For thousands of years across many different cultures, people have believed that there are witches at work in the world, using magical power to harm, destroy and murder.
When was the first witch trial?
As far back as 924, King Æthelstan of the Anglo-Saxons ordered punishment for anyone casting a spell that led to death. The first known trial of witches in the British Isles took place in 1324 in Kilkenny, Ireland, when Alice Kyteler and 11 other women and men were charged with sorcery, demon worship, love magic and attempted murder by harmful magic.
There was, however, one time in history when belief in witchcraft morphed into the sustained persecution, prosecution, and execution of alleged witches, and that was in Europe between 1450 and 1750 (at its most intense from 1570 to 1650).
Myths have grown up around the scale of the persecution. Dan Brown wrote in one bestselling novel: “the church burned at the stake an astounding five million women”. Radical feminist Andrea Dworkin wrote in her book Woman Hating that the witch-hunt was a “gynocide” and a “women’s holocaust”, and claimed that “the most responsible estimate [of those executed] would seem to be nine million”.
In fact, a responsible estimate would be that, across the continent, some 90,000 people were prosecuted for witchcraft, and around half of them – not all women – were executed.
This unprecedented peak of witch-hunting came about because of a complex range of factors. The intellectual foundations of the witch-hunt were laid by a decree from Pope Innocent VIII, published in 1484, stating that witches were heretics who made a pact with Satan.
This was popularised by a book, called the Malleus Maleficarium or The Hammer of the Witches, published two years later by German Dominican monk Heinrich Kramer. Kramer reproduced the papal bull at the front of his book to lend the weight of the Church to his highly misogynistic manual for hunting witches. Educated elites started to believe that witches were evil and real.
When did witchcraft become a crime?
As a result, something extraordinary happened: witchcraft became a crime in Acts of Parliament passed in 1542, 1563, and 1604 in England, and in 1563 in Scotland. Black magic became a capital offence; in the British Isles, witch trials were carried out by secular law courts. The reality of witchcraft was only exaggerated by the publication in 1597 of King James VI of Scotland’s (later King James I of England and Ireland) Daemonologie; the only book on the subject ever written by a reigning monarch. In it, the king detailed how witches met in covens, entered into a diabolic pact, kissed the Devil’s anus as a sign of obeisance, and received his mark.
Added to this, the witch trials occurred at a time of near apocalyptic conditions. In the aftermath of the Reformation, believers – both Protestant and Catholic – came to imagine they were living in the end days and that the Devil stalked the land. They saw his hand at work in the failure of harvests, the influenza epidemic of the 1550s, the incessant rainfall across Europe in the 1590sthe constant recurrence of plague, inflationary prices, and the ever-decreasing temperatures of Europe’s Little Ice Age. In a time of need, those who begged and grumbled were especially vulnerable to resentment and projections of guilt.
All that was needed was a catalyst, an altercation with a spiteful or malicious person, who normally fitted the commonly held stereotype of a witch, followed by some disaster so catastrophic that it overrode fears of angering Satan’s minions: crops failing, a cow sickening, a child dying.
Most people thought witches were miserable, ugly, malevolent hags, possibly with some form of physical disability or deformity. The majority were also women, largely middle-aged or older. Across Europe, over 70% of accused witches were women. In the British Isles, the proportion could be even higher: in the 1640s, 93% of witches accused in Essex were women. Of those in Essex for whom ages are known, most were between 50 and 70.
Why were women believed more capable of witchcraft than men?
Women were thought to be physically, mentally and spiritually weaker than men, and therefore more vulnerable to the Devil’s attacks. They were also believed to be more carnal than men, and more easily seduced by Satan and his demons.
Oxford University historian Professor Lyndal Roper has suggested the key characteristic of accused witches was not just that they were older, but that they were infertile and past the age of menopause. They were expected to be envious of married women with children: witches were anti-mothers. There were, however, some men among those accused; overall, one in five accused witches was male.
Some of those accused were cunning folk. These were lay practitioners of medicine, knowledgeable about the use of herbs, who also claimed to offer beneficent magic: cures for infertility, love potions, and the ability to identify thieves and witches.
The eldest witch accused in the first great witch persecution in Scotland in 1590–91 was renowned midwife Agnes Sampson. The treatment meted out to her was brutal. In Scotland, torture was used, such as the ‘turcas’ to tear out suspects’ nails, the Scottish boots or leg-clamps, and thumbscrews called ‘pinniewinks’. All were designed to extract a confession. It didn’t always work; another accused witch, Robert Greyson, is thought to have died “by the extremity of tortures applied to him” and he confessed little.
The witchfinder general
Under English law, torture was illegal, but in the 1640s, the self-appointed Witchfinder General Matthew Hopkins took advantage of the anarchy of civil war to use a form of torture – sleep deprivation – on his suspects in Essex and East Anglia. He was responsible for a fifth of the total executions for witchcraft in England. In England, witches were hanged; in Scotland, those found guilty were burnt after strangulation.
When did witch trials end?
The witch trials started to peter out in the late 17th century in a changing intellectual, legal, economic and religious climate. Judges and juries started to be more sceptical: Sir John Holt, Lord Chief Justice of England from 1689 to 1710, freed more than a dozen accused witches, when a century earlier Lord Chief Justice Anderson had been convinced that “the land is full of witches”.
In 1692, the same year as the Salem witch trials in America, a trial jury in Kent acquitted a group of witches because there was “no other material evidence against them but their own confessions”. The last to be executed for witchcraft were Alice Molland in Devon in 1685, and Janet Horne in Scotland in 1722. Eventually, the law followed practice, and the Witchcraft Acts were finally repealed in 1735–36.