The Burning Times was the period during the Middle Ages when the Christian Church hunted down, tortured and murdered anyone they suspected of being a witch.
To understand the Burning Times we need to go back in time a bit to the thirteenth century. Wars increased due to the christians wanting more land and trying to force their religion on the people. There were disease, proverty and food lose. The christians needed someone to blame so they chose witchcraft to blame it all on. Women were the best healers and the men were threatend by this so to save there buisnesses they backed the christian idea that women healers were  witches.

Pope Gregory IX started the witch hunt by attacking the wealthy groups that had broken away from the church. The pope wanted their money and property. Thus seeing the possibility of more wealth and control over people the church created the Office of Inquisition.

In 1489 Pope Innocent VIII issued an order to rid the lands of all witches and to kill all cats. The church thought cats to be the devils minions and the companion of Witches. Pope Innocent VIII commissioned the writing of the Malleus Maleficarium (Hammer for Witches). Two German Dominican priest, Jakob Sprenger and Prior Heinrich Kramer, did the actual writing. This became the bible for all witch hunters. It described in detail how to torture people to get confessions. All the expenses for this torture where billed to the victim as a way for the church to justify taking his property.
The church appointed Inquisitors (all men) who had all the rights over accused people to either convict, torture, murder, or set them free. It was very rare for a person accused to be set free and even those that were set free had been put through the most horrendous tortures. All property was confiscated immediately upon accusation and never returned even in the rare cases where people were found innocent. The Inquisitor or each region and all his helpers were payed out of the property and belongings or any one accused of being a witch.

The male doctors were in favor for this as it got rid of their female competition. Any female who attended a birth was branded a Witch for she knew which herbs to use to kill the pain and which ones could be used for birth control. If a women miscarried for any reason including a beating from her husband, the church considered her guilty of murder, which carried the death penalty. In the clergys mind, all women were guilty of something evil until they were dead.

The people that spoke up against the chruch about the injustices were murdered along with the others.

In 1126, a man names Pierre de Bruys was burned for saying that God no longer was in the church. Frere Raymond Jean preached against the church's abuses of power and was executed. When a Franciscan splinter group preached that the Pope and priests abused God's laws, the entire group plus every person in the village of Magnalata was murdered.

Childern as young as 3 years old were tortured until they gave evidence against their mothers. The church gave it's blessing and absolution of sin to all who helped. Accused women were often raped by there torturers and their assistants. All the women were gagged on their way to execution to keep them from revealing this crime.

For the next three centuries, the European Christian churches hunted and murdered so called Witches from the Scandinavian countries in the north to Spain in the south.  All the women and girls in entire villages were wiped out. Strasboug, Germany, burned five thousand victims in 20 years. A thousand so called witches were killed at Como in 1524.  Eventually the panic spread to the america's. Countries outside the influence of the Christian church did not participate.

Because the cats suffered the same fate as the witches during this time, there was no protection against the rats that carried the black plague into Europe. At first the church didn't care about all the rats as they looked at it as torture for the rats to attack the prisoners. But when they did realize it, it was to late.

The witch hunts continued into the seventeenth century, until King Louis XIII ordered the persecutions stopped in France. However both the Catholic and Protestant church officals of England and Scotland were making far to much money and widening their control to stop.

An English witch hunter Matthew Hopkins ( the witch finder general 1644-1646) was responsible for more executions then anyone else. His only interest was the money.

The last so called witch was hung in Scotland in 1727. The last scottish law against Witchcraft was repealed in 1736, but the last of the Witchcraft Acts in Britain wasn't removed from the books until 1951.

Because of the thousands of people slain, true witches went underground, revealing themselves and their groups to no one. Few groups had contacts with other similar groups. Nothing was writing down for fear of being discovered.
I would like to thank  D.J. Conway for his wonderful book "Wicca The Complete Craft" for helping me to explain this to you. Most of it is in his own words with some of it in mine.   ISBN # 1-58091-092-0