A Trial of Witches

A Seventeenth Century Witchcraft Prosecution

Ivan Bunn, Gilbert Geis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781134696321
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

In 1662, Amy Denny and Rose Cullender were accused of witchcraft, and, in one of the most important of such cases in England, stood trial and were hanged in Bury St Edmunds. A Trial of Witches is a complete account of this sensational trial and an analysis of the court procedures, and the larger social, cultural and political concerns of the period.
In a critique of the official process, the book details how the erroneous conclusions of the trial were achieved. The authors consider the key participants in the case, including the judge and medical witness, their institutional importance, their part in the fate of the women and their future careers.
Through detailed research of primary sources, the authors explore the important implications of this case for the understanding of hysteria, group mentality, social forces and the witchcraft phenomenon as a whole.

Part I
The case

1
Witchcrafts here resemble witchcrafts there

On Monday, March 17, 1662, in the English market town of Bury St. Edmunds, an assize site on the Norfolk circuit, two old women were hanged by the neck until dead. Four days earlier, the women had been convicted in a trial by jury for the crime of witchcraft.¹ Because their case was presided over by Sir Matthew Hale, by far the most renowned and respected judge of the time, and featured testimony by the prominent essayist, philosopher, and medical doctor, Sir Thomas Browne, the accused women gained a certain kind of immortality. Their names appear as one of the subject headings in the catalogue of the British Library, though it is ironic that both in the Library listing and in each of the hundreds of references to the case one of the women, Amy Denny, is erroneously called Amy Duny, probably because the composer of the printed summary of her trial erred in transcribing the handwriting of the person who had recorded it.

It is neither right nor decent that two elderly women should have been killed by judicial process for acts they had not done. But injustice is hardly an uncommon matter: it was not so then, and it is not so today. Such matters, it might be argued, should be overlooked—or at least not made much of—lest our knowledge of the sometimes whimsical and brutal nature of official procedures comes to make us uneasy. A nineteenth-century English divine believed so: he insisted that an innocent person about to be hanged ought not to protest, because to do so would undermine citizens’ faith in the integrity of their judicial system.²

The fatuous attitude of the cleric requires no rebuttal, but it may be only meaningless rhetoric to insist that Amy Denny and Rose Cullender should not haye died in vain. We all die in vain, and it will do none of us any real good to have our reputation rehabilitated posthumously. But it seems important to seek lessons from matters that involve gross injustice, lessons that hopefully will deter subsequent injustice. When two women are killed by the state for criminal offenses that they did not, and in fact could not, commit, after a trial involving persons with some of the keenest intellects of the time, something has gone seriously awry. A basic aim of our examination of the witchcraft case of Amy Denny and Rose Cullender is to determine what of present-day value can be learned from this sorry affair.

The trial tarnished evermore, be it only so slightly, the reputations of the two notable personages who played a major part in it—and in this too there are lessons to be learned. Sir Matthew Hale, the judge, has been regarded, in the more than three centuries that have passed since the witchcraft trial, as a sage, compassionate, and decent human being. The Christian faithful probably best know Hale as the kind jurist who during the summer assize in Bedford in August 1661–seven months before the Bury St. Edmunds trial— paused and listened to the pitiful pleas of John Bunyan’s wife for the release of her husband from prison after Hale’s colleagues had scornfully brushed her aside.

Sympathetically, and predictably, Hale told her that there was nothing that he could do, although he explained the official procedures that she might follow to have her husband’s petition reviewed in London.³ Hale’s indulgence of Mrs. Bunyan has drawn high poetic marks:

Law’s high chair is filled

By one whose spirit ne’er was known to fail

In gentleness—with goodness all instilled

Mild, merciful, tho’ still majestic Hale.⁴

Further fulsome tributes to Hale’s wisdom, judicial brilliance, and integrity abound; he regularly is honored as one of the best minds in the history of English jurisprudence, possessor of an incisive analytical ability and an encyclopedic knowledge of the common law. But Hale’s record also carries the slight stain of his action against Amy Denny and Rose Cullender; commentators persistently nag at his heels because of his role in the witchcraft case. Thomas Thirlwall, for instance, the nineteenth-century cleric who edited Hale’s voluminous religious writings, cannot be altogether forgiving. Thirlwall eulogizes Hale’s “learning, wisdom, piety and virtue, which shone in his life with such transcendent luster, and raised him to the highest eminence.”⁵ But he also feels compelled to call our attention to the fact that it was Hale who “passed the sentence of death upon two crazy ⁶

old wretches for that supposed crime.”
A standard early nineteenth-century biographical dictionary similarly labels Hale’s role in the witchcraft trial as “the most blamable passage of his life.”⁷ John Lord Campbell, otherwise overflowing in his praise of Hale—he calls him the “most pure, the most pious, the most independent and the most learned of judges”⁸—notes that Hale “was not only under the influence of the most vulgar credulity, but that he violated the plainest rules of justice, and that he really was the murderer of two innocent women.”⁹ An early nineteenth-century editor, annotating the diary of a contemporary of Hale, observes that Hale’s decision at Bury was “unworthy of any judge,” and that he “left for execution…two unfortunate women, on evidence which now appears to be utterly insufficient.”¹⁰ Sometimes, when it has been important in legal disputes to overcome one or another of Hale’s powerful juridical pronouncements on the common law, the witchcraft case will be exhumed. Thus, in 1889, Rufus W.Peckham, a New York Supreme Court judge, dissenting in regard to the precedent value of Hale’s position on government regulation of businesses affected with a public interest,¹¹ insisted bitingly that Hale’s ideas on this subject were no more substantial than those he had entertained on witchcraft.¹²

Figure 2 Portrait of Sir Matthew Hale

Source: Reproduced with permission of the National Portrait Gallery, London.

The reputation of Sir Thomas Browne bears a similar taint. Browne, appearing in his medical role as expert witness at the 1662 trial, testified that the young girls accusing Denny and Cullender were afflicted with organic problems, but that they undoubtedly also had been bewitched.

Author of the esteemed Religio Medici, among other works, Browne has been acclaimed in hundreds of books and articles for the magnificence of his prose, and for his exceptional tolerance of the beliefs and behavior of those who differed from him.¹³ But many who write about Browne also feel compelled to attend, if only passingly, to his “unfortunate involvement”¹⁴ in the 1662 witchcraft case. Most often writers dismiss Browne’s testimony as little more than a reflection of the ideas of the times: no man, it is maintained, can be held to standards higher than those of the keenest minds around him.¹⁵ By 1662, however, belief in witches was in retreat in England. As Wallace Notestein observes, the wide range of decisions rendered in English witch trials at the time “betrays the perplexity of judges and juries.”¹⁶ Indeed, after 1620 the percentage of acquittals in witchcraft cases in Essex “rose enormously”¹⁷ Surviving Home Circuit records show that between 1647 and 1701, 103 persons were committed for trial for witchcraft, but only 14 were found guilty. Grand juries dismissed 28 cases, and trial juries returned not guilty verdicts in 61 of the 71 cases they heard.¹⁸ In 1664, as one instance among numerous others, Robert Hunt, a magistrate in Somerset, uncovered what he stoutly maintained were two covens of witches, but prosecution was aborted “by the cynical attitude of his fellow justices.”¹⁹ In 1736, the witchcraft law under which Denny and Cullender were executed would be repealed. On the continent, doubts about witchcraft also were surfacing. Anne Barstow notes: “[B]y 1662, many French judges and doctors had become skeptical of demonic possession.”²⁰ It needs to be kept firmly in mind that Browne and Hale represented not a mainstream position but rather one rapidly becoming anachronistic.

Some writers take the view that Browne had only an inconsequential impact on the outcome of the trial, a position neither easily rebutted nor defended given our inability to penetrate the minds of the jurors and judge. Certainly, on the face of it, the accusers’ evidence alone (at least as it is conveyed in the trial report) would appear sufficient to convict, presuming those hearing it found it believable. But the fact that Browne probably was summoned from his home in Norwich (nearby, but not that close to Bury St. Edmunds in terms of the travails of seventeenth-century travel) might indicate that those pushing the case felt the need for his support.

Interpretations of Browne’s performance continue to cut into the integrity of his intellectual and personal credentials. A man’s reputation, it becomes obvious, can be permanently sullied by a few words uttered in an event that at the time appears to him to be of little consequence. No reference to the trial has been found in Browne’s voluminous correspondence with his son and others:²¹ it apparently was not worth a mention.

The case against Amy Denny and Rose Cullender also strongly influenced the most notable of America’s witchcraft prosecutions, the Salem trials of 1692. Indeed, the Salem witch-hunts might not have taken place if there had not been a trial at Bury St. Edmunds: the events at Salem notoriously imitated those at Bury. Cotton Mather in his Wonders of the Invisible World included a large number of excerpts and interpretations of the Bury trial in order to justify what happened at Salem.²² “It may cast some light upon the dark things now in America,” Mather wrote, “if we just give a glance upon like things lately happened in Europe. We may see the witchcrafts here most exactly resemble the witchcrafts there; and we may learn what sort of devils do trouble the world.”²³ John Hale, in his “sad, troubled, and honest”²⁴ account written shortly after the Salem trials, notes that the judges there made “a conscientious endeavor to do the thing that was right. And to that end they consulted the presidents [precedents] of former times & precepts laid down by learned writers about witchcraft …[including] Sir Matthew Hales Tryal of Witches, printed Anno 1682.”²⁵

Thomas Hutchinson, in his history of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, provides further particulars regarding the connection between the Salem trials and the 1662 English prosecution:

the great authority was that of Sir Matthew Hale, revered in New England, not only for his knowledge in the law, but for his gravity and piety. The trial of the witches was published in 1684 [actually 1682]. All these books were in New England, and the conformity between the behavior of most of the supposed bewitched at Salem, and the behavior of those in England, is so exact as to leave no room to doubt the stories had already been read by the New England persons themselves, or had been told to them by others who had read them. Indeed, this conformity instead of giving suspicion, was urged in the confirmation of the truth of both.²⁶

At Salem, 141 persons were accused of witchcraft. Of these, there are records of 122 having been imprisoned. Nineteen persons were hanged; one man, Giles Corey, was pressed to death, and two women died while in custody.²⁷ All, of course, were innocent of the accusations made against them. Those accusations were primarily made by two girls, one nine years old and the other eleven years old. The main accusers of Denny and Cullender, thirty years earlier, were of the same sex and the same ages.

Trials for witchcraft are among the most malevolent occurrences in the annals of the human race, and among the most pathetic. The power of the state is mobilized to stage a trial in which the search for justice often is caricatured. Personal grievances, scapegoating, misogyny, superstition, a quest for notoriety and advancement become transmuted and legitimized in witch-hunts. Accusations can also be leveled to relieve boredom. She did it for “sport, they must have some sport,” one of the Salem “girls” would say, trying to explain herself.²⁸ In witchcraft cases, innocent persons are confronted with a capital charge which it is impossible to rebut in any literal way. How can those accused as witches satisfactorily demonstrate that they had not conspired with the devil to bring about the death of an infant in the neighborhood? How can they prove it was not their image that their accusers claimed to have seen cavorting just beneath the ceiling of the meeting house or in the corner of the bedchamber? It is only when the charges themselves are not regarded as creditable, not when they are rebutted, that an accused might be set free. A person was always in danger of being taken for a witch, since, as Montesquieu noted, “the most unexceptional conduct, the purest morals, and the constant practice of every duty in life are not a sufficient security against the suspicion of those crimes.”²⁹ Montesquieu obviously was thinking of persons of standing in the community.³⁰ How much more vulnerable were persons of little power and poor reputation?

Highly intelligent and able officials accepted as accurate what now appear to have been patently fabricated and unbelievable tales. Why were they so gullible in these instances, when in other matters they could be so shrewd? Answers to such questions can forewarn us about circumstances that pose danger to rational thought and procedure. The prosecution of witches offers a cautionary tale of wrong-minded self-righteousness, of bull-headedness about a position in the face of obvious insufficiencies in the evidence presumed to support it. If the witches had the power they were alleged to possess, why did they not employ it to extricate themselves from their judicial predicament? Why did they not strike down their accusers in the same manner that they allegedly had smitten others? Why, with all those diabolical resources at their disposal, were they usually so poor, their lives so wretched and miserable:’

Only rarely were such obvious matters taken up. About 1140, according to William of Malmesbury, a witch had escaped by flying through a window after her arrest,³¹ but similar kinds of tales are notably absent in the later annals of witchcraft. In the early sixteenth century, Paolo Grillando, a papal judge, insisted that the devil did not free witches from prison because such an act would be...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Part I: The Case
• Part Ii: What Might It Mean?
• Part Iii: Post Mortem
• Appendix: A Tryal Of Witches
• Notes