Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 24.djvu/661

Rh 621 invocation or conjuration of any evil and wicked spirit, or shall consult, covenant with, entertain, employ, feed, or reward any evil and wicked spirit to or for any intent or purpose, or take up any dead man, woman, or child out of his, her, or their grave or any other place where the dead body resteth, or the skin, bone, or any part of any dead person, to be employed or used in any manner of witchcraft, sorcery, charm, or enchantment, or shall use, practise, or exercise any witchcraft, enchantment, charm, or sorcery, whereby any person shall be killed, destroyed, wasted, consumed, pined, or lamed in his or her body or any part thereof,&quot; every such offender is a felon without benefit of clergy. The Act further punished with im prisonment for a first offence, and for a second made it felony without benefit of clergy, to declare by witchcraft where treasure was, to provoke to unlawful love, or to attempt to hurt cattle, goods, or persons. This Act was repealed in 1736 by 9 Geo. II. c. 5. It will be noticed that in all the Acts it was necessary (except in the case of love-philtres) that injury should have been caused or intended or gain made. There were statutes which, although not directly concerned with witchcraft, aimed at the suppression of analogous offences. Thus multiplication of gold and silver (by means of the philosopher s stone) was made felony in 1403 by 5 Hen. IV. c. 4. This was repealed by 1 Will, and M. c. 30, it is said, by the influ ence of Robert Boyle. Numerous Acts dealing with the practice of palmistry and fortune-telling by Egyptians or Gipsies were passed at different times, beginning in 1530 with 22 Hen. VIII. c. 10. They are now superseded by the provisions of the Vagrant Act of 1824. Trials for witchcraft in England do not seem to have been proportionately as numerous or to have been accom panied Avith such circumstances of cruelty as those in most other countries. This may be accounted for partly by the diminishing authority of the church courts, partly by the absence of TORTURE (q.v.) as a recognized means of procedure, though no doubt it was too often used in an informal manner. The pricking of the body of an alleged witch by Hopkins the witch-finder and similar wretches in order to find the insensible spot or devil s mark, the proof by water (a popular survival of the old water ordeal), and similar proceedings, if not judicial torture, at least caused as much pain to the victims. Charges of witch craft seem to have been made with great frequency against persons of rank during the Wars of the Roses for political purposes. The cases of the duchess of Gloucester and Jane Shore will at once occur to the mind, and neither Edward IV. nor his queen were exempt. The duke of Clarence was accused of imputing witchcraft to the former ; and the latter and her mother, the duchess of Bedford, were charged with having obtained the promise of marriage from the king by magical means. Trials in England were most numerous in the 17th century. In the case of the Lancashire witches in 1634 seventeen persons were condemned on the evidence of one boy. In the period from 1645 to 1647 between two and three hundred are said to have been indicted in Suffolk and Essex alone, of whom more than half were convicted. 1 The State Trials contain several instances of such trials, viz., those of Anne Turner in 1615, 2 and the countess of Somerset in 1616 3 (where a charge of witchcraft was joined with the charge of poisoning Sir Thomas Overbury), Mary Smith in 161 6, 4 the Essex witches in 1645, 5 the Suffolk witches in 1665, and the Devon witches in 1682. 7 The most interesting trial is that of the Suffolk witches, because Sir Matthew Hale was the judge and Sir Thomas 1 2 State Trials, 1052 n. 2 Ibid., 930. 3 Hid., 951. 4 Ibid., 1050. 5 4 Ibid., 817. 6 6/Wrf., 647. 7 Blind., 1017. Browne was the medical expert witness. 8 In many of these trials the accused confessed before execution. The reasons which urged them to confess not only impossi bilities, but impossibilities of the most revolting kind, are not very easy to discover. In some cases, no doubt, the object was to escape the misery of life as a reputed witch. The theory of witchcraft, too, was universal and well known, and the revolting details of worship of the devil and of the witches sabbath must have been familiar to all. Torture, as the Milan case shows (see TORTURE), might force from the accused confession of an impossible crime, and even without torture instances have been known in modern times where women have charged themselves with offences in which they were the only believers. 9 These considerations may partially, if not fully, solve a difficulty which has been felt ever since the time of Cardan. Towards the end of the 17th century the feeling towards witchcraft began to change. The case of Hatha way in 1702 no doubt accelerated the decay of the old belief. He was convicted of cheating and assault by falsely pretending to be bewitched and by making an attack on an alleged witch. 10 The last trial in England was that of Jane Wenham in 1712, convicted at Hertford, but not executed. A case said to have occurred in 1716 does not rest on good authority. This change of feeling was no doubt caused to a great extent by the works of writers, few in number but strong in argument, who from the time of Reginald SCOT (q.v.) struck at the very found ations of the popular belief. One of the most interesting but least-known writers is George Gifford, whose views are in the nature of a compromise. His point is that the devil may deceive not only witches but their accusers. 11 The jury who convict may sometimes be right, but it must be very seldom. As lately as 1718 Dr Hutchinson, bishop of Down and Connor, thought it worth while to argue against witchcraft, but rather from the popular than the scientific point of view. 12 Legal writers did little to shake the prevailing opinion. Coke, Bacon, and Hale certainly admitted the possibility of witchcraft ; Selden at least 8 In this case, tried at the assizes at Bury St Edmunds on March 16, 1664-65, two widows named Rose Cullender and Annie Duny were accused of bewitching young children. The main points of the evidence were these. There had been a quarrel between the accused and the parents of the children, and the accused had uttered threats against them. The children fell into fits and vomited crooked pins, and once one of them vomited a twopenny nail with a broad head ; they cried out the names of the accused in their fits ; they could not pronounce the words &quot;Lord,&quot; &quot;Jesus,&quot; or &quot;Christ&quot; in reading, but when they came to &quot;Satan&quot; or &quot;devil&quot; they cried, &quot;This bites, but makes me speak it right well.&quot; One of the children fell into a swoon after being suckled by one of the accused, and out of the child s blanket fell a great toad which exploded in the fire like gunpowder, and immediately afterwards the alleged witch was seen sitting at home maimed and scorched. Evidence of finding the witch s mark was given, and then evidence of reputation, viz. , that the accused, besides being themselves accounted witches, had had -some of their kindred condemned as such. A farmer swore that once when his cart had touched Cullender s house it overturned continually and they could not get it home. Sir Thomas Browne testified that the swooning fits were natural, heightened to great excess by the subtlety of the devil co-operating with the witches. Experiments upon the children were then made in court by bringing them into contact with the witches and others. These were of so unsatisfactory a nature that many present openly declared that they thought the children impostors. The chief baron in his summing up said that there were such creatures as witches was undoubted, for the Scriptures affirmed it and the wisdom of nations had provided laws against such persons. The report alleges that after conviction of the accused the children immediately re covered. 9 A remarkable instance is a case of Robinson v. Robinson and Lane (to be found in the Divorce Court Reports in 1859), where purely imaginary acts of adultery were recorded by the respondent in her diary. 10 14 St. Tr., 643. 11 A Discourse of the Subtle Practices of the Devil by Witches (1587), and A Dialogic concerning Witches and Witchcraft (1603). John Webster s Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft (1677) takes a similar line. 12 Historical Essay concerning Witchcraft, 1st ed., 1718.