The earlier English cases
a witch and her familiars, from an English pamphlet of 1579
One of the most acute problems faced in the study of English witchcraft trials is the absence of trial transcripts, brought about by the character of common law courts, where only the jury could judge the facts, so there was no need to record the evidence in any detail. In consequence, apart from where pre-trial depositions survive, as for the post-Civil War Northern Circuit and the Salem trials, it is often difficult to establish precisely what was at issue in any criminal trial. It has therefore been necessary for historians to rely on pamphlet literature for the history of English witchcraft, unlike historians of many of the Continental jurisdictions. This places a particular emphasis on how one reads the pamphlets. Thus the qualitative evidence required for a full ethnographic study is somewhat shaky, by comparison with Inquisition records, for example.
Another problem arises in any attempt to quantify witchcraft cases in England. There are few records surviving from some of the assize circuits, and often the best records are only the bundles of indictments, annotated with the grand jury and trial jury verdicts. The Home Circuit has the best surviving collection of these, covering the counties around London, including Kent and Essex. However, about a quarter of the records before the Civil War do not survive. Moreover, the information provided about occupations and marital status is what was "legally sufficient", rather than what the historian would like to know. Thus, it was "sufficient" to describe a woman as a spinster, even if she was actually married. Nevertheless, some interesting findings have emerged.
Of the five counties on the Home Circuit (Essex, Hertfordshire, Kent, Surrey, Sussex), nearly 60% of recorded cases were in Essex, so the overall trends were largely produced by patterns in that county. The peak of prosecutions did not occur after the Act of James I or during the Hopkins panic, but in the 1580s when the relatively mild law of Elizabeth was in force. Prosecutions then fell, decade by decade until the 1620s and 1630s, in each of which the circuit saw only about 20 prosecutions. There was then a steep rise during the 1640s (Essex cases) and 1650s (Kent cases), although to nowhere near Elizabethan levels. After the Restoration, in 1660, prosecutions fell again, to less than 20 per decade in the period 1660-79 and then less than ten per decade thereafter. The rate of punishment (32%) and execution (22%) were low on the Home Circuit, but this is also true of other capital crimes tried in England. Witchcraft in Essex, for example, ranks well below burglary (45%) and theft (40.5%) in conviction rates, but between homicide (29%) and rape (19.5%). Thus, although the English courts appear very cautious in witchcraft cases compared with jurisdictions in many other countries, this is a characteristic of the court system as a whole, rather than just with regard to witchcraft. One should also note just what proportion of a court's cases concerned witchcraft. In the Middlesex assizes, between 1574 and 1659, there were 7,660 cases. Of these, 7,158 were property offences, 400 were homicides, and only twenty-one were witchcraft cases. The highest ratios of accused to be executed occurred in the first decade of the seventeenth century (41%) and the 1640s (42%). There were no executions on the Home Circuit during the 1630s or after the 1660s.
It should be stressed that the overall pattern on the Home Circuit was largely shaped by Essex, because other counties within that circuit had different, though relatively insignificant, peaks. Surrey passed 10 per decade only in the 1570s and 1580s, and then fell away to nothing from 1600 to 1640. Hertfordshire was above 10 in 1590 to 1620, before declining. Where records survive in other parts of the country, the huge Essex peaks are not seen. Suburban London, covered by the Middlesex Assizes at the Old Bailey, rarely reached 10 cases per decade. Cheshire managed to pass that figure twice, in the 1630s and 1650s, but saw less than 60 charges, involving 47 witches, over the entire period, and only seven accused were condemned to death, the first in 1631. The early cases in Cheshire were quite unlike those in Essex, mainly involving sorcery and divination. As a result, there is a relatively high proportion of men accused, 27.5%. The first maleficium case in Cheshire that involved harm to persons was not until 1613. Regrettably, the Western Circuit records have mostly been lost, but gaol books surviving from 1670 onwards show a higher level of prosecution then in the South West than there was in the South East at that date. This may suggest an earlier level of prosecutions similar to the second Essex peak, but one that cannot be recovered. This is also suggested by the records of the Oxford and Northern Circuits, but one would hesitate to assume such a pattern in view of the degree of regional variation.
The rapid decline in cases after the accession of James I, to nothing in some counties before 1640, makes it reasonable to treat English witchcraft prosecutions and their decline in two parts: the Elizabethan peak and subsequent decline; the post-Civil War peak and subsequent decline. This page will treat the former.
The first point that needs to be made is that English prosecutions were mostly about maleficium, not about night-flying, intercourse with demons, or the sabbat. Only in the Hopkins cases are there a significant number of cases involving such exotica. This is usually attributed to the role of Hopkins, mediating the transmission of "Continental" ideas, but it may also be ascribed to the technique of "watching", whereby the accused might be kept awake for days to see if the familiars appeared, and the particularly aggressive interrogatory techniques employed. Most prosecutions in England were initiated by neighbours against one another, and popular accusations of secret harm remained dominant. Of the 794 acts of witchcraft mentioned on 785 surviving Home Circuit indictments, only 36 involved raising spirits and 10 involved some kind of sorcery-related fraud. Such cases often involved male witches. 415 acts of witchcraft concerned harm to adults, 161 harm to children, and 164 harm to livestock. A further eight involved harm to property. Thus maleficium rather than devil-worship can be seen as forming the basis of 94% of prosecutions. However, the degree of attention given to Essex may have shaped views in unexpected ways. Studies of Kent and Rye suggest that the "English stereotype" is more of an Essex stereotype than one might assume. Communities could be disrupted in other ways than the refusal of charity.
What turned up on the indictment or in the trial did not necessarily encompass all the popular beliefs about witchcraft, only those which could form the basis of a prosecution under law. Where depositions survive, other elements sometimes appear. Moreover, accusers seem to have known from an early stage what witches were supposed to do. In 1566, the Sussex assizes heard a case about a woman who had sent two toads to suck the udders of a cow. In Essex, the first known case involving animal familiars occurred in 1584. In 1616, an Essex woman was accused of digging up a skull to use for witchcraft and another woman was acquitted on a charge of entertaining evil spirits. Such material was, however, relatively rare until the mid-seventeenth century.
Although the cases involving children were often spectacular, and were more likely to form the basis of pamphlets, it is clear that harms inflicted on adults and livestock were the basis of most accusations. Apart from those who died of strange lingering diseases, adults might complain of being lamed or paralysed. Livestock might sometimes die in large numbers. In some of the Essex cases, women were convicted of having killed cows, sheep and pigs belonging to several neighbours. In such cases, the complainant was usually a man, who might well have lost a substantial sum. Some early cases involving children, such as the Throckmorton case of "the Witches of Warboys", were notable and well publicized, but the proportion of such cases actually rose during the later prosecutions, rising from under 20% in the Elizabethan cases to over 30% in the Restoration cases.
Capital trials and pamphlets are not the only source for English witchcraft beliefs. The ecclesiastical courts heard both sorcery cases, involving various minor forms of magic, and slander cases involving accusations of witchcraft. As one might expect, the Essex courts saw a large number of cases in the late Elizabethan period and a decline to nothing thereafter. The courts of the Archbishop of York saw a reasonable number of sorcery cases, involving the casting or lifting of spells. Many of these were dismissed, and a few offenders were ordered to do penance in their parish church. Slander cases are especially interesting, in that they show the ways women might assault one another's reputations or defend their own. Witchcraft and sexual misconduct were the stock accusations in such circumstances. Some of these cases might have reached the assize courts, had the accused woman not had the resources to take prompt action to defend herself.
SHORT BIBLIOGRAPHY
Marion Gibson, "Mother Arnold: a lost witchcraft pamphlet rediscovered", Notes and Queries 45/3 (1998) 296-300
Laura K. Deal, "Widows and reputation in the Diocese of Chester, 1560-1650", Journal of Family History 23 (1998) 382-392
Peter Rushton, "Women, witchcraft, and slander in early modern England: cases from the church courts of Durham, 1560-1675", Northern History 18 (1982) 116-132 Not at ND
P.J. O'Connor, "Witchcraft pamphlets in Renaissance England: a particular case in which the tale was told", Midwest Quarterly 37 (1996) 215-227 AS 30 .M629
O'Connor's article discusses The Wonderful Discoverie of the Witchcrafts of Margaret and Phillip Flower (London, 1619)
Anne Reiber DeWindt, "Witchcraft and conflicting visions of the ideal village community", Journal of British Studies 34 (1995) 427-463
Malcolm Gaskill, "The Devil in the Shape of a Man: Witchcraft, Conflict and Belief in Jacobean England", Historical Research, 71 (1998) 142-171 [PDF file]
Annabel Gregory, "Witchcraft, politics and "good neighbourhood" in early seventeenth-century Rye", Past & Present 133 (1991) 31-66
Brian P. Levack, "Possession, Witchcraft, and the Law in Jacobean England." Washington and Lee Law Review 52 (1996) 1613-40. Law Library K27 A57
Ronald C. Sawyer, " 'Strangely handled in all her lyms': witchcraft and healing in Jacobean England", Journal of Social History 22 (1989) 461-485
Dewey D.Wallace, "George Gifford, Puritan propaganda and popular religion in Elizabethan England", Sixteenth Century Journal 9 (1978) 27-49
John L. Teall, "Witchcraft and Calvinism in Elizabethan England: Divine Power and Human Agency", Journal of the History of Ideas 23 (1962) 21-36
Leland L. Estes, "Reginald Scot and his Discoverie of Witchcraft: religion and science in the opposition to the European witch craze", Church History 52 (1983) 444-456
Kirilka Stavreva, "Fighting
Words: Witch-Speak in Late Elizabethan Docu-fiction", Journal of
Medieval and Early Modern Studies 30 (2000) 309-338
