Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Chapter 10b - The Witch Mania



In Scotland also witch-finding became a trade. They were known
under the designation of "common prickers," and, like Hopkins,
received a fee for each witch they discovered. At the trial of
Janet Peaston, in 1656, the magistrates of Dalkeith "caused John
Kincaid, of Tranent, the common pricker, to exercise his craft
upon her. He found two marks of the devil's making; for she could
not feel the pin when it was put into either of the said marks,
nor did the marks bleed when the pin was taken out again. When she
was asked where she thought the pins were put in her, she pointed
to a part of her body distant from the real place. They were pins
of three inches in length."96*

These common prickers became at last so numerous, that they were
considered nuisances. The judges refused to take their evidence,
and in 1678 the privy council of Scotland condescended to hear the
complaint of an honest woman, who had been indecently exposed by
one of them, and expressed their opinion that common prickers were
common cheats.

But such an opinion was not formed in high places before hundreds
of innocent persons had fallen victims. The Parliaments had
encouraged the delusion both in England and Scotland; and, by
arming these fellows with a sort of authority, had in a manner
forced the magistrates and ministers to receive their evidence.
The fate of one poor old gentleman, who fell a victim to the arts
of Hopkins in 1646, deserves to be recorded. Mr. Louis, a
venerable clergyman, upwards of seventy years of age, and who had
been rector of Framlingham, in Suffolk, for fifty years, excited
suspicion that he was a wizard. Being a violent royalist, he was
likely to meet with no sympathy at that time; and even his own
parishioners, whom he had served so long and so faithfully, turned
their backs upon him as soon as he was accused. Placed under the
hands of Hopkins, who knew so well how to bring the refractory to
confession, the old man, the light of whose intellect had become
somewhat dimmed from age, confessed that he was a wizard. He said
he had two imps, that continually excited him to do evil; and that
one day, when he was walking on the sea-coast, one of them
prompted him to express a wish that a ship, whose sails were just
visible in the distance, might sink. He consented, and saw the
vessel sink before his eyes. He was, upon this confession, tried
and condemned. On his trial the flame of reason burned up as
brightly as ever. He denied all that had been alleged against him,
and cross-examined Hopkins with great tact and severity. After his
condemnation, he begged that the funeral service of the church
might be read for him. The request was refused, and he repeated it
for himself from memory, as he was led to the scaffold.

A poor woman in Scotland was executed upon evidence even less
strong than this. John Bain, a common pricker, swore that, as he
passed her door, he heard her talking to the devil. She said in
defence, that it was a foolish practice she had of talking to
herself, and several of her neighbours corroborated her statement;
but the evidence of the pricker was received. He swore that none
ever talked to themselves who were not witches. The devil's mark
being found upon her, the additional testimony of her guilt was
deemed conclusive, and she was "convict and brynt."

From the year 1652 to 1682, these trials diminished annually in
number, and acquittals were by no means so rare as they had been.
To doubt in witchcraft was no longer dangerous. Before country
justices, condemnations on the most absurd evidence still
continued, but when the judges of the land had to charge the jury,
they took a more humane and philosophical view. By degrees, the
educated classes (comprised, in those days, within very narrow
limits), openly expressed their unbelief of modern witchcraft,
although they were not bold enough to deny its existence
altogether. Between them and the believers in the old doctrine
fierce arguments ensued, and the sceptics were designated
Sadducees. To convince them, the learned and Reverend Joseph
Glanvil wrote his well-known work, Sadducismus Triumphatus, and
The Collection of Relations; the first part intended as a
philosophical inquiry into witchcraft, and the power of the devil
"to assume a mortal shape;" the latter containing what he
considered a multitude of well-authenticated modern instances.

But though progress was made, it was slow. In 1664, the venerable
Sir Matthew Hale condemned two women, named Amy Duny and Rose
Cullender, to the stake at St. Edmondsbury, upon evidence the most
ridiculous. These two old women, whose ugliness gave their
neighbours the first idea that they were witches, went to a shop
to purchase herrings, and were refused. Indignant at the prejudice
against them, they were not sparing of their abuse. Shortly
afterward, the daughter of the herring-dealer fell sick, and a cry
was raised that she was bewitched by the old women who had been
refused the herrings. This girl was subject to epileptic fits. To
discover the guilt of Amy Duny and Rose Cullender, the girl's eyes
were blinded closely with a shawl, and the witches were commanded
to touch her. They did so, and she was immediately seized with a
fit. Upon this evidence they were sent to prison. The girl was
afterwards touched by an indifferent person, and the force of her
imagination was so great, that, thinking it was again the witches,
she fell down in a violent fit as before. This, however, was not
received in favour of the accused.

The following extract, from the published reports of the trial,
will show the sort of evidence which was received:—

"Samuel Pacey, of Leystoff, (a good, sober man,) being sworn, said
that, on Thursday the 10th of October last, his younger daughter,
Deborah, about nine years old, was suddenly taken so lame that she
could not stand on her legs, and so continued till the 17th of the
same month, when the child desired to be carried to a bank on the
east side of the house, looking towards the sea; and, while she
was sitting there, Amy Duny came to this examinant's house to buy
some herrings, but was denied. Then she came twice more, but,
being as often denied, she went away discontented and grumbling.
At this instant of time, the child was taken with terrible fits,
complaining of a pain in her stomach, as if she was pricked with
pins, shrieking out with a voice like a whelp, and thus continued
till the 30th of the same month. This examinant further saith,
that Amy Duny, having long had the reputation of a witch, and his
child having, in the intervals of her fits, constantly cried out
on her, as the cause of her disorder, saying, that the said Amy
did appear to her and fright her, he himself did suspect the said
Amy to be a witch, and charged her with being the cause of his
child's illness, and set her in the stocks. Two days after, his
daughter Elizabeth was taken with such strange fits, that they
could not force open her mouth without a tap; and the younger
child being in the same condition, they used to her the same
remedy. Both children grievously complained that Amy Duny and
another woman, whose habit and looks they described, did appear to
them, and torment them, and would cry out, ‘There stands Amy Duny!
There stands Rose Cullender!' the other person who afflicted them.
Their fits were not alike. Sometimes they were lame on the right
side; sometimes on the left; and sometimes so sore, that they
could not bear to be touched. Sometimes they were perfectly well
in other respects, but they could not hear, at other times, they
could not see. Sometimes they lost their speech for one, two, and
once for eight, days together. At times they had swooning fits,
and, when they could speak, were taken with a fit of coughing, and
vomited phlegm and crooked pins; and once a great twopenny nail,
with above forty pins; which nail he, the examinant, saw vomited
up, with many of the pins. The nail and pins were produced in the
court. Thus the children continued for two months, during which
time the examinant often made them read in the New Testament, and
observed, when they came to the words Lord Jesus, or Christ, they
could not pronounce them, but fell into a fit. When they came to
the word Satan, or devil, they would point, and say, ‘This bites,
but makes me speak right well.' Finding his children thus
tormented without hopes of recovery, he sent them to his sister,
Margaret Arnold, at Yarmouth, being willing to try whether change
of air would help them".

"Margaret Arnold was the next witness. Being sworn, she said, that
about the 30th of November, Elizabeth and Deborah Pacey came to
her house, with her brother, who told her what had happened, and
that he thought his children bewitched. She, this examinant, did
not much regard it, supposing the children had played tricks, and
put the pins into their mouths themselves. She, therefore, took
all the pins from their clothes, sewing them with thread instead
of pinning them. But, notwithstanding, they raised, at times, at
least thirty pins, in her presence, and had terrible fits; in
which fits they would cry out upon Amy Duny and Rose Cullender,
saying, that they saw them and heard them threatening, as before;
that they saw things, like mice, running about the house; and one
of them catched one, and threw it into the fire, which made a
noise, like a rat. Another time the younger child, being out of
doors, a thing like a bee would have forced itself into her mouth,
at which the child ran screaming into the house, and before this
examinant could come at her, fell into a fit, and vomited a
twopenny nail, with a broad head. After that, this examinant asked
the child how she came by this nail, when she answered, ‘The bee
brought the nail, and forced it into my mouth.' At other times,
the eldest child told this examinant that she saw flies bring her
crooked pins. She would then fall into a fit, and vomit such pins.
One time the said child said she saw a mouse, and crept under the
table to look for it; and afterwards, the child seemed to put
something into her apron, saying, ‘She had caught it.' She then
ran to the fire, and threw it in, on which there did appear to
this examinant something like a flash of gunpowder, although she
does own she saw nothing in the child's hand. Once the child,
being speechless, but otherwise very sensible, ran up and down the
house, crying, ‘Hush! hush!' as if she had seen poultry; but this
examinant saw nothing. At last the child catched at something, and
threw it into the fire. Afterwards, when the child could speak,
this examinant asked her what she saw at the time? She answered,
that she saw a duck. Another time the youngest child said, after a
fit, that Amy Duny had been with her, and tempted her to drown
herself, or cut her throat, or otherwise destroy herself. Another
time they both cried out upon Amy Duny and Rose Cullender, saying,
‘Why don't you come yourselves? Why do you send your imps to
torment us?'"

The celebrated Sir Thomas Brown, the author of Vulgar Errors, was
also examined as a witness upon the trial. Being desired to give
his opinion of the three persons in court, he said, he was clearly
of opinion that they were bewitched. He said, there had lately
been a discovery of witches in Denmark, who used the same way of
tormenting persons, by conveying crooked pins, needles, and nails
into their bodies. That he thought, in such cases, the devil acted
upon human bodies by natural means, namely, by exciting and
stirring up the superabundant humours, he did afflict them in a
more surprising manner by the same diseases their bodies were
usually subject to; that these fits might be natural, only raised
to a great degree by the subtlety of the devil, co-operating with
the malice of these witches.

The evidence being concluded, Sir Matthew Hale addressed the jury.
He said, he would waive repeating the evidence, to prevent any
mistake, and told the jury, there were two things they had to
inquire into. First, Whether or not these children were bewitched;
secondly, Whether these women did bewitch them. He said, he did
not in the least doubt there were witches; first, Because the
Scriptures affirmed it; secondly, Because the wisdom of all
nations, particularly our own, had provided laws against
witchcraft, which implied their belief of such a crime. He desired
them strictly to observe the evidence, and begged of God to direct
their hearts in the weighty concern they had in hand, since, to
condemn the innocent and let the guilty go free, are both an
abomination to the Lord.

The jury then retired, and, in about half an hour, returned a
verdict of guilty upon all the indictments, being thirteen in
number. The next morning the children came with their father to
the lodgings of Sir Matthew Hale, very well, and quite restored to
their usual health. Mr. Pacey, being asked at what time their
health began to improve, replied, that they were quite well in
half an hour after the conviction of the prisoners.

Many attempts were made to induce the unfortunate women to confess
their guilt; but in vain, and they were both hanged.

Eleven trials were instituted before Chief-Justice Holt for
witchcraft between the years 1694 and 1701. The evidence was of
the usual character; but Holt appealed so successfully in each
case to the common sense of the jury, that they were every one
acquitted. A general feeling seemed to pervade the country that
blood enough had been shed upon these absurd charges. Now and
then, the flame of persecution burnt up in a remote district; but
these instances were no longer looked upon as mere matters of
course. They appear, on the contrary, to have excited much
attention; a sure proof, if no other were to be obtained, that
they were becoming unfrequent.

A case of witchcraft was tried in 1711, before Lord Chief Justice
Powell; in which, however, the jury persisted in a verdict of
guilty, though the evidence was of the usual absurd and
contradictory character, and the enlightened judge did all in his
power to bring them to a right conclusion. The accused person was
one Jane Wenham, better known as the Witch of Walkerne; and the
persons who were alleged to have suffered from her witchcraft were
two young women, named Thorne and Street. A witness, named Mr.
Arthur Chauncy, deposed, that he had seen Ann Thorne in several of
her fits, and that she always recovered upon prayers being said,
or if Jane Wenham came to her. He related, that he had pricked the
prisoner several times in the arms, but could never fetch any
blood from her; that he had seen her vomit pins, when there were
none in her clothes or within her reach; and that he had preserved
several of them, which he was ready to produce. The judge,
however, told him that was needless, as he supposed they were
crooked pins.

Mr. Francis Bragge, another witness, deposed, that strange "cakes"
of bewitched feathers having been taken from Ann Thorne's pillow,
he was anxious to see them. He went into a room where some of
these feathers were, and took two of the cakes, and compared them
together. They were both of a circular figure, something larger
than a crown piece; and he observed that the small feathers were
placed in a nice and curious order, at equal distances from each
other, making so many radii of the circle, in the centre of which
the quill ends of the feathers met. He counted the number of these
feathers, and found them to be exactly thirty-two in each cake. He
afterwards endeavoured to pull off two or three of them, and
observed that they were all fastened together by a sort of viscous
matter, which would stretch seven or eight times in a thread
before it broke. Having taken off several of these feathers, he
removed the viscous matter with his fingers, and found under it,
in the centre, some short hairs, black and grey, matted together,
which he verily believed to be cat's hair. He also said, that Jane
Wenham confessed to him that she had bewitched the pillow, and had
practised witchcraft for sixteen years.

The judge interrupted the witness at this stage, and said, he
should very much like to see an enchanted feather, and seemed to
wonder when he was told that none of these strange cakes had been
preserved. His Lordship asked the witness why he did not keep one
or two of them, and was informed that they had all been burnt, in
order to relieve the bewitched person of the pains she suffered,
which could not be so well effected by any other means.

A man, named Thomas Ireland, deposed, that hearing several times a
great noise of cats crying and screaming about his house, he went
out and frightened them away, and they all ran towards the cottage
of Jane Wenham. One of them he swore positively had a face very
like Jane Wenham's. Another man, named Burville, gave similar
evidence, and swore that he had often seen a cat with Jane
Wenham's face. Upon one occasion he was in Ann Thorne's chamber,
when several cats came in, and among them the cat above stated.
This witness would have favoured the court with a much longer
statement, but was stopped by the judge, who said he had heard
quite enough.

The prisoner, in her defence, said nothing, but that "she was a
clear woman." The learned judge then summed up, leaving it to the
jury to determine whether such evidence as they had heard was
sufficient to take away the prisoner's life upon the indictment.
After a long deliberation they brought in their verdict, that she
was guilty upon the evidence. The Judge then asked them whether
they found her guilty upon the indictment of conversing with the
devil in the shape of a cat? The sapient foreman very gravely
answered, "We find her guilty of that." The learned judge then
very reluctantly proceeded to pass sentence of death; but, by his
persevering exertions, a pardon was at last obtained, and the
wretched old woman was set at liberty. In the year 1716, a woman
and her daughter, - the latter only nine years of age,—were hanged
at Huntingdon for selling their souls to the devil, and raising a
storm by pulling off their stockings and making a lather of soap.
This appears to have been the last judicial execution in England.
From that time to the year 1736, the populace raised at intervals
the old cry, and more than once endangered the lives of poor women
by dragging them through ponds on suspicion; but the philosophy of
those who, from their position, sooner or later give the tone to
the opinions and morals of the poor, was silently working a cure
for the evil. The fear of witches ceased to be epidemic, and
became individual, lingering only in minds lettered by inveterate
prejudice or brutalizing superstition. In the year 1736, the penal
statute of James I. was finally blotted from the statutebook, and
suffered no longer to disgrace the advancing intelligence of the
country. Pretenders to witchcraft, fortune-tellers, conjurors, and
all their train, were liable only to the common punishment of
rogues and impostors—imprisonment and the pillory.

In Scotland, the delusion also assumed the same phases, and was
gradually extinguished in the light of civilization. As in England
the progress of improvement was slow. Up to the year 1665, little
or no diminution of the mania was perceptible. In 1643, the
General Assembly recommended that the Privy Council should
institute a standing commission, composed of any "understanding
gentlemen or magistrates," to try the witches, who were stated to
have increased enormously of late years. In 1649, an act was
passed, confirmatory of the original statute of Queen Mary,
explaining some points of the latter which were doubtful, and
enacting severe penalties, not only against witches themselves,
but against all who covenanted with them, or sought by their means
to pry into the secrets of futurity, or cause any evil to the
life, lands, or limbs of their neighbours. For the next ten years,
the popular madness upon this subject was perhaps more furious
than ever; upwards of four thousand persons suffered for the crime
during that interval. This was the consequence of the act of
parliament and the unparalleled severity of the magistrates; the
latter frequently complained that for two witches they burned one
day, there were ten to burn the next: they never thought that they
themselves were the cause of the increase. In a single circuit,
held at Glasgow, Ayr, and Stirling, in 1659, seventeen unhappy
creatures were burned by judicial sentence for trafficking with
Satan. In one day, (November 7, 1661,) the Privy Council issued no
less than fourteen commissions for trials in the provinces. Next
year, the violence of the persecution seems to have abated. From
1662 to 1668, although "the understanding gentlemen and
magistrates" already mentioned, continued to try and condemn, the
High Court of Justiciary had but one offender of this class to
deal with, and she was acquitted. James Welsh, a common pricker,
was ordered to be publicly whipped through the streets of
Edinburgh for falsely accusing a woman of witchcraft; a fact which
alone proves that the superior court sifted the evidence in these
cases with much more care and severity than it had done a few
years previously. The enlightened Sir George Mackenzie, styled by
Dryden "the noble wit of Scotland," laboured hard to introduce
this rule into court—that the confessions of the witches should be
held of little worth, and that the evidence of the prickers and
other interested persons should be received with distrust and
jealousy. This was reversing the old practice, and saved many
innocent lives. Though a firm believer both in ancient and modern
witchcraft, he could not shut his eyes to the atrocities daily
committed under the name of justice. In his work on the Criminal
Law of Scotland, published in 1678, he says, "From the horridness
of this crime, I do conclude that, of all others, it requires the
clearest relevancy and most convincing probature; and I condemn,
next to the wretches themselves, those cruel and too forward
judges who burn persons by thousands as guilty of this crime." In
the same year, Sir John Clerk plumply refused to serve as a
commissioner on trials for witchcraft, alleging, by way of excuse,
"that he was not himself good conjuror enough to be duly
qualified." The views entertained by Sir George Mackenzie were so
favourably received by the Lords of Session that he was deputed,
in 1680, to report to them on the cases of a number of poor women
who were then in prison awaiting their trial. Sir George stated
that there was no evidence against them whatever but their own
confessions, which were absurd and contradictory, and drawn from
them by severe torture. They were immediately discharged.

For the next sixteen years, the Lords of Session were unoccupied
with trials for witchcraft; not one is entered upon the record:
but in 1707, a case occurred, which equalled in absurdity any of
those that signalized the dark reign of King James. A girl, named
Christiana Shaw, eleven years of age, the daughter of John Shaw of
Bargarran, was subject to fits, and being of a spiteful temper,
she accused her maid-servant, with whom she had frequent quarrels,
of bewitching her. Her story, unfortunately, was believed.
Encouraged to tell all the persecutions of the devil which the
maid had sent to torment her, she in the end concocted a romance
that involved twenty-one persons. There was no other evidence
against them but the fancies of this lying child, and the
confessions which pain had extorted from them; but upon this no
less than five women were condemned, before Lord Blantyre and the
rest of the Commissioners, appointed specially by the Privy
Council to try this case. They were burned on the Green at
Paisley. The warlock of the party, one John Reed, who was also
condemned, hanged himself in prison. It was the general belief in
Paisley that the devil had strangled him, lest he should have
revealed in his last moments too many of the unholy secrets of
witchcraft. This trial excited considerable disgust in Scotland.
The Rev. Mr. Bell, a contemporary writer, observed that, in this
business, "persons of more goodness and esteem than most of their
calumniators were defamed for witches." He adds, that the persons
chiefly to blame were "certain ministers of too much forwardness
and absurd credulity, and some topping professors in and about
Glasgow."97*

After this trial, there again occurs a lapse of seven years, when
the subject was painfully forced upon public attention by the
brutal cruelty of the mob at Pittenween. Two women were accused of
having bewitched a strolling beggar, who was subject to fits, or
who pretended to be so, for the purpose of exciting commiseration.
They were cast into prison, and tortured until they confessed. One
of them, named Janet Cornfoot, contrived to escape, but was
brought back to Pittenween next day by a party of soldiers. On her
approach to the town, she was, unfortunately, met by a furious
mob, composed principally of fishermen and their wives, who seized
upon her with the intention of swimming her. They forced her away
to the sea shore, and tying a rope around her body, secured the
end of it to the mast of a fishing-boat lying alongside. In this
manner they ducked her several times. When she was half dead, a
sailor in the boat cut away the rope, and the mob dragged her
through the sea to the beach. Here, as she lay quite insensible, a
brawny ruffian took down the door of his hut, close by, and placed
it on her back. The mob gathered large stones from the beach, and
piled them upon her till the wretched woman was pressed to death.
No magistrate made the slightest attempt to interfere, and the
soldiers looked on, delighted spectators. A great outcry was
raised against this culpable remissness, but no judicial inquiry
was set on foot. This happened in 1704.

The next case we hear of is that of Elspeth Rule, found guilty of
witchcraft before Lord Anstruther at the Dumfries circuit, in
1708. She was sentenced to be marked in the cheek with a redhot
iron, and banished the realm of Scotland for life.

Again there is a long interval. In 1718, the remote county of
Caithness, where the delusion remained in all its pristine vigour
for years after it had ceased elsewhere, was startled from its
propriety by the cry of witchcraft. A silly fellow, named William
Montgomery, a carpenter, had a mortal antipathy to cats, and,
somehow or other, these animals generally chose his back-yard as
the scene of their catterwaulings. He puzzled his brains for a
long time to know why he, above all his neighbours, should be so
pestered; at last he came to the sage conclusion that his
tormentors were no cats, but witches. In this opinion he was
supported by his maid-servant, who swore a round oath that she had
often heard the aforesaid cats talking together in human voices.
The next time the unlucky tabbies assembled in his back-yard, the
valiant carpenter was on the alert. Arming himself with an axe, a
dirk, and a broadsword, he rushed out among them: one of them he
wounded in the back, a second in the hip, and the leg of a third
he maimed with his axe; but he could not capture any of them. A
few days afterwards, two old women of the parish died, and it was
said that, when their bodies were laid out, there appeared upon
the back of one the mark as of a recent wound, and a similar scar
upon the hip of the other. The carpenter and his maid were
convinced that they were the very cats, and the whole county
repeated the same story. Every one was upon the look-out for
proofs corroborative: a very remarkable one was soon discovered.
Nanny Gilbert, a wretched old creature of upwards of seventy years
of age, was found in bed with her leg broken; as she was ugly
enough for a witch, it was asserted that she, also, was one of the
cats that had fared so ill at the hands of the carpenter. The
latter, when informed of the popular suspicion, asserted that he
distinctly remembered to have struck one of the cats a blow with
the back of his broadsword, which ought to have broken her leg.
Nanny was immediately dragged from her bed, and thrown into
prison. Before she was put to the torture, she explained, in a
very natural and intelligible manner, how she had broken her limb;
but this account did not give satisfaction: the professional
persuasions of the torturer made her tell a different tale, and
she confessed that she was indeed a witch, and had been wounded by
Montgomery on the night stated - that the two old women recently
deceased were witches also, besides about a score of others whom
she named. The poor creature suffered so much by the removal from
her own home, and the tortures inflicted upon her, that she died
the next day in prison. Happily for the persons she had named in
her confession, Dundas of Arniston, at that time the King's
Advocate-general, wrote to the Sheriff-depute, one Captain Ross of
Littledean, cautioning him not to proceed to trial, the "thing
being of too great difficulty, and beyond the jurisdiction of an
inferior court." Dundas himself examined the precognition with
great care, and was so convinced of the utter folly of the whole
case that he quashed all further proceedings.

We find this same Sheriff-depute of Caithness very active four
years afterwards in another trial for witchcraft. In spite of the
warning he had received, that all such cases were to be tried in
future by the superior courts, he condemned to death an old woman
at Dornoch, upon the charge of bewitching the cows and pigs of her
neighbours. This poor creature was insane, and actually laughed
and clapped her hands at sight of "the bonnie fire" that was to
consume her. She had a daughter, who was lame both of her hands
and feet, and one of the charges brought against her was, that she
had used this daughter as a pony in her excursions to join the
devil's sabbath, and that the devil himself had shod her, and
produced lameness.

This was the last execution that took place in Scotland for
witchcraft. The penal statutes were repealed in 1756, and, as in
England, whipping, the pillory, or imprisonment, were declared the
future punishments of all pretenders to magic or witchcraft.

Still, for many years after this, the superstition lingered both
in England and Scotland, and in some districts is far from being
extinct even at this day. But before we proceed to trace it any
further than to its legal extinction, we have yet to see the
frightful havoc it made in continental Europe from the
commencement of the seventeenth to the middle of the eighteenth
century. France, Germany, and Switzerland were the countries which
suffered most from the epidemic. The number of victims in these
countries during the sixteenth century has already been mentioned;
but, at the early part of the seventeenth, the numbers are so
great, especially in Germany, that were they not to be found in
the official records of the tribunals, it would be almost
impossible to believe that mankind could ever have been so
maddened and deluded. To use the words of the learned and
indefatigable Horst,98* "the world seemed to be like a large
madhouse for witches and devils to play their antics in." Satan
was believed to be at everybody's call, to raise the whirlwind,
draw down the lightning, blight the productions of the earth, or
destroy the health and paralyse the limbs of man. This belief, so
insulting to the majesty and beneficence of the Creator, was
shared by the most pious ministers of religion. Those who in their
morning and evening prayers acknowledged the one true God, and
praised him for the blessings of the seed time and the harvest,
were convinced that frail humanity could enter into a compact with
the spirits of hell to subvert his laws and thwart all his
merciful intentions. Successive popes, from Innocent VIII.
downwards, promulgated this degrading doctrine, which spread so
rapidly that society seemed to be divided into two great factions,
the bewitching and the bewitched.

The commissioners named by Innocent VIII. to prosecute the
witch-trials in Germany, were Jacob Sprenger, so notorious for his
work on demonology, entitled the "Malleus Maleficarum," or "Hammer
to knock down Witches," Henry Institor a learned jurisconsult, and
the Bishop of Strasburgh. Barnberg, Treves, Cologne, Paderborn,
and Wurzburg, were the chief seats of the commissioners, who,
during their lives alone, condemned to the stake, on a very
moderate calculation, upwards of three thousand victims. The
number of witches so increased, that new commissioners were
continually appointed in Germany, France, and Switzerland. In
Spain and Portugal the Inquisition alone took cognizance of the
crime. It is impossible to search the records of those dark, but
now happily nonexisting tribunals; but the mind recoils with
affright even to form a guess of the multitudes who perished.

The mode of trial in the other countries is more easily
ascertained. Sprenger, in Germany, and Bodinus and Delrio, in
France, have left but too ample a record of the atrocities
committed in the much-abused names of justice and religion.
Bodinus, of great repute and authority in the seventeenth century,
says, "The trial of this offence must not be conducted like other
crimes. Whoever adheres to the ordinary course of justice perverts
the spirit of the law, both Divine and human. He who is accused of
sorcery should never be acquitted unless the malice of the
prosecutor be clearer than the sun; for it is so difficult to
bring full proof of this secret crime, that out of a million of
witches not one would be convicted if the usual course were
followed!" Henri Boguet, a witch-finder, who styled himself "The
Grand Judge of Witches for the Territory of St. Claude," drew up a
code for the guidance of all persons engaged in the witch-trials,
consisting of seventy articles, quite as cruel as the code of
Bodinus. In this document he affirms, that a mere suspicion of
witchcraft justifies the immediate arrest and torture of the
suspected person. If the prisoner muttered, looked on the ground,
and did not shed any tears, all these were proofs positive of
guilt! In all cases of witchcraft, the evidence of the child ought
to be taken against its parent; and persons of notoriously bad
character, although not to be believed upon their oaths on the
ordinary occasions of dispute that might arise between man and
man, were to be believed, if they swore that any person had
bewitched them! Who, when he hears that this diabolical doctrine
was the universally received opinion of the ecclesiastical and
civil authorities, can wonder that thousands upon thousands of
unhappy persons should be brought to the stake? that Cologne
should for many years burn its three hundred witches annually? the
district of Barnberg its four hundred? Nuremberg, Geneva, Paris,
Toulouse, Lyons, and other cities, their two hundred?

A few of these trials may be cited, taking them in the order of
priority, as they occurred in different parts of the Continent. In
1595 an old woman residing in a village near Constance, angry at
not being invited to share the sports of the country people on a
day of public rejoicing, was heard to mutter something to herself,
and was afterwards seen to proceed through the fields towards a
hill, where she was lost sight of. A violent thunderstorm arose
about two hours afterwards, which wet the dancers to the skin, and
did considerable damage to the plantations. This woman, suspected
before of witchcraft, was seized and imprisoned, and accused of
having raised the storm, by filling a hole with wine, and stirring
it about with a stick. She was tortured till she confessed, and
was burned alive the next evening.

About the same time two sorcerers in Toulouse were accused of
having dragged a crucifix about the streets at midnight, stopping
at times to spit upon and kick it, and uttering at intervals an
exorcism to raise the devil. The next day a hail-storm did
considerable damage to the crops, and a girl, the daughter of a
shoemaker in the town, remembered to have heard in the night the
execrations of the wizards. Her story led to their arrest. The
usual means to produce confession were resorted to. The wizards
owned that they could raise tempests whenever they pleased, and
named several persons who possessed similar powers. They were
hanged, and then burned in the market-place, and seven of the
persons they had mentioned shared the same fate.

Hoppo and Stadlin, two noted wizards of Germany, were executed in
1599. They implicated twenty or thirty witches, who went about
causing women to miscarry, bringing down the lightning of heaven,
and making maidens bring forth toads. To this latter fact several
girls were found to swear most positively! Stadlin confessed that
he had killed seven infants in the womb of one woman.

Bodinus highly praises the exertions of a witchfinder, named
Nider, in France, who prosecuted so many that he could not
calculate them. Some of these witches could, by a single word,
cause people to fall down dead; others made women go with child
three years instead of nine months; while others, by certain
invocations and ceremonies, could turn the faces of their enemies
upside down, or twist them round to their backs. Although no
witness was ever procured who saw persons in this horrible state,
the witches confessed that they had the power, and exercised it.
Nothing more was wanting to insure the stake.

At Amsterdam a crazy girl confessed that she could cause sterility
in cattle, and bewitch pigs and poultry by merely repeating the
magic words Turius und Shurius Inturius! She was hanged and
burned. Another woman in the same city, named Kornelis Van
Purmerund, was arrested in consequence of some disclosures the
former had made. A witness came forward and swore that she one day
looked through the window of her hut, and saw Kornelis sitting
before a fire muttering something to the devil. She was sure it
was to the devil, because she heard him answer her. Shortly
afterwards twelve black cats ascended out of the floor, and danced
on their hind legs around the witch for the space of about half an
hour. They then vanished with a horrid noise, and leaving a
disagreeable smell behind them. She also was hanged and burned.

At Bamberg, in Bavaria, the executions from the year 1610 to 1640
were at the rate of about a hundred annually. One woman, suspected
of witchcraft, was seized because, having immoderately praised the
beauty of a child, it had shortly afterwards fallen ill and died.
She confessed upon the rack that the devil had given her the power
to work evil upon those she hated, by speaking words in their
praise. If she said with unwonted fervour, "What a strong man!"
"What a lovely woman !" "What a sweet child!" the devil understood
her, and afflicted them with diseases immediately. It is quite
unnecessary to state the end of this poor creature. Many women
were executed for causing strange substances to lodge in the
bodies of those who offended them. Bits of wood, nails, hair,
eggshells, bits of glass, shreds of linen and woollen cloth,
pebbles, and even hot cinders and knives, were the articles
generally chosen. These were believed to remain in the body till
the witches confessed or were executed, when they were voided from
the bowels, or by the mouth, nostrils, or ears. Modern physicians
have often had cases of a similar description under their care,
where girls have swallowed needles, which have been voided on the
arms, legs, and other parts of the body. But the science of that
day could not account for these phenomena otherwise than by the
power of the devil; and every needle swallowed by a servant maid
cost an old woman her life. Nay, if no more than one suffered in
consequence, the district might think itself fortunate. The
commissioners seldom stopped short at one victim. The revelations
of the rack in most cases implicated half a score.

Of all the records of the witch-trials preserved for the wonder of
succeeding ages, that of Wurzburg, from 1627 to 1629, is the most
frightful. Hauber, who has preserved this list in his "Acta et
Scripta Magica," says, in a note at the end, that it is far from
complete, and that there were a great many other burnings too
numerous to specify. This record, which relates to the city only,
and not to the province of Wurzburg, contains the names of one
hundred and fifty-seven persons, who were burned in two years in
twenty-nine burnings, averaging from five to six at a time. The
list comprises three play-actors, four innkeepers, three common
councilmen of Wurzburg, fourteen vicars of the cathedral, the
burgomaster's lady, an apothecary's wife and daughter, two
choristers of the cathedral, Gobel Babelin the prettiest girl in
the town, and the wife, the two little sons, and the daughter of
the councillor Stolzenberg. Rich and poor, young and old, suffered
alike. At the seventh of these recorded burnings, the victims are
described as a wandering boy, twelve years of age, and four
strange men and women, found sleeping in the market-place.
Thirty-two of the whole number appear to have been vagrants, of
both sexes, who, failing to give a satisfactory account of
themselves, were accused and found guilty of witchcraft. The
number of children on the list is horrible to think upon. The
thirteenth and fourteenth burnings comprised four persons, who are
stated to have been a little maiden nine years of age, a maiden
still less, her sister, their mother, and their aunt, a pretty
young woman of twenty-four. At the eighteenth burning the victims
were two boys of twelve, and a girl of fifteen; at the nineteenth,
the young heir of the noble house of Rotenhahn, aged nine, and two
other boys, one aged ten, and the other twelve. Among other
entries appear the names of Baunach, the fattest, and Steinacher,
the richest burgher in Wurzburg. What tended to keep up the
delusion in this unhappy city, and indeed all over Europe, was the
number of hypochondriac and diseased persons who came voluntarily
forward, and made confession of witchcraft. Several of the victims
in the foregoing list, had only themselves to blame for their
fate. Many again, including the apothecary's wife and daughter
already mentioned, pretended to sorcery, and sold poisons, or
attempted by means of charms and incantations to raise the devil.
But throughout all this fearful period the delusion of the
criminals was as great as that of the judges. Depraved persons
who, in ordinary times, would have been thieves or murderers,
added the desire of sorcery to their depravity, sometimes with the
hope of acquiring power over their fellows, and sometimes with the
hope of securing impunity in this world by the protection of
Satan. One of the persons executed at the first burning, a
prostitute, was heard repeating the exorcism, which was supposed
to have the power of raising the arch enemy in the form of a goat.
This precious specimen of human folly has been preserved by Horst,
in his Zauberbibliothek. It ran as follows, and was to be repeated
slowly, with many ceremonies and waivings of the hand:

"Lalle, Bachera, Magotte, Baphia, Dajam,
  Vagoth Heneche Ammi Nagaz, Adomator
  Raphael Immanuel Christus, Tetragrammaton
  Agra Jod Loi. König! König!

The two last words were uttered quickly, and with a sort of
scream, and were supposed to be highly agreeable to Satan, who
loved to be called a king. If he did not appear immediately, it
was necessary to repeat a further exorcism. The one in greatest
repute was as follows, and was to be read backwards, with the
exception of the last two words

"Anion, Lalle, Sabolos, Sado, Pater, Aziel
  Adonai Sado Vagoth Agra, Jod,
  Baphra! Komm! Komm!"

When the witch wanted to get rid of the devil, who was sometimes
in the habit of prolonging his visits to an unconscionable length,
she had only to repeat the following, also backwards, when he
generally disappeared, leaving behind him a suffocating smell:

"Zellianelle Heotti Bonus Vagotha
  Plisos sother osech unicus Beelzebub
  Dax! Komm! Komm!"

This nonsensical jargon soon became known to all the idle and
foolish boys of Germany. Many an unhappy urchin, who in a youthful
frolic had repeated it, paid for his folly the penalty of his
life. Three, whose ages varied from ten to fifteen, were burned
alive at Wurzburg for no other offence. Of course every other boy
in the city became still more convinced of the power of the charm.
One boy confessed that he would willingly have sold himself to the
devil, if he could have raised him, for a good dinner and cakes
every day of his life, and a pony to ride upon. This luxurious
youngster, instead of being horsewhipped for his folly, was hanged
and burned.

The small district of Lindheim was, if possible, even more
notorious than Wurzburg for the number of its witch-burnings. In
the year 1633 a famous witch, named Pomp Anna, who could cause her
foes to fall sick by merely looking at them, was discovered and
burned, along with three of her companions. Every year in this
parish, consisting at most of a thousand persons, the average
number of executions was five. Between the years 1660 and 1664,
the number consumed was thirty. If the executions all over Germany
had been in this frightful proportion, hardly a family could have
escaped losing one of its members.

In 1627 a ballad entitled the Druten Zeitung, or the Witches
Gazette, was very popular in Germany. It detailed, according to
the titlepage of a copy printed at Smalcald in 1627, "an account
of the remarkable events which took place in Franconia, Bamberg,
and Wurzburg, with those wretches who from avarice or ambition
have sold themselves to the devil, and how they had their reward
at last: set to music, and to be sung to the tune of Dorothea."
The sufferings of the witches at the stake are explained in it
with great minuteness, the poet waxing extremely witty when he
describes the horrible contortions of pain upon their
countenances, and the shrieks that rent the air when any one of
more than common guilt was burned alive. A trick resorted to in
order to force one witch to confess, is told in this doggrel as an
excellent joke. As she obstinately refused to own that she was in
league with the powers of evil, the commissioners suggested that
the hangman should dress himself in a bear's skin, with the horns,
tail, and all the et ceteras, and in this form penetrate into her
dungeon. The woman, in the darkness of her cell, could not detect
the imposture, aided as it was by her own superstitious fears. She
thought she was actually in the presence of the prince of hell;
and when she was told to keep up her courage, and that she should
be relieved from the power of her enemies, she fell on her knees
before the supposed devil, and swore to dedicate herself hereafter
body and soul to his service. Germany is, perhaps, the only
country in Europe where the delusion was so great as to have made
such detestable verses as these the favourites of the people:

"Man shickt ein Henkersknecht
Zu ihr in Gefangniss n'unter,
    Den man hat kleidet recht,
Mir einer Bärnhaute,
    Als wenns der Teufel wär;
Als ihm die Drut anschaute
    Meints ihr Buhl kam daher."

Sie sprach zu ihm behende,
    Wie lässt du mich so lang
In der Obrigkeit Hände?
    Hilf mir aus ihren Zwang,
Wie du mir hast verheissen,
    Ich bin ja eben dein,
Thu mich aus der Angst entreissen
    O liebster Buhle mein ?"99*

This rare poet adds, that in making such an appeal to the hangman,
the witch never imagined the roast that was to be made of her, and
puts in, by way of parenthesis, "was not that fine fun!—Was das
war fur ein Spiel!" As feathers thrown into the air show how the
wind blows, so this trumpery ballad serves to show the current of
popular feeling at the time of its composition.

All readers of history are familiar with the celebrated trial of
the Marechale d'Ancre, who was executed in Paris in the year 1617.
Although witchcraft was one of the accusations brought against
her, the real crime for which she suffered was her ascendency over
the mind of Mary of Medicis, and the consequent influence she
exercised indirectly over the unworthy King, Louis XIII. Her
coachman gave evidence that she had sacrificed a cock at midnight,
in one of the churches, and others swore they had seen her go
secretly into the house of a noted witch, named Isabella. When
asked by what means she had acquired so extraordinary an influence
over the mind of the Queen Mother, she replied boldly, that she
exercised no other power over her, than that which a strong mind
can always exercise over the weak. She died with great firmness.

In two years afterwards scenes far more horrible than any that had
yet taken place in France were enacted at Labourt, at the foot of
the Pyrenees. The Parliament of Bourdeaux, scandalised at the
number of witches who were said to infest Labourt and its
neighbourhood, deputed one of its own members, the noted Pierre de
l'Ancre, and its President, Espaignel, to inquire into the matter,
with full powers to punish the offenders. They arrived at Labourt
in May 1619. De l'Ancre wrote a book, setting forth all his great
deeds, in this battle against the powers of evil. It is full of
obscenity and absurdity; but the facts may be relied on as far as
they relate to the number of trials and executions, and the
strange confessions which torture forced from the unhappy
criminals.

De l'Ancre states as a reason why so many witches were to be found
at Labourt, that the country was mountainous and sterile! He
discovered many of them from their partiality to smoking tobacco.
It may be inferred from this, that he was of the opinion of King
James, that tobacco was the "devil's weed." When the commission
first sat, the number of persons brought to trial was about forty
a day. The acquittals did not average so many as five per cent.
All the witches confessed that they had been present at the great
Domdaniel, or Sabbath. At these saturnalia the devil sat upon a
large gilded throne, sometimes in the form of a goat; sometimes as
a gentleman, dressed all in black, with boots, spurs, and sword;
and very often as a shapeless mass, resembling the trunk of a
blasted tree, seen indistinctly amid the darkness. They generally
proceeded to the Domdaniel, riding on spits, pitchforks, or
broomsticks, and, on their arrival, indulged with the fiends in
every species of debauchery. Upon one occasion they had had the
audacity to celebrate this festival in the very heart of the city
of Bourdeaux. The throne of the arch fiend was placed in the
middle of the Place de Gallienne, and the whole space was covered
with the multitude of witches and wizards, who flocked to it from
far and near; some arriving even from distant Scotland.

After two hundred poor wretches had been hanged and burned, there
seemed no diminution in the number of criminals to be tried. Many
of the latter were asked upon the rack what Satan had said, when
he found that the commissioners were proceeding with such
severity? The general reply was, that he did not seem to care much
about it. Some of them asserted, that they had boldly reproached
him for suffering the execution of their friends, saying, "Out
upon thee, false ,fiend! thy promise was, that they should not
die! Look! how thou hast kept thy word! They have been burned, and
are a heap of ashes!" Upon these occasions he was never offended.
He would give orders that the sports of the Domdaniel should
cease, and producing illusory fires that did not burn, he
encouraged them to walk through, assuring them that the fires
lighted by the executioner gave no more pain than those. They
would then ask him, where their friends were, since they had not
suffered; to which the "Father of Lies" invariably replied, that
they were happy in a far country, and could see and hear all that
was then passing; and that, if they called by name those they
wished to converse with, they might hear their voices in reply.
Satan then imitated the voices of the defunct witches so
successfully, that they were all deceived. Having answered all
objections, the orgies recommenced, and lasted till the cock crew.

De l'Ancre was also very zealous in the trial of unhappy
monomaniacs for the crime of lycanthropy. Several who were
arrested confessed, without being tortured, that they were
weir-wolves, and that, at night, they rushed out among the flocks
and herds, killing and devouring. One young man at Besancon, with
the full consciousness of the awful fate that awaited him,
voluntarily gave himself up to the commissioner Espaignel, and
confessed that he was the servant of a strong fiend, who was known
by the name of "Lord of the Forests." By his power, he was
transformed into the likeness of a wolf. The "Lord of the Forests"
assumed the same shape, but was much larger, fiercer, and
stronger. They prowled about the pastures together at midnight,
strangling the watch-dogs that defended the folds, and killing
more sheep than they could devour. He felt, he said, a fierce
pleasure in these excursions, and howled in excess of joy as he
tore with his fangs the warm flesh of the sheep asunder. This
youth was not alone in this horrid confession; many others
voluntarily owned that they were weir-wolves, and many more were
forced by torture to make the same avowal. Such criminals were
thought to be too atrocious to be hanged first, and then burned:
they were generally sentenced to be burned alive, and their ashes
to be scattered to the winds. Grave and learned doctors of
divinity openly sustained the possibility of these
transformations, relying mainly upon the history of
Nebuchadnezzar. They could not imagine why, if he had been an ox,
modern men could not become wolves, by Divine permission and the
power of the devil. They also contended that, if men should
confess, it was evidence enough, if there had been no other.
Delrio mentions that one gentleman accused of lycanthropy was put
to the torture no less than twenty times, but still he would not
confess. An intoxicating draught was then given him, and under its
influence he confessed that he was a weir-wolf. Delrio cites this
to show the extreme equity of the commissioners. They never burned
anybody till he confessed; and if one course of torture would not
suffice, their patience was not exhausted, and they tried him
again and again, even to the twentieth time! Well may we exclaim,
when such atrocities have been committed in the name of religion,

"Quel lion, quel tigre égale en cruauté,
  Une injuste fureur qu'arme la piété?"

The trial of the unhappy Urbain Grandier, the curate of Loudun,
for bewitching a number of girls in the convent of the Ursulines
in that town, was, like that of the Maréchale d'Ancre, an
accusation resorted to by his enemies to ruin one against whom no
other charge could be brought so readily. This noted affair, which
kept France in commotion for months, and the true character of
which was known even at that time, merits no more than a passing
notice in this place. It did not spring from the epidemic dread of
sorcery then so prevalent, but was carried on by wretched
intriguers, who had sworn to have the life of their foe. Such a
charge could not be refuted in 1644: the accused could not, as
Bodinus expresses it, "make the malice of the prosecutors more
clear than the sun;" and his own denial, however intelligible,
honest, and straightforward, was held as nothing in refutation of
the testimony of the crazy women who imagined themselves
bewitched. The more absurd and contradictory their assertions, the
stronger the argument employed by his enemies that the devil was
in them. He was burned alive, under circumstances of great
cruelty.100*

A singular instance of the epidemic fear of witchcraft occurred at
Lille, in 1639. A pious, but not very sane lady, named Antoinette
Bourignon, founded a school, or hospice, in that city. One day, on
entering the school-room, she imagined that she saw a great number
of little black angels flying about the heads of the children. In
great alarm, she told her pupils of what she had seen, warning
them to beware of the devil, whose imps were hovering about them.
The foolish woman continued daily to repeat the same story, and
Satan and his power became the only subject of conversation, not
only between the girls themselves, but between them and their
instructors. One of them at this time ran away from the school. On
being brought back and interrogated, she said she had not run
away, but had been carried away by the devil—she was a witch, and
had been one since the age of seven. Some other little girls in
the school went into fits at this announcement, and, on their
recovery, confessed that they also were witches. At last, the
whole of them, to the number of fifty, worked upon each other's
imaginations to such a degree that they also confessed that they
were witches—that they attended the Domdaniel, or meeting of the
fiends—that they could ride through the air on broom-sticks, feast
on infants' flesh, or creep through a key-hole.

The citizens of Lille were astounded at these disclosures. The
clergy hastened to investigate the matter; many of them, to their
credit, openly expressed their opinion that the whole affair was
an imposture: not so the majority—they strenuously insisted that
the confessions of the children were valid, and that it was
necessary to make an example by burning them all for witches. The
poor parents, alarmed for their offspring, implored the examining
Capuchins with tears in their eyes to save their young lives,
insisting that they were bewitched, and not bewitching. This
opinion also gained ground in the town. Antoinette Bourignon, who
had put these absurd notions into the heads of the children, was
accused of witchcraft, and examined before the council. The
circumstances of the case seemed so unfavourable towards her that
she would not stay for a second examination. Disguising herself as
she best could, she hastened out of Lille and escaped pursuit. If
she had remained four hours longer, she would have been burned by
judicial sentence, as a witch and a heretic. It is to be hoped
that, wherever she went, she learned the danger of tampering with
youthful minds, and was never again entrusted with the management
of children.

The Duke of Brunswick and the Elector of Menz were struck with the
great cruelty exercised in the torture of suspected persons, and
convinced at the same time that no righteous judge would consider
a confession extorted by pain, and contradictory in itself, as
sufficient evidence to justify the execution of any accused
person. It is related of the Duke of Brunswick that he invited two
learned Jesuits to his house, who were known to entertain strong
opinions upon the subject of witchcraft, with a view of showing
them the cruelty and absurdity of such practises. A woman lay in
the dungeon of the city accused of witchcraft, and the Duke,
having given previous instructions to the officiating torturers,
went with the two Jesuits to hear her confession. By a series of
artful leading questions, the poor creature, in the extremity of
her anguish, was induced to confess that she had often attended
the sabbath of the fiends upon the Brocken—that she had seen two
Jesuits there, who had made themselves notorious, even among
witches, for their abominations—that she had seen them assume the
form of goats, wolves, and other animals; and that many noted
witches had borne them five, six, and seven children at a birth,
who had heads like toads and legs like spiders. Being asked if the
Jesuits were far from her, she replied that they were in the room
beside her. The Duke of Brunswick led his astounded friends away,
and explained the stratagem. This was convincing proof to both of
them that thousands of persons had suffered unjustly; they knew
their own innocence, and shuddered to think what their fate might
have been, if an enemy, instead of a friend, had put such a
confession into the mouth of a criminal. One of these Jesuits was
Frederick Spee, the author of the Cautio Criminalis, published in
1631. This work, exposing the horrors of the witch trials, had a
most salutary effect in Germany: Schonbrunn, Archbishop and
Elector of Menz, abolished the torture entirely within his
dominions, and his example was imitated by the Duke of Brunswick
and other potentates. The number of supposed witches immediately
diminished, and the violence of the mania began to subside. The
Elector of Brandenburg issued a rescript, in 1654, with respect to
the case of Anna of Ellerbrock, a supposed witch, forbidding the
use of torture, and stigmatizing the swimming of witches as an
unjust, cruel, and deceitful test.

This was the beginning of the dawn after the long-protracted
darkness. The tribunals no longer condemned witches to execution
by hundreds in a year. Würzburg, the grand theatre of the
burnings, burned but one, where, forty years previously, it had
burned three score. From 1660 to 1670, the electoral chambers in
all parts of Germany constantly commuted the sentence of death
passed by the provincial tribunals into imprisonment for life, or
burning on the cheek.

A truer philosophy had gradually disabused the public mind.
Learned men freed themselves from the trammels of a debasing
superstition, and governments, both civil and ecclesiastical,
repressed the popular delusion they had so long encouraged. The
Parliament of Normandy condemned a number of women to death, in
the year 1670, on the old charge of riding on broomsticks to the
Domdaniel; but Louis XIV. commuted the sentence into banishment
for life. The Parliament remonstrated, and sent the King the
following remarkable request. The reader will, perhaps, be glad to
see this document at length. It is of importance, as the last
effort of a legislative assembly to uphold this great error; and
the arguments they used, and the instances they quoted, are in the
highest degree curious. It reflects honour upon the memory of
Louis XIV. that he was not swayed by it.

Request of the Parliament of Rouen to the King, in 1670

"SIRE,—EMBOLDENED by the authority which your Majesty has
committed into our hands in the province of Normandy, to try and
punish offences, and more particularly those offences of the
nature of witchcraft, which tend to the destruction of religion
and the ruin of nations, we, your Parliament, remonstrate humbly
with your Majesty upon certain cases of this kind which have been
lately brought before us. We cannot permit the letter addressed by
your Majesty's command to the Attorney-General of this district,
for the reprieve of certain persons condemned to death for
witchcraft, and for the staying of proceedings in several other
cases, to remain unnoticed, and without remarking upon the
consequences which may ensue. There is also a letter from your
Secretary of State, declaring your Majesty's intention to commute
the punishment of these criminals into one of perpetual
banishment, and to submit to the opinion of the Procureur-General,
and of the most learned members of the Parliament of Paris,
whether, in the matter of witchcraft, the jurisprudence of the
Parliament of Rouen is to be followed in preference to that of the
Parliament of Paris, and of the other parliaments of the kingdom
which judge differently."

"Although by the ordinances of the Kings your predecessors,
Parliaments have been forbidden to pay any attention to lettres de
cachet; we, nevertheless, from the knowledge which we have, in
common with the whole kingdom, of the care bestowed by your
Majesty for the good of your subjects, and from the submission and
obedience to your commandments which we have always manifested,
have stayed all proceedings, in conformity to your orders; hoping
that your Majesty, considering the importance of the crime of
witchcraft, and the consequences likely to ensue from its
impunity, will be graciously pleased to grant us once more your
permission to continue the trials, and execute judgment upon those
found guilty. And as, since we received the letter of your
Secretary of State, we have also been made acquainted with the
determination of your Majesty, not only to commute the sentence of
death passed upon these witches into one of perpetual banishment
from the province, but to re-establish them in the possession of
their goods and chattels, and of their good fame and character,
your Parliament have thought it their duty, on occasion of these
crimes, the greatest which men can commit, to make you acquainted
with the general and uniform feelings of the people of this
province with regard to them; it being, moreover, a question in
which are concerned the glory of God and the relief of your
suffering subjects, who groan under their fears from the threats
and menaces of this sort of persons, and who feel the effects of
them every day in the mortal and extraordinary maladies which
attack them, and the surprising damage and loss of their
possessions.

"Your Majesty knows well that there is no crime so opposed to the
commands of God as witchcraft, which destroys the very foundation
of religion, and draws strange abominations after it. It is for
this reason, Sire, that the Scriptures pronounce the punishment of
death against offenders, and that the church and the holy fathers
have fulminated their anathemas, and that canonical decisions have
one and all decreed the most severe punishments, to deter from
this crime; and that the Church of France, animated by the piety
of the Kings your predecessors, has expressed so great a horror at
it, that, not judging the punishment of perpetual imprisonment,
the highest it has the power to inflict, sufficiently severe, it
has left such criminals to be dealt with by the secular power."

"It has been the general feeling of all nations that such
criminals ought to be condemned to death, and all the ancients
were of the same opinion. The law of the" "Twelve Tables," which
was the principal of the Roman laws, ordains the same punishment.
All jurisconsults agreed in it, as well as the constitutions of
the Emperors, and more especially those of Constantine and
Theodosius, who, enlightened by the Gospel, not only renewed the
same punishment, but also deprived, expressly, all persons found
guilty of witchcraft of the right of appeal, and declared them to
be unworthy of a prince's mercy. And Charles VIII, Sire, inspired
by the same sentiments, passed that beautiful and severe ordinance
(cette belle et sévère ordonnance), which enjoined the judges to
punish witches according to the exigencies of the case, under a
penalty of being themselves fined or imprisoned, or dismissed from
their office; and decreed, at the same time, that all persons who
refused to denounce a witch, should be punished as accomplices;
and that all, on the contrary, who gave evidence against one,
should be rewarded.

"From these considerations, Sire, and in the execution of so holy
an ordinance, your parliaments, by their decrees, proportion their
punishments to the guilt of the offenders: and your Parliament of
Normandy has never, until the present time, found that its
practice was different from that of other courts; for all the
books which treat upon this matter cite an infinite number of
decrees condemning witches to be burnt, or broken on the wheel, or
to other punishments. The following are examples:—In the time of
Chilperic, as may be seen in Gregory of Tours, b. vi, c. 35 of his
History of France: all the decrees of the Parliament of Paris
passed according to, and in conformity with, this ancient
jurisprudence of the kingdom, cited by Imbert, in his Judicial
Practice all those cited by Monstrelet, in 1459, against the
witches of Artois; the decrees of the same Parliament, of the l3th
of October 1573, against Mary Le Fief, native of Saumur; of the
21st of October 1596, against the Sieur de Beaumont, who pleaded,
in his defence, that he had only sought the aid of the devil for
the purpose of unbewitching the afflicted and of curing diseases;
of the 4th of July 1606, against Francis du Bose; of the 20th of
July 1582, against Abel de la Rue, native of Coulommiers; of the
2nd of October 1593, against Rousseau and his daughter; of 1608,
against another Rousseau and one Peley, for witchcraft and
adoration of the devil at the Sabbath, under the figure of a
he-goat, as confessed by them; the decree of 4th of February 1615,
against Leclerc, who appealed from the sentence of the Parliament
of Orleans, and who was condemned for having attended the Sabbath,
and confessed, as well as two of his accomplices, who died in
prison, that he had adored the devil, renounced his baptism and
his faith in God, danced the witches' dance, and offered up unholy
sacrifices; the decrees of the 6th of May 1616, against a man
named Leger, on a similar accusation; the pardon granted by
Charles IX to Trois Echelles, upon condition of revealing his
accomplices, but afterwards revoked for renewed sorcery on his
part; the decree of the Parliament of Paris, cited by Mornac in
1595; the judgments passed in consequence of the commission given
by Henry IV to the Sieur de Lancre, councillor of the Parliament
of Bourdeaux; of the 20th of March 1619, against Etienne Audibert;
those passed by the Chamber of Nerac, on the 26th of June 1620,
against several witches; those passed by the Parliament of
Toulouse in 1577, as cited by Gregory Tolosanus, against four
hundred persons accused of this crime, and who were all marked
with the sign of the devil. Besides all these, we might recall to
your Majesty's recollection the various decrees of the Parliament
of Provence, especially in the case of Gaufrédy in 1611; the
decrees of the Parliament of Dijon, and those of the Parliament of
Rennes, following the example of the condemnation of the Marshal
de Rays, who was burned in 1441, for the crime of witchcraft, in
presence of the Duke of Brittany;—all these examples, Sire, prove
that the accusation of witchcraft has always been punished with
death by the Parliaments of your kingdom, and justify the
uniformity of their practice".

"These, Sire, are the motives upon which your Parliament of
Normandy has acted in decreeing the punishment of death against
the persons lately brought before it for this crime. If it has
happened that, on any occasion, these parliaments, and the
Parliament of Normandy among the rest, have condemned the guilty
to a less punishment than that of death, it was for the reason
that their guilt was not of the deepest dye; your Majesty, and the
Kings your predecessors, having left full liberty to the various
tribunals to whom they delegated the administration of justice, to
decree such punishment as was warranted by the evidence brought
before them.

"After so many authorities, and punishments ordained by human and
divine laws, we humbly supplicate your Majesty to reflect once
more upon the extraordinary results which proceed from the
malevolence of this sort of people—on the deaths from unknown
diseases, which are often the consequences of their menaces—on the
loss of the goods and chattels of your subjects—on the proofs of
guilt continually afforded by the insensibility of the marks upon
the accused—on the sudden transportation of bodies from one place
to another—on the sacrifices and nocturnal assemblies, and other
facts, corroborated by the testimony of ancient and modern
authors, and verified by so many eye-witnesses, composed partly of
accomplices, and partly of people who had no interest in the
trials beyond the love of truth, and confirmed, moreover, by the
confessions of the accused parties themselves; and that, Sire,
with so much agreement and conformity between the different cases,
that the most ignorant persons convicted of this crime have spoken
to the same circumstances, and in nearly the same words, as the
most celebrated authors who have written about it, all of which
may be easily proved to your Majesty's satisfaction by the records
of various trials before your parliaments.

"These, Sire, are truths so intimately bound up with the
principles of our religion, that, extraordinary although they be,
no person has been able to this time to call them in question. If
some have cited, in opposition to these truths, the pretended
canon of the Council of Ancyre, and a passage from St. Augustin,
in a treatise upon the Spirit and the Soul, it has been without
foundation; and it would be easy to convince your Majesty that
neither the one nor the other ought to be accounted of any
authority; and, besides that, the canon, in this sense, would be
contrary to the opinion of all succeeding councils of the church,
Cardinal Baronius, and all learned commentators, agree that it is
not to be found in any old edition. In effect, in those editions
wherein it is found, it is in another language, and is in direct
contradiction to the twenty-third canon of the same council, which
condemns sorcery, according to all preceding constitutions. Even
supposing that this canon was really promulgated by the Council of
Ancyre, we must observe that it was issued in the second century,
when the principal attention of the Church was directed to the
destruction of paganism. For this reason, it condemns that class
of women who said they could pass through the air, and over
immense regions, with Diana and Herodias, and enjoins all
preachers to teach the falsehood of such an opinion, in order to
deter people from the worship of these false divinities; but it
does not question the power of the devil over the human body,
which is, in fact, proved by the Holy Gospel of Jesus Christ
himself. And with regard, Sire, to the pretended passage of St.
Augustin, everybody knows that it was not written by him, because
the writer, whoever he was, cites Boetius, who died more than
eighty years after the time of St. Augustin. Besides, there is
still more convincing proof in the fact, that the same father
establishes the truth of witchcraft in all his writings, and more
particularly in his City of God and in his first volume, question
the 25th, wherein he states that sorcery is a communion between
man and the devil, which all good Christians ought to look upon
with horror".

"Taking all these things into consideration, Sire, the officers of
your Parliament hope, from the justice of your Majesty, that you
will be graciously pleased to receive the humble remonstrances
they have taken the liberty to make. They are compelled, for the
acquittal of their own consciences and in discharge of their duty,
to make known to your Majesty, that the decrees they passed
against the sorcerers and witches brought before them, were passed
after a mature deliberation on the part of all the judges present,
and that nothing has been done therein which is not conformable to
the universal jurisprudence of the kingdom, and for the general
welfare of your Majesty's subjects, of whom there is not one who
can say that he is secure from the malevolence of such criminals.
We therefore supplicate your Majesty to suffer us to carry into
effect the sentences we passed, and to proceed with the trial of
the other persons accused of the same crime; and that the piety of
your Majesty will not suffer to be introduced during your reign an
opinion contrary to the principles of that holy religion for which
you have always employed so gloriously both your cares and your
arms."

Louis, as we have already mentioned, paid no attention to this
appeal. The lives of the old women were spared, and prosecutions
for mere witchcraft, unconnected with other offences, were
discontinued throughout France. In 1680 an act was passed for the
punishment, not of witches, but of pretenders to witchcraft,
fortune-tellers, divineresses, and poisoners.

Thus the light broke in upon Germany, France, England, and
Scotland about the same time, gradually growing clearer and
clearer till the middle of the eighteenth century, when witchcraft
was finally reckoned amongst exploded doctrines, and the belief in
it confined to the uttermost vulgar. Twice, however, did the
madness burst forth again as furious, while it lasted, as ever it
had been. The first time in Sweden, in 1669, and the second in
Germany, so late as 1749. Both these instances merit particular
mention. The first is one of the most extraordinary upon record,
and for atrocity and absurdity is unsurpassed in the annals of any
nation.

It having been reported to the King of Sweden that the little
village of Mohra, in the province of Dalecarlia, was troubled
exceedingly with witches, he appointed a commission of clergy and
laymen to trace the rumour to its source, with full powers to
punish the guilty. On the 12th of August 1669, the commissioners
arrived in the bewitched village, to the great joy of the
credulous inhabitants. On the following day the whole population,
amounting to three thousand persons, assembled in the church. A
sermon was preached, "declaring the miserable case of those people
that suffered themselves to be deluded by the devil," and fervent
prayer was offered up that God would remove the scourge from among
them.

The whole assembly then adjourned to the rector's house, filling
all the street before it, when the King's commission was read,
charging every person who knew anything of the witchery, to come
forward and declare the truth. A passion of tears seized upon the
multitude; men, women, and children began to weep and sob, and all
promised to divulge what they had heard or knew. In this frame of
mind they were dismissed to their homes. On the following day they
were again called together, when the depositions of several
persons were taken publicly before them all. The result was that
seventy persons, including fifteen children, were taken into
custody. Numbers also were arrested in the neighbouring district
of Elfdale. Being put to the torture, they all confessed their
guilt. They said they used to go to a gravel-pit that lay hard by
the cross-way, where they put a vest upon their heads, and danced
"round and round and round about." They then went to the
cross-way, and called three times upon the devil; the first time
in a low still voice; the second, somewhat louder; and the third,
very loudly, with these words, "Antecessor, come, and carry us to
Blockula!" This invocation never failed to bring him to their
view. He generally appeared as a little old man, in a grey coat,
with red and blue stockings, with exceedingly long garters. He had
besides a very high-crowned hat, with bands of many-coloured linen
enfolded about it, and a long red beard, that hung down to his
middle.

The first question he put to them was, whether they would serve
him soul and body? On their answering in the affirmative, he told
them to make ready for the journey to Blockula. It was necessary
to procure, in the first place, "some scrapings of altars and
filings of church clocks." Antecessor then gave them a horn, with
some salve in it, wherewith they anointed themselves. These
preparations ended, he brought beasts for them to ride upon,
horses, asses, goats, and monkeys; and, giving them a saddle, a
hammer, and a nail, uttered the word of command, and away they
went. Nothing stopped them. They flew over churches, high walls,
rocks, and mountains, until they came to the green meadow where
Blockula was situated. Upon these occasions they carried as many
children with them as they could; for the devil, they said, "did
plague and whip them if they did not procure him children,
insomuch that they had no peace or quiet for him."

Many parents corroborated a part of this evidence, stating that
their children had repeatedly told them that they had been carried
away in the night to Blockula, where the devil had beaten them
black and blue. They had seen the marks in the morning, but they
soon disappeared. One little girl was examined, who swore
positively that she was carried through the air by the witches,
and when at a great height she uttered the holy name of Jesus. She
immediately fell to the ground, and made a great hole in her side.
"The devil, however, picked her up, healed her side, and carried
her away to Blockula." She added, and her mother confirmed her
statement, that she had till that day "an exceeding great pain in
her side." This was a clencher, and the nail of conviction was
driven home to the hearts of the judges.

The place called Blockula, whither they were carried, was a large
house, with a gate to it, "in a delicate meadow, whereof they
could see no end." There was a very long table in it, at which the
witches sat down; and in other rooms "there were very lovely and
delicate beds for them to sleep upon."

After a number of ceremonies had been performed, by which they
bound themselves, body and soul, to the service of Antecessor,
they sat down to a feast, composed of broth, made of colworts and
bacon, oatmeal, bread and butter, milk and cheese. The devil
always took the chair, and sometimes played to them on the harp or
the fiddle, while they were eating. After dinner they danced in a
ring, sometimes naked, and sometimes in their clothes, cursing and
swearing all the time. Some of the women added particulars too
horrible and too obscene for repetition.

Once the devil pretended to be dead, that he might see whether his
people regretted him. They instantly set up a loud wail, and wept
three tears each for him, at which he was so pleased, that he
jumped up among them, and hugged in his arms those who had been
most obstreperous in their sorrow.

Such were the principal details given by the children, and
corroborated by the confessions of the full-grown witches.
Anything more absurd was never before stated in a court of
justice. Many of the accused contradicted themselves most
palpably; but the commissioners gave no heed to discrepancies. One
of them, the parson of the district, stated, in the course of the
inquiry, that on a particular night, which he mentioned, he had
been afflicted with a headach so agonizing, that he could not
account for it otherwise than by supposing he was bewitched. In
fact, he thought a score of witches must have been dancing on the
crown of his head. This announcement excited great horror among
the pious dames of the auditory, who loudly expressed their wonder
that the devil should have power to hurt so good a man. One poor
witch, who lay in the very jaws of death, confessed that she knew
too well the cause of the minister's headach. The devil had sent
her with a sledge hammer and a large nail, to drive into the good
man's skull. She had hammered at it for some time, but the skull
was so enormously thick, that she made no impression upon it.
Every hand was held up in astonishment. The pious minister blessed
God that his skull was so solid, and he became renowned for his
thick head all the days of his life. Whether the witch intended a
joke does not appear, but she was looked upon as a criminal more
than usually atrocious. Seventy persons were condemned to death on
these so awful yet so ridiculous confessions. Twenty-three of them
were burned together, in one fire, in the village of Mohra, in the
presence of thousands of delighted spectators. On the following
day fifteen children were murdered in the same manner; offered up
in sacrifice to the bloody Moloch of superstition. The remaining
thirty-two were executed at the neighbouring town of Fahluna.
Besides these, fifty-six children were found guilty of witchcraft
in a minor degree, and sentenced to various punishments, such as
running the gauntlet, imprisonment, and public whipping once a
week for a twelvemonth.

Long after the occurrence of this case, it was cited as one of the
most convincing proofs upon record of the prevalence of
witchcraft. When men wish to construct or support a theory, how
they torture facts into their service! The lying whimsies of a few
sick children, encouraged by foolish parents, and drawn out by
superstitious neighbours, were sufficient to set a country in a
flame. If, instead of commissioners as deeply sunk in the slough
of ignorance as the people they were sent amongst, there had been
deputed a few men firm in courage and clear in understanding, how
different would have been the result! Some of the poor children
who were burned would have been sent to an infirmary; others would
have been well flogged; the credulity of the parents would have
been laughed at, and the lives of seventy persons spared. The
belief in witchcraft remains in Sweden to this day; but, happily,
the annals of that country present no more such instances of
lamentable aberration of intellect as the one just cited.

In New England, about the same time, the colonists were scared by
similar stories of the antics of the devil. All at once a fear
seized upon the multitude, and supposed criminals were arrested
day after day in such numbers, that the prisons were found too
small to contain them. A girl, named Goodwin, the daughter of a
mason, who was hypochondriac and subject to fits, imagined that an
old Irishwoman, named Glover, had bewitched her. Her two brothers,
in whose constitutions there was apparently a predisposition to
similar fits, went off in the same way, crying out that the devil
and Dame Glover were tormenting them. At times their joints were
so stiff that they could not be moved, while at others, said the
neighbours, they were so flexible, that the bones appeared
softened into sinews. The supposed witch was seized, and, as she
could not repeat the Lord's Prayer without making a mistake in it,
she was condemned and executed.

But the popular excitement was not allayed. One victim was not
enough: the people waited agape for new disclosures. Suddenly two
hysteric girls in another family fell into fits daily, and the cry
of witchcraft resounded from one end of the colony to the other.
The feeling of suffocation in the throat, so common in cases of
hysteria, was said by the patients to be caused by the devil
himself, who had stuck balls in the windpipe to choke them. They
felt the pricking of thorns in every part of the body, and one of
them vomited needles. The case of these girls, who were the
daughter and niece of a Mr. Parris, the minister of a Calvinist
chapel, excited so much attention, that all the weak women in the
colony began to fancy themselves similarly afflicted. The more
they brooded on it, the more convinced they became. The contagion
of this mental disease was as great as if it had been a
pestilence. One after the other the women fainted away, asserting,
on their recovery, that they had seen the spectres of witches.
Where there were three or four girls in a family, they so worked,
each upon the diseased imagination of the other, that they fell
into fits five or six times in a day. Some related that the devil
himself appeared to them, bearing in his hand a parchment roll,
and promising that if they would sign an agreement transferring to
him their immortal souls, they should be immediately relieved from
fits and all the ills of the flesh. Others asserted that they saw
witches only, who made them similar promises, threatening that
they should never be free from aches and pains till they had
agreed to become the devil's. When they refused, the witches
pinched, or bit, or pricked them with long pins and needles. More
than two hundred persons named by these mischievous visionaries,
were thrown into prison. They were of all ages and conditions of
life, and many of them of exemplary character. No less than
nineteen were condemned and executed before reason returned to the
minds of the colonists. The most horrible part of this lamentable
history is, that among the victims there was a little child only
five years old. Some women swore that they had seen it repeatedly
in company with the devil, and that it had bitten them often with
its little teeth, for refusing to sign a compact with the Evil
One. It can hardly increase our feelings of disgust and abhorrence
when we learn that this insane community actually tried and
executed a dog for the same offence!

One man, named Cory, stoutly refused to plead to the preposterous
indictment against him. As was the practice in such eases, he was
pressed to death. It is told of the Sheriff of New England, who
superintended the execution, that when this unhappy man thrust out
his tongue in his mortal agony, he seized hold of a cane, and
crammed it back again into the mouth. If ever there were a fiend
in human form, it was this Sheriff; a man, who, if the truth were
known, perhaps plumed himself upon his piety—thought he was doing
God good service, and
"Hoped to merit heaven by making earth a hell!"

Arguing still in the firm belief of witchcraft, the bereaved
people began to inquire, when they saw their dearest friends
snatched away from them by these wide-spreading accusations,
whether the whole proceedings were not carried on by the agency of
the devil. Might not the great enemy have put false testimony into
the mouths of the witnesses, or might not the witnesses be witches
themselves? Every man who was in danger of losing his wife, his
child, or his sister, embraced this doctrine with avidity. The
revulsion was as sudden as the first frenzy. All at once, the
colonists were convinced of their error. The judges put a stop to
the prosecutions, even of those who had confessed their guilt. The
latter were no sooner at liberty than they retracted all they had
said, and the greater number hardly remembered the avowals which
agony had extorted from them. Eight persons, who had been tried
and condemned, were set free; and gradually girls ceased to have
fits and to talk of the persecutions of the devil. The judge who
had condemned the first criminal executed on this charge, was so
smitten with sorrow and humiliation at his folly, that he set
apart the anniversary of that day as one of solemn penitence and
fasting. He still clung to the belief in witchcraft; no new light
had broken in upon him on that subject, but, happily for the
community, the delusion had taken a merciful turn. The whole
colony shared the feeling; the jurors on the different trials
openly expressed their penitence in the churches; and those who
had suffered were regarded as the victims, and not the accomplices
of Satan.

It is related that the Indian tribes in New England were sorely
puzzled at the infatuation of the settlers, and thought them
either a race inferior to, or more sinful than the French
colonists in the vicinity, amongst whom, as they remarked, "the
Great Spirit sent no witches."

Returning again to the continent of Europe, we find that, after
the year 1680, men became still wiser upon this subject. For
twenty years the populace were left to their belief, but
governments in general gave it no aliment in the shape of
executions. The edict of Louis XIV. gave a blow to the
superstition, from which it never recovered. The last execution in
the Protestant cantons of Switzerland was at Geneva, in 1652. The
various potentates of Germany, although they could not stay the
trials, invariably commuted the sentence into imprisonment, in all
cases where the pretended witch was accused of pure witchcraft,
unconnected with any other crime. In the year 1701, Thomasius, the
learned professor at the University of Halle, delivered his
inaugural thesis, De Crimine Magiæ, which struck another blow at
the falling monster of popular error. But a faith so strong as
that in witchcraft was not to be eradicated at once: the arguments
of learned men did not penetrate to the villages and hamlets, but
still they achieved great things; they rendered the belief an
unworking faith, and prevented the supply of victims, on which for
so many ages it had battened and grown strong.

Once more the delusion broke out; like a wild beast wounded to the
death, it collected all its remaining energies for the final
convulsion, which was to show how mighty it had once been.
Germany, which had nursed the frightful error in its cradle,
tended it on its death-bed, and Wurzburg, the scene of so many
murders on the same pretext, was destined to be the scene of the
last. That it might lose no portion of its bad renown, the last
murder was as atrocious as the first. This case offers a great
resemblance to that of the witches of Mohra and New England,
except in the number of its victims. It happened so late as the
year 1749, to the astonishment and disgust of the rest of Europe.

A number of young women in a convent at Würzburg fancied
themselves bewitched; they felt, like all hysteric subjects, a
sense of suffocation in the throat. They went into fits
repeatedly; and one of them, who had swallowed needles, evacuated
them at abscesses, which formed in different parts of the body.
The cry of sorcery was raised, and a young woman, named Maria
Renata Sanger, was arrested on the charge of having leagued with
the devil, to bewitch five of the young ladies. It was sworn on
the trial that Maria had been frequently seen to clamber over the
convent walls in the shape of a pig—that, proceeding to the
cellar, she used to drink the best wine till she was intoxicated;
and then start suddenly up in her own form. Other girls asserted
that she used to prowl about the roof like a cat, and often
penetrate into their chamber, and frighten them by her dreadful
howlings. It was also said that she had been seen in the shape of
a hare, milking the cows dry in the meadows belonging to the
convent; that she used to perform as an actress on the boards of
Drury Lane theatre in London, and, on the very same night, return
upon a broomstick to Wurzburg, and afflict the young ladies with
pains in all their limbs. Upon this evidence she was condemned,
and burned alive in the market-place of Wurzburg.

Here ends this frightful catalogue of murder and superstition.
Since that day, the belief in witchcraft has fled from the
populous abodes of men, and taken refuge in remote villages and
districts too wild, rugged, and inhospitable to afford a
resting-place for the foot of civilization. Rude fishers and
uneducated labourers still attribute every phenomenon of nature
which they cannot account for, to the devil and witches.
Catalepsy, that wondrous disease, is still thought by ignorant
gossips to be the work of Satan; and hypochondriacs, uninformed by
science of the nature of their malady, devoutly believe in the
reality of their visions. The reader would hardly credit the
extent of the delusion upon this subject in the very heart of
England at this day. Many an old woman leads a life of misery from
the unfeeling insults of her neighbours, who raise the scornful
finger and hooting voice at her, because in her decrepitude she is
ugly, spiteful, perhaps insane, and realizes in her personal
appearance the description preserved by tradition of the witches
of yore. Even in the neighbourhood of great towns the taint
remains of this once widely-spread contagion. If no victims fall
beneath it, the enlightenment of the law is all that prevents a
recurrence of scenes as horrid as those of the seventeeth century.
Hundreds upon hundreds of witnesses could be found to swear to
absurdities as great as those asserted by the infamous Matthew
Hopkins.

In the Annual Register for 1760, an instance of the belief in
witchcraft is related, which shows how superstition lingers. A
dispute arose in the little village of Glen, in Leicestershire,
between two old women, each of whom vehemently accused the other
of witchcraft. The quarrel at last ran so high that a challenge
ensued, and they both agreed to be tried by the ordeal of
swimming. They accordingly stripped to their shifts—procured some
men, who tied their thumbs and great toes together, cross-wise,
and then, with a cart-rope about their middle, suffered themselves
to be thrown into a pool of water. One of them sank immediately,
but the other continued struggling a short time upon the surface
of the water, which the mob deeming an infallible sign of her
guilt, pulled her out, and insisted that she should immediately
impeach all her accomplices in the craft. She accordingly told
them that, in the neighbouring village of Burton, there were
several old women as "much witches as she was." Happily for her,
this negative information was deemed sufficient, and a student in
astrology, or "white-witch," coming up at the time, the mob, by
his direction, proceeded forthwith to Burton in search of all the
delinquents. After a little consultation on their arrival, they
went to the old woman's house on whom they had fixed the strongest
suspicion. The poor old creature on their approach locked the
outer door, and from the window of an upstairs room asked what
they wanted. They informed her that she was charged with being
guilty of witchcraft, and that they were come to duck her;
remonstrating with her at the same time upon the necessity of
submission to the ordeal, that, if she were innocent, all the
world might know it. Upon her persisting in a positive refusal to
come down, they broke open the door and carried her out by force,
to a deep gravel-pit full of water. They tied her thumbs and toes
together and threw her into the water, where they kept her for
several minutes, drawing her out and in two or three times by the
rope round her middle. Not being able to satisfy themselves
whether she were a witch or no, they at last let her go, or, more
properly speaking, they left her on the bank to walk home by
herself, if she ever recovered. Next day, they tried the same
experiment upon another woman, and afterwards upon a third; but,
fortunately, neither of the victims lost her life from this
brutality. Many of the ringleaders in the outrage were apprehended
during the week, and tried before the justices at
quarter-sessions. Two of them were sentenced to stand in the
pillory and to be imprisoned for a month; and as many as twenty
more were fined in small sums for the assault, and bound over to
keep the peace for a twelvemonth.

"So late as the year 1785," says Arnot, in his collection and
abridgment of Criminal Trials in Scotland, "it was the custom
among the sect of Seceders to read from the pulpit an annual
confession of sins, national and personal; amongst the former of
which was particularly mentioned the ‘Repeal by Parliament of the
penal statute against witches, contrary to the express laws of
God.'"

Many houses are still to be found in England with the horse-shoe
(the grand preservative against witchcraft) nailed against the
threshold. If any over-wise philosopher should attempt to remove
them, the chances are that he would have more broken bones than
thanks for his interference. Let any man walk into Cross-street,
Hatton-Garden, and from thence into Bleeding-heart Yard, and learn
the tales still told and believed of one house in that
neighbourhood, and he will ask himself in astonishment if such
things can be in the nineteenth century. The witchcraft of Lady
Hatton, the wife of the famous Sir Christopher, so renowned for
his elegant dancing in the days of Elizabeth, is as devoutly
believed as the Gospels. The room is to be seen where the devil
seized her after the expiration of the contract he had made with
her, and bore her away bodily to the pit of Tophet: the pump
against which he dashed her is still pointed out, and the spot
where her heart was found, after he had torn it out of her bosom
with his iron claws, has received the name of Bleeding-heart Yard,
in confirmation of the story. Whether the horse-shoe still remains
upon the door of the haunted house, to keep away other witches, is
uncertain; but there it was, twelve or thirteen years ago. The
writer resided at that time in the house alluded to, and well
remembers that more than one old woman begged for admittance
repeatedly, to satisfy themselves that it was in its proper place.
One poor creature, apparently insane, and clothed in rags, came to
the door with a tremendous double-knock, as loud as that of a
fashionable footman, and walked straight along the passage to the
horse-shoe. Great was the wonderment of the inmates, especially
when the woman spat upon the horse-shoe, and expressed her sorrow
that she could do no harm while it remained there. After spitting
upon, and kicking it again and again, she coolly turned round and
left the house, without saying a word to anybody. This poor
creature perhaps intended a joke, but the probability is that she
imagined herself a witch. In Saffron Hill, where she resided, her
ignorant neighbours gave her that character, and looked upon her
with no little fear and aversion.

More than one example of the popular belief in witchcraft occurred
in the neighbourhood of Hastings so lately as the year 1830. An
aged woman, who resided in the Rope-walk of that town, was so
repulsive in her appearance, that she was invariably accused of
being a witch by all the ignorant people who knew her. She was
bent completely double; and though very old, her eye was unusually
bright and malignant. She wore a red cloak, and supported herself
on a crutch: she was, to all outward appearance, the very beau
ideal of a witch. So dear is power to the human heart, that this
old woman actually encouraged the popular superstition: she took
no pains to remove the ill impression, but seemed to delight that
she, old and miserable as she was, could keep in awe so many
happier and stronger fellow-creatures. Timid girls crouched with
fear when they met her, and many would go a mile out of their way
to avoid her. Like the witches of the olden time, she was not
sparing of her curses against those who offended her. The child of
a woman who resided within two doors of her, was afflicted with
lameness, and the mother constantly asserted that the old woman
had bewitched her. All the neighbours credited the tale. It was
believed, too, that she could assume the form of a cat. Many a
harmless puss has been hunted almost to the death by mobs of men
and boys, upon the supposition that the animal would start up
before them in the true shape of Mother—.

In the same town there resided a fisherman,—who is, probably,
still alive, and whose name, for that reason, we forbear to
mention,—who was the object of unceasing persecution, because it
was said that he had sold himself to the devil. It was currently
reported that he could creep through a keyhole, and that he had
made a witch of his daughter, in order that he might have the more
power over his fellows. It was also believed that he could sit on
the points of pins and needles, and feel no pain. His
brother-fishermen put him to this test whenever they had an
opportunity. In the alehouses which he frequented, they often
placed long needles in the cushions of the chairs, in such a
manner that he could not fail to pierce himself when he sat down.
The result of these experiments tended to confirm their faith in
his supernatural powers. It was asserted that he never flinched.
Such was the popular feeling in the fashionable town of Hastings
only seven years ago; very probably it is the same now.

In the north of England, the superstition lingers to an almost
inconceivable extent. Lancashire abounds with witch-doctors, a set
of quacks, who pretend to cure diseases inflicted by the devil.
The practices of these worthies may be judged of by the following
case, reported in the Hertford Reformer, of the 23rd of June,
1838. The witch-doctor alluded to is better known by the name of
the cunning man, and has a large practice in the counties of
Lincoln and Nottingham. According to the writer in "The Reformer,"
the dupe, whose name is not mentioned, had been for about two
years afflicted with a painful abscess, and had been prescribed
for without relief by more than one medical gentleman. He was
urged by some of his friends, not only in his own village, but in
neighbouring ones, to consult the witch-doctor, as they were
convinced he was under some evil influence. He agreed, and sent
his wife to the cunning man, who lived in New Saint Swithin's, in
Lincoln. She was informed by this ignorant impostor that her
husband's disorder was an infliction of the devil, occasioned by
his next-door neighbours, who had made use of certain charms for
that purpose. From the description he gave of the process, it
appears to be the same as that employed by Dr. Fian and Gellie
Duncan, to work woe upon King James. He stated that the
neighbours, instigated by a witch, whom he pointed out, took some
wax, and moulded it before the fire into the form of her husband,
as near as they could represent him; they then pierced the image
with pins on all sides—repeated the Lord's Prayer backwards, and
offered prayers to the devil that he would fix his stings into the
person whom that figure represented, in like manner as they
pierced it with pins. To counteract the effects of this diabolical
process, the witch-doctor prescribed a certain medicine, and a
charm to be worn next the body, on that part where the disease
principally lay. The patient was to repeat the 109th and 119th
Psalms every day, or the cure would not be effectual. The fee
which he claimed for this advice was a guinea.

So efficacious is faith in the cure of any malady, that the
patient actually felt much better after a three weeks' course of
this prescription. The notable charm which the quack had given was
afterwards opened, and found to be a piece of parchment, covered
with some cabalistic characters and signs of the planets.

The next-door neighbours were in great alarm that the witch-doctor
would, on the solicitation of the recovering patient, employ some
means to punish them for their pretended witchcraft. To escape the
infliction, they feed another cunning man, in Nottinghamshire, who
told them of a similar charm, which would preserve them from all
the malice of their enemies. The writer concludes by saying that,
"the doctor, not long after he had been thus consulted, wrote to
say that he had discovered that his patient was not afflicted by
Satan, as he had imagined, but by God, and would continue, more or
less, in the same state till his life's end."

An impostor carried on a similar trade in the neighbourhood of
Tunbridge Wells, about the year 1830. He had been in practice for
several years, and charged enormous fees for his advice. This
fellow pretended to be the seventh son of a seventh son, and to be
endowed in consequence with miraculous powers for the cure of all
diseases, but especially of those resulting from witchcraft. It
was not only the poor who employed him, but ladies who rode in
their carriages. He was often sent for from a distance of sixty or
seventy miles by these people, who paid all his expenses to and
fro, besides rewarding him handsomely. He was about eighty years
of age, and his extremely venerable appearance aided his
imposition in no slight degree. His name was Okey, or Oakley.

In France, the superstition at this day is even more prevalent
than it is in England. Garinet, in his history of Magic and
Sorcery in that country, cites upwards of twenty instances which
occurred between the years 1805 and 1818. In the latter year, no
less than three tribunals were occupied with trials originating in
this humiliating belief: we shall cite only one of them. Julian
Desbourdes, aged fifty-three, a mason, and inhabitant of the
village of Thilouze, near Bordeaux, was taken suddenly ill, in the
month of January 1818. As he did not know how to account for his
malady, he suspected at last that he was bewitched. He
communicated this suspicion to his son-in-law, Bridier, and they
both went to consult a sort of idiot, named Baudouin, who passed
for a conjuror, or white-witch. This man told them that Desbourdes
was certainly bewitched, and offered to accompany them to the
house of an old man, named Renard, who, he said, was undoubtedly
the criminal. On the night of the 23rd of January all three
proceeded stealthily to the dwelling of Renard, and accused him of
afflicting persons with diseases, by the aid of the devil.
Desbourdes fell on his knees, and earnestly entreated to be
restored to his former health, promising that he would take no
measures against him for the evil he had done. The old man denied
in the strongest terms that he was a wizard; and when Desbourdes
still pressed him to remove the spell from him, he said he knew
nothing about the spell, and refused to remove it. The idiot
Baudouin, the white-witch, now interfered, and told his companions
that no relief for the malady could ever be procured until the old
man confessed his guilt. To force him to confession they lighted
some sticks of sulphur, which they had brought with them for the
purpose, and placed them under the old man's nose. In a few
moments, he fell down suffocated and apparently lifeless. They
were all greatly alarmed; and thinking that they had killed the.
man, they carried him out and threw him into a neighbouring pond,
hoping to make it appear that he had fallen in accidentally. The
pond, however, was not very deep, and the coolness of the water
reviving the old man, he opened his eyes and sat up. Desbourdes
and Bridier, who were still waiting on the bank, were now more
alarmed than before, lest he should recover and inform against
them. They, therefore, waded into the pond—seized their victim by
the hair of the head—beat him severely, and then held him under
water till he was drowned.

They were all three apprehended on the charge of murder a few days
afterwards. Desbourdes and Bridier were found guilty of aggravated
manslaughter only, and sentenced to be burnt on the back, and to
work in the galleys for life. The white-witch Baudouin was
acquitted, on the ground of insanity.

M. Garinet further informs us that France, at the time he wrote
(1818), was overrun by a race of fellows, who made a trade of
casting out devils and finding out witches. He adds, also, that
many of the priests in the rural districts encouraged the
superstition of their parishioners, by resorting frequently to
exorcisms, whenever any foolish persons took it into their heads
that a spell had been thrown over them. He recommended, as a
remedy for the evil, that all these exorcists, whether lay or
clerical, should be sent to the galleys, and that the number of
witches would then very sensibly diminish.

Many other instances of this lingering belief might be cited both
in France and Great Britain, and indeed in every other country in
Europe. So deeply rooted are some errors that ages cannot remove
them. The poisonous tree that once overshadowed the land, may be
cut down by the sturdy efforts of sages and philosophers—the sun
may shine clearly upon spots where venemous things once nestled in
security and shade; but still the entangled roots are stretched
beneath the surface, and may be found by those who dig. Another
king, like James I, might make them vegetate again; and, more
mischievous still, another pope, like Innocent VIII, might raise
the decaying roots to strength and verdure. Still, it is consoling
to think, that the delirium has passed away; that the raging
madness has given place to a milder folly; and that we may now
count by units the votaries of a superstition which, in former
ages, numbered its victims by tens of thousands, and its votaries
by millions.