After the death of Elizabeth I and her success, James I ascended the throne, but things were really getting better. “He passed a new law punishing almost all forms of witchcraft with death,” Erin Hillis wrote for Impetus. In 1597, a few years before his accession to the throne, James had written a book on witchcraft, demonology. When he became king in 1604, he quickly promulgated a new law. She writes, however, that the conviction rate for witchcraft actually dropped under the 1604 law, Hillis writes, because one of the other things the law did was prohibit the use of torture to extract confessions. In England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland, as well as in the British colonies, there have historically been a number of witchcraft laws that governed witchcraft and provided for penalties for its practice, or – in subsequent years – rather for purporting to practice it. A law of 1562[1] against incantations, enchantments and witchcraft (5 Eliz. I c. 16) was adopted at the beginning of the reign of Elizabeth I. He was in some respects more merciful to those convicted of witchcraft than his predecessor and demanded the death penalty only when harm had been done; Minor offences are punishable by imprisonment. The law stated that anyone who “used, practiced or practiced witchcraft, enchantment, spells or witchcraft, thereby killing or destroying any person” was guilty of a crime of no benefit to the clergy and should be killed. [5] In 1563, a law was passed on the “Law Against Incantations, Enchantments and Witchcraft”, and one of the first major trials under this law took place only three years later at the Chelmsford Assizes.
Four women – Elizabeth Frauncis, Lora Wynchester and mother and daughter Agnes and Joan Waterhouse – have been charged. Frauncis told the court that she had been practicing witchcraft since the age of twelve, after learning from her grandmother, and that she fed the devil with her blood in the form of a white cat that she kept in a basket. Agnes Waterhouse had a cat she thought was for a similar purpose – and she even named it Satan. Frauncis was imprisoned, Agnes was hanged and Johanna was found not guilty. This process is important because this is the first documented case of a witch using a known animal for metaphysical purposes. You can read more in the digital version of a popular pamphlet of the time, The Examination and Confession of Certain Wytches at Chensforde. In the 1640s, the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland and the Kirk Commission lobbied for the implementation and expansion of the Witchcraft Act 1563, which had been the basis for previous witch trials. The Covenanter regime passed a series of laws imposing piety in 1649 that made blasphemy, the worship of false gods and rogues, and the curses of their relatives capital crimes. They also passed a new witch law that ratified the existing 1563 law and extended it to advisors to “demons and familiar spirits” who were now to be punished with death. [11] In 1612, a dozen people were accused of using witchcraft to murder ten of their neighbors. Two men and nine women from the Pendle Hill area of Lancashire were eventually brought to trial, and of those eleven, ten were eventually convicted and sentenced to death by hanging. While there were certainly other witch trials in England from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, it was rare for so many people to be tried and tried at the same time, and even more unusual for so many to be sentenced to death.
Of the approximately five hundred people executed for witchcraft in England for three hundred years, ten were the Pendle witches. Although one of the defendants, Elizabeth Demdike, has long been known as a witch in the area, it is entirely possible that the allegations that led to a formal indictment and the trial itself were rooted in a feud between Demdike`s family and another local clan. For a fascinating look at the trials, you can read The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the County of Lancaster, an account of the events of Thomas Potts, the employee of the Lancaster Assizes.
