. ”

“ We may take comfort in the course of evolution; in that the violently mad (employing the word in a wide and general sense) are no longer exorcised and tormented; in that the eccentrically mad are no longer burned and tortured for what was imagined against them; in that the weak-minded and the partially deranged are being considered, with a view to their segregation in special places apart from healthy offenders; in that innate and absolute abnormality of emotions has been established by the specialists upon overwhelming evidence ”

“ They were correct in affirming many amazing facts and phenomena (and all these persist, for nature has not changed. [611] There are at least as many abnormal and half-mad people amongst us now as there ever were, only we treat the clearer cases kindly, and are no longer afraid of mythical influences) , although these were magnified and multiplied million-fold, for Superstition is a monster that grows by feeding. They were fantastic in their fabulous explanations of them. The rest—in those cruel times when torture was as common as is cross-examination—followed quite naturally. ”

“ By the statute Pro Clero of 1350, [331] “all manner of clerks, as well secular as religious, which shall be from henceforth convicted before the secular justices aforesaid for any treasons or felonies touching other persons than the King himself or his royal majesty, shall from henceforth freely have and enjoy the privilege of Holy Church, and shall be, without any impeachment or delay, delivered to the ordinaries demanding them.” This came to mean immunity for all who could read. ”

“ We cannot determine what had marked them down—perhaps they were his private enemies—moral reform has always been a ready pretext to work vengeance with, and has been much employed in these latter days. They may have been old, eccentric, isolated, or insane; in any case, once seized they had to die, and in their torments implicated others, most likely any names conveniently suggested to them. The fame of the new discoverer spread far and wide. ”

“ In 1779 [482] persons liable to be burned in the hand might escape with a fine, or they might be whipped in public or private, not more than three times; women were to be flogged in the presence of females. By this Act the branding was abolished in practice; and about half a century later all that remained of the old privilege was done away with in the reign of George IV. [483]
It has been customary to condemn all these old rights for so many years accorded to clerkship, because they are supposed to have constituted infringements of the principle that all men should be equal before the law. ”

“ The Church allowed class distinctions in several ways; [361] offences might be punished according to the rank of the aggrieved party, so that the penance for the murder of a bishop was for twelve or fourteen years, or longer, upon bread and water, while the slaying of a deacon could be atoned for by seven or ten years’, and of a layman by four, five, or seven years’ discipline.
On the other hand, people, and especially the clergy, were liable to be sentenced more severely in proportion to their rank. ”

“ The law lagged behind, however, as it generally does, the statute of James I. (1603) being, when Hutchinson wrote, “now in force” in 1718.
And so it continued for eighteen years longer, until repealed in 1736. [553] In Ireland the law lasted until 1821. Witchcraft was clearly kept alive by theology. People who really believed in a personal devil (and even those who questioned the witch convictions assumed the devil to be very much alive) , designing mischief and disguised everywhere, could easily accept tales of familiar spirits. ”

“ Members who could not become ministers, and who yet wanted to do something, often had interest enough to hang somebody, or at least to get a law passed creating a new capital felony. [161]
Thus through the ambitions of private members and the general callousness of the ruling class, the number of capital offences kept ever growing, until, in theory, there were more than two hundred of them. ”

“ In 1496 lay persons who should murder their lord, master, or sovereign immediate were deprived of their clergy; and in the fourth year of the following reign more exceptions were made, and clergy was taken from all, not actually within orders, who committed a felony in a church, or upon the king’s highway, or who slew anybody in his own house. ”

“ But criminal anthropology as a science is in an embryo stage....” With regard to the abnormal we are only on the threshold of justice; a multitude of causes, theological and instinctive, prevent the facts from being faced and known. ”

“ It may be true that some criminals are irreclaimable, just as some diseases are incurable, and in such cases it is not unreasonable to acquiesce in the theory that criminality is a disease and the result of physical imperfection. ”

“ The excellent plan was proposed that the profits of the prisoners’ labour should be placed to their relief. But to find useful labour within prison walls has always been a most difficult problem, and the world outside was always far too busy to see to it. ”

“ And no doubt nearly all would make a long and desperate struggle against incriminating their unfortunate friends, who might, however innocent of crime, be also other people’s enemies. And so the accursed ingenuity of man was practised on these miserable victims of his ignorance and superstition. ”

“ For such offences as carrying off a nun, allowing a prisoner to evade prison, or stealing tame beasts out of parks, a sentence of three years might be awarded besides the customary fine. As we have seen, the profits of “justice” were highly regarded; the fines were precious perquisites of the Crown (and sometimes of subordinate administrators and officials as well) . The prisons were used as “squeezers” to extort them. “Imprisonment,” say Pollock and Maitland, [118] “was, as a general rule, but preparatory to a fine. After a year or two the wrongdoer might make fine ”

“ The benches of our courts are all blackened by them; there are not sufficient magistrates to hear the cases. Our prisons are gorged with witches, and not a day passes but our warrants are ensanguined with them, and we return saddened to our homes, shocked at the ghastly and appalling things that they confess.” And in our own land, about fifty years later, we come upon a letter written to Sir Edmund Spencer in 1647: “Within the compass of two years near upon 300 witches were arraigned, and the greater part executed, in Essex and Suffolk only. ”

“ It is painful to add that this long-continued punishment had the recorded approbation of all the authorities of the hospital. Nothing can more forcibly illustrate the hardening effect of being habitual witnesses of cruelty, and the process which the heart of man undergoes when allowed to exercise irresponsible power.”
The medical men were poorly paid and proportionately neglectful. At the time of which we are speaking—the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century—the physician at Bedlam got only £100 a year. ”