Witch trial

“ We have spoken of the discouragement given to prosecutions for witchcraft by the example of Chief Justice Holt. His successor, Parker, put a check on the trial by water by his declaration at the Essex Summer Assizes, in 1712, that if it occasioned the death of the suspected witch, all the parties concerned would be deemed guilty of wilful murder. In spite of the law, however, there were cases in which it was appealed to for the satisfaction of ignorant and spiteful villagers. ”

“ The woman had thoughtlessly laid herself open by her own words to the most serious suspicion. In spite of this, however, the jury brought her in not guilty, "to the great amazement of some, ... yet others who consider the great difficulty in proving a Witch, thought the jury could do no less than acquit her."
This was, during the period, the one trial in or near London of which we have details. There can be no [278] doubt that the courts in London and the vicinity were beginning to ignore cases of witchcraft. After 1670 there were no more trials of the sort in Middlesex. ”

“ This notion was further enlarged by the establishment of the additional doctrine, that a witch could be present, and act with demoniac power upon her victims, anywhere, at all times, and at any distance, without the instrumental agency of any other animal or being, in her spirit, spectre, or apparition. When the person on trial was accused of having tortured or strangled or pinched or bruised another, it did not break the force of the accusation to bring hundreds of witnesses to prove that he was, at the very time, in another remote place or country ”

“ He was a man of “overweening vanity,” panting for fame, and the strenuous mover in the trials. He harangued the populace and sermonized on witchcraft; he wrote a book: “The Trials of Witches,” and even on horseback, at the hanging of Rev. George Burroughs, he harangued the people gathered there, lest they interfere and rob the gallows.
23By the new charter courts of justice were to be established by the General Court. The witch trials were, therefore, stranded and must remain in statu quo, apparently, for several months, while awaiting the action of the General Court. ”

“ Where one is indicted for being in league with the devil, and exercising acts of witchcraft, it sufficeth to prove that the indictee was in confederacy with that evil spirit, and did such things; but in the trial of one indicted for bewitching any person, two things are to be proved, viz. that such a person is bewitched, and that the indictee is the witch."
[Pg 487] Mr. Forbes says that symptoms of witchcraft are: "When learned and skilful physicians find the patient's trouble doth not proceed from any bodily distemper or natural causes ”

“ There is a mass of unpublished materials in libraries and archives at home and abroad, and of information as to witchcraft and the witch trials, accessible in court records, depositions, and current accounts in public and private collections, all awaiting the coming of some master hand to transform them into an exhaustive history of the most grievous of human superstitions. ”

“ Henri Boguet, a witch-finder, who styled himself “The Grand Judge of Witches for the Territory of St. Claude,” drew up a code for the guidance of all persons engaged in the witch-trials, consisting of seventy articles, quite as cruel as the code of Bodinus. In this document he affirms, that a mere suspicion of witchcraft justifies the immediate arrest and torture of the suspected person. If the prisoner muttered, looked on the ground, and did not shed any tears, all these were proofs positive of guilt! In all cases of witchcraft, the evidence of the child ought to be taken against its parent ”

“ The seventies witnessed a rapid dropping off in both figures. Even more so the eighties. By the close of the eighties the accounts of witchcraft were exceedingly rare. The decisions of the courts in the matter were in a state of fluctuation. Two things were happening. The justices of the peace were growing much more reluctant to send accused witches to the assize courts; and the itinerant judges as a body were, in spite of the decisions of Hale and Raymond, more careful in witch trials than ever before, and more likely to withstand public sentiment. ”

“ The American Witch and
Views of the Educated In America there were witch trials—in Connecticut, New York, and Pennsylvania, [3] —some years before 1692. In Boston, 1648, Margaret Jones, of malignant touch, was hanged, and Mrs. Ann (Wm.) Hebbins, in 1655. In Springfield, 1651, Mrs. Mary (Hugh) Parsons was hanged. In Ipswich quarter court, 1652, a man was sentenced to pay a fine of twenty shillings, or to be whipped for “having familiarity with the Devil.” ”

“ Yet she was nearly a hundred years behind Rome in her zeal, for it was not till June, 1563, that she made the subject matter for legislation at all, and then the Estates [50] enacted “that ‘nae person take upon hand to use any manner of witchcrafts, sorcery, or necromancy, nor give themselves furth to have ony sic craft or knowledge thereof therethrough abusing the people;’ also, that ‘nae person seek ony help, response, or consultation, at ony sic users or abusers of witchcrafts ... under pain of death.’ This is the statute under which all the subsequent witch trials took place.” ”

“ This is one of those cases which might plausibly be quoted in support of the ground on which the witch trials have been defended by Selden, Bayle, and the writers of the Encyclopédie,—namely, the necessity of punishing the pretensions to such powers, or the belief in their existence, with as great rigour as if their exercise had been real. “The law against witches,” says Selden, “does not prove there be any, but it punishes the malice of those people that use such means to take away men’s lives. ”

“ And they would themselves come to believe in their possession of such powers. And hence on trial, under torture, or after sentence, they would make confession of witchcraft, with strange disordered narratives of 163Satanic leagues and unholy revellings. A woman was called a white witch whose specialty was the cure of disease, or the recovery of lost or stolen property ”

“ The mysterious crime of witchcraft was so difficult of proof that judicial ingenuity was taxed to its utmost to secure conviction, and the Devil was always ready to aid his followers and baffle the ends of justice. The Inquisitor Sprenger, writing in 1487, therefore recommends that, when a witch cannot be forced to confess her guilt by either prayers or torture, she shall be asked whether she will undergo the ordeal of red-hot iron ”

“ For they have found that not one person who has been accused of being a witch, and has admitted the fact, has been convicted.
"And yet it would seem that a confession of witchcraft ought to be a better proof of it, than the mere assertion of possible enemies," responded Master Raymond.
"Of course—if there was any show of reason or fairness in the prosecutions, from first to last; but as it is all sheer malice and wickedness, on the part of the accusers, from the beginning to the end, it would be vain to expect any reasonableness or fairness from them." ”

“ It found an apparent confirmation in the text, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” (Exodus xxii., 18) , and the great legal authorities of England, Bacon, Blackstone, Coke, Selden, and Matthew Hale, had given decisions implying the fact of witchcraft and indicating the various degrees of guilt. It was easier to accept this explanation since executions for this crime had already taken place at Charlestown, Dorchester, Cambridge, Hartford and Springfield. Governor Winthrop, Governor Bradstreet and Governor Endicott had each sentenced a witch to death. ”

“ In England, America, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Russia—every country without exception—witches have lived, flourished, and been burned at the stake. Laws were enacted against witches, and they were condemned on the most trivial and even ridiculous evidence imaginable. If an old woman were seen to enter a house by the front door, and a black cat was seen to leave the house by the back door, it was deemed sufficient evidence that the old woman was a witch, without further evidence or investigation—and indeed much of the evidence was not nearly so good and circumstantial as this! ”

“ Conjuration or invocation of any evil spirit was felony without benefit of clergy; so also to consult, covenant with, entertain, feed, or reward any evil spirit, or to take up any dead body for charms or spells; to use or practise witchcrafts, enchantment, charm, or sorcery, so that any one was lamed, killed, or pined, was felony without benefit of clergy, to be followed up by burning. Then ‘The Country Justice’ goes on to give the legal signs of a witch, and those on which a magistrate might safely act, as legal “discoveries.” ”

“ The cause of the phenomena is, of course, as obscure for us as for the worthy magistrate. We can only say that, when precisely similar evidence was brought before judges and juries in England and New England, at a period when medicine, law, and religion all recognised the existence of witchcraft, magic, and diabolical possession, they had scarcely any choice but to condemn the accused. Causa patet, they said: ‘The devil is at the bottom of it all, and the witch is his minister’. ”

“ The prisoner must approach the judge backwards—just as she approaches Satan's throne at the Sabbath, by the way—and he must make the sign of the cross frequently the while. As we have seen, any evidence, even of those debarred from testifying in ordinary cases, might be given against a witch. This, of course, provided an excellent opportunity for the dis [Pg 208] honest servant, who, having stolen his mistress' property and with it levanted, need only accuse her of witchcraft to escape any unpleasant consequences to himself. ”

“ It spread in true epidemic form all over the Continent and into England and Scotland, even to America. Distinguished jurists declared that ordinary methods of trial should not be used for this offence, for so difficult is it to bring proof of the crime of witchcraft, that out of a million of witches not one could be convicted if the usual course of justice were followed. ”

“ Simple people will then believe that they have died from some natural cause,—from sickness or suffocation. Then when buried the witches steal them from the grave. It has happened that judges have opened, after similar confessions, the grave and found the child in it; but in such cases the judge must consider that the devil is a great taskmaster who may have cheated the eyes of the servants of justice, in order to protect his servants, and in such a case the confession of the witch (forced from her by torture) should prove more than the easily deluded vision of the judge. ”

“ The African, be it granted, is tremendously under the dominion of law, and it is the law that such trials should take place before execution; but [Pg 162] there is also involved in it another curious fact, and that is that the spirit of the ordeal is held to be able to manage and suppress the bad spirits trained by the witch to destruction. Human beings alone can collar the witch and destroy him in an exemplary manner, but spiritual aid is required to collar the witch’s devil, or it would get adrift and carry on after its owner’s death. ”

“ Few, very few, persons at that day were above the weakness of a firm belief in witchcraft; even a judge of the Court of Session would not dare openly to question the justice and humanity of the Mosaical law: "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live." ”

“ The cessation of legal procedure against witches was negative rather than positive: the enactments in the statute-books were left unrepealed, and so seemed not to altogether discountenance a still somewhat doubtful prejudice. It was so late as in the ninth year of the reign of George II., 1736, that the Witch Act of 1604 was formally and finally repealed. By a tardy exertion of sense and justice the Legislature then enacted that, for the future, no prosecutions [272] should be instituted on account of witchcraft, sorcery, conjuration, enchantment, &c., against any person or persons. ”

“ At one period the execution of witches exceeded those in England, though the number put to death in the latter country was truly appalling. In 1646 two hundred persons were tried and executed for witchcraft at the Sussex and Essex assizes. The last persons put to death for witchcraft in England were, some say, in 1664, while others assert the last victims suffered in 1682. The latest instance of a witch being executed in Scotland was in 1722, when the supposed offender was burned at Loth, or Dornoch, Sutherlandshire, by order of the sheriff of that county. ”

“ I would very readily have pardoned him for an undoubted belief in witchcraft, and I should have considered that this belief detracted little from his character for discernment and humanity.... There not only was no evidence against them which ought to have weighed in the mind of any reasonable man who believed in witchcraft; but during the trial the imposture practised by the prosecutors was detected and exposed. The enormous violation of justice then perpetrated has become more revolting as the mists of ignorance, which partly covered it, have been dispersed. ”