Witchcraft

The rise and fall of Witchcraft Persecutions

This paper is concerned with the phenomenon of witchcraft and paranoiac persecution of witches in early modern England, which differed great deal from the contemporary witch-hunts across the Channel or even in Scotland; an incredibly complex subject, having its’ roots deeply in both Christian policies of intolerance and in universal tendency of the superstitious and ignorant folk to ascribe any misfortune of life to the machinations of hostile powers; which can be also seen, among many other things, as tool in solving local social disputes and persecution of heresy and unorthodox ideas ;

Although laws against heresy and homicide and injury by means of witchcraft existed before, and witchcraft itself was a familiar phenomenon in the whole of Europe and in England itself, no law against sorcery itself was issued until the beginning of the "organized campaign", which, at least in England, began relatively late - close to the end of the reign of Henry VIII, i.e. very soon after the English Reformation, and there is an excellent explanation for that: the Protestant reformers rejected and attacked any magical elements , that, according to their beliefs, were the remnants of the Pagan culture, pol- luting the faith of Christ, of both religious and secular kinds. In England, the "magic" of the medieval Catholic Church was demolished with the Old Church itself, and the number of witches, who provided a partial substitution of this magic to the people expanded enormously during the years after Reformation. Being a follower of those reformers, Henry had to act in accordance to those believes: the first law against sorcery itself, of the continental kind, was issued in 1542, ending the legal uncertainty concerning the issue of minor cases of witchcraft, but even than the witch-hunt took a somehow different and less cruel and bloody form than on the continent, where the main notion was that Witch is to be punished for her heretic beliefs and relations with the Devil; In England this idea of Heretic Christianity was far less popular and was never widely accepted - the witchcraft was seen mostly as anti- social crime, very much like a theft or murder, but, of course, one, involving supernatural powers.

The nature of witch-beliefs is very much debatable, and there are many theories explaining their popularity, but, as far as I see, the most plausible explanation is the one already stated above - that English witch beliefs, like the ones elsewhere, but, probably, to a greater extend, helped people to explain and account for misfortunes of everyday’s life, like injury, disease or sudden or suspicious death of a man, provided a substitution for the lost magic of the Catholic church and also gave people a powerful tool in dealing with uncertainties in life and anxiety caused by Reformation and the collapse of traditional feudal society, the reason for many changes in traditional life of English society. If a misfortune happened to a man, and there was nothing he could do - the prayers did not work and medicine did not help, it seemed impossible that the God is behind this punishment, and it could easily be assumed that the Devil and his agents on Earth are responsible, so the person could make himself busy with looking for the witch, thing that helped the man to take his mind off grief and gave him a hope of recovery , so it is very easy to see why this view quickly became so popular that, as Reginald Scot argued in his Discoverie of Witchcraft: "…any adversitie, greefe, sicknesse, losse of children, corn, cattell, or libertie happen unto them… they exclaime upon witches…", although after the detailed study of the 16th and 17th century it becomes obvious that even relatively to the number of accidental deaths , the number of accusations in witchcraft is quite low.

The existence of witches also helped the people to explain awkward deeds of their leaders, success of their rivals, or existence of other religious fractions and "heretic" christianity. For example - Cardinal Wolsey and Anne Boleyn were popularly believed to have bewitched Henry VIII, or Cromwell was believed to have made a pact with Devil before Battle of Worcester , but it clearly wasn’t an everyday function or the real nature of the witchcraft accusations, and, generally, the "big" names were left untouched.

The nature of the misfortunes had very much to do with the accusations in Witchcraft. Only individual or family misfortunes, like the burning of a certain house, bad crops on a certain field or outbreak of disease in certain family, could be explained by witchcraft - such major troubles as the burning of the whole town or village, bad summers or epidemics were never, at least in England, explained by witchcraft. For example, local outbreak of plague in Essex in 16th century did not coincide with the increase in alleged deaths by witchcraft. The study of relations between church attendance and accusations in witchcraft does not give us any conclusive answer - many of the convicted witches were godly people. Since they were considered unpleasant and odd- looking, witches were also rarely accused in such deeds as sexual misbehavior. So, it is evident, that the persecution of witches was the outlet for people’s repressed fears of bad fortune, for their worries and their feelings of hatred, and fits perfectly in our idea of the English village of 16th and 17th centuries.

It is also evident that the accusations in witchcraft, almost exclusively , occurred between neighbors in both cities and villages, so, to some extend, it also became a kind of tool in solving local social disputes. Very often such cases involved the refusal of one neighbor to help another, quite an offensive deed in that cooperative society; The fact that the one who refused to help was almost always the one who was bewitched can be explained by feeling of guilt of the last, and the desire to explain the misfortune as Devil’s deed, and not as God’s punishment. Another worth-mentioning fact is that people were advised not to help suspected witches by any means, and thus the were provided with a powerful tool for severing unwanted relationships .

Not only the English ideas about the identity and the nature of witches’ crimes was different from the Continental ones, punishments were different too - although tortures existed legally, they were applied not as often as on continent, and no witch was ever burnt in England. The approximate number of executed witches in England between 1542 and 1736 exceeds a thousand, and however horrible this number is from our point of view, it is only a small fraction of the total of at least two hundred thousands killed in the rest of the world .

The law of 1542 was repealed a number of years later, immediately after the accession of his ill-fated son to the throne, but, nevertheless, the number of witch trials and lynches rose suddenly in the end of 1550s, probably due to return the of many Marian exiles - mostly Protestant fanatics, who had been to Geneva, became impregnated with the Witch-craze of Calvinists, saw essence of the witch-hunts of the continent, and brought some European customs concerning the issue back to England . A new law was issued only 16 years later, under the Queen Elizabeth the First, in 1563, undoubtedly due to encouragement from some English Bishops . It was aimed at all who "use, practice, or exercise invocations or conjurations of evil and wicked spirits to or for any intend or purpose". Although the Queen was reluctant to pass this law, she was persuaded by John Jewel to do so. However, even this law was far milder than the ones on the continent - if a person was killed by means of witchcraft, the witch was to be put to death. If the death wasn’t involved, but only injury, the witch was to be punished by imprisonment or "quarterly pillory" for her first "offense", and by death by hanging (not by burning) for her second one. Imprisonment and the pillory ware also promised to anyone who, "by arts of magic", practicing the discovery of treasures or stolen property etc.

Further developments came with accession of James I, who came from Scotland, a country which was much closer to the Calvinist Europe than to the Anglican England, and thus adopted continental laws and customs in dealing with witches , and whose ideas about witchcraft were, to certain extend, more radical , and brought with him hordes of Scots, imbued with the dogmatic and cruel form of the witch-craze of their country, and who were eager to implement those customs and laws in England; In the first Bill of his first Parliament in 1604 he repealed the Elizabe- than law from 1563, and introduced a new legislation about witchcraft, far more severe than the one passed under Elizabeth; Rephrasing Elizabeth’s law, it promised death penalty for invocation of spirits, of any kind and for any purpose, on the first conviction. Another major change was that this law made it capital offense to "consult, covenant with, entertain, employ, feed or reward" and man employing the means mentioned above. Penalty for confection of evil love charms, hurting and maiming of men or cattle was increased from lifelong imprisonment to death.

However, James was the last English monarch who was under the influence of Witchcraft hysteria, and even he recanted his views about witchcraft closer to the end of his reign ; his successors exercised growing skepticism towards witchcraft, and this law was the last law concerning the issue, issued in England.

Although there was a sudden jump in a number of held witch-trials during the 1640s and 1650s , this was the last outbreak of the mass witch-hunts on the territory of England. Here, the decline of witchcraft began - the terror had burnt itself out, together with thousands of innocent people…

The decline of witchcraft became apparent in 1660s, but it is still not clear why those sudden changes took place, although the collapse of Renaissance Neoplatonism is the most obvious reason. The learned men, representing upper classes, who only a number of years before presented the witchcraft as "undeniable and terrifying reality", grew more and more skeptical towards the subject, beginning to regard the whole concept of witchcraft as "vulgar fraud", and were more and more reluctant to accuse and prosecute alleged witches. In France, the young Louis XVI refused to sign death orders for several convicted witches, in Germany, the Duke of Brunswick and the Elector of Metz forbade torture and persecution of witches, and in England, Charles II himself was extremely skeptical towards the subject, although no legislation banning the prosecutions, which already became quite rare, was issued. Simply, we can say, the witch-beliefs went out of fashion among the educated classes…

The number of witch-trials and executions decreased everywhere in England - the last recorded execution in South England occurred in 1657. Hangings went on at Chester during the 1670s, but the records there are incomplete. Random and rare bursts of trials and hangings went on during the next 50 years (the last known witch-trial took place in Leicester in 1717), until the law of 1604 was finally repealed in 1736 by the Parliament under George II. Although another law, penalizing the people who pretend "…to exercise or use any kind of witchcraft, sorcery, inchantment or conjuration, or undertake to tell fortunes, or pretend from his or her skill or knowledge in any occult or crafty science, to discover where or in what manner any goods or chattels…" was immediately issued. This law was aimed at white-witches, charlatans, gypsies and "wisemen", and was supposed to protect simple folk from the above listed; the penalties were light (mostly monetary fines), so this law cannot even be compared with the ones of the previous centuries. The Witch-Craze in England has over….

There is a multitude of different theories about the reasons behind the sudden end of witchcraft in England and in the world. As far as I understand, there is no single explanation for this phenomenon - it was caused by the outbreak of scientific revolution, industrial revolution - development of industries and trade, that shrunk the distances between the European nations and made the majority of people more prosperous than they were before (thus, the new prosperity have removed the need for social scapegoat), opening the possibilities of education to the larger number of people, the decline in religious fanaticism among the ruling class and the decline of judicial torture all over Europe . As stated above, the beliefs in witchcraft compensated for the full or partial loss of the "magic" of Medieval Catholicism during the wave of reformation in Europe, but the beginning of the understanding of the laws of nature, development of physics, astronomy (witch almost eliminated the "science" of astrology in that period) and other sciences, in its’ turn, helped the educated classes to overcome the belief in such superstitions as witchcraft, Sabbat etc. Yet, we cannot possibly describe the total change of medieval comprehension of the supernatural world in only a few sentences, and ascribe this change only to the Scientific Revolution… As many historians argue: "increasing scientific knowledge does not nessesa- rily destroy beliefs in wizardry" and that "(the end of witches’ persecu- tions)…cannot be attributed entirely to rationalism" ; And indeed, although the impact of the scientific revolution on the subject is undeniable, the changes in people’s life were far from being radical - mortality remained very high, the medical science did not progress much, and the development of other sciences had very little impact on people’s lives. A number of other, anthropological, explanations were proposed - some argued that the witch-craze was the product of the small, rural societies, that became less and less important with the growth of major industrial centers - thing which caused the disappearance of tensions between neighbors, but this assumption doesn’t seem to hold - large cities, like Rome, Paris and London, existed throughout Middle Ages, and accusations in witchcraft did not exclusively involved neighbors…

However, all the above-stated social and religious changes came to England more or less simultaneously, and there is no doubt that they all were respon- sible for the decline of witch-hunts. Eventually, in the beginning of 18th century the pockets of old, Pagan faith, were destroyed by economic growth, the followers of the cults were all dead and the theme of witchcraft was quickly turned into romantic subject by popular entertainers, and as consequence, the people learned to accept the fortunes and misfortunes of life without involving witchcraft or looking for scapegoats.