The American Historical Review A CASE OF WITCHCRAFT HE accessible materials for a history of Elizabethan witchcraft THE a are scattered and fragmentary. Much is lost, and much remains inedited. Yet we cannot hope to understand the prosecutions of the last sixty years of the seventeenth century, whether in Old England or in New, until we arrive at a substantially accurate comprehension of what was thought and done at the close of the great queen's reign. It is not only the dogmas of the theologians, the tenets of the physicians, and the rules of the law that we need to know, but, above everything else, the beliefs and feelings of the populace of the folk itself. For it is in this matter of witchcraft, if anywhere, that public opinion is supreme. The populace may, perhaps, be restrained by the more enlightened part of the community, but the so-called governing classes cannot prosecute with success if the populace does not approve. Witch-hunting never flourishes unless the common people are eager for it. It is to them that the officers of the law must look for testimony, and it is the jury of the vicinage that renders the verdict. Experience has taught, over and over again, how hard it is for the most skeptical judge to bring about an acquittal in a particular case when the neighborhood from which the jury comes is convinced of the reality of the crime in general. There was a famous witch-trial at Exeter, England, in 1682. Roger North was present, and here is his account of the state of public opinion: The women were very old, decrepit, and impotent, and were brought to the assizes with as much noise and fury of the rabble against them as could be shewed on any occassion. The stories of their arts were in everyone's mouth, and they were not content to belie them in the country, but even in the city where they were to be tried miracles were fathered upon them, as that the judge's coach was fixed upon the castle bridge, and the like. All which the country believed, and accordingly AM. HIST. REV., VOL. XXIII.—I. (1) persecuted the wretched old creatures. A less zeal in a city or kingdom hath been the overture of defection or revolution, and if these women had been acquitted, it was thought that the country people would have committed some disorder.1 This was a case in which it seems clear that the judges would have preferred a verdict of "not guilty" if they had been left to themselves. Another striking example is that of Jane Wenham, who was condemned to death for witchcraft in 1712. Her trial is notable for its recent date. By that time there was much incredulity on the subject in the minds of educated men. Chief Justice Powell, who presided, made open fun of the evidence and summed up strongly in the defendant's favor, but in vain. He was obliged to sentence the woman to death and to content himself with procuring her pardon from the crown. Nor was it until 1736 that the English and Scottish statutes against witchcraft were repealed. In considering the tenacity of the popular belief on this subject, we should never forget that the essence of witchcraft is maleficium. The hatred and terror which a witch evokes is due to her will and her power to inflict bodily injury. Compacts with the devil, the suckling of imps, the violation of graves, the abominations of the Witches' Sabbath-these are mere incidentals, the paraphernalia of the art. They aggravate the offense, to be sure, and proof that a woman is implicated in such horrors may send her to the scaffold or the stake. But, in the last analysis, every witch is prosecuted, not because she amuses herself with riding a broomstick or because she has taken a fiend for a lover: she is hunted down like a wolf because she is an enemy to mankind. Her heart is full of malignity. For a harsh word, or the refusal of a bit of bread, she becomes your mortal foe. And her revenge is out of all proportion to the affront, for she is in league with spirits of evil who are almost infinite in strength. She sends blight upon your crops, the rot upon your sheep, the murrain on your cattle; your house takes fire; your ship is cast away. She visits you and your family with strange wasting diseases—with palsy, with consumption, with raging fever, with madness, with death. Witch-trials are not prompted by theological hair-splitting, by systems of devil-lore, by the text, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live". These all come after the fact. It is self-protection that incites the accuser. His cause is fear-and fear of bodily harm. The witch is a murderer, or may become a murderer on the slightest provocation. Her life cannot be spared, for there is no safety until she is sent out of the world. 1 Autobiography (Jessopp, 1887), ch. X., pp. 131-132; cf. American Antiquarian Society, Proceedings, new series, XVIII. 191 ff. Now the mere creed-the belief that witches exist and that they can work supernaturally to the injury and even to the destruction of their enemies-is the heritage of the human race. The Englishman of the sixteenth or seventeenth century did not excogitate or dream it for himself, or borrow it from the Continent, or learn it from his spiritual advisers whether before the Reformation or after. He inherited it in an unbroken line from his primeval ancestors. And along with it came another dogma, likewise of abysmal antiquity-the theory that all diseases are of supernatural origin. This dogma had, to be sure, been somewhat limited in scope as the shaman developed into the physician, but it was still extant and still vigorous. Every malady that baffled the doctors was ascribed to witchcraft, often by the doctors themselves; and all sudden or virulent or wasting maladies lay under suspicion. These things are truisms, but they are continually lost sight of by the investigators of English witchcraft. There is a constant assumption that such beliefs are abnormal, a persistent tendency to ignore the fact that it was rather a mark of exceptional enlightenment to look to natural causes in popular diagnosis than a mark of positive credulity or superstition to look to supernatural causes. In brief, the ordinary Elizabethan, in this essential particular-the doctrine of maleficium and its application to disease-had not yet emerged from barbarism. And it was the doctrine of maleficium, and nothing else, that made the witch-creed terrible. After a witch had been arrested, it is true, she often fell into the hands of the learned who asked her questions based on an elaborate system of demonology, and, when so interrogated, she often confessed strange things, which the industry of scholars may trace to foreign creeds or imported philosophies. Some of this erudite material, through the pulpit or otherwise, did certainly attach itself to the native and popular beliefs. And thus we may easily be led to fancy that judges, philosophers, divines-and even King James I.—were to blame for the prevalence of English witchcraft in the seventeenth century. But such elaborations were merely incidental. They came into a particular case, if at all, only when the witch had once been cried out upon. Somebody falls sick, and the doctors cannot cure him; a child has hysterical fits and is grievously tormented. There are aged women in the village at whom we have long looked askance. They are foul-mouthed, perhaps, and prone to curse when we offend them; or they have laid claim to occult power, and have traded on the terror they inspire. They may even imagine themselves to hold intercourse with Satan, for they share the current superstitions and are not very strong in their wits. One of these beldames is mentioned as the bewitcher, perhaps because the patient's distempered fancy has seen a face and called a name. Then old rumors are revived: Smith's cattle died year before last, or Jones's little son. For there is ever at hand a huge mass of such latent evidence, all connected with the primitive doctrine of maleficium, and only waiting for a prosecution to bring it before the courts. When the trial begins, we may hear of compacts with Satan, of flights through the air, of sordid and hideous revels at the Witches' Sabbath. But such things are mere confirmatory details. The essential point, the really efficient impulse, is always maleficium -injury to goods or body or life through supernatural means. For England, the worst period of witch-prosecution is, by common consent, the seventeenth century-the century of the Lancashire witches, of Matthew Hopkins and John Stearne, of Glanvill's Saducismus Triumphatus. The reign of James, we remember, covers exactly twenty-two years, from March, 1603, to March, 1625. In 1604 Parliament enacted a famous statute against witchcraft, usually called the statute of James I. The idea has been prevalent that the delusion was dying out at the close of Elizabeth's reign, and that the advent of the British Solomon gave it fresh vigor.2 My purpose is to report an extremely interesting case of alleged witchcraft which occurred in Devonshire in 1601 and 1602, just before James came to the throne. This alone would make it significant enough. But it is still further noteworthy because it exhibits the phenomena in what we may call a pure form. We have only the testimony of voluntary, and for the most part aggrieved, witnesses. There are no arguments, no confessions, no comments from the bench. There is nothing but the beliefs and experiences of the witnesses themselves, honestly detailed according to their lights. Hence the documents afford us a perfect picture of the witchcraft creed as held by the common people. And we find, as we should expect, that the sum and substance of it all was maleficium—injury to the property and the health of the victims, amounting even to ruin and death. The documents have never been printed.3 They consist of eleven "examinations ", taken before a Devon justice of the peace, 2 For arguments against this idea see Studies in the History of Religions presented to Crawford Howell Toy (1912), pp. 1–65; cf. American Historical Review, XX. 570 (1915). 3 I have mentioned the case in the Studies in the History of Religions, p. 17. Apart from this mention it seems to have eluded investigators of the subject. 4 One of these includes the testimony of a man and his wife, so that we really have twelve witnesses. |