PRIZE ESSAYS
OF THE
AMERICAN HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION

1909

To this Essay was awarded the
Herbert Baxter Adams Prize
in European History
for 1909

A HISTORY
OF
WITCHCRAFT IN ENGLAND
FROM 1558 TO 1718

BY
WALLACE NOTESTEIN
ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF HISTORY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA

PUBLISHED BY
THE AMERICAN HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION
Washington, 1911

Copyright, 1911
By The American Historical Association
Washington, D.C.

THE LORD BALTIMORE PRESS
BALTIMORE, M.D., U.S.A.

PREFACE.

In its original form this essay was the dissertation[v]
submitted for a doctorate in philosophy conferred by
Yale University in 1908. When first projected it was the
writer’s purpose to take up the subject of English
witchcraft under certain general political and social
aspects. It was not long, however, before he began to
feel that preliminary to such a treatment there was
necessary a chronological survey of the witch trials.
Those strange and tragic affairs were so closely involved
with the politics, literature, and life of the
seventeenth century that one is surprised to find how
few of them have received accurate or complete record
in history. It may be said, in fact, that few subjects have
gathered about themselves so large concretions of misinformation
as English witchcraft. This is largely, of
course, because so little attention has been given to it
by serious students of history. The mistakes and misunderstandings
of contemporary writers and of the
local historians have been handed down from county
history to county history until many of them have crept
into general works. For this reason it was determined
to attempt a chronological treatment which would
give a narrative history of the more significant trials
along with some account of the progress of opinion.
This plan has been adhered to somewhat strictly, sometimes
not without regret upon the part of the writer. It
is his hope later in a series of articles to deal with some
of the more general phases of the subject, with such[vi]
topics as the use of torture, the part of the physicians,
the contagious nature of the witch alarms, the relation
of Puritanism to persecution, the supposed influence of
the Royal Society, the general causes for the gradual
decline of the belief, and other like questions. It will
be seen in the course of the narrative that some of these
matters have been touched upon.

This study of witchcraft has been limited to a period
of about one hundred and sixty years in English history.
The year 1558 has been chosen as the starting
point because almost immediately after the accession of
Elizabeth there began the movement for a new law, a
movement which resulted in the statute of 1563. With
that statute the history of the persecution of witches
gathers importance. The year 1718 has been selected
as a concluding date because that year was marked by
the publication of Francis Hutchinson’s notable attack
upon the belief. Hutchinson levelled a final and deadly
blow at the dying superstition. Few men of intelligence
dared after that avow any belief in the reality of witchcraft;
it is probable that very few even secretly cherished
such a belief. A complete history would of course
include a full account both of the witch trials from Anglo-Saxon
times to Elizabeth’s accession and of the
various witch-swimming incidents of the eighteenth
century. The latter it has not seemed worth while here
to consider. The former would involve an examination
of all English sources from the earliest times and would
mean a study of isolated and unrelated trials occurring
at long intervals (at least, we have record only of such)
and chiefly in church courts. The writer has not undertaken
to treat this earlier period; he must confess to
but small knowledge of it. In the few pages which he[vii]
has given to it he has attempted nothing more than to
sketch from the most obvious sources an outline of
what is currently known as to English witches and
witchcraft prior to the days of Elizabeth. It is to be
hoped that some student of medieval society will at
some time make a thorough investigation of the history
of witchcraft in England to the accession of the great
Queen.

For the study of the period to be covered in this
monograph there exists a wealth of material. It would
perhaps not be too much to say that everything in print
and manuscript in England during the last half of the
sixteenth and the entire seventeenth century should be
read or at least glanced over. The writer has limited
himself to certain kinds of material from which he could
reasonably expect to glean information. These sources
fall into seven principal categories. Most important of
all are the pamphlets, or chapbooks, dealing with the
history of particular alarms and trials and usually concluding
with the details of confession and execution.
Second only to them in importance are the local or
municipal records, usually court files, but sometimes
merely expense accounts. In the memoirs and diaries can
be found many mentions of trials witnessed by the diarist
or described to him. The newspapers of the time, in
their eagerness to exploit the unusual, seize gloatingly
upon the stories of witchcraft. The works of local
historians and antiquarians record in their lists of
striking and extraordinary events within their counties
or boroughs the several trials and hangings for the
crime. The writers, mainly theologians, who discuss
the theory and doctrine of witchcraft illustrate the principles
they lay down by cases that have fallen under[viii]
their observation. Lastly, the state papers contain occasional
references to the activities of the Devil and of
his agents in the realm.

Besides these seven types of material there should
be named a few others less important. From the pamphlet
accounts of the criminal dockets at the Old Bailey
and Newgate, leaflets which were published at frequent
intervals after the Restoration, are to be gleaned mentions
of perhaps half a dozen trials for witchcraft. The
plays of Dekker, Heywood, and Shadwell must be used
by the student, not because they add information
omitted elsewhere, but because they offer some clue to
the way in which the witches at Edmonton and Lancaster
were regarded by the public. If the pamphlet
narrative of the witch of Edmonton had been lost, it
might be possible to reconstruct from the play of Dekker,
Ford, and Rowley some of the outlines of the story.
It would be at best a hazardous undertaking. To reconstruct
the trials at Lancaster from the plays of Heywood
and Brome or from that of Shadwell would be
quite impossible. The ballads present a form of evidence
much like that of the plays. Like the plays, they
happen all to deal with cases about which we are
already well informed. In general, they seem to follow
the narratives and depositions faithfully.

No mention has been made of manuscript sources.
Those used by the author have all belonged to one or
other of the types of material described.

It has been remarked that there is current a large
body of misinformation about English witchcraft.
It would be ungrateful of the author not to acknowledge
that some very good work has been done on the
theme. The Reverend Francis Hutchinson, as already[ix]
mentioned, wrote in 1718 an epoch-making history of
the subject, a book which is still useful and can never be
wholly displaced. In 1851 Thomas Wright brought out
his Narratives of Sorcery and Magic, a work at once
entertaining and learned. Wright wrote largely from
original sources and wrote with a good deal of care.
Such blunders as he made were the result of haste
and of the want of those materials which we now
possess. Mrs. Lynn Linton’s Witch Stories, published
first in 1861, is a better book than might be supposed
from a casual glance at it. It was written with no more
serious purpose than to entertain, but it is by no means
to be despised. So far as it goes, it represents careful
work. It would be wrong to pass over Lecky’s brilliant
essay on witchcraft in his History of Rationalism, valuable
of course rather as an interpretation than as an
historical account. Lecky said many things about
witchcraft that needed to be said, and said them well.
It is my belief that his verdicts as to the importance
of sundry factors may have to be modified; but,
however that be, the importance of his essay must
always be recognized. One must not omit in passing
James Russell Lowell’s charming essay on the subject.
Both Lecky and Lowell of course touched English
witchcraft but lightly. Since Mrs. Lynn Linton’s no
careful treatment of English witchcraft proper has appeared.
In 1907, however, Professor Kittredge published
his Notes on Witchcraft, the sixty-seven pages of
which with their footnotes contain a more scrupulous
sifting of the evidence as to witchcraft in England than
is to be found in any other treatment. Professor Kittredge
is chiefly interested in English witchcraft as it
relates itself to witchcraft in New England, but his[x]
work contains much that is fresh about the belief in England.
As to the rôle and the importance of various
actors in the drama and as to sundry minor matters,
the writer has found himself forced to divergence of
view. He recognizes nevertheless the importance
of Professor Kittredge’s contribution to the study
of the whole subject and acknowledges his own indebtedness
to the essay for suggestion and guidance.

The author cannot hope that the work here presented
is final. Unfortunately there is still hidden away in
England an unexplored mass of local records. Some of
them no doubt contain accounts of witch trials. I have
used chiefly such printed and manuscript materials as
were accessible in London and Oxford. Some day perhaps
I may find time to go the rounds of the English
counties and search the masses of gaol delivery records
and municipal archives. From the really small amount
of new material on the subject brought to light
by the Historical Manuscripts Commission and by the
publication of many municipal records, it seems improbable
that such a search would uncover so many
unlisted trials as seriously to modify the narrative.
Nevertheless until such a search is made no history of
the subject has the right to be counted final. Mr.
Charles W. Wallace, the student of Shakespeare, tells
me that in turning over the multitudinous records of
the Star Chamber he found a few witch cases. Professor
Kittredge believes that there is still a great deal
of such material to be turned up in private collections
and local archives. Any information on this matter
which any student of English local history can give me
will be gratefully received.[xi]

I wish to express my thanks for reading parts of the
manuscript to William Savage Johnson of Kansas University
and to Miss Ada Comstock of the University of
Minnesota. For general assistance and advice on the
subject I am under obligations to Professor Wilbur C.
Abbott and to Professor George Burton Adams of Yale
University. It is quite impossible to say how very much
I owe to Professor George L. Burr of Cornell. From
cover to cover the book, since the award to it of the
Adams Prize, has profited from his painstaking criticism
and wise suggestion.

Minneapolis, October 10, 1911.

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER I.

The Beginnings of English Witchcraft.

It has been said by a thoughtful writer that the subject[1]
of witchcraft has hardly received that place which
it deserves in the history of opinions. There has been,
of course, a reason for this neglect—the fact that the belief
in witchcraft is no longer existent among intelligent
people and that its history, in consequence, seems to
possess rather an antiquarian than a living interest. No
one can tell the story of the witch trials of sixteenth
and seventeenth century England without digging up
a buried past, and the process of exhumation is not
always pleasant. Yet the study of English witchcraft
is more than an unsightly exposure of a forgotten
superstition. There were few aspects of sixteenth and
seventeenth century life that were not affected by the
ugly belief. It is quite impossible to grasp the social conditions,
it is impossible to understand the opinions, fears,
and hopes of the men and women who lived in Elizabethan
and Stuart England, without some knowledge
of the part played in that age by witchcraft. It was a
matter that concerned all classes from the royal household
to the ignorant denizens of country villages. Privy
councillors anxious about their sovereign and thrifty
peasants worrying over their crops, clergymen alert to
detect the Devil in their own parishes, medical quacks
eager to profit by the fear of evil women, justices of the
peace zealous to beat down the works of Satan—all
classes, indeed—believed more or less sincerely in the[2]
dangerous powers of human creatures who had surrendered
themselves to the Evil One.

Witchcraft, in a general and vague sense, was something
very old in English history. In a more specific
and limited sense it is a comparatively modern phenomenon.
This leads us to a definition of the term. It
is a definition that can be given adequately only in an
historical way. A group of closely related and somewhat
ill defined conceptions went far back. Some of
them, indeed, were to be found in the Old Testament,
many of them in the Latin and Greek writers. The
word witchcraft itself belonged to Anglo-Saxon days.
As early as the seventh century Theodore of Tarsus
imposed penances upon magicians and enchanters, and
the laws, from Alfred on, abound with mentions of
witchcraft.[1] From these passages the meaning of the
word witch as used by the early English may be fairly
deduced. The word was the current English term for
one who used spells and charms, who was assisted by
evil spirits to accomplish certain ends. It will be seen
that this is by no means the whole meaning of the term
in later times. Nothing is yet said about the transformation
of witches into other shapes, and there is no
mention of a compact, implicit or otherwise, with the
Devil; there is no allusion to the nocturnal meetings of
the Devil’s worshippers and to the orgies that took place
upon those occasions; there is no elaborate and systematic
theological explanation of human relations with
demons.

[3]

But these notions were to reach England soon enough.
Already there were germinating in southern Europe
ideas out of which the completer notions were to spring.
As early as the close of the ninth century certain Byzantine
traditions were being introduced into the
West. There were legends of men who had made written
compacts with the Devil, men whom he promised to
assist in this world in return for their souls in the next.[2]
But, while such stories were current throughout the
Middle Ages, the notion behind them does not seem to
have been connected with the other features of what
was to make up the idea of witchcraft until about the
middle of the fourteenth century. It was about that
time that the belief in the “Sabbat” or nocturnal assembly
of the witches made its appearance.[3] The
belief grew up that witches rode through the air to these
meetings, that they renounced Christ and engaged in
foul forms of homage to Satan. Lea tells us that towards
the close of the century the University of Paris
formulated the theory that a pact with Satan was inherent
in all magic, and judges began to connect this
pact with the old belief in night riders through the air.
The countless confessions that resulted from the carefully
framed questions of the judges served to develop
and systematize the theory of the subject. The witch
was much more than a sorcerer. Sorcerers had been
those who, through the aid of evil spirits, by the use
[4]of certain words or of representations of persons or
things produced changes above the ordinary course of
nature. “The witch,” says Lea, “has abandoned
Christianity, has renounced her baptism, has worshipped
Satan as her God, has surrendered herself to
him, body and soul, and exists only to be his instrument
in working the evil to her fellow creatures which he cannot
accomplish without a human agent.”[4] This was the
final and definite notion of a witch. It was the conception
that controlled European opinion on the subject
from the latter part of the fourteenth to the close of the
seventeenth century. It was, as has been seen, an
elaborate theological notion that had grown out of the
comparatively simple and vague ideas to be found in the
scriptural and classical writers.

It may well be doubted whether this definite and intricate
theological notion of witchcraft reached England
so early as the fourteenth century. Certainly not until
a good deal later—if negative evidence is at all trustworthy—was
a clear distinction made between sorcery
and witchcraft. The witches searched for by Henry
IV, the professor of divinity, the friar, the clerk, and
the witch of Eye, who were hurried before the Council
of Henry VI, that unfortunate Duchess of Gloucester
who had to walk the streets of London, the Duchess
of Bedford, the conspirators against Edward IV who
were supposed to use magic, the unlucky mistress of
Edward IV—none of these who through the course of
two centuries were charged with magical misdeeds
were, so far as we know, accused of those dreadful relations
with the Devil, the nauseating details of which
fill out the later narratives of witch history.

[5]

The truth seems to be that the idea of witchcraft was
not very clearly defined and differentiated in the minds
of ordinary Englishmen until after the beginning of
legislation upon the subject. It is not impossible that
there were English theologians who could have set forth
the complete philosophy of the belief, but to the average
mind sorcery, conjuration, enchantment, and witchcraft
were but evil ways of mastering nature. All that was
changed when laws were passed. With legislation came
greatly increased numbers of accusations; with accusations
and executions came treatises and theory. Continental
writers were consulted, and the whole system
and science of the subject were soon elaborated for all
who read.

With the earlier period, which has been sketched
merely by way of definition, this monograph cannot
attempt to deal. It limits itself to a narrative of the
witch trials, and incidentally of opinion as to witchcraft,
after there was definite legislation by Parliament. The
statute of the fifth year of Elizabeth’s reign marks a
point in the history of the judicial persecution at which
an account may very naturally begin. The year 1558
has been selected as the date because from the very
opening of the reign which was to be signalized by the
passing of that statute and was to be characterized by a
serious effort to enforce it, the persecution was preparing.

Up to that time the crime of sorcery had been dealt
with in a few early instances by the common-law courts,
occasionally (where politics were involved) by the
privy council, but more usually, it is probable, by the
church. This, indeed, may easily be illustrated from
the works of law. Britton and Fleta include an inquiry[6]
about sorcerers as one of the articles of the sheriff’s
tourn. A note upon Britton, however, declares that it
is for the ecclesiastical court to try such offenders and to
deliver them to be put to death in the king’s court, but
that the king himself may proceed against them if he
pleases.[5] While there is some overlapping of procedure
implied by this, the confusion seems to have been yet
greater in actual practice. A brief narrative of some cases
prior to 1558 will illustrate the strangely unsettled state
of procedure. Pollock and Maitland relate several
trials to be found in the early pleas. In 1209 one woman
accused another of sorcery in the king’s court and
the defendant cleared herself by the ordeal. In 1279
a man accused of killing a witch who assaulted him in
his house was fined, but only because he had fled away.
Walter Langton, Bishop of Lichfield and treasurer of
Edward I, was accused of sorcery and homage to Satan
and cleared himself with the compurgators. In 1325
more than twenty men were indicted and tried by the
king’s bench for murder by tormenting a waxen image.
All of them were acquitted. In 1371 there was
brought before the king’s bench an inhabitant of Southwark
who was charged with sorcery, but he was finally
discharged on swearing that he would never be a sorcerer.[6]

It will be observed that these early cases were all of
them tried in the secular courts; but there is no reason
to doubt that the ecclesiastical courts were quite as active,
and their zeal must have been quickened by the
[7]statute of 1401, which in cases of heresy made the lay
power their executioner. It was at nearly the same
time, however, that the charge of sorcery began to be
frequently used as a political weapon. In such cases,
of course, the accused was usually a person of influence
and the matter was tried in the council. It will be seen,
then, that the crime was one that might fall either under
ecclesiastical or conciliar jurisdiction and the particular
circumstances usually determined finally the jurisdiction.
When Henry IV was informed that the diocese
of Lincoln was full of sorcerers, magicians, enchanters,
necromancers, diviners, and soothsayers, he
sent a letter to the bishop requiring him to search for
sorcerers and to commit them to prison after conviction,
or even before, if it should seem expedient.[7] This was
entrusting the matter to the church, but the order was
given by authority of the king, not improbably after
the matter had been discussed in the council. In the
reign of Henry VI conciliar and ecclesiastical authorities
both took part at different times and in different
ways. Thomas Northfield, a member of the Order of
Preachers in Worcester and a professor of divinity,
was brought before the council, together with all suspected
matter belonging to him, and especially his books
treating of sorcery. Pike does not tell us the outcome.[8]
In the same year there were summoned before the council
three humbler sorcerers, Margery Jourdemain, John
Virley, a cleric, and John Ashwell, a friar of the
[8]Order of the Holy Cross. It would be hard to say
whether the three were in any way connected with
political intrigue. It is possible that they were suspected
of sorcery against the sovereign. They were all,
however, dismissed on giving security.[9] It was only a
few years after this instance of conciliar jurisdiction
that a much more important case was turned over to
the clergy. The story of Eleanor Cobham, Duchess of
Gloucester, is a familiar one. It was determined by the
enemies of Duke Humphrey of Gloucester to attack
him through his wife, who was believed to be influential
with the young king. The first move was made by arresting
a Roger Bolingbroke who had been connected
with the duke and the duchess, and who was said to be
an astronomer or necromancer. It was declared that
he had cast the duchess’s horoscope with a view to ascertaining
her chances to the throne. Bolingbroke made
confession, and Eleanor was then brought before “certayne
bisshoppis of the kyngis.” In the mean time
several lords, members of the privy council, were authorized
to “enquire of al maner tresons, sorcery, and
alle othir thyngis that myghte in eny wise … concerne
harmfulli the kyngis persone.”[10] Bolingbroke and a
clergyman, Thomas Southwell, were indicted of treason
with the duchess as accessory. With them was accused
that Margery Jourdemain who had been released
ten years before. Eleanor was then reexamined before
the Bishops of London, Lincoln, and Norwich, she was
condemned as guilty, and required to walk barefoot
[9]through the streets of London, which she “dede righte
mekely.” The rest of her life she spent in a northern
prison. Bolingbroke was executed as a traitor, and
Margery Jourdemain was burnt at Smithfield.[11]

The case of the Duchess of Bedford—another instance
of the connection between sorcery and political
intrigue—fell naturally into the hands of the council.
It was believed by those who could understand in no
other way the king’s infatuation that he had been bewitched
by the mother of the queen. The story was
whispered from ear to ear until the duchess got wind
of it and complained to the council against her maligners.
The council declared her cleared of suspicion
and ordered that the decision should be “enacted of
record.”[12]

The charge of sorcery brought by the protector Richard
of Gloucester against Jane Shore, who had been the
mistress of Edward IV, never came to trial and in
consequence illustrates neither ecclesiastical nor conciliar
jurisdiction. It is worthy of note however that the
accusation was preferred by the protector—who was
soon to be Richard III—in the council chamber.[13]

It will be seen that these cases prove very little as to
procedure in the matter of sorcery and witchcraft.
They are cases that arose in a disturbed period and that
concerned chiefly people of note. That they were tried
before the bishops or before the privy council does not
[10]mean that all such charges were brought into those
courts. There must have been less important cases that
were never brought before the council or the great
ecclesiastical courts. It seems probable—to reason
backward from later practice—that less important
trials were conducted almost exclusively by the minor
church courts.[14]

This would at first lead us to suspect that, when the
state finally began to legislate against witchcraft by
statute, it was endeavoring to wrest jurisdiction of the
crime out of the hands of the church and to put it into
secular hands. Such a supposition, however, there is
nothing to justify. It seems probable, on the contrary,
that the statute enacted in the reign of Henry VIII was
passed rather to support the church in its struggle
against sorcery and witchcraft than to limit its jurisdiction
in the matter. It was to assist in checking these
practitioners that the state stepped in. At another
point in this chapter we shall have occasion to note the
great interest in sorcery and all kindred subjects that
was springing up over England, and we shall at times
observe some of the manifestations of this interest as
well as some of the causes for it. Here it is necessary
only to urge the importance of this interest as accounting
for the passage of a statute.[15]

[11]

Chapter VIII of 33 Henry VIII states its purpose
clearly: “Where,” reads the preamble, “dyvers and
sundrie persones unlawfully have devised and practised
Invocacions and conjuracions of Sprites, pretendyng
by suche meanes to understande and get Knowlege for
their owne lucre in what place treasure of golde and Silver
shulde or mought be founde or had … and also
have used and occupied wichecraftes, inchauntmentes
and sorceries to the distruccion of their neighbours persones
and goodes.” A description was given of the
methods practised, and it was enacted that the use of
any invocation or conjuration of spirits, witchcrafts,
enchantments, or sorceries should be considered felony.[16]
It will be observed that the law made no graduation of
offences. Everything was listed as felony. No later
piece of legislation on the subject was so sweeping in
its severity.

[12]

The law remained on the statute-book only six years.
In the early part of the reign of Edward VI, when the
protector Somerset was in power, a policy of great
leniency in respect to felonies was proposed. In December
of 1547 a bill was introduced into Parliament
to repeal certain statutes for treason and felony. “This
bill being a matter of great concern to every subject, a
committee was appointed, consisting of the Archbishop
of Canterbury, the lord chancellor, the lord chamberlain,
the Marquis of Dorset, the Earls of Shrewsbury
and Southampton, the Bishops of Ely, Lincoln, and
Worcester, the Lords Cobham, Clinton, and Wentworth,
with certain of the king’s learned council; all which
noblemen were appointed to meet a committee of the
Commons … in order to treat and commune on the
purport of the said bill.”[17] The Commons, it seems,
had already prepared a bill of their own, but this they
were willing to drop and the Lords’ measure with some
amendments was finally passed. It was under this wide
repeal of felonies that chapter VIII of 33 Henry VIII
was finally annulled. Whether the question of witchcraft
came up for special consideration or not, we are
not informed. We do know that the Bishops of London,
Durham, Ely, Hereford, and Chichester, took exception
to some amendments that were inserted in the
act of repeal,[18] and it is not impossible that they were
opposed to repealing the act against witchcraft. Certainly
there is no reason to suppose that the church was
resisting the encroachment of the state in the subject.

As a matter of fact it is probable that, in the general
question of repeal of felonies, the question of witch[13]craft
received scant attention. There is indeed an interesting
story that seems to point in that direction
and that deserves repeating also as an illustration of
the protector’s attitude towards the question. Edward
Underhill gives the narrative in his autobiography:
“When we hade dyned, the maior sentt to [two] off his
offycers with me to seke Alene; whome we mett withalle
in Poles, and toke hym with us unto his chamber,
wheare we founde fygures sett to calke the nativetie
off the kynge, and a jugementt gevyne off his deathe,
wheroff this folyshe wreche thoughte hymselfe so sure
thatt he and his conselars the papistes bruted it all
over. The kynge laye att Hamtone courte the same
tyme, and me lord protector at the Syone; unto whome
I caryed this Alen, with his bokes off conejuracyons,
cearkles, and many thynges beloungynge to thatt dyvlyshe
art, wiche he affyrmed before me lorde was a lawfulle
cyens [science], for the statute agaynst souche
was repealed. ‘Thow folyshe knave! (sayde me lorde)
yff thou and all thatt be off thy cyens telle me what I
shalle do to-morow, I wylle geve the alle thatt I have’;
commaundynge me to cary hym unto the Tower.” Alen
was examined about his science and it was discovered
that he was “a very unlearned asse, and a sorcerer, for
the wiche he was worthye hangynge, sayde Mr. Recorde.”
He was however kept in the Tower “about the
space off a yere, and then by frendshipe delyvered.
So scapithe alwayes the weked.”[19]

But the wicked were not long to escape. The beginning
of Elizabeth’s reign saw a serious and successful
effort to put on the statute-book definite and severe
[14]penalties for conjuration, sorcery, witchcraft, and related
crimes. The question was taken up in the very
first year of the new reign and a bill was draughted.[20]
It was not, however, until 1563 that the statute was
finally passed. It was then enacted that those who
“shall use, practise, or exercise any Witchecrafte,
Enchantment, Charme or Sorcerie, whereby any person
shall happen to bee killed or destroyed, …
their Concellors and Aidours, … shall suffer paynes
of Deathe as a Felon or Felons.” It was further declared
that those by whose practices any person was
wasted, consumed, or lamed, should suffer for the first
offence one year’s imprisonment and should be put in
the pillory four times. For the second offence death
was the penalty. It was further provided that those
who by witchcraft presumed to discover treasure or
to find stolen property or to “provoke any person to
unlawfull love” should suffer a year’s imprisonment
and four appearances in the pillory.

With this law the history of the prosecution of witchcraft
in England as a secular crime may well begin.
The question naturally arises, What was the occasion
of this law? How did it happen that just at this particular
time so drastic a measure was passed and put
into operation? Fortunately part of the evidence exists
upon which to frame an answer. The English churchmen
who had been driven out of England during the
Marian persecution had many of them sojourned in
Zurich and Geneva, where the extirpation of witches
was in full progress, and had talked over the matter
with eminent Continental theologians. With the acces[15]sion
of Elizabeth these men returned to England in
force and became prominent in church and state, many
of them receiving bishoprics. It is not possible to
show that they all were influential in putting through
the statute of the fifth year of Elizabeth. It is clear
that one of them spoke out plainly on the subject. It
can hardly be doubted that he represented the opinions
of many other ecclesiastics who had come under the
same influences during their exile.[21] John Jewel was
an Anglican of Calvinistic sympathies who on his return
to England at Elizabeth’s accession had been appointed
Bishop of Salisbury. Within a short time he
came to occupy a prominent position in the court. He
preached before the Queen and accompanied her on a
visit to Oxford. It was in the course of one of his first
[16]sermons—somewhere between November of 1559 and
March of 1560[22]—that he laid before her his convictions
on witchcraft. It is, he tells her, “the horrible using of
your poor subjects,” that forces him to speak. “This
kind of people (I mean witches and sorcerers) within
these few last years are marvellously increased within
this your grace’s realm. These eyes have seen most
evident and manifest marks of their wickedness. Your
grace’s subjects pine away even unto death, their colour
fadeth, their flesh rotteth, their speech is benumbed,
their senses are bereft. Wherefore, your poor subjects’
[17]most humble petition unto your highness is, that the
laws touching such malefactors may be put in due execution.”

The church historian, Strype, conjectures that this
sermon was the cause of the law passed in the fifth year
of Elizabeth’s reign, by which witchcraft was again
made a felony, as it had been in the reign of Henry
VIII.[23] Whatever weight we may attach to Strype’s
suggestion, we have every right to believe that Jewel
introduced foreign opinion on witchcraft. Very probably
there were many returned exiles as well as others
[18]who brought back word of the crusade on the Continent;
but Jewel’s words put the matter formally before
the queen and her government.[24]

We can trace the effect of the ecclesiastic’s appeal
still further. The impression produced by it was responsible
probably not only for the passage of the law
but also for the issue of commissions to the justices of
the peace to apprehend all the witches they were able to
find in their jurisdictions.[25]

It can hardly be doubted that the impression produced
by the bishop’s sermon serves in part to explain
the beginning of the state’s attack upon witches. Yet
one naturally inquires after some other factor in the
problem. Is it not likely that there were in England
itself certain peculiar conditions, certain special circumstances,
that served to forward the attack? To
answer that query, we must recall the situation in
England when Elizabeth took the throne. Elizabeth
was a Protestant, and her accession meant the relinquishment
of the Catholic hold upon England. But it
was not long before the claims of Mary, Queen of
Scots, began to give the English ministers bad dreams.
Catholic and Spanish plots against the life of Elizabeth
kept the government detectives on the lookout. Perhaps
because it was deemed the hardest to circumvent,
[19]the use of conjuration against the life of the queen was
most feared. It was a method too that appealed to conspirators,
who never questioned its efficacy, and who
anticipated little risk of discovery.

To understand why the English government should
have been so alarmed at the efforts of the conjurers,
we shall have to go back to the half-century that preceded
the reign of the great queen and review briefly
the rise of those curious traders in mystery. The earlier
half of the fifteenth century, when the witch fires were
already lighted in South Germany, saw the coming of
conjurers in England. Their numbers soon evidenced
a growing interest in the supernatural upon the part
of the English and foreshadowed the growing faith in
witchcraft. From the scattered local records the facts
have been pieced together to show that here and there
professors of magic powers were beginning to get a
hearing. As they first appear upon the scene, the conjurers
may be grouped in two classes, the position
seekers and the treasure seekers. To the first belong
those who used incantations and charms to win the
favor of the powerful, and so to gain advancement for
themselves or for their clients.[26] It was a time when
there was every encouragement to try these means.
Men like Wolsey and Thomas Cromwell had risen from
humble rank to the highest places in the state. Their
careers seemed inexplicable, if not uncanny. It was
easy to believe that unfair and unlawful practices had
been used. What had been done before could be done
again. So the dealers in magic may have reasoned.[20]
At all events, whatever their mental operations, they
experimented with charms which were to gain the favor
of the great, and some of their operations came to
the ears of the court.

The treasure seekers[27] were more numerous. Every
now and then in the course of English history treasures
have been unearthed, many of them buried in Roman
times. Stories of lucky finds had of course gained wide
circulation. Here was the opportunity of the bankrupt
adventurer and the stranded promoter. The treasures
could be found by the science of magic. The notion
was closely akin to the still current idea that wells
can be located by the use of hazel wands. But none
of the conjurers—and this seems a curious fact to one
familiar with the English stories of the supernatural—ever
lit upon the desired treasure. Their efforts hardly
aroused public interest, least of all alarm. Experimenters,
who fifty years later would have been hurried
before the privy council, were allowed to conjure and
dig as they pleased. Henry VIII even sold the right in
one locality, and sold it at a price which showed how
lightly he regarded it.[28]

Other forms of magic were of course practiced. By
the time that Elizabeth succeeded to the throne, it is
safe to say that the practice of forbidden arts had become
wide-spread in England. Reginald Scot a little
later declared that every parish was full of men and
women who claimed to work miracles.[29] Most of them
were women, and their performances read like those
of the gipsy fortune-tellers today. “Cunning women”
[21]they called themselves. They were many of them
semi-medical or pseudo-medical practitioners[30] who
used herbs and extracts, and, when those failed, charms
and enchantments, to heal the sick. If they were fairly
fortunate, they became known as “good witches.” Particularly
in connection with midwifery were their incantations
deemed effective.[31] From such functions it
was no far call to forecast the outcome of love affairs,
or to prepare potions which would ensure love.[32] They
became general helpers to the distressed. They could
tell where lost property was to be found, an undertaking
closely related to that of the treasure seekers.[33]

It was usually in the less serious diseases[34] that these
cunning folk were consulted. They were called upon
often indeed—if one fragmentary evidence may be
trusted—to diagnose the diseases and to account for the
deaths of domestic animals.[35] It may very easily be that
it was from the necessity of explaining the deaths of animals
that the practitioners of magic began to talk
about witchcraft and to throw out a hint that some
[22]witch was at the back of the matter. It would be in line
with their own pretensions. Were they not good
witches? Was it not their province to overcome the
machinations of the black witches, that is, witches who
wrought evil rather than good? The disease of an
animal was hard to prescribe for. A sick horse would
hardly respond to the waving of hands and a jumble
of strange words. The animal was, in all probability,
bewitched.

At any rate, whether in this particular manner or not,
it became shortly the duty of the cunning women to
recognize the signs of witchcraft, to prescribe for it,
and if possible to detect the witch. In many cases the
practitioner wisely enough refused to name any one,
but described the appearance of the guilty party and
set forth a series of operations by which to expose her
machinations. If certain herbs were plucked and
treated in certain ways, if such and such words were
said, the guilty party would appear at the door. At
other times the wise woman gave a perfectly recognizable
description of the guilty one and offered remedies
that would nullify her maleficent influences. No
doubt the party indicated as the witch was very often
another of the “good witches,” perhaps a rival.
Throughout the records of the superstition are scattered
examples of wise women upon whom suspicion
suddenly lighted, and who were arraigned and sent to
the gallows. Beyond question the suspicion began often
with the ill words of a neighbor,[36] perhaps of a competitor,
words that started an attack upon the woman’s
reputation that she was unable to repel.

[23]

It is not to be supposed that the art of cunning was
confined to the female sex. Throughout the reign of
Elizabeth, the realm was alive with men who were
pretenders to knowledge of mysteries. So closely was
the occupation allied to that of the physician that no such
strict line as now exists between reputable physicians
and quack doctors separated the “good witches” from
the regular practicers of medicine. It was so customary
in Elizabethan times for thoroughly reputable
and even eminent medical men to explain baffling cases
as the results of witchcraft[37] that to draw the line of demarcation
between them and the pretenders who suggested
by means of a charm or a glass a maleficent
agent would be impossible. Granted the phenomena of
conjuration and witchcraft as facts—and no one had
yet disputed them—it was altogether easy to believe
that good witches who antagonized the works of black
witches were more dependable than the family physician,
who could but suggest the cause of sickness. The
regular practitioner must often have created business
for his brother of the cunning arts.

One would like to know what these practicers
thought of their own arts. Certainly some of them accomplished
cures. Mental troubles that baffled the ordinary
physician would offer the “good witch” a rare
field for successful endeavor. Such would be able not
only to persuade a community of their good offices, but
to deceive themselves. Not all of them, however, by any
means, were self-deceived. Conscious fraud played a
part in a large percentage of cases. One witch was
[24]very naive in her confession of fraud. When suspected
of sorcery and cited to court, she was said to
have frankly recited her charm:

She was acquitted and doubtless continued to add penny
to penny.[38]

We need not, indeed, be surprised that the state
should have been remiss in punishing a crime so vague
in character and so closely related to an honorable profession.
Except where conjuration had affected high
interests of state, it had been practically overlooked by
the government. Now and then throughout the fourteenth
and fifteenth centuries there had been isolated
plots against the sovereign, in which conjury had
played a conspicuous part. With these few exceptions
the crime had been one left to ecclesiastical jurisdiction.
But now the state was ready to reclaim its jurisdiction
over these crimes and to assume a very positive attitude
of hostility towards them. This came about in
a way that has already been briefly indicated. The
government of the queen found itself threatened constantly
by plots for making away with the queen, plots
which their instigators hoped would overturn the Protestant
regime and bring England back into the fold.
Elizabeth had hardly mounted her throne when her
councillors began to suspect the use of sorcery and con[25]juration
against her life. As a result they instituted
the most painstaking inquiries into all reported cases of
the sort, especially in and about London and the neighboring
counties. Every Catholic was suspected. Two
cases that were taken up within the first year came to
nothing, but a third trial proved more serious. In November
of 1558 Sir Anthony Fortescue,[39] member of
a well known Catholic family, was arrested, together
with several accomplices, upon the charge of casting the
horoscope of the queen’s life. Fortescue was soon released,
but in 1561 he was again put in custody, this
time with two brothers-in-law, Edmund and Arthur
Pole, nephews of the famous cardinal of that name.
The plot that came to light had many ramifications. It
was proposed to marry Mary, Queen of Scots, to Edmund
Pole, and from Flanders to proclaim her Queen
of England. In the meantime Elizabeth was to die a
natural death—at least so the conspirators claimed—prophesied
for her by two conjurers, John Prestall and
Edmund Cosyn, with the assistance of a “wicked
spryte.” It was discovered that the plot involved the
French and Spanish ambassadors. Relations between
Paris and London became strained. The conspirators
were tried and sentenced to death. Fortescue himself,
perhaps because he was a second cousin of the queen
and brother of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, seems
to have escaped the gallows.[40]

The Fortescue affair was, however, but one of many
conspiracies on foot during the time. Throughout the
sixties and the seventies the queen’s councillors were
[26]on the lookout. Justices of the peace and other prominent
men in the counties were kept informed by the
privy council of reported conjurers, and they were instructed
to send in what evidence they could gather
against them. It is remarkable that three-fourths of
the cases that came under investigation were from a
territory within thirty miles of London. Two-thirds
of them were from Essex. Not all the conjurers were
charged with plotting against the queen, but that charge
was most common. It is safe to suppose that, in the
cases where that accusation was not preferred, it was
nevertheless the alarm of the privy council for the life
of the queen that had prompted the investigation and
arrest.

Between 1578 and 1582, critical years in the affairs
of the Scottish queen, the anxiety of the London
authorities was intense[41]—their precautions were redoubled.
Representatives of the government were
sent out to search for conjurers and were paid well for
their services.[42] The Earl of Shrewsbury, a member
of the council who had charge of the now captive
Queen Mary, kept in his employ special detectors of
[27]conjuring.[43] Nothing about Elizabeth’s government
was better organized than Cecil’s detective service, and
the state papers show that the ferreting out of the conjurers
was by no means the least of its work. It was
a service carried on, of course, as quietly as could
be, and yet the cases now and again came to light and
made clear to the public that the government was very
fearful of conjurers’ attacks upon the queen. No
doubt the activity of the council put all conjurers under
public suspicion and in some degree roused public resentment
against them.

This brings us back to the point: What had the conjurers
to do with witchcraft? By this time the answer
is fairly obvious. The practisers of the magic arts,
the charmers and enchanters, were responsible for developing
the notions of witchcraft. The good witch
brought in her company the black witch. This in itself
might never have meant more than an increased activity
in the church courts. But when Protestant England
grew suddenly nervous for the life of the queen,
when the conjurers became a source of danger to the
sovereign, and the council commenced its campaign
against them, the conditions had been created in which
witchcraft became at once the most dangerous and detested
of crimes. While the government was busy
putting down the conjurers, the aroused popular sentiment
was compelling the justices of the peace and then
the assize judges to hang the witches.

This cannot be better illustrated than by the Abingdon
affair of 1578-1579. Word had been carried to the
privy council that Sir Henry Newell, justice of the
[28]peace, had committed some women near Abingdon on
the charge of making waxen images.[44] The government
was at once alarmed and sent a message to Sir Henry
and to the Dean of Windsor instructing them to find
out the facts and to discover if the plots were directed
against the queen. The precaution was unnecessary.
There was no ground for believing that the designs of
the women accused had included the queen. Indeed
the evidence of guilt of any kind was very flimsy. But
the excitement of the public had been stirred to the
highest pitch. The privy council had shown its fear
of the women and all four of them went to the gallows.[45]

The same situation that brought about the attack
upon witchcraft and conjuration was no doubt responsible
for the transfer of jurisdiction over the crime.
We have already seen that the practice of conjuration
had probably been left largely to the episcopal hierarchy[29]
for punishment. The archdeacons were expected
in their visitations to inquire into the practice
of enchantment and magic within the parishes and to
make report.[47] In the reign of Elizabeth it became no
light duty. The church set itself to suppress both the
consulter and the consulted.[48] By the largest number
of recorded cases deal of course with the first class. It
was very easy when sick or in trouble to go to a professed
conjurer for help.[49] It was like seeking a physician’s
service, as we have seen. The church frowned
upon it, but the danger involved in disobeying the
church was not deemed great. The cunning man or
woman was of course the one who ran the great risk.
When worst came to worst and the ecclesiastical power
took cognizance of his profession, the best he could do
was to plead that he was a “good witch” and rendered
valuable services to the community.[50] But a good end
was in the eyes of the church no excuse for an evil
means. The good witches were dealers with evil
spirits and hence to be repressed.

Yet the church was very light in its punishments.
In the matter of penalties, indeed, consulter and consulted
fared nearly alike, and both got off easily. Public
confession and penance in one or more specifically
designated churches, usually in the nearest parish
church, constituted the customary penalty.[51] In a few
[30]instances it was coupled with the requirement that the
criminal should stand in the pillory, taper in hand, at
several places at stated times.[52] The ecclesiastical records
are so full of church penances that a student is
led to wonder how effectual they were in shaming the
penitent into better conduct. It may well be guessed
that most of the criminals were not sensitive souls that
would suffer profoundly from the disgrace incurred.

The control of matters of this kind was in the hands
of the church by sufferance only. So long as the state
was not greatly interested, the church was permitted to
retain its jurisdiction.[53] Doubtless the kings of England
would have claimed the state’s right of jurisdiction
if it had become a matter of dispute. The church itself
recognized the secular power in more important cases.[54]
In such cases the archdeacon usually acted with the
justice of peace in conducting the examination,[55] as
in rendering sentence. Even then, however, the penalty
was as a rule ecclesiastical. But, with the second half
of the sixteenth century, there arose new conditions
which resulted in the transfer of this control to the
state. Henry VIII had broken with Rome and established
a Church of England around the king as a centre.
[31]The power of the church belonged to the king, and,
if to the king, to his ministers and his judges. Hence
certain crimes that had been under the control of the
church fell under the jurisdiction of the king’s courts.[56]
In a more special way the same change came about
through the attack of the privy council upon the conjurers.
What had hitherto been a comparatively insignificant
offence now became a crime against the state
and was so dealt with.

The change, of course, was not sudden. It was not
accomplished in a year, nor in a decade. It was going
on throughout the first half of Elizabeth’s reign. By
the beginning of the eighties the church control was
disappearing. After 1585 the state had practically exclusive
jurisdiction.[57]

We have now finished the attempt to trace the beginning
of the definite movement against witchcraft in
England. What witchcraft was, what it became, how
it was to be distinguished from sorcery—these are questions
that we have tried to answer very briefly. We
have dealt in a cursory way with a series of cases extending
from Anglo-Saxon days down to the fifteenth
century in order to show how unfixed was the matter
of jurisdiction. We have sought also to explain how
Continental opinion was introduced into England
[32]through Jewel and other Marian exiles, to show what
independent forces were operating in England, and to
exhibit the growing influence of the charmers and
their relation to the development of witchcraft; and
lastly we have aimed to prove that the special danger
to the queen had no little part in creating the crusade
against witches. These are conclusions of some moment
and a caution must be inserted. We have been
treating of a period where facts are few and information
fragmentary. Under such circumstances conclusions
can only be tentative. Perhaps the most that
can be said of them is that they are suggestions.

CHAPTER II.

Witchcraft under Elizabeth.

The year 1566 is hardly less interesting in the history[33]
of English witchcraft than 1563. It has been seen that
the new statute passed in 1563 was the beginning of a
vigorous prosecution by the state of the detested agents
of the evil one. In 1566 occurred the first important
trial known to us in the new period. That trial deserves
note not only on its own account, but because it
was recorded in the first of the long series of witch
chap-books—if we may so call them. A very large
proportion of our information about the execution of
the witches is derived from these crude pamphlets,
briefly recounting the trials. The witch chap-book was a
distinct species. In the days when the chronicles were
the only newspapers it was what is now the “extra,”
brought out to catch the public before the sensation
had lost its flavor. It was of course a partisan document,
usually a vindication of the worthy judge who
had condemned the guilty, with some moral and religious
considerations by the respectable and righteous
author. A terribly serious bit of history it was that he
had to tell and he told it grimly and without pity. Such
comedy as lights up the gloomy black-letter pages was
quite unintentional. He told a story too that was full
of details trivial enough in themselves, but details that
give many glimpses into the every-day life of the lower
classes in town and country.[34]

The pamphlet of 1566 was brief and compact of information.
It was entitled The examination and confession
of certaine Wytches at Chensforde in the Countie
of Essex before the Quenes Maiesties Judges the
XXVI daye of July anno 1566. The trial there recorded
is one that presents some of the most curious
and inexplicable features in the annals of English
witchcraft. The personnel of the “size” court is mysterious.
At the first examination “Doctor Cole” and
“Master Foscue” were present. Both men are easily
identified. Doctor Cole was the Reverend Thomas
Cole, who had held several places in Essex and had in
1564 been presented to the rectory of Stanford Rivers,
about ten miles from Chelmsford. Master Foscue was
unquestionably Sir John Fortescue, later Chancellor of
the Exchequer, and at this time keeper of the great
wardrobe. On the second examination Sir Gilbert Gerard,
the queen’s attorney, and John Southcote, justice
of the queen’s bench, were present. Why Southcote
should be present is perfectly clear. It is not so easy
to understand about the others. Was the attorney-general
acting as presiding officer, or was he conducting
the prosecution? The latter hypothesis is of course
more consistent with his position. But what were the
rector of Stanford Rivers and the keeper of the great
wardrobe doing there? Had Doctor Cole been appointed
in recognition of the claims of the church? And
the keeper of the wardrobe, what was the part that he
played? One cannot easily escape the conclusion that
the case was deemed one of unusual significance. Perhaps
the privy council had heard of something that
alarmed it and had delegated these four men, all known[35]
at Elizabeth’s court, to examine into the matter in connection
with the assizes.

The examinations themselves present features of
more interest to the psychologist than to the historical
student. Yet they have some importance in the understanding
of witchcraft as a social phenomenon. Elizabeth
Francis, when examined, confessed with readiness
to various “vilanies.” From her grandmother she said
she had as a child received a white spotted cat, named
Sathan, whom she had fed, and who gave her what she
asked for. “She desired to have one Andrew Byles
to her husband, which was a man of some welth, and
the cat dyd promyse she shold.” But the promise
proved illusory. The man left her without marriage
and then she “willed Sathan … to touch his body,
whych he forthewith dyd, whereof he died.” Once
again she importuned Satan for a husband. This time
she gained one “not so rich as the other.” She bore a
daughter to him, but the marriage was an unhappy one.
“They lived not so quietly as she desyred, beinge stirred
to much unquietnes and moved to swearing and cursinge.”
Thereupon she employed the spirit to kill her
child and to lame her husband. After keeping the cat
fifteen years she turned it over to Mother Waterhouse,
“a pore woman.”[1]

Mother Waterhouse was now examined. She had
received the cat and kept it “a great while in woll in
a pot.” She had then turned it into a toad. She had
used it to kill geese, hogs, and cattle of her neighbors.
At length she had employed it to kill a neighbor whom
[36]she disliked, and finally her own husband. The woman’s
eighteen-year-old daughter, Joan, was now called
to the stand and confirmed the fact that her mother
kept a toad. She herself had one day been refused a
piece of bread and cheese by a neighbor’s child and had
invoked the toad’s help. The toad promised to assist
her if she would surrender her soul. She did so. Then
the toad haunted the neighbor’s girl in the form of a dog
with horns. The mother was again called to the stand
and repeated the curious story told by her daughter.

Now the neighbor’s child, Agnes Brown, was brought
in to testify. Her story tallied in some of its details
with that of the two Waterhouse women; she had been
haunted by the horned dog, and she added certain descriptions
of its conduct that revealed good play of
childish imagination.[2]

The attorney put some questions, but rather to lead
on the witnesses than to entangle them. He succeeded,
however, in creating a violent altercation between the
Waterhouses on the one hand, and Agnes Brown on the
other, over trifling matters of detail.[3] At length he offered
to release Mother Waterhouse if she would make
the spirit appear in the court.[4] The offer was waived.
The attorney then asked, “When dyd thye Cat suck
of thy bloud?” “Never,” said she. He commanded
the jailer to lift up the “kercher” on the woman’s
head. He did so and the spots on her face and nose
where she had pricked herself for the evil spirit were
exposed.

[37]

The jury retired. Two days later Agnes Waterhouse
suffered the penalty of the law, not however until she
had added to her confessions.[5]

The case is a baffling one. We can be quite sure that
the pamphlet account is incomplete. One would like
to know more about the substance of fact behind this
evidence. Did the parties that were said to have been
killed by witchcraft really die at the times specified?
Either the facts of their deaths were well known in the
community and were fitted with great cleverness into
the story Mother Waterhouse told, or the jurors and
the judges neglected the first principles of common
sense and failed to inquire about the facts.[6] The questions
asked by the queen’s attorney reveal hardly more
than an unintelligent curiosity to know the rest of the
story. He shows just one saving glint of skepticism.
He offered to release Mother Waterhouse if she would
materialize her spirit.

Mother Waterhouse was her own worst enemy. Her
own testimony was the principal evidence presented
against her, and yet she denied guilt on one particular
upon which the attorney-general had interrogated her.
This might lead one to suppose that her answers were
the haphazard replies of a half-witted woman. But the
supposition is by no means consistent with the very
definite and clear-cut nature of her testimony. It is
useless to try to unravel the tangles of the case. It is
possible that under some sort of duress—although there
[38]is no evidence of this—she had deliberately concocted
a story to fit those of Elizabeth Francis and Agnes
Brown, and that her daughter, hearing her mother’s
narrative in court—a very possible thing in that day—had
fitted hers into it. It is conceivable too that Mother
Waterhouse had yielded merely to the wish to amaze
her listeners. It is a more probable supposition that
the questions asked of her by the judge were based upon
the accusations already made by Agnes Brown and that
they suggested to her the main outlines of her narrative.

Elizabeth Francis, who had been the first accused and
who had accused Mother Waterhouse, escaped.
Whether it was because she had turned state’s evidence
or because she had influential friends in the community,
we do not know. It is possible that the judges recognized
that her confession was unsupported by the testimony
of other witnesses. Such a supposition, however,
credits the court with keener discrimination than seems
ever to have been exhibited in such cases in the sixteenth
century.[7]

But, though Elizabeth Francis had escaped, her reputation
as a dangerous woman in the community was
fixed. Thirteen years later she was again put on trial
before the itinerant justices. This brings us to the
second trial of witches at Chelmsford in 1579. Mistress
Francis’s examination elicited less than in the first trial.
She had cursed a woman “and badde a mischief to
light uppon her.” The woman, she understood, was
[39]grievously pained. She followed the course that she
had taken before and began to accuse others. We
know very little as to the outcome. At least one of the
women accused went free because “manslaughter or
murder was not objected against her.”[8] Three women,
however, were condemned and executed. One of them
was almost certainly Elleine Smith, daughter of a woman
hanged as a witch,—another illustration of the persistence
of suspicion against the members of a family.

The Chelmsford affair of 1579[9] was not unlike that
of 1566. There were the same tales of spirits that assumed
animal forms. The young son of Elleine Smith
declared that his mother kept three spirits, Great Dick
in a wicker bottle, Little Dick in a leathern bottle, and
Willet in a wool-pack. Goodwife Webb saw “a thyng
like a black Dogge goe out of her doore.” But the general
character of the testimony in the second trial bore
no relation to that in the first. There was no agreement
of the different witnesses. The evidence was haphazard.
The witch and another woman had a falling out—fallings
out were very common. Next day the woman
was taken ill. This was the sort of unimpeachable testimony
that was to be accepted for a century yet. In
the affair of 1566 the judges had made some attempt at
quizzing the witnesses, but in 1579 all testimony was
seemingly rated at par.[10] In both instances the proof
rested mainly upon confession. Every woman executed
[40]had made confessions of guilt. This of course was
deemed sufficient. Nevertheless the courts were beginning
to introduce other methods of proving the accused
guilty. The marks on Agnes Waterhouse had been uncovered
at the request of the attorney-general; and at
her execution she had been questioned about her ability
to say the Lord’s Prayer and other parts of the service.
Neither of these matters was emphasized, but the mention
of them proves that notions were already current
that were later to have great vogue.

The Chelmsford cases find their greatest significance,
however, not as illustrations of the use and abuse of evidence,
but because they exemplify the continuity of the
witch movement. That continuity finds further illustration
in the fact that there was a third alarm at
Chelmsford in 1589, which resulted in three more executions.
But in this case the women involved seem,
so far as we know, to have had no connection with the
earlier cases. The fate of Elizabeth Francis and that
of Elleine Smith are more instructive as proof of the
long-standing nature of a community suspicion. Elleine
could not escape her mother’s reputation nor Elizabeth
her own.

Both these women seem to have been of low character
at any rate. Elizabeth had admitted illicit amours,
and Elleine may very well have been guilty on the same
count.[11] All of the women involved in the two trials
were in circumstances of wretched poverty; most, if
not all, of them were dependent upon begging and the
poor relief for support.[12]

[41]

It is easy to imagine the excitement in Essex that
these trials must have produced. The accused had represented
a wide territory in the county. The women
had been fetched to Chelmsford from towns as far
apart as Hatfield-Peverel and Maldon. It is not remarkable
that three years later than the affair of 1579
there should have been another outbreak in the county,
this time in a more aggravated form. St. Oses, or St.
Osyth’s, to the northeast of Chelmsford, was to be the
scene of the most remarkable affair of its kind in Elizabethan
times. The alarm began with the formulation of
charges against a woman of the community. Ursley
Kemp was a poor woman of doubtful reputation. She
rendered miscellaneous services to her neighbors. She
acted as midwife, nursed children, and added to her
income by “unwitching” the diseased. Like other
women of the sort, she was looked upon with suspicion.
Hence, when she had been refused the nursing of the
child of Grace Thurlow, a servant of that Mr. Darcy
who was later to try her, and when the child soon afterward
fell out of its cradle and broke its neck, the mother
suspected Ursley of witchcraft. Nevertheless she did
not refuse her help when she “began to have a lameness
in her bones.” Ursley promised to unwitch her and
seemingly kept her word, for the lameness disappeared.
Then it was that the nurse-woman asked for the twelve-pence
she had been promised and was refused. Grace
pleaded that she was a “poore and needie woman.”
Ursley became angry and threatened to be even with
her. The lameness reappeared and Grace Thurlow
was thoroughly convinced that Ursley was to blame.
When the case was carried before the justices of the
peace, the accused woman denied that she was guilty[42]
of anything more than unwitching the afflicted. That
she had learned, she said, ten or more years ago from a
woman now deceased. She was committed to the assizes,
and Justice Brian Darcy, whose servant Grace
Thurlow had started the trouble, took the case in hand.
He examined her eight-year-old “base son,” who gave
damning evidence against his mother. She fed four
imps, Tyffin, Tittey, Piggen, and Jacket. The boy’s
testimony and the judge’s promise that if she would
confess the truth she “would have favour,” seemed
to break down the woman’s resolution. “Bursting out
with weeping she fell upon her knees and confessed
that she had four spirits.” Two of them she had used
for laming, two for killing. Not only the details of her
son’s evidence, but all the earlier charges, she confirmed
step by step, first in private confessions to the judge
and then publicly at the court sessions. The woman’s
stories tallied with those of all her accusers[13] and displayed
no little play of imagination in the orientation of
details.[14] Not content with thus entangling herself in a
fearful web of crime, she went on to point out other
women guilty of similar witchcrafts. Four of those
whom she named were haled before the justice. Elizabeth
Bennett, who spun wool for a cloth-maker, was
one of those most vehemently accused, but she denied
knowledge of any kind of witchcraft. It had been
charged against her that she kept some wool hidden in a
pot under some stones in her house. She denied at
first the possession of this potent and malignant charm;
but, influenced by the gentle urgings of Justice Darcy,[15]
[43]she gave way, as Ursley Kemp had done, and, breaking
all restraint, poured forth wild stories of devilish crimes
committed through the assistance of her imps.

But why should we trace out the confessions, charges,
and counter-charges that followed? The stories that
were poured forth continued to involve a widening
group until sixteen persons were under accusation of
the most awful crimes, committed by demoniacal
agency. As at Chelmsford, they were the dregs of the
lower classes, women with illegitimate children, some
of them dependent upon public support. It will be
seen that in some respects the panic bore a likeness to
those that had preceded. The spirits, which took extraordinary
and bizarre forms, were the offspring of the
same perverted imaginations, but they had assumed new
shapes. Ursley Kemp kept a white lamb, a little gray
cat, a black cat, and a black toad. There were spirits
of every sort, “two little thyngs like horses, one white,
the other black'”; six “spirits like cowes … as
big as rattles”; spirits masquerading as blackbirds.
One spirit strangely enough remained invisible. It will
be observed by the reader that the spirits almost fitted
into a color scheme. Very vivid colors were those
preferred in their spirits by these St. Oses women.
The reader can see, too, that the confessions showed
the influence of the great cat tradition.

We have seen the readiness with which the deluded
women made confession. Some of the confessions
were poured forth as from souls long surcharged with
guilt. But not all of them came in this way. Margerie
Sammon, who had testified against one of her neighbors,
was finally herself caught in the web of accusation
in which a sister had also been involved. She was ac[44]cused
by her sister. “I defie thee,” she answered,
“though thou art my sister.” But her sister drew her
aside and “whyspered her in the eare,” after which,
with “great submission and many teares,” she made
a voluble confession. One wonders about that whispered
consultation. Had her sister perhaps suggested
that the justice was offering mercy to those who confessed?
For Justice Darcy was very liberal with his
promises of mercy and absolutely unscrupulous about
breaking them.[16] It is gratifying to be able to record
that there was yet a remnant left who confessed nothing
at all and stood stubborn to the last. One of them
was Margaret Grevel, who denied the accusations
against her. She “saith that shee herselfe hath lost
severall bruings and bakings of bread, and also swine,
but she never did complaine thereof: saying that shee
wished her gere were at a stay and then shee cared
not whether shee were hanged or burnt or what did
become of her.” Annis Herd was another who stuck
to her innocence. She could recall various incidents
mentioned by her accusers; it was true that she had
talked to Andrew West about getting a pig, it was true
that she had seen Mr. Harrison at his parsonage gathering
plums and had asked for some and been refused.
But she denied that she had any imps or that she had
killed any one.

The use of evidence in this trial would lead one to
suppose that in England no rules of evidence were
yet in existence. The testimony of children ranging
[45]in age from six to nine was eagerly received. No objection
indeed was made to the testimony of a neighbor
who professed to have overheard what he deemed an
incriminating statement. As a matter of fact the remark,
if made, was harmless enough.[17] Expert evidence
was introduced in a roundabout way by the statement
offered in court that a physician had suspected
that a certain case was witchcraft. Nothing was excluded.
The garrulous women had been give free rein
to pile up their silly accusations against one another.
Not until the trial was nearing its end does it seem to
have occurred to Brian Darcy to warn a woman against
making false charges.

It will be recalled that in the Chelmsford trials
Mother Waterhouse had been found to have upon her
certain marks, yet little emphasis had been laid upon
them. In the trials of 1582 the proof drawn from these
marks was deemed of the first importance and the
judge appointed juries of women to make examination.
No artist has yet dared to paint the picture of the gloating
female inquisitors grouped around their naked and
trembling victim, a scene that was to be enacted in many
a witch trial. And it is well, for the scene would be too
repellent and brutal for reproduction. In the use of
these specially instituted juries there was no care to get
unbiassed decisions. One of the inquisitors appointed
to examine Cystley Celles had already served as witness
against her.

[46]

It is hard to refrain from an indictment of the hopelessly
prejudiced justice who gathered the evidence.[18]
To entrap the defendants seems to have been his end.
In the account which he wrote[19] he seems to have feared
lest the public should fail to understand how his cleverness
ministered to the conviction of the women.[20]

“There is a man,” he wrote, “of great cunning and
knowledge come over lately unto our Queenes Maiestie,
which hath advertised her what a companie and number
of witches be within Englande: whereupon I and other
of her Justices have received commission for the apprehending
of as many as are within these limites.” No
doubt he hoped to attract royal notice and win favor by
his zeal.

The Chelmsford affairs and that at St. Oses were the
three remarkable trials of their kind in the first part of
Elizabeth’s reign. They furnish some evidence of the
progress of superstition. The procedure in 1582 reveals
considerable advance over that of 1566. The theory of
diabolic agency had been elaborated. The testimony
offered was gaining in complexity and in variety. New
[47]proofs of guilt were being introduced as well as new
methods of testing the matter. In the second part of
Elizabeth’s reign we have but one trial of unusual interest,
that at Warboys in Huntingdonshire. This, we
shall see, continued the elaboration of the witch procedure.
It was a case that attracted probably more notice
at the time than any other in the sixteenth century.
The accidental fancy of a child and the pronouncement
of a baffled physician were in this instance the originating
causes of the trouble. One of the children of Sir
Robert Throckmorton, head of a prominent family in
Huntingdonshire, was taken ill. It so happened that a
neighbor, by name Alice Samuel, called at the house and
the ailing and nervous child took the notion that the
woman was a witch and cried out against her. “Did you
ever see, sayd the child, one more like a witch then she
is; take off her blacke thrumbd cap, for I cannot abide
to looke on her.” Her parents apparently thought
nothing of this at the time. When Dr. Barrow, an eminent
physician of Cambridge, having treated the child
for two of the diseases of children, and without success,
asked the mother and father if any witchcraft were
suspected, he was answered in the negative. The
Throckmortons were by no means quick to harbor a suspicion.
But when two and then three other children in
the family fell ill and began in the same way to designate
Mother Samuel as a witch, the parents were more
willing to heed the hint thrown out by the physician.
The suspected woman was forcibly brought by Gilbert
Pickering, an uncle of the children, into their presence.
The children at once fell upon the ground “strangely
tormented,” and insisted upon scratching Mother Samuel’s[48]
hand. Meantime Lady Cromwell[21] visited at the
Throckmorton house, and, after an interview with Alice
Samuel, suffered in her dreams from her till at length
she fell ill and died, something over a year later. This
confirmed what had been suspicion. To detail all the
steps taken to prove Mother Samuel guilty is unnecessary.
A degree of caution was used which was remarkable.
Henry Pickering, a relative, and some of
his fellow scholars at Cambridge made an investigation
into the case, but decided with the others that the
woman was guilty. Mother Samuel herself laid the
whole trouble to the children’s “wantonness.” Again
and again she was urged by the children to confess.
“Such were the heavenly and divine speeches of the
children in their fits to this old woman … as that if a
man had heard it he would not have thought himself
better edified at ten sermons.” The parents pleaded
with her to admit her responsibility for the constantly
recurring sickness of their children, but she denied
bitterly that she was to blame. She was compelled to
live at the Throckmorton house and to be a witness
constantly to the strange behavior of the children. The
poor creature was dragged back and forth, watched and
experimented upon in a dozen ways, until it is little
wonder that she grew ill and spent her nights in groaning.
She was implored to confess and told that all
might yet be well. For a long time she persisted in her
denial, but at length in a moment of weakness, when
the children had come out of their fits at her chance
exhortation to them, she became convinced that she was
guilty and exclaimed, “O sir, I have been the cause
[49]of all this trouble to your children.” The woman, who
up to this time had shown some spirit, had broken
down. She now confessed that she had given her soul
to the Devil. A clergyman was hastily sent for, who
preached a sermon of repentance, upon which the distracted
woman made a public confession. But on the
next day, after she had been refreshed by sleep and
had been in her own home again, she denied her confession.
The constable now prepared to take the woman
as well as her daughter to the Bishop of Lincoln, and
the frightened creature again made a confession. In
the presence of the bishop she reiterated her story in
detail and gave the names of her spirits. She was put in
gaol at Huntingdon and with her were imprisoned her
daughter Agnes and her husband John Samuel, who
were now accused by the Throckmorton children, and
all three were tried at the assizes in Huntingdon before
Judge Fenner. The facts already narrated were given
in evidence, the seizures of the children at the appearance
of any of the Samuel family[22], the certainty with
which the children could with closed eyes pick Mother
Samuel out of a crowd and scratch her, the confessions
of the crazed creature, all these evidences were given
to the court. But the strongest proof was that given
in the presence of the court. The daughter Agnes
Samuel was charged to repeat, “As I am a witch and
consenting to the death of Lady Cromwell, I charge
thee, come out of her.”[23] At this charge the children
would at once recover from their fits. But a charge
[50]phrased negatively, “As I am no witch,” was ineffectual.
And the affirmative charge, when tried by
some other person, had no result. This was deemed
conclusive proof. The woman was beyond doubt guilty.
The same method was applied with equally successful
issue to the father. When he refused to use the words
of the charge he was warned by the judge that he would
endanger his life. He gave way.

It is needless to say that the grand jury arraigned
all three of the family and that the “jury of life and
death” found them guilty. It needed but a five hours’
trial.[24] The mother was induced to plead pregnancy as
a delay to execution, but after an examination by a
jury was adjudged not pregnant. The daughter had
been urged to make the same defence, but spiritedly
replied, “It shall never be said that I was both a witch
and a whore.” At the execution the mother made another
confession, in which she implicated her husband,
but refused to the end to accuse her daughter.

From beginning to end it had been the strong against
the weak. Sir Robert Throckmorton, Sir Henry Cromwell,
William Wickham, Bishop of Lincoln, the justices
of the peace, Justice Fenner of the king’s court, the Cambridge
scholars, the “Doctor of Divinitie,” and two
other clergymen, all were banded together against this
poor but respectable family. In some respects the trial
reminds us of one that was to take place ninety-nine
years later in Massachusetts. The part played by the
children in the two instances was very similar. Mother
Samuel had hit the nail on the head when she said that
the trouble was due to the children’s “wantonness.”
[51]Probably the first child had really suffered from some
slight ailment. The others were imitators eager to gain
notice and pleased with their success; and this fact was
realized by some people at the time. “It had been reported
by some in the county, those that thought themselves
wise, that this Mother Samuel … was an old
simple woman, and that one might make her by fayre
words confesse what they would.” Moreover the tone of
the writer’s defense makes it evident that others beside
Mother Samuel laid the action of the Throckmorton
children to “wantonness.” And six years later Samuel
Harsnett, chaplain to the Bishop of London and a
man already influential, called the account of the affair
“a very ridiculous booke” and evidently believed the
children guilty of the same pretences as William Somers,
whose confessions of imposture he was relating.[25]

We have already observed that the Warboys affair
was the only celebrated trial of its sort in the last part
of Elizabeth’s reign—that is, from the time of Reginald
Scot to the accession of James I. This does not mean
that the superstition was waning or that the trials were
on the decrease. The records show that the number
of trials was steadily increasing. They were more
widely distributed. London was still the centre of
the belief. Chief-Justice Anderson sent Joan Kerke
to Tyburn and the Middlesex sessions were still occupied
with accusations. The counties adjacent to it
could still claim more than two-thirds of the executions.
But a far wider area was infected with the superstition.
Norfolk in East Anglia, Leicester, Nottingham and
[52]Derby in the Midlands, and York and Northumberland
in the North were all involved.

The truth is that there are two tendencies that appear
very clearly towards the last part of Elizabeth’s reign.
On the one hand the feeling of the people against
witchcraft was growing in intensity, while on the other
the administration at London was inclined to be more
lenient. Pardons and reprieves were issued to women
already condemned,[26] while some attempt was made
to curb popular excitement. The attitude of the queen
towards the celebrated John Dee was an instance in
point. Dee was an eminent alchemist, astrologer, and
spiritualist of his time. He has left a diary which
shows us his half mystic, half scientific pursuits. In
the earlier part of Mary’s reign he had been accused of
attempting poison or magic against the queen and had
been imprisoned and examined by the privy council
and by the Star Chamber. At Elizabeth’s accession he
had cast the horoscope for her coronation day, and he
was said to have revealed to the queen who were her
enemies at foreign courts. More than once afterwards
Dee was called upon by the queen to render her services
when she was ill or when some mysterious design
against her person was feared. While he dealt with
many curious things, he had consistently refused to meddle
with conjuring. Indeed he had rebuked the conjurer
Hartley and had refused to help the bewitched Margaret
Byrom of Cleworth in Lancashire. Sometime
about 1590 Dee’s enemies—and he had many—put in
circulation stories of his success as a conjurer. It was
[53]the more easy to do, because for a long time he had
been suspected by many of unlawful dealings with
spirits. His position became dangerous. He appealed
to Elizabeth for protection and she gave him assurance
that he might push on with his studies. Throughout
her life the queen continued to stand by Dee,[27] and it
was not until a new sovereign came to the throne that
he again came into danger. But the moral of the incident
is obvious. The privy council, so nervous about
the conjurers in the days of Mary, Queen of Scots,
and the Catholic and Spanish plots, was now resting
easier and refused to be affrighted.

We have already referred to the pardons issued as one
of the evidences of the more lenient policy of the government.
That policy appeared too in the lessening
rigor of the assize judges. The first half of Elizabeth’s
reign had been marked by few acquittals. Nearly half
the cases of which we have record in the second part
resulted in the discharge of the accused. Whether the
judges were taking their cue from the privy council
or whether some of them were feeling the same reaction
against the cruelty of the prosecutions, it is certain
that there was a considerable nullifying of the
force of the belief. We shall see in the chapter on
Reginald Scot that his Discoverie of Witchcraft was
said to have “affected the magistracy and the clergy.”
It is hard to lay one’s finger upon influences of this
sort, but we can hardly doubt that there was some connection
between Scot’s brave indictment of the witch-triers
and the lessening severity of court verdicts.
[54]When George Gifford, the non-conformist clergyman
at Maiden, wrote his Dialogue concerning Witches, in
which he earnestly deprecated the conviction of so
many witches, he dedicated the book “to the Right
Worshipful Maister Robert Clarke, one of her Maiesties
Barons of her Highnesse Court of the Exchequer,”
and wrote that he had been “delighted to heare and see
the wise and godly course used upon the seate of justice
by your worship, when such have bene arraigned.”
Unfortunately there is not much evidence of this kind.

One other fact must not be overlooked. A large percentage
of the cases that went against the accused were
in towns judicially independent of the assize courts.
At Faversham, at Lynn, at Yarmouth, and at Leicester[28]
the local municipal authorities were to blame for
the hanging of witches. The regular assize courts had
nothing to do with the matter. The case at Faversham
in Kent was unusual. Joan Cason was indicted for bewitching
to death a three-year-old child. Eight of her
neighbors, seven of them women, “poore people,”
testified against her. The woman took up her own
cause with great spirit and exposed the malicious dealings
of her adversaries and also certain controversies
betwixt her and them. “But although she satisfied
the bench,” says Holinshed, “and all the jurie touching
hir innocencie … she … confessed that a little vermin,
being of colour reddish, of stature lesse than a rat
… did … haunt her house.” She was willing too to
admit illicit relations with one Mason, whose housekeeper
she had been—probably the original cause of her
[55]troubles. The jury acquitted her of witchcraft, but
found her guilty of the “invocation of evil spirits,” intending
to send her to the pillory. While the mayor
was admonishing her, a lawyer called attention to the
point that the invocation of evil spirits had been made
a felony. The mayor sentenced the woman to execution.
But, “because there was no matter of invocation
given in evidence against hir, … hir execution was
staied by the space of three daies.” Sundry preachers
tried to wring confessions from her, but to no purpose.
Yet she made so godly an end, says the chronicler, that
“manie now lamented hir death which were before hir
utter enimies.”[29] The case illustrates vividly the clumsiness
of municipal court procedure. The mayor’s
court was unfamiliar with the law and utterly unable
to avert the consequences of its own finding. In the
regular assize courts, Joan Cason would probably have
been sentenced to four public appearances in the
pillory.

The differences between the first half and the second
half of Elizabeth’s reign have not been deemed
wide enough by the writer to justify separate treatment.
The whole reign was a time when the superstition
was gaining ground. Yet in the span of years
from Reginald Scot to the death of Elizabeth there was
enough of reaction to justify a differentiation of statistics.
In both periods, and more particularly in the first,
we may be sure that some of the records have been
lost and that a thorough search of local archives
would reveal some trials of which we have at present
[56]no knowledge. It was a time rich in mention of witch
trials, but a time too when but few cases were fully described.
Scot’s incidental references to the varied experiences
of Sir Roger Manwood and of his uncle Sir
Thomas Scot merely confirm an impression gained
from the literature of the time that the witch executions
were becoming, throughout the seventies and early
eighties, too common to be remarkable. For the second
period we have record of probably a larger percentage
of all the cases. For the whole time from 1563,
when the new law went into effect, down to 1603, we
have records of nearly fifty executions. Of these just
about two-thirds occurred in the earlier period, while
of the acquittals two-thirds belong to the later period.
It would be rash to attach too much significance to these
figures. As a matter of fact, the records are so incomplete
that the actual totals have little if any meaning
and only the proportions can be considered.[30] Yet it
looks as if the forces which caused the persecution of
witches in England were beginning to abate; and it may
fairly be inquired whether some new factor may not
have entered into the situation. It is time to speak of
Reginald Scot and of the exorcists.

CHAPTER III.

Reginald Scot.

From the chronicling of witch trials we turn aside[57]
in this chapter to follow the career of the first great
English opponent of the superstition. We have seen
how the attack upon the supposed creatures of the
Devil was growing stronger throughout the reign of
Elizabeth. We shall see how that attack was checked,
at least in some degree, by the resistance of one man.
Few men of so quiet and studious life have wrought so
effectively as Reginald Scot. He came of a family well
known in Kent, but not politically aggressive. As a
young man he studied at Hart Hall[1] in Oxford, but
left without taking his degree and returned to Scots-Hall,
where he settled down to the routine duties of
managing his estate. He gave himself over, we are
told, to husbandry and gardening and to a solid course
of general reading in the obscure authors that had “by
the generality been neglected.” In 1574 his studies in
horticulture resulted in the publication of A Perfect
Platforme of a Hoppe-Garden and necessary instructions
for the making and maintaining thereof. That
the book ministered to a practical interest was evidenced
by the call for three editions within five years.
Whether he now applied himself to the study of that
subject which was to be the theme of his Discoverie,
we do not know. It was a matter which had doubtless
[58]arrested his attention even earlier and had enlisted a
growing interest upon his part. Not until a decade
after his Hoppe-Garden, however, did he put forth the
epoch-making Discoverie. Nor does it seem likely that
he had been engaged for a long period on the actual
composition. Rather, the style and matter of the book
seem to evince traces of hurry in preparation. If this
theory be true—and Mr. Brinsley Nicholson, his modern
commentator, has adduced excellent reasons for accepting
it[2]—there can be but one explanation, the St.
Oses affair. That tragedy, occurring within a short
distance of his own home, had no doubt so outraged
his sense of justice, that the work which he had perhaps
long been contemplating he now set himself to
complete as soon as possible.[3] Even he who runs may
read in Scot’s strong sentences that he was not writing
for instruction only, to propound a new doctrine, but
that he was battling with the single purpose to stop a
detestable and wicked practice. Something of a dilettante
in real life, he became in his writing a man with
an absorbing mission. That mission sprang not indeed
from indignation at the St. Oses affair alone. From the
days of childhood his experience had been of a kind to
encourage skepticism. He had been reared in a county
where Elizabeth Barton, the Holy Maid of Kent, first
came into prominence, and he had seen the downfall
that followed her public exposure.[4] In the year after he
[59]brought out his Hoppe-garden, his county was again
stirred by performances of a supposedly supernatural
character. Mildred Norrington, a girl of seventeen,[5] used
ventriloquism with such skill that she convinced two
clergymen and all her neighbors that she was possessed.
In answer to queries, the evil spirit that spoke through
Mildred declared that “old Alice of Westwell”[6] had sent
him to possess the girl. Alice, the spirit admitted, stood
guilty of terrible witchcrafts. The demon’s word was
taken, and Alice seems to have been “arraigned upon
this evidence.”[7] But, through the justices’ adroit management
of the trial, the fraud of the accuser was exposed.
She confessed herself a pretender and suffered
“condign punishment.” This case happened within six
miles of Scot’s home and opened his eyes to the possibility
of humbug. In the very same year two pretenders,
Agnes Bridges and Rachel Pinder, were convicted
in London. By vomiting pins and straws[8] they
had convinced many that they were bewitched, but the
trickery was soon found out and they were compelled
to do public penance at St. Paul’s.[9] We are not told
what was the fate of a detestable Mother Baker, who,
when consulted by the parents of a sick girl at New
[60]Romney in Kent, accused a neighbor woman.[10] She
said that the woman had made a waxen heart and
pricked it and by this means accomplished her evil purpose.
In order to prove her accusation, she had in the
mean time concealed the wax figure of a heart in the
house of the woman she accused, and then pretended
to find it.[11] It is some satisfaction to know that the malicious
creature—who, during the history of witchcraft,
had many imitators—was caught and compelled to
confess.

Scot learned, indeed, by observing marvels of this
sort[12]—what it is strange that many others did not
learn—to look upon displays of the supernatural with
a good deal of doubt. How much he had ever believed
in them we do not know. It is not unlikely that in common
with his generation he had, as a young man, held
a somewhat ill-defined opinion about the Devil’s use of
witches. The belief in that had come down, a comparatively
innocuous tradition, from a primitive period. It
was a subject that had not been raised in speculation or
for that matter in court rooms. But since Scot’s early
manhood all this had been changed. England had been
swept by a tidal wave of suspicion. Hazy theological
notions had been tightened into rigid convictions. Convictions
had passed into legislative statutes and instructions
to judges. The bench, which had at first
acted on the new laws with caution and a desire to detect
imposture, became infected with the fear and grew
more ready to discover witchcraft and to punish it. It
[61]is unnecessary to recapitulate the progress of a movement
already traced in the previous chapter. Suffice it
to say that the Kentish gentleman, familiarized with
accounts of imposture, was unwilling to follow the rising
current of superstition. Of course this is merely
another way of saying that Scot was unconventional
in his mental operations and thought the subject out
for himself with results variant from those of his own
generation. Here was a new abuse in England, here
was a wrong that he had seen spring up within his own
lifetime and in his own part of England. He made it
his mission as far as possible to right the wrong. “For
so much,” he says, “as the mightie helpe themselves
together, and the poore widowes crie, though it reach to
heaven, is scarse heard here upon earth: I thought
good (according to my poore abilitie) to make intercession,
that some part of common rigor, and some
points of hastie judgement may be advised upon.”[13]

It was indeed a splendid mission and he was singularly
well equipped for it. He had the qualifications—scholarly
training and the power of scientific observation,
a background of broad theological and scriptural
information, a familiarity with legal learning and practice,
as well as a command of vigorous and incisive language—which
were certain to make his work effective
towards its object.

That he was a scholar is true in more senses than one.
In his use of deduction from classical writers he was
something of a scholastic, in his willingness to venture
into new fields of thought he was a product of the Renaissance,
in his thorough use of research he reminds us
of a modern investigator. He gives in his book a bib[62]liography
of the works consulted by him and one counts
over two hundred Latin and thirty English titles. His
reading had covered the whole field of superstition. To
Cornelius Agrippa and to Wierus (Johann Weyer),[14]
who had attacked the tyranny of superstition upon the
Continent, he owed an especial debt. He had not, however,
borrowed enough from them to impair in any
serious way the value of his own original contribution.

In respect to law, Scot was less a student than a man
of experience. The Discoverie, however, bristled with
references which indicated a legal way of thinking. He
was almost certainly a man who had used the law.
Brinsley Nicholson believes that he had been a justice
of the peace. In any case he had a lawyer’s sense of the
value of evidence and a lawyer’s way of putting his
case.

No less practical was his knowledge of theology and
scripture. Here he had to meet the baffling problems
of the Witch of Endor. The story of the witch who
had called up before the frightened King Saul the
spirit of the dead Samuel and made him speak, stood as
a lion in the path of all opponents of witch persecution.
When Scot dared to explain this Old Testament tale
as an instance of ventriloquism, and to compare it to
the celebrated case of Mildred Norrington, he showed
a boldness in interpretation of the Bible far in advance
of his contemporaries.

His anticipation of present-day points of view
cropped out perhaps more in his scientific spirit than in
[63]any other way. For years before he put pen to paper
he had been conducting investigations into alleged cases
of conjuring and witchcraft, attending trials,[15] and
questioning clergymen and magistrates. For such observation
he was most favorably situated and he used his
position in his community to further his knowledge. A
man almost impertinently curious was this sixteenth-century
student. When he learned of a conjurer whose
sentence of death had been remitted by the queen and
who professed penitence for his crimes, he opened a
correspondence and obtained from the man the clear
statement that his conjuries were all impostures. The
prisoner referred him to “a booke written in the old
Saxon toong by one Sir John Malborne, a divine of
Oxenford, three hundred yeares past,” in which all
these trickeries are cleared up. Scot put forth his best
efforts to procure the work from the parson to whom it
had been entrusted, but without success.[16] In another
case he attended the assizes at Rochester, where a
woman was on trial. One of her accusers was the vicar
of the parish, who made several charges, not the least
of which was that he could not enunciate clearly in
church owing to enchantment. This explanation Scot
carried to her and she was able to give him an explanation
much less creditable to the clergyman of the
ailment, an explanation which Scot found confirmed
by an enquiry among the neighbors. To quiet such
rumors in the community about the nature of the illness
the vicar had to procure from London a medical
certificate that it was a lung trouble.[17]

[64]

Can we wonder that a student at such pains to discover
the fact as to a wrong done should have used
barbed words in the portrayal of injustice? Strong
convictions spurred on his pen, already taught to shape
vigorous and incisive sentences. Not a stylist, as measured
by the highest Elizabethan standards of charm and
mellifluence, he possessed a clearness and directness
which win the modern reader. By his methods of analysis
he displayed a quality of mind akin to and probably
influenced by that of Calvin, while his intellectual
attitude showed the stimulus of the Reformation.

He was indeed in his own restricted field a reformer.
He was not only the protagonist of a new cause, but a
pioneer who had to cut through the underbrush of
opinion a pathway for speculation to follow. So far
as England was concerned, Scot found no philosophy
of the subject, no systematic defences or assaults upon
the loosely constructed theory of demonic agency.
It was for him to state in definite terms the beliefs he
was seeking to overthrow. The Roman church knew
fairly well by this time what it meant by witchcraft,
but English theologians and philosophers would
hardly have found common ground on any one tenet
about the matter.[18] Without exaggeration it may be
asserted that Scot by his assault all along the front
forced the enemy’s advance and in some sense dictated
his line of battle.

The assault was directed indeed against the centre
of the opposing entrenchments, the belief in the con[65]tinuance
of miracles. Scot declared that with Christ
and his apostles the age of miracles had passed, an
opinion which he supported by the authority of Calvin
and of St. Augustine. What was counted the supernatural
assumed two forms—the phenomena exhibited
by those whom he classed under the wide term of
“couseners,” and the phenomena said to be exhibited
by the “poor doting women” known as witches. The
tricks and deceits of the “couseners” he was at great
pains to explain. Not less than one-third of his work
is given up to setting forth the methods of conjurers,
card tricks, sleight-of-hand performances, illusions of
magic, materializations of spirits, and the wonders of
alchemy and astrology. In the range of his information
about these subjects, the discoverer was encyclopedic.
No current form of dabbling with the supernatural
was left unexposed.

In his attack upon the phenomena of witchcraft he
had a different problem. He had to deal with phenomena
the so-called facts of which were not susceptible
of any material explanation. The theory of a Devil
who had intimate relations with human beings, who
controlled them and sent them out upon maleficent
errands, was in its essence a theological conception
and could not be absolutely disproved by scientific
observation. It was necessary instead to attack the
idea on its a priori grounds. This attack Scot attempted
to base on the nature of spirits. Spirits and
bodies, he urged, are antithetical and inconvertible,
nor can any one save God give spirit a bodily form.
The Devil, a something beyond our comprehension,
cannot change spirit into body, nor can he himself
assume a bodily form, nor has he any power save that[66]
granted him by God for vengeance. This being true,
the whole belief in the Devil’s intercourse with witches
is undermined. Such, very briefly, were the philosophic
bases of Scot’s skepticism. Yet the more cogent
parts of his work were those in which he denied the
validity of any evidence so far offered for the existence
of witches. What is witchcraft? he asked; and
his answer is worth quoting. “Witchcraft is in truth
a cousening art, wherin the name of God is abused,
prophaned and blasphemed, and his power attributed
to a vile creature. In estimation of the vulgar people,
it is a supernaturall worke, contrived betweene a corporall
old woman, and a spirituall divell. The maner
thereof is so secret, mysticall, and strange, that to this
daie there hath never beene any credible witnes
thereof.”[19] The want of credible evidence was indeed
a point upon which Scot continually insisted
with great force. He pictured vividly the course which
a witchcraft case often ran: “One sort of such as are
said to bee witches are women which be commonly
old, lame, bleare-eied, pale, fowle, and full of wrinkles;
… they are leane and deformed, shewing melancholie
in their faces; … they are doting, scolds, mad, divelish….
These miserable wretches are so odious unto all
their neighbors, and so feared, as few dare offend them,
or denie them anie thing they aske: whereby they take
upon them, yea, and sometimes thinke, that they can
doo such things as are beyond the abilitie of humane
nature. These go from house to house, and from doore
to doore for a pot of milke, yest, drinke, pottage, or
some such releefe; without the which they could hardlie
[67]live…. It falleth out many times, that neither their
necessities, nor their expectation is answered…. In
tract of time the witch waxeth odious and tedious to
hir neighbors; … she cursseth one, and sometimes another;
and that from the maister of the house, his wife,
children, cattell, etc. to the little pig that lieth in the
stie…. Doubtlesse (at length) some of hir neighbours
die, or fall sicke.”[20] Then they suspect her, says
Scot, and grow convinced that she is the author of their
mishaps. “The witch, … seeing things sometimes
come to passe according to hir wishes, … being called
before a Justice, … confesseth that she hath brought
such things to passe. Wherein, not onelie she, but the
accuser, and also the Justice are fowlie deceived and
abused.”[21] Such indeed was the epitome of many
cases. The process from beginning to end was never
better described; the ease with which confessions were
dragged from weak-spirited women was never pictured
more truly. With quite as keen insight he displayed
the motives that animated witnesses and described
the prejudices and fears that worked on jurors and
judges. It was, indeed, upon these factors that he
rested the weight of his argument for the negative.[22]

The affirmative opinion was grounded, he believed,
upon the ignorance of the common people, “assotted
[68]and bewitched” by the jesting or serious words of
poets, by the inventions of “lowd liers and couseners,”
and by “tales they have heard from old doting women,
or from their mother’s maids, and with whatsoever the
grandfoole their ghostlie father or anie other morrow
masse preest had informed them.”[23]

By the same method by which he opposed the belief
in witchcraft he opposed the belief in possession by an
evil spirit. The known cases, when examined, proved
frauds. The instances in the New Testament he
seemed inclined to explain by the assumption that possession
merely meant disease.[24]

That Scot should maintain an absolute negative in
the face of all strange phenomena would have been too
much to expect. He seems to have believed, though
not without some difficulty, that stones had in them
“certaine proper vertues which are given them of a
speciall influence of the planets.” The unicorn’s horn,
he thought, had certain curative properties. And he
had heard “by credible report” and the affirmation of
“many grave authors” that “the wound of a man
murthered reneweth bleeding at the presence of a deere
freend, or of a mortall enimie.”[25]

His credulity in these points may be disappointing
to the reader who hopes to find in Scot a scientific
rationalist. That, of course, he was not; and his leaning
towards superstition on these points makes one
ask, What did he really believe about witchcraft?
When all the fraud and false testimony and self-deception
were excluded, what about the remaining cases
[69]of witchcraft? Scot was very careful never to deny in
toto the existence of witches. That would have been
to deny the Bible. What were these witches, then?
Doubtless he would have answered that he had already
classified them under two heads: they were either
“couseners” or “poor doting women”—and by
“couseners” he seems to have meant those who used
trickery and fraud. In other words, Scot distinctly
implied that there were no real witches—with powers
given them by the Devil. Would he have stood by this
when pushed into a corner? It is just possible that he
would have done so, that he understood his own implications,
but hardly dared to utter a straighforward
denial of the reality of witchcraft. It is more likely
that he had not altogether thought himself out.

The immediate impression of Scot’s book we know
little about. Such contemporary comment as we have
is neutral.[26] That his book was read painstakingly by
every later writer on the subject, that it shortly became
the great support of one party in the controversy, that
King James deemed it worth while to write an answer,
and that on his accession to the throne he almost certainly
ordered the book to be burned by the common
[70]hangman,[27] these are better evidence than absolutely
contemporary notices to show that the Discoverie exerted
an influence.

We cannot better suggest how radical Scot’s position
must have seemed to his own time than by showing
the point of view of another opponent of witchcraft,
George Gifford, a non-conformist clergyman.[28] He
had read the Discoverie and probably felt that the theological
aspect of the subject had been neglected.
Moreover it had probably been his fortune, as Scot’s,
to attend the St. Oses trials. Three years after Scot’s
book he brought out A Discourse of the Subtill Practises
of Devilles by Witches, and followed it six years
later by A Dialogue concerning Witches,[29] a book in
which he expounded his opinions in somewhat more
popular fashion. Like Scot, he wrote to end, so far as
possible, the punishment of innocent women;[30] like
Scot, he believed that most of the evidence presented
against them was worthless.[31] But on other points he
[71]was far less radical. There were witches. He found
them in the Bible.[32] To be sure they were nothing more
than pawns for the Devil. He uses them “onely for a
colour,”[33] that is, puts them forward to cover his own
dealings, and then he deludes them and makes them
“beleeve things which are nothing so.”[34] In consequence
they frequently at their executions falsely accuse
others of dreadful witchcrafts. It is all the work
of the Devil. But he himself cannot do anything except
through the power of God,[35] who, sometimes for
vengeance upon His enemies and sometimes to try His
own people,[36] permits the Evil One to do harm.[37]

[72]

Gifford of course never made the impression that
Scot had made.[38] But he represented the more conservative
position and was the first in a long line of
writers who deprecated persecution while they accepted
the current view as to witchcraft; and therefore he furnishes
a standard by which to measure Scot, who had
nothing of the conservative about him. Scot had
many readers and exerted a strong influence even upon
those who disagreed with him; but he had few or none
to follow in his steps. It was not until nearly a century
later that there came upon the scene a man who dared
to speak as Scot had spoken. Few men have been so
far ahead of their time.

CHAPTER IV.

The Exorcists.

In the narrative of English witchcraft the story of[73]
the exorcists is a side-issue. Yet their performances
were so closely connected with the operations of the
Devil and of his agents that they cannot be left out of
account in any adequate statement of the subject. And
it is impossible to understand the strength and weakness
of the superstition without a comprehension of the rôle
that the would-be agents for expelling evil spirits
played. That the reign which had seen pass in procession
the bands of conjurers and witches should
close with the exorcists was to be expected. It was
their part to complete the cycle of superstition. If
miracles of magic were possible, if conjurers could use
a supernatural power of some sort to assist them in
performing wonders, there was nothing very remarkable
about creatures who wrought harm to their fellows
through the agency of evil spirits. And if witches
could send evil spirits to do harm, it followed that those
spirits could be expelled or exorcised by divine assistance.
If by prayer to the Devil demons could be
commanded to enter human beings, they could be driven
out by prayer to God. The processes of reasoning
were perfectly clear; and they were easily accepted
because they found adequate confirmation in the New
Testament. The gospels were full of narratives of men
possessed with evil spirits who had been freed by the
invocation of God. Of these stories no doubt the most
quoted and the one most effective in moulding opinion[74]
was the account of the dispossessed devils who had
entered into a herd of swine and plunged over a steep
place into the sea.

It must not be supposed that exorcism was a result
of belief in witchcraft. It was as old as the Christian
church. It was still made use of by the Roman
church and, indeed, by certain Protestant groups. And
just at this time the Roman church found it a most
important instrument in the struggle against the reformed
religions. In England Romanism was waging
a losing war, and had need of all the miracles that it
could claim in order to reestablish its waning credit.
The hunted priests who were being driven out by Whitgift
were not unwilling to resort to a practice which
they hoped would regain for them the allegiance of the
common people. During the years 1585-1586 they had
conducted what they considered marvellous works of
exorcism in Catholic households of Buckinghamshire
and Middlesex.[1] Great efforts had been made to keep
news of these séances from reaching the ears of the
government, but accounts of them had gained wide
circulation and came to the privy council. That body
was of course stimulated to greater activity against the
Catholics.[2]

[75]

As a phase of a suppressed form of religion the matter
might never have assumed any significance. Had not
a third-rate Puritan clergyman, John Darrel, almost
by accident hit upon the use of exorcism, the story of
its use would be hardly worth telling.[3] When this
young minister was not more than twenty, but already,
as he says, reckoned “a man of hope,” he was asked to
cure a seventeen-year-old girl at Mansfield in Nottingham,
Katherine Wright.[4] Her disease called for simple
medical treatment. That was not Darrel’s plan of
operation. She had an evil spirit, he declared. From
four o’clock in the morning until noon he prayed over
her spirit. He either set going of his own initiative
the opinion that possessed persons could point out
witches, or he quickly availed himself of such a belief
already existing. The evil spirit, he declared, could
recognize and even name the witch that had sent it as
well as the witch’s confederates. All of this was no
doubt suggested to the possessed girl and she was soon
induced to name the witch that troubled her. This was
Margaret Roper, a woman with whom she was upon
bad terms. Margaret Roper was at once taken into
custody by the constable. She happened to be brought
before a justice of the peace possessing more than usual
discrimination. He not only discharged her,[5] but
threatened John Darrel with arrest.[6]

This was in 1586. Darrel disappeared from view
[76]for ten years or so, when he turned up at Burton-upon-Trent,
not very far from the scene of his first operations.
Here he volunteered to cure Thomas Darling. The
story is a curious one and too long for repetition. Some
facts must, however, be presented in order to bring the
story up to the point at which Darrel intervened.
Thomas Darling, a young Derbyshire boy, had become
ill after returning from a hunt. He was afflicted with
innumerable fits, in which he saw green angels and a
green cat. His aunt very properly consulted a physician,
who at the second consultation thought it possible
that the child was bewitched. The aunt failed
to credit the diagnosis. The boy’s fits continued and
soon took on a religious character. Between seizures
he conversed with godly people. They soon discovered
that the reading of the Scriptures brought on attacks.
This looked very like the Devil’s work. The suggestion
of the physician was more seriously regarded.
Meanwhile the boy had overheard the discussion of
witchcraft and proceeded to relate a story. He had
met, he said, a “little old woman” in a “gray gown with
a black fringe about the cape, a broad thrimmed hat,
and three warts on her face.”[7] Very accidentally, as he
claimed, he offended her. She angrily said a rhyming
charm that ended with the words, “I wil goe to heaven,
and thou shalt goe to hell,” and stooped to the ground.

The story produced a sensation. Those who heard it
declared at once that the woman must have been Elizabeth
Wright, or her daughter Alse Gooderidge, women
long suspected of witchcraft. Alse was fetched to the
boy. She said she had never seen him, but her pres[77]ence
increased the violence of his fits. Mother and
daughter were carried before two justices of the peace,
who examined them together with Alse’s husband and
daughter. The women were searched for special marks
in the usual revolting manner with the usual outcome,
but only Alse herself was sent to gaol.[8]

The boy grew no better. It was discovered that the
reading of certain verses in the first chapter of John
invariably set him off.[9] The justices of the peace put
Alse through several examinations, but with little result.
Two good witches were consulted, but refused to help
unless the family of the bewitched came to see them.

Meantime a cunning man appeared who promised
to prove Alse a witch. In the presence of “manie
worshipfull personages” “he put a paire of new shooes
on her feete, setting her close to the fire till the shooes
being extreame hot might constrayne her through increase
of the paine to confesse.” “This,” says the
writer, “was his ridiculous practice.” The woman
“being throghly heated desired a release” and offered
to confess, but, as soon as her feet were cooled, refused.
No doubt the justices of the peace would have repudiated
the statement that the illegal process of torture
was used. The methods of the cunning man were really
nothing else.

[78]

The woman was harried day and night by neighbors
to bring her to confess.[10] At length she gave way and,
in a series of reluctant confessions, told a crude story
of her wrong-doings that bore some slight resemblance
to the boy’s tale, and involved the use of a spirit in the
form of a dog.

Now it was that John Darrel came upon the ground
eager to make a name for himself. Darling had been
ill for three months and was not improving. Even yet
some of the boy’s relatives and friends doubted if he
were possessed. Not so Darrel. He at once undertook
to pray and fast for the boy. According to his own
account his efforts were singularly blessed. At all
events the boy gradually improved and Darrel claimed
the credit. As for Alse Gooderidge, she was tried at
the assizes, convicted by the jury, and sentenced by
Lord Chief-Justice Anderson to imprisonment. She
died soon after.[11] This affair undoubtedly widened
Darrel’s reputation.

Not long after, a notable case of possession in Lancashire
afforded him a new opportunity to attract notice.
The case of Nicholas Starchie’s children provoked
so much comment at the time that it is perhaps
worth while to go back and bring the narrative up to
the point where Darrel entered.[12] Two of Starchie’s
[79]children had one day been taken ill most mysteriously,
the girl “with a dumpish and heavie countenance, and
with a certaine fearefull starting and pulling together
of her body.” The boy was “compelled to
shout” on the way to school. Both grew steadily
worse[13] and the father consulted Edmund Hartley, a
noted conjurer of his time. Hartley quieted the children
by the use of charms. When he realized that his
services would be indispensable to the father he made
a pretence of leaving and so forced a promise from
Starchie to pay him 40 shillings a year. This ruse was
so successful that he raised his demands. He asked
for a house and lot, but was refused. The children fell
ill again. The perplexed parent now went to a physician
of Manchester. But the physician “sawe no signe
of sicknes.” Dr. Dee, the famous astrologer and
friend of Elizabeth, was summoned. He advised the
help of “godlie preachers.”[14]

Meantime the situation in the afflicted family took a
more serious turn. Besides Mr. Starchie’s children,
three young wards of his, a servant, and a visitor, were
all taken with the mysterious illness. The modern
[80]reader might suspect that some contagious disease had
gripped the family, but the irregular and intermittent
character of the disease precludes that hypothesis. Darrel
in his own pamphlet on the matter declares that
when the parents on one occasion went to a play the
children were quiet, but that when they were engaged
in godly exercise they were tormented, a statement
that raises a suspicion that the disease, like that of the
Throckmorton children, was largely imaginary.

But the divines were at work. They had questioned
the conjurer, and had found that he fumbled “verie
ill favouredlie” in the repetition of the Lord’s Prayer.
He was haled before a justice of the peace, who began
gathering evidence against him and turned him over
to the assizes. There it came out that he had been
wont to kiss the Starchie children, and had even attempted,
although without success, to kiss a maid servant.
In this way he had presumably communicated
the evil spirit—a new notion. The court could find no
law, however, upon which to hang him. He had bewitched
the children, but he had bewitched none of
them to death, and therefore had not incurred the
death penalty. But the father leaped into the gap.
He remembered that he had seen the conjurer draw a
magic circle and divide it into four parts and that he
had bidden the witness step into the quarters one after
another. Making such circles was definitely mentioned
in the law as felony. Hartley denied the charge, but to
no purpose. He was convicted of felony[15]—so far as
we can judge, on this unsupported afterthought of a
single witness—and was hanged. Sympathy, however,
[81]would be inappropriate. In the whole history of witchcraft
there were few victims who came so near to deserving
their fate.

This was the story up to the time of Darrel’s arrival.
With Darrel came his assistant, George More, pastor
of a church in Derbyshire. The two at once recognized
the supernatural character of the case they were
to treat and began religious services for the stricken
family. It was to no effect. “All or most of them
joined together in a strange and supernatural loud
whupping that the house and grounde did sounde therwith
again.”

But the exorcists were not by any means disheartened.
On the following day, in company with another
minister, they renewed the services and were able to
expel six of the seven spirits. On the third day they
stormed and took the last citadel of Satan. Unhappily
the capture was not permanent. Darrel tells us himself
that the woman later became a Papist[16] and the
evil spirit returned.

The exorcist now turned his skill upon a young apprenticed
musician of Nottingham. According to Darrel’s
story of the affair,[17] William Somers had nine
years before met an old woman who had threatened
him. Again, more than a year before Darrel came to
Nottingham, Somers had had two encounters with a
strange woman “at a deep cole-pit, hard by the way-side.”
Soon afterwards he “did use such strang
and idle kinde of gestures in laughing, dancing and such
[82]like lighte behaviour, that he was suspected to be
madd.” He began to suffer from bodily distortions
and to evince other signs of possession which created
no little excitement in Nottingham.

Darrel had been sent for by this time. He came at
once and with his usual precipitancy pronounced the
case one of possession. Somers, he said, was suffering
for the sins of Nottingham.[18] It was time that
something should be done. Prayer and fasting were
instituted. For three days the youth was preached to
and prayed over, while the people of Nottingham, or
some of them at least, joined in the fast. On the third
day came what was deemed a most remarkable exhibition.
The preacher named slowly, one after another,
fourteen signs of possession. As he named them
Somers illustrated in turn each form of possession.[19]
Here was confirmatory evidence of a high order. The
exorcist had outdone himself. He now held out promises
of deliverance for the subject. For a quarter
of an hour the boy lay as if dead, and then rose up
quite well.

Darrel now took up again the witchfinder’s rôle he
had once before assumed. Somers was encouraged to
name the contrivers of his bewitchment. Through
him, Darrel is said to have boasted, they would expose
all the witches in England.[20] They made a most excellent
start at it. Thirteen women were accused by the
boy,[21] who would fall into fits at the sight of a witch,
[83]and a general invitation was extended to prefer charges.
But the community was becoming a bit incredulous
and failed to respond. All but two of the accused
women were released.

The witch-discoverer, who in the meantime had been
chosen preacher at St. Mary’s in Nottingham, made two
serious mistakes. He allowed accusations to be preferred
against Alice Freeman, sister of an alderman,[22]
and he let Somers be taken out of his hands. By the
contrivance of some citizens who doubted the possession,
Somers was placed in the house of correction, on
a trumped-up charge that he had bewitched a Mr. Sterland
to death.[23] Removed from the clergyman’s influence,
he made confession that his possessions were
pretended.[24] Darrel, he declared, had taught him how
to pretend. The matter had now gained wide notoriety
and was taken up by the Anglican church. The archdeacon
of Derby reported the affair to his superiors,
and the Archbishop of York appointed a commission
to examine into the case.[25] Whether from alarm or
because he had anew come under Darrel’s influence,
Somers refused to confess before the commission and
again acted out his fits with such success that the commission
seems to have been convinced of the reality of
his possession.[26] This was a notable victory for the
exorcist.

[84]

But Chief-Justice Anderson of the court of common
pleas was now commencing the assizes at Nottingham
and was sitting in judgment on the case of
Alice Freeman. Anderson was a man of intense convictions.
He believed in the reality of witchcraft and
had earlier sent at least one witch to the gallows[27] and
one to prison.[28] But he was a man who hated Puritanism
with all his heart, and would at once have suspected
Puritan exorcism. Whether because the arch-instigator
against Alice Freeman was a Puritan, or because
the evidence adduced against her was flimsy, or
because Somers, again summoned to court, acknowledged
his fraud,[29] or for all these reasons, Anderson
not only dismissed the case,[30] but he wrote a letter about
it to the Archbishop of Canterbury. Archbishop
Whitgift called Darrel and More before the court of
high commission, where the Bishop of London, two
of the Lord Chief-Justices, the master of requests,
and other eminent officials heard the case. It seems fairly
certain that Bancroft, the Bishop of London, really
took control of this examination and that he acted quite
as much the part of a prosecutor as that of a judge.
One of Darrel’s friends complained bitterly that the
exorcist was not allowed to make “his particular defences”
but “was still from time to time cut off by the
Lord Bishop of London.”[31] No doubt the bishop may
have been somewhat arbitrary. It was his privilege
[85]under the procedure of the high commission court, and
he was dealing with one whom he deemed a very evident
impostor. In fine, a verdict was rendered against
the two clergymen. They were deposed from the ministry
and put in close prison.[32] So great was the stir
they had caused that in 1599 Samuel Harsnett, chaplain
to the Bishop of London, published A Discovery of
the Fraudulent Practises of John Darrel, a careful
résumé of the entire case, with a complete exposure of
Darrel’s trickery. In this account the testimony of
Somers was given as to the origin of his possession.
He testified before the ecclesiastical court that he had
known Darrel several years before they had met at
Nottingham. At their first meeting he promised, declared
Somers, “to tell me some thinges, wherein if
I would be ruled by him, I should not be driven to goe
so barely as I did.” Darrel related to Somers the
story of Katherine Wright and her possession, and
remarked, “If thou wilt sweare unto me to keepe my
counsell, I will teache thee to doe all those trickes which
Katherine Wright did, and many others that are more
straunge.” He then illustrated some of the tricks for the
benefit of his pupil and gave him a written paper of
directions. From that time on there were meetings
between the two at various places. The pupil, however,
was not altogether successful with his fits and was
once turned out of service as a pretender. He was
then apprenticed to the musician already mentioned,
and again met Darrel, who urged him to go and see
Thomas Darling of Burton, “because,” says Somers,
“that seeing him in his fittes, I might the better learn to
do them myselfe.” Somers met Darrel again and went
[86]through with a series of tricks of possession. It was
after all these meetings and practice that Somers began
his career as a possessed person in Nottingham and
was prayed over by Mr. Darrel. Such at least was
his story as told to the ecclesiastical commission. It
would be hazardous to say that the narrative was all
true. Certainly it was accepted by Harsnett, who may
be called the official reporter of the proceedings at Darrel’s
trial, as substantially true.[33]

The publication of the Discovery by Harsnett proved
indeed to be only the beginning of a pamphlet controversy
which Darrel and his supporters were but too
willing to take up.[34] Harsnett himself after his first
onslaught did not re-enter the contest. The semi-official
character of his writing rendered it unnecessary to
refute the statements of a convicted man. At any rate,
he was soon occupied with another production of similar
aim. In 1602 Bishop Bancroft was busily collecting
the materials, in the form of sworn statements, for the
exposure of Catholic pretenders. He turned the material
over to his chaplain. Whether the several examinations
of Roman exorcists and their subjects were
the result of a new interest in exposing exorcism on
the part of the powers which had sent Darrel to prison,
or whether they were merely a phase of increased vigilance
against the activity of the Roman priests, we cannot
be sure. The first conclusion does not seem improbable.
Be that as it may, the court of high com[87]mission
got hold of evidence enough to justify the privy
council in authorizing a full publication of the testimony.[35]
Harsnett was deputed to write the account
of the Catholic exorcists which was brought out in
1603 under the title of A Declaration of Egregious
Popish Impostures. We have not the historical materials
with which to verify the claims made in the book.
On the face of it the case against the Roman priests
looks bad. A mass of examinations was printed which
seem to show that the Jesuit Weston and his confreres
in England had been guilty of a great deal of
jugglery and pretence. The Jesuits, however, were
wiser in their generation than the Puritans and had
not made charges of witchcraft. For that reason their
performances may be passed over.

Neither the pretences of the Catholics nor the refutation
of them are very important for our purposes.
The exposure of John Darrel was of significance, because
it involved the guilt or innocence of the women
he accused as witches, as well as because the ecclesiastical
authorities took action against him and thereby
levelled a blow directly at exorcism and possession[36] and
indirectly at loose charges of witchcraft. Harsnett’s
books were the outcome of this affair and the ensuing
exposures of the Catholics, and they were more sig[88]nificant
than anything that had gone before. The
Church of England had not committed itself very
definitely on witchcraft, but its spokesman in the attack
upon the Catholic pretenders took no uncertain
ground. He was skeptical not only about exorcism but
about witchcraft as well. It is refreshing and inspiriting
to read his hard-flung and pungent words.
“Out of these,” he wrote, “is shaped us the true Idea
of a Witch, an old weather-beaten Croane, having her
chinne and her knees meeting for age, walking like a
bow leaning on a shaft, hollow-eyed, untoothed, furrowed
on her face, having her lips trembling with the
palsie, going mumbling in the streetes, one that hath
forgotten her pater noster, and hath yet a shrewd
tongue in her head, to call a drab, a drab. If shee have
learned of an olde wife in a chimnies end: Pax, max,
fax, for a spel: or can say Sir John of Grantams curse,
for the Millers Eeles, that were stolne: … Why then
ho, beware, looke about you my neighbours; if any of
you have a sheepe sicke of the giddies, or an hogge of
[89]the mumps, or an horse of the staggers, or a knavish
boy of the schoole, or an idle girle of the wheele, or a
young drab of the sullens, and hath not fat enough for
her porredge, nor her father and mother butter enough
for their bread; and she have a little helpe of the
Mother, Epilepsie, or Cramp, … and then with-all
old mother Nobs hath called her by chaunce ‘idle young
huswife,’ or bid the devil scratch her, then no doubt
but mother Nobs is the witch…. Horace the Heathen
spied long agoe, that a Witch, a Wizard, and a Conjurer
were but bul-beggers to scare fooles…. And
Geoffry Chaucer, who had his two eyes, wit, and learning
in his head, spying that all these brainlesse imaginations
of witchings, possessings, house-hanting, and
the rest, were the forgeries, cosenages, Imposturs, and
legerdemaine of craftie priests, … writes in good
plaine terms.”[37]

It meant a good deal that Harsnett took such a stand.
Scot had been a voice crying in the wilderness. Harsnett
was supported by the powers in church and state.
He was, as has been seen, the chaplain of Bishop Bancroft,[38]
now—from 1604—to become Archbishop of
Canterbury. He was himself to become eminent in
English history as master of Pembroke Hall (Cambridge),
vice-chancellor of Cambridge University,
Bishop of Chichester, Bishop of Norwich, and Arch[90]bishop
of York.[39] Whatever support he had at the
time—and it is very clear that he had the backing of
the English church on the question of exorcism—his
later position and influence must have given great
weight not only to his views on exorcism but to his
skepticism about witchcraft.[40]

His opinions on the subject, so far as can be judged
by his few direct statements and by implications, were
quite as radical as those of his predecessor.[41] As a
matter of fact he was a man who read widely[42] and
had pondered deeply on the superstition, but his thought
had been colored by Scot.[43] His assault, however, was
less direct and studied than that of his master. Scot
was a man of uncommonly serious temperament, a
plain, blunt-spoken, church-going Englishman who
covered the whole ground of superstition without
turning one phrase less serious than another. His pupil,
if so Harsnett may be called, wrote earnestly, even ag[91]gressively,
but with a sarcastic and bitter humor that
entertained the reader and was much less likely to convince.
The curl never left his lips. If at times a smile
appeared, it was but an accented sneer. A writer with
a feeling indeed for the delicate effects of word combination,
if his humor had been less chilled by hate, if
his wit had been of a lighter and more playful vein,
he might have laughed superstition out of England.
When he described the dreadful power of holy water
and frankincense and the book of exorcisms “to scald,
broyle and sizzle the devil,” or “the dreadful power of
the crosse and sacrament of the altar to torment the
devill and to make him roare,” or “the astonishable
power of nicknames, reliques and asses ears,”[44] he
revealed a faculty of fun-making just short of effective
humor.

It would not be fair to leave Harsnett without a
word on his place as a writer. In point of literary distinction
his prose style maintains a high level. In the
use of forceful epithet and vivid phrase he is excelled
by no Elizabethan prose writer. Because his writings
deal so largely with dry-as-dust reports of examinations,
they have never attained to that position in English
literature which parts of them merit.[45]

Harsnett’s book was the last chapter in the story of
Elizabethan witchcraft and exorcism. It is hardly too
much to say that it was the first chapter in the literary
exploitation of witchcraft. Out of the Declaration
Shakespeare and Ben Jonson mined those ores which
when fused and refined by imagination and fancy
were shaped into the shining forms of art. Shake[92]spearean
scholars have pointed out the connection between
the dramatist and the exposer of exorcism. It
has indeed been suggested by one student of Shakespeare
that the great playwright was lending his aid by
certain allusions in Twelfth Night to Harsnett’s attempts
to pour ridicule on Puritan exorcism.[46] It would
be hard to say how much there is in this suggestion.
About Ben Jonson we can speak more certainly. It is
clearly evident that he sneered at Darrel’s pretended
possessions. In the third scene of the fifth act of The
Devil is an Ass he makes Mere-craft say:

This is proof enough, not only that Jonson was in
sympathy with the Anglican assailants of Puritan exorcism,
but that he expected to find others of like opinion
among those who listened to his play. And it was
not unreasonable that he should expect this. It is clear
enough that the powers of the Anglican church were
behind Harsnett and that their influence gave his views
weight. We have already observed that there were
some evidences in the last part of Elizabeth’s reign of
a reaction against witch superstition. Harsnett’s
book, while directed primarily against exorcism, is
nevertheless another proof of that reaction.

CHAPTER V.

James I and Witchcraft.

Some one has remarked that witchcraft came into[93]
England with the Stuarts and went out with them.
This offhand way of fixing the rise and fall of a movement
has just enough truth about it to cause misconception.
Nothing is easier than to glance at the alarms
of Elizabeth’s reign and to see in them accidental outbreaks
with little meaning, isolated affairs presaging
a new movement rather than part of it. As a matter
of fact, any such view is superficial. In previous chapters
the writer has endeavored to show just how foreign
ideas and conditions at home gave the impulse
to a movement which within a single reign took very
definite form.

Yet so much was the movement accelerated, such
additional impetus was given it by James I, that the
view that James set the superstition going in England,
however superficial, has some truth in it. If Elizabeth
had ever given the matter thought, she had not at least
given it many words. James had very definite opinions
on the subject and hesitated not at all to make them
known. His views had weight. It is useless to deny
that the royal position swayed the courts. James’s part
in the witch persecution cannot be condoned, save on
the ground that he was perfectly honest. He felt
deeply on the matter. It was little wonder. He had
grown up in Scotland in the very midst of the witch
alarms. His own life, he believed, had been imperilled[94]
by the machinations of witches. He believed he had
every reason to fear and hate the creatures, and we can
only wonder that he was so moderate as we shall later
find him to have been. The story of the affair that
stirred up the Scottish king and his people has often been
told, but it must be included here to make his attitude
explicable. In 1589 he had arranged for a marriage
with the Princess Anne of Denmark. The marriage
had been performed by proxy in July, and it was then
provided that the princess was to come to England.
She set out, but was driven on to the coast of Norway
by a violent storm, and detained there by the continuance
of the storms. James sailed to Upsala, and, after
a winter in the north of the Continent, brought his
bride to Scotland in the spring, not without encountering
more rough weather. To the people of the time
it was quite clear that the ocean was unfriendly to
James’s alliance. Had Scotland been ancient Greece,
no doubt Neptune would have been propitiated by a
sacrifice. But it was Scotland, and the ever-to-be-feared
Satan was not so easily propitiated. He had
been very active of late in the realm.

Moreover it was a time when Satanic and other conspiracies
were likely to come to light. The kingdom
was unsettled, if not discontented. There were plots, and
rumors of plots. The effort to expose them, as well
as to thwart the attacks of the evil one on the king,
led to the conception and spread of the monstrous story
of the conspiracy of Dr. Fian. Dr. Fian was nothing
less than a Scottish Dr. Faustus. He was a schoolmaster
by profession. After a dissolute youth he was said
to have given soul to the Devil. According to the story
he gathered around him a motley crowd, Catholic women[95]
of rank, “wise women,” and humble peasant people;
but it was a crew ready for evil enterprise. It is not
very clear why they were supposed to have attacked
the king; perhaps because of his well known piety,
perhaps because he was a Protestant. In any case they
set about, as the story went, to destroy him, and thought
to have found their opportunity in his trip to Denmark.
They would drown him in a storm at sea. There was
a simple expedient for raising a storm, the throwing of
cats into the sea. This Scottish method of sacrificing
to Neptune was duly carried out, and, as we have seen,
just fell short of destroying the king. It was only the
piety of the king, as Dr. Fian admitted in his confession,
that overmatched the power of the evil one.[1]

Such is the story that stirred Scotland from end to
end. It is a story that is easily explained. The confessions
were wrung from the supposed conspirators
by the various forms of torture “lately provided for
witches in that country.” Geillis Duncane had been
tried with “the torture of the pilliwinkes upon her
fingers, which is a grievous torture, and binding or
wrinching her head with a cord or roape.” Agnes
Sampson had suffered terrible tortures and shameful
indignities until her womanly modesty could no longer
endure it and she confessed “whatsoever was demanded
of her.” Dr. Fian was put through the or[96]dinary
forms of torture and was then “put to the most
severe and cruel pain in the world, called the bootes,”
and thereby was at length induced to break his silence
and to incriminate himself. At another time, when the
king, who examined him in person, saw that the man
was stubborn and denied the confessions already made,
he ordered him to be tortured again. His finger nails
were pulled off with a pair of pincers, and under what
was left of them needles were inserted “up to the
heads.” This was followed by other tortures too terrible
to narrate.[2]

It is a little hard to understand how it was that the
king “took great delight to be present at the examinations,”
but throughout the whole wretched series of
trials he was never wanting in zeal. When Barbara
Napier, sister-in-law to the laird of Carshoggil, was to
be executed, a postponement had been granted on account
of her approaching accouchement. Afterwards,
“nobody insisting in the pursute of her, she was set at
libertie.” It seems also that the jury that had before
condemned her had acquitted her of the main charge,
that of treasonable witchcraft against the king. The
king was angered at the default of justice, went to the
Tolbooth, and made an address on the subject. He
spoke of “his own impartiality, the use of witchcraft,
the enormity of the crime, … the ignorance of thinking
such matters mere fantasies, the cause of his own
interference in the matter, the ignorance of the assizes
in the late trial, his own opinion of what witches really
are.”[3]

[97]

It was only a few years later that James put that
opinion into written form. All the world knows that
the king was a serious student. With unremitting zeal
he studied this matter, and in 1597, seven years after
the Dr. Fian affair, he published his Dæmonologie.[4] It
was expressly designed to controvert the “damnable
opinions of two principally in our age”—Scot, who
“is not ashamed in publick Print to deny that there
can be such a thing as witchcraft,” and Wierus, “a
German physician,” who “sets out a publicke apologie
for all these craft-folkes whereby … he plainly bewrayes
himself to have been one of that profession.”

It was to be expected that James would be an exponent
of the current system of belief. He had read
diligently, if not widely, in the Continental lore of the
subject and had assimilated much of it. He was Scotch
enough to be interested in theology and Stuart enough
to have very definite opinions. James had, too, his
own way of putting things. There was a certain freshness
about his treatment, in spite of the fact that he was
ploughing old fields. Nothing illustrates better his combination
of adherence to tradition, of credulity, and of
originality than his views on the transportation of
witches, a subject that had long engaged the theorists
in demonology. Witches could be transported, he believed,
by natural means, or they could be carried
through the air “by the force of the spirit which is
their conducter,” as Habakkuk was carried by the
angel.[5] This much he could accept. But that they
[98]could be transformed into a “little beast or foule”
and pierce through “whatsoever house or Church,
though all ordinarie passages be closed,” this he
refused to believe. So far, however, there was nothing
original about either his belief or his disbelief. But
his suggestion on another matter was very probably his
own. There had been long discussion as to how far
through the air witches could go. It was James’s
opinion that they could go only so far as they could
retain their breath.

But it was seldom that the royal demonologist wandered
far from the beaten road. He was a conformist
and he felt that the orthodox case needed defence: so
he set about to answer the objectors. To the argument
that it was a strange thing that witches were melancholy
and solitary women (and so, he would have explained,
offer the easiest object of attack) he interposed a flat
denial: they are “some of them rich and worldly-wise,
some of them fat or corpulent in their bodies.”
To the point that if witches had the power ascribed to
them no one but themselves would be left alive in the
world, he answered that such would be the case, were
not the power of the Devil bridled by God. To the
plea that God would not allow his children to be vexed
by the Devil, he replied that God permits the godly
who are sleeping in sin to be troubled; that He even
allows the Evil One to vex the righteous for his own
good—a conventional argument that has done service
in many a theological controversy.

It is a curious circumstance that James seemingly
recognized the reliability of the Romish exorcisms
which the Church of England was about that time beginning
to attack. His explanation of them is worthy[99]
of “the wisest fool in Christendom.” The Papists
could often effect cures of the possessed, he thought,
because “the divell is content to release the bodily
hurting of them, … thereby to obtain the perpetual
hurt of the soules.”

That James should indulge in religious disquisitions
rather than in points of evidence was to be expected.
Although he had given up the Scottish theology, he
never succeeded in getting it thoroughly out of his system.
As to the evidence against the accused, the royal
writer was brief. Two sorts of evidence he thought
of value, one “the finding of their marke, and the
trying the insensiblenes thereof, the other is their fleeting
[floating] on the water.” The latter sign was based,
he said, on the fact that the water refuses to receive
a witch—that is to say, the pure element would refuse
to receive those who had renounced their baptism.[6]
We shall see that the influence of the Dæmonologie can
be fairly appraised by measuring the increased use of
these two tests of guilt within his own reign and that of
his son. Hitherto the evidence of the mark had been of
rather less importance, while the ordeal by water was
not in use.

The alleged witch-mark on the body had to do with
the contracts between witches and the Devil. This
loathsome side of witch belief we cannot go into. Suffice
it to say that James insisted on the reality of these
contracts and consequently upon the punishment that
should be meted to those who had entered into them.
All witches except children should be sentenced to
[100]death. The king shows a trace of conventional moderation,
however, and admits that the magistrates
should be careful whom they condemned. But, while
he holds that the innocent should not be condemned,
he warns officials against the sin of failing to convict
the guilty.[7] We shall see that throughout his reign in
England he pursued a course perfectly consistent with
these principles.

A critical estimate of James’s book it is somewhat
hard to give. Students of witchcraft have given utterance
to the most extravagant but widely divergent
opinions upon it. The writer confesses that he has
not that acquaintance with the witch literature of the
Continent which would enable him to appraise the
Dæmonologie as to its originality. So good an authority
as Thomas Wright has declared that it is “much
inferior to the other treatises on the subject,” and that
it was compiled from foreign works.[8] Doubtless a
study of the Continental literature would warrant, at
least in part, this opinion. Yet one gets the impression,
from what may be learned of that great body of writing
through the historians of witchcraft, that James’s
opinions were in some respects his own. He had, of
course, absorbed the current belief, but he did not hesitate
to give his own interpretation and explanation of
phenomena. That interpretation is not wanting in
shrewdness. It seems to one who has wandered through
many tedious defences of the belief in witchcraft that
James’s work is as able as any in English prior to the
[101]time of Joseph Glanvill in 1668. One who should read
Glanvill and James together would get a very satisfactory
understanding of the position of the defenders
of the superstition. Glanvill insisted upon what he believed
were well authenticated facts of experience.
James grounded his belief upon a course of theoretical
reasoning.

We have already indicated that James’s book was
influential in its time. It goes without saying that
his position as a sovereign greatly enhanced its influence.
This was particularly true after he took the
throne of England. The dicta that emanated from
the executive of the English nation could not fail to
find a wide audience, and especially in England itself.
His work offered a text-book to officials. It was
a key to the character and methods of the new ruler,
and those who hoped for promotion were quick to
avail themselves of it. To prosecute witches was to
win the sovereign’s approval. The judges were
prompted to greater activity. Moreover, the sanction
of royalty gave to popular outbreaks against suspicious
women greater consideration at the hands of the gentry.
And it was in the last analysis the gentry, in the
persons of the justices of the peace, who decided
whether or no neighborhood whispering and rumors
should be followed up.

But the king’s most direct influence was in the passing
of a new law. His first Parliament had been in
session but eight days when steps were taken by the
House of Lords towards strengthening the statute
against witchcraft. The law in force, passed in the
fifth year of Elizabeth’s reign, imposed the death penalty
for killing by witchcraft, and a year’s imprison[102]ment
for injuring by witchcraft or by allied means.
James would naturally feel that this law was merely
one version of the statute against murder and did not
touch the horrible crime of contract with the Devil
and the keeping of imps.[9] Here was a sin beside which
the taking of life was a light offence. It was needful
that those who were guilty of it should suffer the severest
penalty of the law, even if they had not caused
the loss of a single life. It was to remedy this defect
in the criminal code that a new statute was introduced.

It is not worth while to trace the progress of that
bill from day to day. It can be followed in the journals
of the Lords and Commons. The bill went to a large
committee that included six earls and twelve bishops.[10]
Perhaps the presence of the bishops was an evidence
that witchcraft was still looked upon as a sin rather
than as a crime. It was a matter upon which the opinion
of the church had been received before and might
well be accepted again. It was further arranged that
the Lord Chief-Justice of the common pleas, Sir Edmund
Anderson, and the attorney-general, the later so
famous Sir Edward Coke, along with other eminent
jurists, were to act with the committee. Anderson, it
will be recalled, had presided over numerous trials and
had both condemned and released witches. As to
Coke’s attitude towards this subject, we know not a
[103]thing, save that he served on this committee. The
committee seems to have found enough to do. At any
rate the proposed statute underwent revision.[11] Doubtless
the privy council had a hand in the matter;[12] indeed
it is not unlikely that the bill was drawn up under
its direction. On the 9th of June, about two months and
a half after its introduction, the statute passed its final
reading in the Lords.[13] It repealed the statute of Elizabeth’s
reign and provided that any one who “shall
use, practise or exercise any Invocation or Conjuration
of any evill and wicked Spirit, or shall consult, covenant
with, entertaine, employe, feede, or rewarde any
evill and wicked Spirit to or for any intent or purpose;
or take up any dead man, woman, or child, … to be imployed
or used in any manner of Witchcrafte” should
suffer death as a felon. It further provided that any one
who should “take upon him or them by Witchcrafte …
to tell or declare in what place any treasure of
Golde or Silver should or might be founde … or
where Goods or Things loste or stollen should be
founde or become, or to the intent to provoke any
person to unlawfull love, or wherebie any Cattell or
Goods of any person shall be destroyed, wasted, or
impaired, or to hurte or destroy any person in his or her
bodie, although the same be not effected and done,”
should for the first offence suffer one year’s imprisonment
with four appearances in the pillory, and for the
second offence, death. The law explains itself. Not
only the killing of people by the use of evil spirits, but
[104]even the using of evil spirits in such a way as actually
to cause hurt was a capital crime. The second clause
punished white magic and the intent to hurt, even where
it “be not effected,” by a year’s imprisonment and the
pillory. It can be easily seen that one of the things
which the framers of the statute were attempting to
accomplish in their somewhat awkward wording was
to make the fact of witchcraft as a felony depend
chiefly upon a single form of evidence, the testimony
to the use of evil spirits.

We have seen why people with James’s convictions
about contracts with the Devil might desire to rest
the crime upon this kind of proof.[14] It can be readily
understood, too, how the statute would work in practice.
Hitherto it had been possible to arraign a witch
on the accusations of her neighbors, but it was not possible
to send her to the gallows unless some death in
the vicinity could be laid to her charge. The community
that hustled a suspicious woman to court was
likely to suffer the expense of her imprisonment for a
year. It had no assurance that it could be finally rid of
her.

Under the new statute it was only necessary to prove
that the woman made use of evil spirits, and she was
put out of the way. It was a simpler thing to charge
a woman with keeping a “familiar” than to accuse
her of murder. The stories that the village gossips
gathered in their rounds had the keeping of “fa[105]miliars”
for their central interest.[15] It was only necessary
to produce a few of these gossips in court and the
woman was doomed.

To be sure, this is theory. The practical question is,
not how would the law operate, but how did it operate?
This brings us again into the dangerous field of statistics.
Now, if we may suppose that the witch cases
known to us are a safe basis of comparison, the reign
of James, as has already been intimated, shows a notable
increase in witch executions over that of Elizabeth.
We have records of between forty and fifty people who
suffered for the crime during the reign of James, all but
one of them within the first fifteen years. It will be
seen that the average per year is nearly double that of
the executions known to us in the first part of Elizabeth’s
rule, and of course several times that of those
known in the last part. This increased number we
are at once inclined to assign to the direct and indirect
influence of the new king. But it may very fairly be
asked whether the new statute passed at the king’s
suggestion had not been in part responsible for the increased
number. This question can be answered from
an examination of those cases where we have the
charges given. Of thirty-seven such cases in the reign
of James I, where the capital sentence was given,
seventeen were on indictments for witchcrafts that had
not caused death. In the other twenty cases, the accused
were charged with murder.[16]

[106]

This means that over two-fifths of those who are
known to have been convicted under the new law would
have escaped death under the Elizabethan statute.
With all due allowance for the incompleteness of our
statistics, it seems certain that the new law had added
very considerably to the number of capital sentences.
Subtract the seventeen death sentences for crimes of
witchcraft that were not murder from the total number
of such sentences, and we have figures not so different
from those of Elizabeth’s reign.

This is a sufficient comment on the effectiveness of
the new law as respects its particularly novel features.
A study of the character of the evidence and of the
tests of guilt employed at the various trials during the
reign will show that the phrasing of the law, as well
as the royal directions for trying guilt, influenced the
forms of accusation and the verdicts of the juries. In
other words the testimony rendered in some of the
well known trials of the reign offers the best commentary
upon the statute as well as upon the Dæmonologie.
This can be illustrated from three of the processes
employed to determine guilt. The king had recommended
the water ordeal. Up to this time it had not
been employed in English witch cases, so far as we
know. The first record of its use was in 1612, nine
years after James ascended the English throne. In
that year there was a “discoverie” of witches at
Northampton. Eight or nine women were accused of
torturing a man and his sister and of laming others.
One of them was, at the command of a justice of the
peace, cast into the water with “her hands and feete
bound,” but “could not sink to the bottome by any
meanes.” The same experiment was applied to Arthur[107]
Bill and his parents. He was accused of bewitching a
Martha Aspine. His father and mother had long been
considered witches. But the “matter remaining doubtful
that it could not be cleerly tryed upon him,” he (and
his parents) were tied with “their thumbes and great
toes … acrosse” and thrown into the water. The
suspicion that was before not well grounded was now
confirmed.[17] To be sure, this was done by the justices
of the peace and we do not know how much it influenced
the assize court.[18]

These are the only instances given us by the records
of James’s reign where this test was employed by the
authorities. But in the very next year after the Northampton
affair it was used in the adjoining county of
Bedford by private parties. A land-owner who had
suffered ills, as he thought, from two tenants, Mother
Sutton and her daughter, took matters into his own
hands. His men were ordered to strip the two women
“in to their smocks,” to tie their arms together, and
to throw them into the water. The precaution of a
“roape tyed about their middles” was useless, for
both floated. This was not enough. The mother, tied
toe and thumb, was thrown into the water again. She
“sunke not at all, but sitting upon the water turned
round about like a wheele…. And then being taken
[108]up, she as boldly as if she had beene innocent asked
them if they could doe any more to her.”

The use of marks as evidence was not as new as the
water ordeal. But it is a rather curious thing that in
the two series of cases involving water ordeal the other
process was also emphasized. In these two instances it
would seem as if the advice of the Dæmonologie had
been taken very directly by the accusers.[19] There was
one other instance of this test.[20] The remarkable
thing, however, is that in the most important trial of
the time, that at Lancaster in 1612, there was an utter
absence, at least so far as the extant record goes, of
female juries or of reports from them.[21] This method
of determining guilt was not as yet widely accepted in
the courts. We can hardly doubt that it had been
definitely forbidden at Lancaster.[22] The evidence of the
use of evil spirits, against which the statute of the first
year of James I had been especially framed, was employed
in such a large proportion of trials that it is not
worth while to go over the cases in detail.

The law forbade to take up any dead person or the
skin, bone, or other part thereof for use in witchcraft.
Presumably some instance of this form of
witchcraft had been responsible for the phrase, but
we have on record no case of the sort until a few
years after the passage of the statute. It was one of
[109]the principal charges against Johanna Harrison of
Royston in 1606 that the officers found in her possession
“all the bones due to the Anatomy of man and
woman.”[23] This discovery brought out other charges
and she was hanged. At the famous Lancashire trials
in 1612 the arch-witch Chattox was declared to have
had in her possession three scalps and eight teeth. She
was guilty on other counts, but she escaped the executioner
by death.

These are illustrations of the point that the Dæmonologie
and the statute of James I find their commentary
in the evidence offered at the trials. It goes without
saying that these illustrations represent only a few
of the forms of testimony given in the courts. It may
not, therefore, be amiss to run over some other specimens
of the proof that characterized the witch trials
of the reign. With most of them we are already familiar.
The requirement that the witch should repeat certain
words after the justice of the peace was used once
in the reign of James. It was an unusual method at
best.[24] A commoner form of proof was that adduced
from the finding or seeing clay or waxen images in the
possession of the accused.[25] The witness who had
found such a model on the premises of the defendant
or had seen the defendant handling it, jumped readily
[110]to the conclusion that the image represented some individual.
If it should be asked how we are to account
for this sort of evidence, the answer is an easy one.
Every now and then in the annals of witchcraft it came
out that a would-be accuser had hidden a waxen or
clay figure in the house of the person he wished to accuse
and had then found it. No doubt some cases started
in this way. No doubt, too, bitter women with grudges
to satisfy did experiment with images and were caught
at it. But this was rare. In the greater number of
cases the stories of images were pure fabrications. To
that category belong almost certainly the tales told at
Lancaster.[26]

“Spectral evidence” we have met with in the Elizabethan
period. That reign saw two or three instances
of its employment, and there were more examples of it
in the reign of James. Master Avery of Northampton,
who with his sister was the principal accuser in the
trials there, saw in one of his fits a black wart on the
body of Agnes Brown, a wart which was actually found
“upon search.”[27] Master Avery saw other spectres,
but the most curious was that of a bloody man desiring
him to have mercy on his Mistress Agnes and to cease
impeaching her.[28] At Bedford, Master Enger’s servant
had a long story to tell, but the most thrilling part concerned
a visit which the young Mary Sutton (whom
he was accusing) made to him. On a “moonshine
night” she came in at the window in her “accustomed
[111]and personall habite and shape” and knitted at his
side. Then drawing nearer, she offered him terms by
which he could be restored to his former health, terms
which we are to understand the virtuous witness refused.
It is pleasant to know that Master Enger was
“distrustfull of the truth” of this tale. One fears that
these spectres were not the products of overwrought
imagination, as were many others, but were merely
fabrics of elaborate fiction.[29] In any case they were
not the groundwork of the proof. In the Fairfax prosecutions
at York in 1622 the charges against the six
women accused rested entirely upon a great tissue
of spectral evidence. The three children had talked
to the spectres, had met them outdoors and at church
and in the kitchen. The spectres were remarkably
wise and named visitors whom the family did not know.
They struggled with the children, they rolled over them
in bed, they followed them to the neighbors.

Somewhat akin to the evidence from apparitions was
that from the effect of a witch’s glance. This is uncommonly
rare in English witchcraft, but the reign of James
offers two instances of it. In Royston, Hertfordshire,
there was “an honest fellow and as boone a
companion … one that loved the pot with the long
necke almost as well as his prayers.” One day when
he was drinking with four companions Johanna Harrison
came in and “stood gloating upon them.” He went
home and at once fell sick.[30] At Northampton the
[112]twelve-year-old Hugh Lucas had looked “stark” upon
Jane Lucas at church and gone into convulsions when
he returned home.[31]

One other form of proof demands notice. In the
trial of Jennet Preston at York it was testified that the
corpse of Mr. Lister, whom she was believed to have
slain by witchcraft, had bled at her presence. The judge
did not overlook this in summarizing the evidence. It
was one of three important counts against the woman,
indeed it was, says the impressive Mr. Potts, quoting
the judge, of more consequence than all the rest.[32] Of
course Mistress Preston went to the gallows.

It will occur to the reader to ask whether any sort
of evidence was ruled out or objected to. On this
point we have but slight knowledge. In reporting the
trial of Elizabeth Sawyer of Edmonton in 1621 the
Reverend Henry Goodcole wrote that a piece of thatch
from the accused woman’s house was plucked and
burned, whereupon the woman presently came upon
the scene.[33] Goodcole characterized this method as an
“old ridiculous custome” and we may guess that he
spoke for the judge too. In the Lancashire cases, Justice
Altham, whose credulity knew hardly any bounds,
grew suddenly “suspitious of the accusation of this
[113]yong wench, Jennet Device,” who had been piling up
charges against Alice Nutter. The girl was sent out
of the room, the witches were mixed up, and Jennet
was required on coming in again to pick out Alice Nutter.
Of course that proved an easy matter.[34] At another
time, when Jennet was glibly enumerating the
witches that had assembled at the great meeting at
Malking Tower, the judge suddenly asked her if Joane-a-Downe
were there. But the little girl failed to rise
to the bait and answered negatively, much to the satisfaction
of everybody, and especially of the righteous
Mr. Potts.[35]

This is all we know directly about any tendency to
question evidence at Lancaster in 1612, but a good deal
more may be inferred from what is not there. A comparison
of that trial with other contemporary trials
will convince any one that Justices Altham and Bromley
must have ruled out certain forms of evidence. There
were no experiments made of any sort nor any female
juries set inspecting.[36] This, indeed, is not to say that
all silly testimony was excluded. There is enough and
more of sheer nonsense in the testimony to prove the
contrary.

We turn now from the question of evidence to a
brief consideration of several less prominent features
of Jacobean witchcraft. We shall note the character
of the sentences, the distribution of the trials, the personnel
and position in life of the accused, and lastly the
question of jurisdiction.

[114]

We have in another connection indicated the approximate
number of executions of which we have
record in James’s reign. That number, we saw, was
certainly over forty and probably approached fifty.
It represented, however, not quite half the total number
of cases of accusation recorded. In consequence
the other verdicts and sentences have significance. Especially
is this true of the acquittals. They amounted
to thirty, perhaps to forty. When we add the trials
of which we do not know the outcome, we can guess
that the number was close to the sum total of executions.
Legally only one other outcome of a trial was possible,
a year’s imprisonment with quarterly appearances in
the pillory. There were three or four instances of this
penalty as well as one case where bond of good behavior
was perhaps substituted for imprisonment.[37]
Five pardons were issued,[38] three of them by the authorities
at London, two of them by local powers apparently
under compulsion.[39]

We come now to consider the personnel, sex, occupations,
and positions in life of the accused. On certain
of these matters it is possible to give statistical conclusions,
but such conclusions must be accepted with
great caution. By a count as careful as the insufficient
evidence permits it would seem that about six times as
many women were indicted as men. This was to be
expected. It is perhaps less in accord with tradition
that twice as many married women as spinsters seem to
[115]have figured in the witch trials of the Jacobean era.
The proportion of widows to unmarried women was
about the same, so that the proportion of unmarried
women among the whole number accused would seem
to have been small. These results must be accepted
guardedly, yet more complete statistics would probably
show that the proportion of married women was even
greater.[40]

The position in life of these people was not unlike
that of the same class in the earlier period. In the
account of the Lancashire trials we shall see that the
two families whose quarrels started the trouble were
the lowest of low hill-country people, beggars and
charmers, lax in their morals and cunning in their dealings.
The Flower women, mother and daughter, had
been charged with evil living; it was said that Agnes
Brown and her daughter of Northampton had very
doubtful reputations; Mother Sutton of Bedford was
alleged to have three illegitimate children. The rest
of the witches of the time were not, however, quite so
low in the scale. They were household servants, poor
tenants, “hog hearders,” wives of yeomen, broomsellers,
and what not.

Above this motley peasant crew were a few of various
higher ranks. A schoolmaster who had experimented
with sorcery against the king,[41] a minister who
had been “busy with conjuration in his youth,”[42] a
[116]lady charged with sorcery but held for other sin,[43] a conjurer
who had rendered professional services to a passionate
countess,[44] these make up a strange group of
witches, and for that matter an unimportant one. None
of their cases were illustrations of the working of
witch law; they were rather stray examples of the connection
between superstition, on the one hand, and
politics and court intrigue on the other. Not so, however,
the prosecution of Alice Nutter in the Lancashire
trials of 1612. Alice Nutter was a member of a well
known county family. “She was,” says Potts, “a
rich woman, had a great estate and children of good
hope.”[45] She was moreover “of good temper, free
from envy and malice.” In spite of all this she was accused
of the most desperate crimes and went to the
gallows. Why family connections and influences
could not have saved her is a mystery.

In another connection we spoke of two witches pardoned
by local authorities at the instance of the government.
This brings us to the question of jurisdiction.
The town of Rye had but recently, it would seem, been
granted a charter and certain judicial rights. But when
the town authorities sentenced one woman to death and
indicted another for witchcraft, the Lord Warden interfered
with a question as to their power.[46] The town,
after some correspondence, gave way and both women
were pardoned. This was, however, the only instance
of disputed jurisdiction. The local powers in King’s
[117]Lynn hanged a witch without interference,[47] and the
vicar-general of the Bishop of Durham proceeded
against a “common charmer”[48] with impunity, as of
course he had every right to do.

There is, in fact, a shred of evidence to show that
the memory of ecclesiastical jurisdiction had not been
lost. In the North Riding of Yorkshire the quarter
sessions sentenced Ralph Milner for “sorcerie, witchcraft,
inchantment and telling of fortunes” to confess
his fault at divine service, “that he hath heighlie offended
God and deluded men, and is heartily sorie.”[49]
There is nothing, of course, in the statute to authorize
this form of punishment, and it is only accounted for
as a reversion to the original ecclesiastical penalty for
a crime that seemed to belong in church courts.

What we call nowadays mob law had not yet made its
appearance—that is, in connection with witchcraft. We
shall see plenty of it when we come to the early part
of the eighteenth century. But there was in 1613 one
significant instance of independence of any jurisdiction,
secular or ecclesiastical. In the famous case at
Bedford, Master Enger, whom we have met before, had
been “damnified” in his property to the round sum of
£200. He was at length persuaded that Mother Sutton
was to blame. Without any authority whatsoever he
brought her forcibly to his house and caused her to
be scratched.[50] Not only so, but he threw the woman
and her daughter, tied and bound, into his mill-pond
[118]to prove their guilt.[51] In the mean time the wretched
creatures had been stripped of their clothes and examined
for marks, under whose oversight we are not
told, but Master Enger was responsible. He should
have suffered for all this, but there is no record of his
having done so. On the contrary he carried the prosecution
of the women to a successful issue and saw them
both hanged.

We now turn to the question of the distribution of
witchcraft in the realm during James’s reign. From
the incidental references already given, it will be evident
that the trials were distributed over a wide area.
In number executed, Lancashire led with ten, Leicester
had nine, Northampton five or more, Middlesex
four,[52] Bedford, Lincoln, York, Bristol, and Hertford
each two; Derby had several, the exact number we can
not learn. These figures of the more serious trials
seem to show that the alarm was drifting from the
southeast corner of England towards the midlands. In
the last half of Elizabeth’s rule the centre had been to
the north of London in the southern midlands. Now
it seems to have progressed to the northern midlands.
Leicester, Derby, and Nottingham may be selected as
the triangle of counties that would fairly represent the
centre of the movement. If the matter were to be
determined with mathematical accuracy, the centre
would need to be placed perhaps a little farther west,
for Stafford, Cheshire, Bristol, and the remote Welsh
[119]Carnarvon all experienced witch alarms. In the north,
York and Durham had their share of trials.

It will be easier to realize what had happened when
we discover that, so far as records go, Kent and Essex
were entirely quiet during the period, and East Anglia
almost so. We shall later see that these counties had
not at all forgotten to believe in witchcraft, but the
witchfinders had ceased their activities for a while.

To be sure, this reasoning from the distribution of
trials is a dangerous proceeding. Witch alarms, on they
face of things, seem haphazard outbursts of excitement.
And such no doubt they are in part; yet one who
goes over many cases in order cannot fail to observe
that an outbreak in one county was very likely to be
followed by one in the next county.[53] This is perfectly
intelligible to every one familiar with the essentially
contagious character of these scares. The stories
spread from village to village as fast as that personified
Rumor of the poet Vergil, “than which nothing
is fleeter”; nor did they halt with the sheriffs at the
county boundaries.

We have now traced the growth of James’s opinions
until they found effect in English law, have seen the
practical operation of that law, and have gone over
the forms of evidence, as well as some other features
of the witch trials of his reign. In the next chapter we
shall take up some of the more famous Jacobean cases in
detail as examples of witch alarms. We shall seek
to find out how they started and what were the real
causes at work.

CHAPTER VI.

Notable Jacobean Cases.

It is possible to sift, to analyze, and to reconstruct[120]
the material derived from witch trials until some few
conclusions about a given period can be ventured. A
large proportion of cases can be proved to belong in this
or that category, a certain percentage of the women
can be shown to possess these or those traits in common.
Yet it is quite thinkable that one might be armed
with a quiver full of generalizations, and fail, withal,
to comprehend Jacobean witchcraft. If one could have
asked information on the subject from a Londoner
of 1620, he would probably have heard little about
witchcraft in general, but a very great deal about the
Lancashire, Northampton, Leicester, Lincoln, and
Fairfax trials. The Londoner might have been able to
tell the stories complete of all those famous cases. He
would have been but poorly informed could he not have
related some of them, and the listener would have
caught the surface drift of those stories. But a witch
panic is a subtle thing, not to be understood by those
who do not follow all its deeper sequences. The springs
of the movement, the interaction of cause and effect,
the operation of personal traits, these are factors that
must be evaluated, and they are not factors that can be
fitted into a general scheme, labelled and classified.

This does not mean that the cases should be examined
in chronological sequence. That is not necessary; for[121]
the half-dozen cases that we shall run over had little or
no cause-and-effect connection with one another. It
is convenient, indeed, to make some classification, and
the simplest is that by probable origin, especially as it
will enable us to emphasize that important feature of
the trials. Now, by this method the six or more trials
of note may be grouped under three headings: cases
that seem to have originated in the actual practice of
magic, cases where the victims of convulsions and fits
started the furor, and cases that were simply the last
stage of bitter quarrels or the result of grudges.

To the first group belongs the Lancastrian case of
1612, which, however, may also be classed under the
last heading. No case in the course of the superstition
in England gained such wide fame. Upon it Shadwell
founded in part a well-known play, The Lancashire
Witches, while poets and writers of prose have referred
to it until the two words have been linked in a phrase
that has given them lasting association. It was in the
lonely forest of Pendle among the wild hills of
eastern Lancashire that there lived two hostile families
headed by Elizabeth Southerns, or “Old Demdike,”
and by Anne Chattox. The latter was a wool carder,
“a very old, withered, spent, and decreped creature,”
“her lippes ever chattering”; the former a blind beggar
of four-score years, “a generall agent for the Devell
in all these partes,” and a “wicked fire-brand of mischiefe,”
who had brought up her children and grandchildren
to be witches. Both families professed supernatural
practices. Both families no doubt traded on the
fear they inspired. Indeed Dame Chattox was said to
have sold her guarantee to do no harm in return for a
fixed annual payment of “one aghen-dole of meale.”[122]

That there was a feud between the two clans was to
be expected. They were at once neighbors and competitors,
and were engaged in a career in which they
must plot each against the other, and suspect each other.
There are hints of other difficulties. Years before there
had been a quarrel over stolen property. Demdike’s
daughter had missed clothes and food to the value of
20 shillings, and had later found some of the clothing
in the possession of Chattox’s daughter. A more serious
difficulty involved a third family: a member of the
Nutter family, well-to-do people in Lancashire, had
sought to seduce old Chattox’s married daughter, and,
when repelled, had warned her that when he inherited
the property where she lived she should be evicted.
Chattox had retaliated by seeking to kill Nutter by
witchcraft, and had been further incited thereto by
three women, who wished to be rid of Nutter, in order
that “the women, their coosens, might have the land.”
As a consequence Nutter had died within three months.
The quarrel, indeed, was three-cornered. It was said
that Demdike’s daughter had fashioned a clay picture
of a Nutter woman.[1]

We have all the elements here of a mountain feud;
but, in place of the revolvers and Kentucky moonshine
of to-day, we have clay images and Satanic banquets.
The battles were to be fought out with imps of Hell as
[123]participants and with ammunition supplied by the Evil
One himself. It was this connection with a reservoir
of untouched demoniacal powers that made the quarrel
of the miserable mountaineers the most celebrated incident
in Lancashire story. Here were charmers and
“inchanters,” experienced dealers in magic, struggling
against one another. Small wonder that the community
became alarmed and that Roger Nowell, justice of the
peace, suddenly swooped down upon the Pendle families.
It was but a short time before he had four women
cooped up in Lancaster castle. In a few days more he
was able to get confessions out of them. They admitted
acquaintance with the Devil and implicated one another.

Now comes the strange part of the story. According
to confessions made later, Elizabeth Device, not yet
shut up, but likely to be at any time, called a meeting
on Good Friday of all the witches in Pendle forest.
They were to come to her home at Malking Tower to
plot the delivery of the imprisoned women by the
blowing up of Lancaster castle.[2] The affair took the
form of a dinner; and beef, bacon, and roasted mutton
were served. “All the witches went out of the said
House in their owne shapes and likenesses. And they
all, by that they were forth of the dores, gotten on
Horsebacke, like unto Foales, some of one colour, some
of another; and Preston’s wife was the last; and, when
shee got on Horsebacke, they all presently vanished
out of … sight.” This was the story, and the various
witnesses agreed remarkably well as to its main details.
Those who believed in the “sabbath” of witches
[124]must have felt their opinions confirmed by the testimony
of the witnesses at Lancaster. Even the modern
reader, with his skepticism, is somewhat daunted by the
cumulative force of what purports to be the evidence
and would fain rationalize it by supposing that some
sort of a meeting actually did take place at Malking
Tower and that some Pendle men and women who had
delved in magic arts till they believed in them did formulate
plans for revenge. But this is not a probable
supposition. The concurring evidence in the Malking
Tower story is of no more compelling character than
that to be found in a multitude of Continental stories
of witch gatherings which have been shown to be the
outcome of physical or mental pressure and of leading
questions. It seems unnecessary to accept even a substratum
of fact.[3] Probably one of the accused women
invented the story of the witch feast after the model
of others of which she had heard, or developed it under
the stimulus of suggestive questions from a justice.
Such a narrative, once started, would spread like wildfire
and the witnesses and the accused who were persuaded
to confess might tell approximately the same
story. A careful re-reading of all this evidence suggests
that the various testimonies may indeed have been
echoes of the first narrative. They seem to lack those
characteristic differences which would stamp them as
independent accounts. Moreover, when the story was
once started, it is not improbable that the justices and
the judges would assist the witnesses by framing questions
based upon the narrative already given. It cannot
be said that the evidence exists upon which to es[125]tablish
this hypothesis. There is little to show that
the witnesses were adroitly led into their narratives.
But we know from other trials that the method was so
often adopted that it is not a far cry to suspect that it
was used at Lancaster.

It is not worth while to trace out the wearisome
details that were elicited by confession. Those already
in prison made confessions that implicated others, until
the busy justices of the peace had shut up sixteen women
and four men to be tried at the assizes. Sir Edward
Bromley and Sir James Altham, who were then on the
northern circuit, reached Lancaster on the sixteenth of
August. In the meantime, “Old Demdike,” after a
confession of most awful crimes, had died in prison.
All the others were put on trial. Thomas Potts compiled
a very careful abstract of all the testimony taken, perhaps
the most detailed account of a witch trial written
in the English language, with the possible exception of
the St. Oses affair. The evidence was in truth of a
somewhat similar type. Secret interviews with the
Evil One, promises of worldly riches, a contract sealed
with blood, little shapes of dogs, cats, and hares, clay
pictures that had been dried and had crumpled, threats
and consequent “languishing” and death, these were
the trappings of the stories. The tales were old. Only
the Malking Tower incident was new. But its very
novelty gave a plausibility to the stories that were
woven around it. There was not a single person to
interpose a doubt. The cross-examinations were nothing
more than feeble attempts to bring out further
charges.

Though there is in the record little suggestion of the
use of pressure to obtain the confessions, the fact that[126]
three were retracted leads to a suspicion that they had
not been given quite freely. There was doubtless something
contagious about the impulse to confess. It is,
nevertheless, a curious circumstance that five members
of the two rival Pendle families made confession, while
all the others whom their confessions had involved
stuck to it that they were innocent.[4] Among those who
persisted in denying their guilt Alice Nutter merits
special note. We have already mentioned her in the last
chapter as an example of a well-to-do and well connected
woman who fell a victim to the Lancashire excitement.[5]
The evidence against the woman was perhaps
the flimsiest ever offered to a court. Elizabeth
Device, daughter of “Old Demdike,” and her two
children were the chief accusers. Elizabeth had seen
her present at the Malking Tower meeting. Moreover,
she stated that Alice had helped her mother (“Old
Demdike”) bewitch a man to death. Her son had
heard his grandmother Demdike narrate the incident.
This testimony and his sister’s definite statement that
Alice Nutter attended the Malking Tower meeting established
Mistress Nutter’s guilt.[6] The judge, indeed,
was “very suspitious of the accusation of this yong
wench, Jennet Device,” and, as we have already seen,
caused her to be sent out of the court room till the accused
lady could be placed among other prisoners,
when the girl was recalled and required before the
great audience present to pick out the witch, as, of
[127]course, she easily did, and as easily escaped another
transparent trap.[7]

The two children figured prominently from this on.
The nine-year-old girl gave evidence as to events of
three years before, while the young man, who could
hardly have been out of his teens,[8] recounted what had
happened twelve years earlier. It was their testimony
against their mother that roused most interest. Although
of a circumstantial character, it fitted in most
remarkable fashion into the evidence already presented.[9]
The mother, says the nonchalant pamphleteer,
indignantly “cryed out against the child,” cursing her
so outrageously that she was removed from the room
while the child kept the stand. It is useless to waste
sympathy upon a mother who was getting at the hands
of her children the same treatment she had given her
own mother Demdike. The Chattox family held together
better. Mistress Redfearne had been carefully
shielded in the testimony of her mother Chattox, but
she fell a victim to the accusations of the opposing family.
The course of her trial was remarkable. Denying
her guilt with great emphasis, she had by some wonder
been acquitted. But this verdict displeased the people
in attendance upon the trial. Induced by the cries of
the people, the court was persuaded to try her again.
The charge against her was exactly the same, that
eighteen years before she had participated in killing
Christopher Nutter with a clay figure. “Old Demdike”
had seen her in the act of making the image, and there
[128]was offered also the testimony of the sister and brother
of the dead man, who recalled that Robert Nutter on
his death-bed had accused Anne of his bewitchment.[10]
It does not seem to have occurred to the court that the
principle that a person could not twice be put in jeopardy
for the same offence was already an old principle
in English law.[11] The judges were more concerned
with appeasing the people than with recalling old precedents,
and sent the woman to the gallows.

The Pendle cases were interrupted on the third day
by the trial of three women from Salmesbury, who
pleaded not guilty and put themselves “upon God and
their Countrey.” The case against them rested upon the
testimony of a single young woman, Grace Sowerbutts,
who declared that for the three years past she
[129]had been vexed by the women in question, who “did
violently draw her by the haire of the head, and layd her
on the toppe of a Hay-mowe.” This delightfully absurd
charge was coupled with some testimony about the
appearances of the accused in animal form. Three
men attempted to bolster up the story; but no “matter
of witchcraft” was proved, says the for once incredulous
Mr. Potts. The women seized the decisive moment.
They kneeled before the judge and requested
him to examine Grace Sowerbutts as to who set her on.
The judge—who had seemingly not thought of this before—followed
the suggestion. The girl changed
countenance and acknowledged that she had been taught
her story. At the order of the judge she was questioned
by a clergyman and two justices of the peace, who
found that she had been coached to tell her story by a
Master Thompson, alias Southworth, a “seminarie
priest.” So ended the charges against the Salmesbury
witches.

One would suppose that this verdict might have
turned the tide in the other cases. But the evidence, as
Potts is careful to show, lest the reader should draw a
wrong conclusion, was of very different character in
the other trials. They were all finished on the third
day of court and turned over to the jury. Five of the
accused, exclusive of those at Salmesbury, were acquitted,
one condemned to a year’s imprisonment, and
ten sentenced to death. To this number should be
added Jennet Preston, who had in the preceding month
been tried at York for the killing of a Mr. Lister, and
who was named by the Lancaster witnesses as one of
the gang at Malking Tower.[130]

So ended the Lancashire trials of 1612. The most
remarkable event of the sort in James’s reign, they were
clearly the outcome of his writings and policy. Potts
asks pointedly: “What hath the King’s Maiestie written
and published in his Dæmonologie by way of premonition
and prevention, which hath not here by the
first or last beene executed, put in practice, or discovered?”

Our second group of cases includes those where
convulsive and “possessed” persons had started the
alarm. The Northampton, Leicester, and Lichfield
cases were all instances in point. The last two, however,
may be omitted here because they will come up in
another connection. The affair at Northampton in
1612, just a month earlier than the Lancashire affair,
merits notice. Elizabeth Belcher and her brother,
“Master Avery,” were the disturbing agents. Mistress
Belcher had long been suffering with an illness that
baffled diagnosis. It was suggested to her that the
cause was witchcraft. A list of women reputed to be
witches was repeated to her. The name of Joan Brown
seemed to impress her. “Hath shee done it?” she
asked.[12] The name was repeated to her and from that
time she held Joan guilty.[13] Joan and her mother were
[131]shut up. Meantime Master Avery began to take fits
and to aid his sister in making accusation. Between
them they soon had accused six women for their afflictions.
The stir brought to the surface the hidden
suspicions of others. There was a witch panic and the
justices of the peace[14] scurried hither and thither till
they had fourteen witches locked up in Northampton.
When the trial came off at Northampton, Master Avery
was the hero. He re-enacted the rôle of the Throckmorton
children at Warboys with great success. When
he came to court—he came in a “coch”—he was at
once stricken with convulsions. His torments in court
were very convincing. It is pleasant to know that
when he came out of his seizure he would talk very
“discreetly, christianly, and charitably.” Master Avery
was versatile, however. His evidence against the
women rested by no means alone on his seizures. He
had countless apparitions in which he saw the accused;[15]
he had been mysteriously thrown from a horse; strangest
of all, he had foretold at a certain time that if any
one should go down to the gaol and listen to the voices
of the witches, he could not understand a word. Whereupon
a Master of Arts of Trinity College, Oxford,
went off to the prison at the uncanny hour of two in
the morning and “heard a confused noise of much
[132]chattering and chiding, but could not discover a ready
word.”

Master Avery had a great deal more to tell, but the
jury seem not to have fully credited him.[16] They convicted
Joan Brown and her mother, however, on the
charges of Elizabeth and her brother. Three others
were found guilty upon other counts. None of them,
so far as the records go, and the records were careful
on this point, admitted any guilt.[17] The one young man
among those who were hanged bitterly resisted his
conviction from the beginning and died declaring that
authority had turned to tyranny. He might well feel
so. His father and mother had both been tortured by
the water ordeal, and his mother had been worried till
she committed suicide in prison.

This brings us to the third sort of cases, those that
were the outcome of quarrels or grudges. It has
already been observed that the Lancashire affair could
very well be reckoned under this heading. It is no exaggeration
to say that a goodly percentage of all other
witch trials in the reign of James could be classified
in the same way. Most notable among them was the
famous trial of the Belvoir witches at Lincoln in 1618-1619.
The trial has received wide notice because it
concerned a leading family—perhaps the wealthiest in
England—the great Catholic family of Manners, of
which the Earl of Rutland was head. The effort to account
for the mysterious illness of his young heir and
[133]for that which had a few years earlier carried off the
boy’s elder brother led to a charge of witchcraft against
three humble women of the neighborhood. The Rutland
affair shows how easily a suspicion of witchcraft might
involve the fortunes of the lowly with those of the
great. Joan Flower and her two daughters had been employed
as charwomen in Belvoir Castle, the home of the
Rutlands. One of the daughters, indeed, had been put
in charge of “the poultrey abroad and the washhouse
within dores.” But this daughter seems not
to have given satisfaction to the countess in her
work, some other causes of disagreement arose which
involved Mother Flower, and both Mother Flower and
her daughter were sent away from the castle. This
was the beginning of the trouble. Mother Flower
“cursed them all that were the cause of this discontentment.”
Naturally little heed was paid to her
grumblings. Such things were common enough and it
did not even occur to any one, when the eldest son of
the earl sickened and died, that the event was in any
way connected with the malice of the Flowers. It
was not until about five years later, when the younger
son Francis fell sick of an illness to prove fatal, that
suspicion seems to have lighted upon the three women.[18]
The circumstances that led to their discharge were
then recalled and along with them a mass of idle gossip
and scandal against the women. It was remembered
[134]that Mother Joan was “a monstrous malicious woman,
full of oathes, curses, and imprecations irreligious.”
Some of her neighbors “dared to affirme that she dealt
with familiar spirits, and terrified them all with curses
and threatning of revenge.” At length, in February of
1618/19, on the return of the earl from attending His
Majesty “both at Newmarket before Christmas and at
Christmas at Whitehall,” the women were fetched before
justices of the peace, who bound them over to the
assizes at Lincoln. Mother Flower died on the way to
Lincoln, but the two daughters were tried there before
Sir Edward Bromley, who had been judge at the Lancashire
trials, and before Sir Henry Hobart. The
women made a detailed confession of weird crimes.
There were tales of gloves belonging to the two young
sons of the earl, gloves that had been found in uncanny
places and had been put in hot water and rubbed upon
Rutterkin the cat—or spirit. There were worse stories
that will not bear repetition. Needless to say, Margaret
and Philippa Flower were convicted and hanged.[19]

The Rutland cases have been used to illustrate how
the witch accusation might arise out of a grudge or
quarrel. There were three or four other cases that
[135]illustrate this origin of the charge. The first is that
of Johanna Harrison—she has been mentioned in the
previous chapter—who had an “altercation” with a
neighbor. Of course she threatened him, he fell ill,
and he scratched her.[20] But here the commonplace tale
takes a new turn. She had him arrested and was
awarded five shillings damages and her costs of suit.
No wonder the man fell sick again. Perhaps—but this
cannot be certain—it was the same man who was drinking
his ale one day with his fellows when she entered
and stood “gloating” over him. He turned and said,
“Doe you heare, Witch, looke tother waies.” The
woman berated him with angry words, and, feeling
ill the next morning—he had been drinking heavily
the night before—he dragged her off to the justice.
A few weeks later she and her daughter were hanged
at Hertford.[21]

The story of Mother Sutton and Master Enger has
been referred to in several connections, but it will bear
telling in narrative form. Mother Sutton was a poor
tenant of Master Enger’s, “a gentleman of worship,”
who often bestowed upon her “food and cloathes.” On
account of her want she had been chosen village “hog-heard,”
and had for twenty years fulfilled the duties
of her office “not without commendations.” But it
happened that she quarreled one day with her benefactor,
and then his difficulties began. The tale is almost
too trivial for repetition, but is nevertheless characteristic.
Master Enger’s servants were taking some
[136]corn to market, when they met “a faire black sowe”
grazing. The wayward beast began turning round “as
readily as a Windmill sail at worke; and as sodainly
their horses fell to starting and drawing some one way,
some another.” They started off with the cart of corn,
but broke from it and ran away. The servants caught
them and went on to Bedford with the load. But the
sow followed. When the corn had been sold, one of
the servants went home, the other stayed with his
“boone companions.” When he rode home later, he
found the sow grazing outside of town. It ran by
his side, and the horses ran away again. But the
servants watched the sow and saw it enter Mother
Sutton’s house. Master Enger made light of the story
when it was told to him, and, with remarkable insight
for a character in a witch story, “supposed they were
drunke.” But a few days later the same servant fell
into conversation with Mother Sutton, when a beetle
came and struck him. He fell into a trance, and then
went home and told his master. The next night the
servant said that Mary Sutton entered his room—the
vision we have already described.[22]

The rest of the story the reader knows from the last
chapter. Mother Sutton and her daughter were put
to various ordeals and at length hanged. Doubtless the
imaginative servant, who had in some way, perhaps,
been involved in the original quarrel, gained favor with
his master, and standing in the community.[23]

[137]

The tale of the Bakewell witches is a very curious
one and, though not to be confidently depended upon,
may suggest how it was possible to avail oneself
of superstition in order to repay a grudge. A Scotchman
staying at a lodging-house in Bakewell fell in debt
to his landlady, who retained some of his clothes as security.
He went to London, concealed himself in a
cellar, and was there found by a watchman, who arrested
him for being in an unoccupied house with felonious
intent. He professed to be dazed and declared
that he was at Bakewell in Derbyshire at three o’clock
that morning. He explained it by the fact that he had
repeated certain words which he had heard his lodging-house
keeper and her sister say. The judge was amazed,
the man’s depositions were taken down, and he was
sent to the justices of Derby.

All that we really know about the Bakewell affair is
that several witches probably suffered death there in
1607. A local antiquarian has given this tale of how
the alarm started.[24] While it is unlike any other narrative
of witchcraft, it is not necessarily without
foundation.

The reader has doubtless observed that the cases
which we have been describing occurred, all of them
with one exception, between 1603 and 1619. In discussing
the matter of the distribution of witchcraft
in the last chapter we noted that not only executions
for the crime, but even accusations and indictments,
were nearly altogether limited to the first fifteen years
[138]of James’s rule. If it is true that there was a rather
sudden falling off of prosecution in the reign of the
zealous James, the fact merits explanation. Fortunately
the explanation is not far to seek. The king’s
faith in the verity of many of the charges made against
witches had been rudely shaken. As a matter of fact
there had always been a grain of skepticism in his
make-up. This had come out even before he entered
England. In 1597 he had become alarmed at the spread
of trials in Scotland and had revoked all the commissions
then in force for the trial of the offence.[25] At
the very time when he became king of England, there
were special circumstances that must have had weight
with him. Throughout the last years of Elizabeth’s
reign there had been, as we have seen, a morbid interest
in demoniacal possession, an interest to which sensation-mongers
were quickly minded to respond. We
saw that at the end of the sixteenth century the Anglican
church stepped in to put down the exorcizing of
spirits,[26] largely perhaps because it had been carried on
by Catholics and by a Puritan clergyman. Yet neither
Harsnett’s book nor Darrel’s imprisonment quite
availed to end a practice which offered at all times to
all comers a path to notoriety. James had not been on
the English throne a year when he became interested
in a case of this kind. Mary Glover, a girl alleged to
have been bewitched by a Mother Jackson, was at the
king’s wish examined by a skilled physician, Dr. Edward
Jorden, who recognized her fits as disease, brought the
girl to a confession, published an account of the matter,
[139]and so saved the life of the woman whom she had
accused.[27]

In the very next year there was a case at Cambridge
that gained royal notice. It is not easy to straighten
out the facts from the letters on the matter, but it
seems that two Cambridge maids had a curious disease
suggesting bewitchment.[28] A Franciscan and a Puritan
clergyman were, along with others, suspected. The
matter was at once referred to the king and the government.
James directed that examinations be made
and reported to him. This was done. James wormed
out of the “principal” some admission of former
dealing with conjuration, but turned the whole thing
over to the courts, where it seems later to have been
established that the disease of the bewitched maidens
was “naturall.”

These were but the first of several impostures that
interested the king. A girl at Windsor, another in Hertfordshire,
were possessed by the Devil,[29] two maids at
Westminster were “in raptures from the Virgin Mary
and Michael the Archangel,”[30] a priest of Leicestershire
was “possessed of the Blessed Trinity.”[31] Such cases—not
to mention the Grace Sowerbutts confessions at
Lancaster that were like to end so tragically—were
[140]the excrescences of an intensely religious age. The
reader of early colonial diaries in America will recognize
the resemblance of these to the wonders they report.
James took such with extreme seriousness.[32]
The possessed person was summoned to court for exhibition,
or the king went out of his way to see him. It
is a matter of common information that James prided
himself on his cleverness. Having succeeded in detecting
certain frauds, he became an expert detective.
In one instance “he ordered it so that a proper courtier
made love to one of these bewitched maids”[33] and
soon got her over her troubles. In another case a
woman “strangely affected” by the first verse of John’s
Gospel failed to recognize it when read in Greek,[34]
proof positive that the omniscient Devil did not possess
her.

Three instances of exposure of imposture were most
notable, those of Grace Sowerbutts, the boy at Leicester,
and the “Boy of Bilston.” The first of these has already
been sufficiently discussed in connection with the Lancashire
trials. The second had nothing remarkable about
it. A twelve or thirteen-year-old boy had fits which he
said were caused by spirits sent by several women whom
he accused as witches. Nine women were hanged, while
six more were under arrest and would probably have
met the same end, had not the king in his northward
progress, while stopping at Leicester, detected the
[141]shamming.[35] Whether or no the boy was punished we
are not told. It is some satisfaction that the judges
were disgraced.[36]

The boy of Bilston was, if Webster may be believed,[37]
the most famous, if not the most successful, fraud of
all. The case was heralded over the entire realm and
thousands came to see. The story is almost an exact
duplicate of earlier narratives of possession. A thirteen-year-old
boy of Bilston in Staffordshire, William
Perry, began to have fits and to accuse a Jane Clarke,
whose presence invariably made him worse. He “cast
out of his mouth rags, thred, straw, crooked pins.”
These were but single deceptions in a repertoire of
varied tricks. Doubtless he had been trained in his rôle
by a Roman priest. At any rate the Catholics tried exorcism
upon him, but to no purpose. Perhaps some Puritans
experimented with cures which had like result.[38]
The boy continued his spasms and his charges against
the witch and she was brought into court at the July
[142]assizes. But Bishop Morton,[39] before whose chancellor
the boy had first been brought, was present, and the
judges turned the boy over to him for further investigation.[40]
Then, with the help of his secretary, he set
about to test the boy, and readily exposed his deception—in
most curious fashion too. The boy, like one we
have met before, could not endure the first verse of
John’s Gospel, but failed to recognize it when read in
the Greek. After that he was secretly watched and his
somewhat elaborate preparations for his pretences were
found out. He was persuaded to confess his trickery
in court before Sir Peter Warburton and Sir Humphrey
Winch, “and the face of the County and Country
there assembled,”[41] as well as to beg forgiveness of the
women whom he had accused.

It will be seen that the records of imposture were well
on their way to rival the records of witchcraft, if not
in numbers, at least in the notice that they received.
And the king who had so bitterly arraigned Reginald
Scot was himself becoming the discoverer-general of
England.[42] It is not, then, without being forewarned
[143]that we read Fuller’s remarkable statement about the
king’s change of heart. “The frequency of such forged
possessions wrought such an alteration upon the judgement
of King James that he, receding from what he had
written in his ‘Dæmonology,’ grew first diffident of, and
then flatly to deny, the workings of witches and devils,
as but falsehoods and delusions.”[43] In immediate connection
with this must be quoted what Francis Osborne
has to say.[44] He was told, he writes, that the
king would have gone as far as to deny any such operations,
but out of reasons of state and to gratify the
church.[45]

Such a conversion is so remarkable that we could
wish we had absolutely contemporary statements of it.
As a matter of fact, the statements we have quoted
establish nothing more than a probability, but they
certainly do establish that. Fuller, the church historian,
responsible for the first of the two statements, was a
student in Queen’s College[46] at Cambridge during the
last four years of James’s reign; Osborne was a man
[144]of thirty-two when the king died, and had spent a part
of his young manhood at the court. Their testimony
was that of men who had every opportunity to know
about the king’s change of opinion.[47] In the absence
of any evidence to the contrary, we must accept, at
least provisionally, their statements.[48] And it is easier
to do so in view of the marked falling off of prosecutions
that we have already noted. This indeed is confirmation
of a negative sort; but we have one interesting
bit of affirmative proof, the outcome of the trials at
York in 1622. In that year the children of Mr. Edward
Fairfax, a member of the historic Fairfax family of
Yorkshire, were seized with some strange illness, in
which they saw again and again the spectres of six
different women. These women were examined by the
justices of the peace and committed to the assizes.[49] In
the mean time they had found able and vigorous defenders
in the community. What happened at the April
assizes we no not know, but we know that four of the
women were released, two of them on bond.[50] This was
probably a compromise method of settling the matter.
Fairfax was not satisfied. Probably through his influence
the women were again brought up at the August
[145]assizes.[51] Then, at least, as we know beyond a doubt,
they were formally tried, this time upon indictments
preferred by Fairfax himself.[52] The judge
warned the jury to be very careful, and, after hearing
some of the evidence, dismissed the women on the
ground that the evidence “reached not to the point
of the statute.”[53] This seems significant. A man
of a well known county family was utterly baffled
in pressing charges in a case where his own children
were involved.[54] It looks as if there were judges
who were following the king’s lead in looking out
for imposture.[55] In any case there was, in certain
quarters, a public sentiment against the conviction of
witches, a sentiment that made itself felt. This we
shall have occasion to note again in following out the
currents and fluctuations of opinions.

CHAPTER VII.

The Lancashire Witches and Charles I.

In his attitude towards superstition, Charles I resembled[146]
the later rather than the earlier James I. No
reign up to the Revolution was marked by so few executions.
It was a time of comparative quiet. Here
and there isolated murmurs against suspected creatures
of the Devil roused the justices of the peace to
write letters, and even to make inquiries that as often
as not resulted in indefinite commitments, or brought
out the protests of neighbors in favor of the accused.
But, if there were not many cases, they represented a
wide area. Middlesex, Wilts, Somerset, Leicestershire,
Staffordshire, Lancashire, Durham, Yorkshire,
and Northumberland were among the counties infested.
Yet we can count but six executions, and only four
of them rest upon secure evidence.[1] This is of course
to reckon the reign of Charles as not extending beyond
1642, when the Civil War broke out and the Puritan
leaders assumed responsibility for the government.

Up to that time there was but one really notable
witch alarm in England. But it was one that illustrated
again, as in Essex, the continuity of the superstition
in a given locality. The Lancashire witches of 1633
were the direct outcome of the Lancashire witches of
1612. The story is a weird one. An eleven-year-old
[147]boy played truant one day to his cattle-herding, and, as
he afterwards told the story, went plum-gathering.
When he came back he had to find a plausible excuse
to present to his parents. Now, the lad had been
brought up in the Blackburn forest, close to Pendle
Hill; he had overheard stories of Malking Tower[2]
from the chatter of gossipping women;[3] he had shivered
as suspected women were pointed out to him; he
knew the names of some of them. His imagination,
in search for an excuse, caught at the witch motive[4]
and elaborated it with the easy invention of youth.[5] He
had seen two greyhounds come running towards him.
They looked like those owned by two of his neighbors.
When he saw that no one was following them, he set
out to hunt with them, and presently a hare rose very
near before him, at the sight whereof he cried “Loo,
Loo,” but the dogs would not run. Being very angry,
he tied them to a little bush in the hedge and beat them,
and at once, instead of the black greyhound, “one Dick[148]onson’s
wife” stood up, and instead of the brown
greyhound “a little boy whom this informer knoweth
not.” He started to run away, but the woman stayed
him and offered him a piece of silver “much like to a
faire shillinge” if he would not betray her. The conscientious
boy answered “Nay, thou art a witch,”
“whereupon shee put her hand into her pocket againe
and pulled out a stringe like unto a bridle that gingled,
which shee put upon the litle boyes heade that stood up
in the browne greyhounds steade, whereupon the said
boy stood up a white horse.” In true Arabian Nights
fashion they mounted and rode away. They came to a
new house called Hoarstones, where there were three
score or more people, and horses of several colors, and
a fire with meat roasting. They had flesh and bread
upon a trencher and they drank from glasses. After
the first taste the boy “refused and would have noe
more, and said it was nought.” There were other refreshments
at the feast. The boy was, as he afterwards
confessed, familiar with the story of the feast at Malking
Tower.[6]

The names of those present he did not volunteer at
first; but, on being questioned, he named eighteen[7]
whom he had seen. The boy confessed that he had been
clever enough to make most of his list from those who
were already suspected by their neighbors.

It needed but a match to set off the flame of witch-hatred
in Lancashire. The boy’s story was quite suf[149]ficient.
Whether his narrative was a spontaneous invention
of his own, concocted in emergency, as he asserted
in his confession at London, or whether it was
a carefully constructed lie taught him by his father in
order to revenge himself upon some hated neighbors,
and perhaps to exact blackmail, as some of the accused
later charged, we shall never know. In later life the
boy is said to have admitted that he had been set on by
his father,[8] but the narrative possesses certain earmarks
of a story struck out by a child’s imagination.[9] It is
easy enough to reconcile the two theories by supposing
that the boy started the story of his own initiative and
that his father was too shrewd not to realize the opportunity
to make a sensation and perhaps some money.
He took the boy before justices of the peace, who, with
the zeal their predecessors had displayed twenty-two
years before, made many arrests.[10] The boy was exhibited
from town to town in Lancashire as a great
wonder and witch-detector. It was in the course of
these exhibitions that he was brought to a little town
on the Lancashire border of Yorkshire and was taken
to the afternoon church service, where a young minister,
who was long afterwards to become a famous opponent
of the superstition, was discoursing to his congregation.
The boy was held up by those in charge as
if to give him the chance to detect witches among the
audience. The minister saw him, and at the end of the
service at once came down to the boy, and without par[150]ley
asked him, “Good boy, tell me truly, and in earnest,
didst thou see and hear such things of the meeting of
the witches as is reported by many that thou dost relate?”
The boy, as Webster has told the story, was not
given time for reply by the men in charge of him, who
protested against such questions. The lad, they said,
had been before two justices of the peace, and had not
been catechized in that fashion.[11]

A lone skeptic had little chance to beat back the wave
of excitement created by the young Robinson’s stories.
His success prompted him to concoct new tales.[12] He
had seen Lloynd’s wife sitting on a cross-bar in his
father’s chimney; he had called to her; she had not
come down but had vanished in the air. Other accounts
the boy gave, but none of them revealed the
clear invention of his first narrative.

He had done his work. The justices of the peace
were bringing in the accused to the assizes at Lancaster.
There Robinson was once more called upon to
render his now famous testimony. He was supported
by his father,[13] who gave evidence that on the day he
had sent his boy for the cattle he had gone after him
and as he approached had heard him cry and had found
him quite “distracted.” When the boy recovered himself,
he had related the story already told. This was
the evidence of the father, and together with that of the
[151]son it constituted the most telling piece of testimony
presented. But it served, as was usual in such cases,
as an opening for all those who, for any reason, thought
they had grounds of suspicion against any of their
neighbors. It was recalled by one witness that a
neighbor girl could bewitch a pail and make it roll towards
her. We shall later have occasion to note the
basis of fact behind this curious accusation. There
was other testimony of an equally damaging character.
But in nearly all the cases stress was laid upon
the bodily marks. In one instance, indeed, nothing
else was charged.[14] The reader will remember that in
the Lancaster cases of 1612 the evidence of marks on
the body was notably absent, so notably that we were
led to suspect that it had been ruled out by the judge.
That such evidence was now reckoned important is
proof that this particularly dark feature of the witch
superstition was receiving increasing emphasis.

How many in all were accused we do not know.
Webster, writing later, said that seventeen were found
guilty.[15] It is possible that even a larger number were acquitted.
Certainly some were acquitted. A distinction
of some sort was made in the evidence. This makes
it all the harder to understand why the truth of Robinson’s
stories was not tested in the same way in which
those of Grace Sowerbutts had been tested in 1612.
Did that detection of fraud never occur to the judges,
or had they never heard of the famous boy at Bilston?
Perhaps not they but the juries were to blame, for it
[152]seems that the court was not altogether satisfied with
the jury’s verdict and delayed sentence. Perhaps, indeed,
the judges wrote to London about the matter.
Be that as it may, the privy council decided to take
cognizance of an affair that was already the talk of the
realm.[16] Secretaries Coke and Windebank sent instructions
to Henry Bridgeman, Bishop of Chester and successor
to that Morton who had exposed the boy of Bilston,
to examine seven of the condemned witches and
to make a report.[17] Bridgeman doubtless knew of his
predecessor’s success in exposing fraudulent accusations.
Before the bishop was ready to report, His Majesty
sent orders that three or four of the accused should
be brought up to London by a writ of habeas corpus.
Owing to a neglect to insert definite names, there was a
delay.[18] It was during this interval, probably, that
Bishop Bridgeman was able to make his examination.
He found three of the seven already dead and one
hopelessly ill. The other three he questioned with great
care. Two of them, Mary Spencer, a girl of twenty,
and Frances Dickonson, the first whom Robinson had
accused, made spirited denials. Mary Spencer avowed
that her accusers had been actuated by malice against
her and her parents for several years. At the trial, she
had been unable, she said, to answer for herself, because
the noise of the crowd had been so great as to
prevent her from hearing the evidence against her. As
for the charge of bewitching a pail so that it came run[153]ning
towards her of its own accord, she declared that
she used as a child to roll a pail down-hill and to call it
after her as she ran, a perfectly natural piece of child’s
play. Frances Dickonson, too, charged malice upon her
accusers, especially upon the father of Edmund Robinson.
Her husband, she said, had been unwilling to
sell him a cow without surety and had so gained his
ill-will. She went on to assert that the elder Robinson
had volunteered to withdraw the charges against her if
her husband would pay him forty shillings. This
counter charge was supported by another witness and
seemed to make a good deal of an impression on the
ecclesiastic.

The third woman to be examined by the bishop was
a widow of sixty, who had not been numbered among
the original seventeen witches. She acknowledged that
she was a witch, but was, wrote the bishop, “more often
faulting in the particulars of her actions as one having
a strong imagination of the former, but of too weak a
memory to retain or relate the latter.” The woman told
a commonplace story of a man in black attire who had
come to her six years before and made the usual contract.
But very curiously she could name only one
other witch, and professed to know none of those
already in gaol.

Such were the results of the examinations sent in by
the bishop. In the letter which he sent along, he expressed
doubt about the whole matter. “Conceit and
malice,” he wrote, “are so powerful with many in those
parts that they will easily afford an oath to work revenge
upon their neighbour.” He would, he intimated,
have gone further in examining the counter charges
brought by the accused, had it not been that he hesi[154]tated
to proceed against the king, that is, the
prosecution.

This report doubtless confirmed the fears of the
government. The writs to the sheriff of Lancaster
were redirected, and four of the women were brought
up to London and carried to the “Ship Tavern” at
Greenwich, close to one of the royal residences.[19] Two
of His Majesty’s surgeons, Alexander Baker and Sir
William Knowles, the latter of whom was accustomed
to examine candidates for the king’s touch, together
with five other surgeons and ten certificated midwives,
were now ordered to make a bodily examination of the
women, under the direction of the eminent Harvey,[20] the
king’s physician, who was later to discover the circulation
of the blood. In the course of this chapter we
shall see that Harvey had long cherished misgivings
about witchcraft. Probably by this time he had come
to disbelieve it. One can but wonder if Charles, already
probably aware of Harvey’s views, had not intended
from his first step in the Lancashire case to give his
physician a chance to assert his opinion. In any case
his report and that of his subordinates was entirely in
favor of the women, except that in the case of Margaret
Johnson (who had confessed) they had found
a mark, but one to which they attached little significance.[21]
The women seem to have been carried before
the king himself.[22] We do not know, however, that he
expressed any opinion on the matter.