Page:American Historical Review, Vol. 23.djvu/29

Rh There is one more deposition in our manuscript—that of John Galsworthie of Hardness. It affords no novelties, but may be given in full to complete the record.

These documents are interesting enough as pictures of life and manners. But, as already suggested, their chief claim to our notice rests upon their date and upon the pure and unmixed form in which they exhibit the essential element in all witchcraft. The latter point needs no emphasis. The outcry against Michael Trevisard and his family was raised by the people itself—by the unadulterated, unsophisticated "folk", instigated only by its own primeval philosophy of maleficium. There were no social or political or theological complications. We have simply an upheaval from below, from the abysmal pit of savagery out of which the human race has had to struggle up. And such uncontaminated testimony, coming at this particular moment (in 1601 and 1602), is of very special consequence. If we are to comprehend the history of witchcraft in England, we must keep in mind, for this exact time, a clear idea of the intellectual condition of just that class to which Alice Butler and Joan Baddaford and William Tompson and all the other complainants belonged. Queen Elizabeth died in 1603, and King James's witchcraft act was passed in 1604. There is a more or less general impression that this act was momentous, and that the accession of James gave an extraordinary impulse to prosecution. If, as all will agree, our documents are typical of the state of popular feeling in 1601 and 1602, they offer an instant challenge to this idea. Anyhow they make short work of the notion that English witchcraft was a theological importation from the Continent.