Historic England holds an extensive range of publications and historic collections in its public archive covering the historic environment. Source Historic England Archive BB98/02592. How Rye Bread May Have Caused the Salem Witch Trials, https://www.britannica.com/topic/witchcraft, Academia - The Magic Art of Witchcraft and Black Magic, Ancient Origins - The Long History of Witchcraft Persecution, witchcraft - Children's Encyclopedia (Ages 8-11), witchcraft - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up). She was later hanged after being found guilty following a statement given by a nine-year old witness. The responsibility for the witch hunts can be distributed among theologians, legal theorists, and the practices of secular and ecclesiastical courts. Archives, Open He wrote the treatise, : Detail from Witches, a 1508 painting depicting the Witches Sabbath, Science History Images/Alamy Stock Photo), https://www.youtube.com/user/EnglishHeritageFilm. Travel with us from the pre-Christian world to the burial mounds of the English landscape, where an underworld of elves, demons and familiars came alive in the popular imagination. several witches were burnt, in total 97 between 1468 and 1651. The 1604 Witchcraft Act under James could be described as a reversion to that status quo rather than an innovation. In 1374 Pope Gregory XI declared that all magic was done with the aid of demons and thus was open to prosecution for heresy. The outbreak at Salem, where 19 people were executed, was the result of a combination of church politics, family feuds, and hysterical children, all in a vacuum of political authority. But for many educated people of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, these characterisations of white and black witchcraft would unquestionably seem to have Many others knew that old women could be persecuted by their neighbours for no reason other than that they werent very attractive. WebBetter Essays. But who could such women be? Ecclesiastical and civil authorities usually tried to restrain witch trials and rarely manipulated witch hunts to obtain money or power. srietzke via Flickr. Web1. She writes They are almost always described as deviants disorderly women who failed to, or refused to, abide by the behavioral norms of their society. Pendle Hill in Lancashire is well known for its associations with witches. For ease of reading I have modernised spellings when quoting from original documents. Lets suppose that an eager JP has put together a significant number of depositions complaints in writing from your fellow villagers and has also interrogated you, and got a confession from you. Witchcraft was always viewed with a bit of an apprehension mixed with This article was first published on HistoryExtra in 2015, Suzannah Lipscomb is Emeritus Professor at the University of Roehampton, and the author of several books about the 16th century, Enjoying HistoryExtra.com? Puritans in solemn worship, lithograph from The Church of England: A History for the People, 1910. In my own region of Bruges and West Flanders And dont let her give you anything, especially anything connected with food, and extra-especially food itself. Scholastic philosophy meant that all of created nature became an object of scrutiny from which scholastics could create a model that applied to everything. Our ancestors could feel it too. SP 16/270 f.134. A contractor cutting bricks for the wall of the partially-restored wild and natural walled garden at Warley Place, Brentwood. Even in England, the idea of a male witch was perfectly feasible. Prosecutions of witches in Austria, Poland, and Hungary took place as late as the 18th century. Not in English-speaking countries. They were believed to take the form of common animals and feed on the blood of the witch leaving tell-tale marks which were thus considered physical evidence of witchcraft. The number of trials and executions varied widely according to time and place, but in fact no more than about 110,000 persons in all were tried for witchcraft, and no more than 40,000 to 60,000 executed. WebThroughout the 16th and 17th century, witch trials and the persecution and punishment of suspected witches were common in Europe. In other words, they had found nothing odd at all on the bodies of three of the women, and on the fourth there were a couple of growths but nothing that the examiners thought sinister. Mother Shipton's Cave, Knaresborough. Most recently we haveinvestigatedfour deadly pandemics and epidemics thatchanged livesinthe UK over the last 600 years. Witches were burned at the stake. Among the main effects of the papal judicial institution known as the Inquisition was in fact the restraint and reduction of witch trials that resulted from the strictness of its rules. So they haunted monastic dormitories to steal human seed in order to impregnate women with demon children. The Spanish Inquisition and the Catholic Church instigated the witch trials, In Scotland, where he had ruled as James VI since 1587, James had personally intervened in the 1590 trial of the North Berwick witches, who were accused of attempting to kill him. Resentment and fear of the power of the hag, a woman released from the constraints of virginity and then of maternal duties, has been frequently described in Mediterranean cultures. The Protestant Reformation and Catholic Counter-Reformation heightened the fear of witchcraft by promoting the idea of personal piety (the individual alone with his or her Bible and God), which enhanced individualism while downplaying community. Between 1560 and 1630, there was a surge In 17th-century Europe witchcraft was very much a fact of life; no one would have questioned the existence of witches, or the belief that they could use sorcery to cause harm. This information will help us make improvements to the website. The origins of witchcraft may have begun as a continuation of using magic as a normal and essential part of life, but its evolution shows the practice of magic turned into a disrespect towards God and Puritan values. Very broadly speaking, a witch is a person who employs magical entities, which may include powers she carries within her body, to harm other people. Hornbeam Arts via Flickr. The witch hunts varied enormously in place and in time, but they were united by a common and coherent theological and legal worldview. You can bury them, but that doesnt mean theyre gone. First, the witch hunts did not occur in the Middle Ages but in what historians call the early modern period (the late 14th to the early 18th century), the era of the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Scientific Revolution. Such figures were typically created without reference to witchcraft at all, but led to the creation of the figure of the heretic witch. Charges of maleficium were prompted by a wide array of suspicions. How did culture shift towards this persecution? In England the majority of those accused were women. Use witch marks to stop her from crossing into your house or from allowing her familiars to cross into your house. The 11th century saw the arrival of Scholasticism. However, witches bodies were burned in Scotland, though they were strangled to death first. Whoops! Classical authors such as Aeschylus, Horace, and Virgil described sorceresses, ghosts, furies, and harpies with hideous pale faces and crazed hair; clothed in rotting garments, they met at night and sacrificed both animals and humans. They cant pass the cross, and they stop there. Our website works best with the latest version of the browsers below, unfortunately your browser is not supported. In France in 1022 a group of heretics in Orlans was accused of orgy, infanticide, invocations of demons, and use of the dead childrens ashes in a blasphemous parody of the Eucharist. The divide between Protestants and the rest of their communities continued to increase until the early seventeenth century, when the Puritans departed across the Atlantic in pursuit of a godlier way of life. Midwives, of course, were experts in female anatomy. The Devil was deeply and widely feared as the greatest enemy of Christ, keenly intent on destroying soul, life, family, community, church, and state. Nevertheless, the reasons for the decline in the witch hunts are as difficult to discern as the reasons for their origins. The modern English word witchcraft has three principal connotations: the practice of magic or sorcery worldwide; the beliefs associated with the Western witch hunts of the 14th to the 18th century; and varieties of the modern movement called Wicca, frequently mispronounced wikka.. The problem is that most of what we think we know is wrong. Now Im going to put you in a time machine and take you back 400 years. The Devil Re-Baptizing Men and Women in the Pact, from The Compendium Malifarcarum, 1610. As more young women began to exhibit symptoms, mass hysteria ensued, and three women were accused of witchcraft: Sarah Good, Sarah Osborn and Tituba, an By 143550, the number of prosecutions had begun to rise sharply, and toward the end of the 15th century, two events stimulated the hunts: Pope Innocent VIIIs publication in 1484 of the bull Summis desiderantes affectibus (Desiring with the Greatest Ardour) condemning witchcraft as Satanism, the worst of all possible heresies, and the publication in 1486 of Heinrich Krmer and Jacob Sprengers Malleus maleficarum (The Hammer of Witches), a learned but cruelly misogynist book blaming witchcraft chiefly on women. Delve into our history pages to discover more about our sites, how they have changed over time, and who made them what they are today. Witch doctors, whose job it was to release people from evil spells, seldom existed in the West, largely because even helpful magic was attributed to demons. The second is like the nipple or teat of a womans breast but of the same colour with the rest of skin without any hollowness or issue for any blood or juice to come from thence. 2. She doesnt have to be female. Women were certainly more likely than men to be economically and politically powerless, but that generalization is too broad to be helpful, for it holds true for societies in periods where witchcraft is absent. The most common suspicions concerned livestock, crops, storms, disease, property and inheritance, sexual dysfunction or rivalry, family feuds, marital discord, stepparents, sibling rivalries, and local politics. She has to be like the dead: hard, infertile and she has to hate. According to traditional Navajo belief, when a witch travels at night, he wears the skin of a dead animal in order to Lancaster Castle's monumental gatehouse would have welcomed the 10 accused who would have trekked 50 miles or so from Pendle to be thrown into the castle's damp cells and left for months. The Protestant vein of Christianity saw the emergence of a more conservative line of thought which rejected the Catholic notion that humans could wield any type of supernatural power, and that all things were subject to the will of God and God only. The visible role played by women in some heresies during this period may have contributed to the stereotype of the witch as female. These courts reduced the number of witch trials significantly by 1600, half a century before legal theory, legislation, and theology began to dismiss the notion of witchcraft in France and other countries. Witchcraft was a felony in both England and its American colonies, and therefore witches were hanged, not burned. Read about the remarkable lives of some of the women who have left their mark on society and shaped our way of life from Anglo-Saxon times to the 20th century. Although events at Salem are often described as hysteria, this wasnt madness, or insanity. Alice Nutter was the wealthy widow of a farmer. Self-proclaimed Witchfinder General, Matthew Hopkins, was the most notorious witch-hunter in the 1640s. Witches were really goddess-worshipping herbalist midwives. The actual numbers are far lower, but still striking: between 1482 and 1782, around 100,000 people across Europe were accused of witchcraft, and some 4050,000 were executed. This pattern took shape in 10501300, which was also an era of enormous reform, reorganization, and centralization in both the ecclesiastical and secular aspects of society, an important aspect of which was suppressing dissent. After an outbreak of hunts in France in 158788, increasingly skeptical judges began a series of restraining reforms marked by the requirement of obligatory appeal to the Parlement in cases of witchcraft, making accusations even more expensive and dangerous. These creatures favour cream and have to be appeased by constant offerings of it or they can start to behave like poltergeists. One of the most famous witch trials in British history is that of the Pendle witches in 1612, where 12 'witches' who lived around Pendle Hill, mostly women, were charged with the murders of 10 people using witchcraft. Seventeenth-century American colonists were more apt to benefit from piracy rather than to suffer from it. We see evidence of this in the following examples: In his paper Diabolical Duos: Witch Spouses in Early New England, Paul Moyer discusses the witchcraft accusations made against couples in the middle-seventeenth century as well as during the Salem witch trials. Along with this older tradition, attitudes toward witches and the witch hunts of the 14th18th centuries stemmed from a long history of the churchs theological and legal attacks on heretics. This form is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Belief in witchcraft was prevalent at all levels of society, even among the most highly-educated (indeed in 1597 James VI of Scotland, later James I of England, had published his own compendium of witchcraft lore). witchcraft, traditionally, the exercise or invocation of alleged supernatural powers to control people or events, practices typically involving sorcery or magic. Your email address will not be published. In places in England, you can almost feel it underneath the soil the weight of the past and the freight of its dead. Why not try 6 issues of BBC History Magazine or BBC History Revealed for 9.99 delivered straight to your door + FREE access to HistoryExtra.com. 91 persons were condemned to WebThe Salem witch trials of the late 17th century were a formative episode in Americas early history, and have remained at the forefront of the national consciousness ever since. In England condemned witches were hanged rather than burnt in line with the status of witchcraft as a felony under the common law. Between 1482 and 1782, thousands of people across Europe most of them women were accused of witchcraft and subsequently executed. Neither were witches (with the exception of some targeted by the Spanish Inquisition) generally persecuted by the church. One of the accused died in custody, another was found not guilty and the other ten were found guilty and hanged. 5. The hunts were most severe from 1580 to 1630, and the last known execution for witchcraft was in Switzerland in 1782. The intensity of these beliefs is best represented by the European witch hunts of the 14th to 18th century, but witchcraft and its associated ideas are never far from the surface of popular consciousness andsustained by folk talesfind explicit focus from time to time in popular television and films and in fiction. But where this happened it was usually carried out by local communities and was not part of the normal functioning of the justice system. Yet this stereotype has a long history and has constituted for many cultures a viable explanation of evil in the world. They remain where they were buried. The idea that those accused of witchcraft were midwives or herbalists, and especially that they were midwives possessed of feminine expertise that threatened male authority, is a myth. The first hanging for witchcraft in New England was in 1647, after the witch hunts had already abated in Europe, though a peculiar outbreak in Sweden in 166876 bore some similarity to that in New England. Author of, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology, London School of Economics and Political Science, University of London. In our latest three-partpodcastseries we are exploring stories from our collection which tell the history oftrials;from witch trials and trial by combat to todays legal system. When Historic England asked the public to help our research into witches' marks, 600 people came forward with photos and information. 6 Pages. 7. They write new content and verify and edit content received from contributors. Magic was used to heal the sick, protect people and their families from harm intended towards them by others with whom they had disagreements; protect their livestock and economic stability from natural and deliberate causes; and to ease daily difficulties such as aiding in finding lost belongings. Part of the Alfred Newton and Sons collection. Where did witches come from? Witchcraft spells just like all other spells are indeed real. However, whether something is real or not really depends on perceptions and what the person was looking wants to see. If you are looking for evidence that witchcraft is not real, then you will see evidence to that effect. The terms witchcraft and witch derive from Old English wiccecraeft: from wicca (masculine) or wicce (feminine), pronounced witchah and witchuh, respectively, denoting someone who practices sorcery; and from craeft meaning craft or skill. Roughly equivalent words in other European languagessuch as sorcellerie (French), Hexerei (German), stregoneria (Italian), and brujera (Spanish)have different connotations, and none precisely translates another. Most people are aware of the witch trials that reached their height in the 16th and 17th centuries. The idea that you can separate out part of yourself, a part that may look exactly like you, and send it to work your will on the bodies of others, is central to the idea of witchcraft. But, in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, men and women of both high and low status believed in witches ubiquity in a far more disturbing way. Allegations of witchcraft frequently blamed the accused for naturally-occurring events the illness or death of people or livestock, the failure of crops, even sexual dysfunction. Archaeologist Dr David Neal discussing his illustration of the mosaic being excavated at Rutland Roman Villa with members of the University of Leicester Archaeological Services team, IMAGE OF THE MONTH: Jacob Epstein's sculpture of the Devil being delivered to Coventry Cathedral on the back of a lorry. We place some essential cookies on your device to make this website work. WebAbout 140 witch trials were held in Finnmark in the 17th century between 1601 and 1692 [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] in what is sometimes considered as the worst persecution in times of peace in Norway according to Rune Hagen. Suzannah Lipscomb is professor of history at the University of Roehampton and is the writer and presenter of 13 TV history documentary series . The number of trials and executions varied widely according WebWitchcraft in Europe during the 17th century was common. Most accused children had parents who had been accused of witchcraft. The Spanish Inquisition executed only two witches in total. The actual numbers are far lower, but still striking: between 1482 and 1782, around 100,000 people across Europe were accused of witchcraft, and some 4050,000 Spam protection has stopped this request. Government Licence v3.0. Old, outcast, ugly, eccentric the witch of the Witches Sabbath was born. Sermons and didactic treatises, including devil books warning of Satans power, spread both the terror of Satan and the corresponding frantic need to purge society of him. Yet as with the Privy Council, we should not simply assume that this group was sceptical about witchcraft. In Scotland, where he had ruled as James VI since 1587, James had personally intervened in the 1590 trial of the North Berwick witches, who were accused of attempting to kill him. Most of those accused were also poor and elderly; many were widows, and menopausal and post-menopausal women are disproportionally represented among them. References in contemporary literature regularly make reference to women giving evidence in court that they have found suspicious marks upon the bodies of accused witches. Trials for witchcraft took place across Europe, with some areas persecuting alleged witches much more actively than others. Although many witchcraft theorists were not deeply misogynist, many others were, notably the authors of the infamous Malleus maleficarum. So the places where pagans buried their dead are especially fraught. There is no particular moment when this popular idea is formulated. In Spain, Portugal, and southern Italy, witch prosecutions seldom occurred, and executions were very rare. One of the most important aspects of the hunts remains unexplained. Although these figures are alarming, they do not remotely approach the feverishly exaggerated claims of some 20th-century writers. Reaching their peak in the middle of the century, the rise of puritanism across the UK The answers to these questions shine a light on a witchcraft scare that rocked 17th-century England, and tell us much about beliefs in witchcraft and how they affected ordinary people at that time. One of the key problems facing anyone involved in witchcraft investigations or trials was the issue of evidence. For many years during the 16th century, the market place in King's Lynn was the scene of public executions of alleged witches. The emphasis on personal piety exacerbated the rigid characterization of people as either good or bad. It also aggravated feelings of guilt and the psychological tendency to project negative intentions onto others. The process, however, was similar at every level. Children were often accusers (as they were at Salem), but they were sometimes also among the accused. The total number of people tried for witchcraft in England throughout the period of persecution was no more than 2,000. This is when the Roman idea of the witch and her manifestation as the embodiment of winter in Alpine regions catastrophically came together to allow the first generation of demonologists to formulate an exact identity for the recipients of the seed. How did this idea develop? In England, most of the accusers and those making written complaints against witches were women. By the late 16th century, many prosperous and professional people in western Europe were accused, so that the leaders of society began to have a personal interest in checking the hunts. The people, who saw no difference in the origin of the power they drew upon and focused more on theresults, paid no mind and continued using thepractices with which they were accustomed. As such, most witches across Europe received the usual penalty for murder hanging (though in Scotland and under the Spanish Inquisition witches were burned). Witches were considered Satans followers, members of an antichurch and an antistate, the sworn enemies of Christian society in the Middle Ages, and a counter-state in the early modern period. People who practiced magic, often referred to as cunning folk or wise folk, were respected and valued by their communities. In practice this was usually done in cases of treason, the most famous example being the Gunpowder Plot. One such figure was peculiar to the western Alps. Yet one general explanation is valid: the unique character of the witch hunts was consistent with the prevailing worldview of intelligent, educated, experienced people for more than three centuries. But the idea of the witch who flies in the night and draws power from dark cosmic forces to work her ill will on others pre-dates Christianity, probably by many centuries. Since no women were allowed into monastic dormitories, somebody suggested that the female figures might be devils capable of transforming themselves into the appearance of females in order to tempt monks into sexual sin. Consequently, witchcraft became almost synonymous with social deviance. Witches were also said to have familiars, demonic creatures which 4. Step into the world of early modern England as Professor Diane Purkiss describes popular and intellectual beliefs about witchcraft in the 16th and 17th centuries. To improve security and online experience, please use a different browser or. From the Salem Witch Trials to the witches ofMacbeth, the figure of the witch is embedded in our culture. From the Salem Witch Trials to the witches of. Instead, they were more likely to work side by side with the accusers to help them to identify witch marks. This fabric of ideas was a fantasy. What caused the behavior of the afflicted witnesses? You are still standing on the hillside above the site, looking at the lumps in the grass and wondering. The cave of Mother Shipton who was believed to have been a Yorkshire witch and oracle. Professor Diane Purkiss debunks eight of the most common myths about witchcraft. Anyone willing to feed them on blood can hope to put them to work in a series of worrying deals. document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); Subscribe now for regular news, updates and priority booking for events.Sign up, All content is available under the Open More than 200 people were accused of practicing witchcraftthe devils magic and 20 were executed. Many of them were found guilty, but the judge who presided over the case was uneasy about the verdict, and referred the case to the Privy Council. How the Little Ice Age Changed History., https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/01/how-the-little-ice-age-changed-history, www.history.com/news/how-medieval-churches-used-witch-hunts-to-gain-more-followers, Little, B. No matter that in this case nothing sinister was found; for Jenett Hargreaves, Frances Dicconsen, Mary Spencer and Margaret Johnson, the examinations themselves must have been a degrading and traumatic ordeal. You have to keep to the rules. (London. If you like, you can add to it, or deny that you said bits of it, but that might just make you look inconsistent. I agree that decisions on the use of torture was supposedly reserved for the monarch, but, like those on waterboarding in the US, this was not much of a restriction.