Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England

Alan MacFarlane

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134644667
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

This is a classic regional and comparative study of early modern witchcraft. The history of witchcraft continues to attract attention with its emotive and contentious debates. The methodology and conclusions of this book have impacted not only on witchcraft studies but the entire approach to social and cultural history with its quantitative and anthropological approach. The book provides an important case study on Essex as well as drawing comparisons with other regions of early modern England. The second edition of this classic work adds a new historiographical introduction, placing the book in context today.

Part one

Sources and statistics

Chapter 1

Problems and sources in the study of witchcraft

It is not surprising that the history of witchcraft should have attracted considerable attention.¹ Nor is it difficult to see why such a subject should have aroused so much emotion in those who studied it. Trials for witchcraft contain much that is brutal, much that is sexually perverted, and much that seems at first sight either ludicrous or fantastic. There are disagreements among authorities over all the fundamental problems concerning the history of this phenomenon: when witchcraft accusations and beliefs began and ended; what caused the apparent increase of accusations during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Europe; what led to the apparent decline in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; whether there really were ‘witches’; whether any particular group of people can be held responsible for the prosecutions and beliefs. Among the subjects upon which there is most disagreement, although this is usually implicit rather than explicit, are the very terms ‘witchcraft’ and ‘sorcery’. Since many subsequent arguments have arisen from divergence of definitions, it is important to state as early as possible the meaning ascribed to various words.

The terms ‘witchcraft’, ‘sorcery’, and ‘magic’ are notoriously difficult to define. There is no consensus of opinion on their meaning, either among present-day historians and anthropologists or among writers living in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Various attempted definitions and the overall state of confusion are discussed elsewhere.² Here we merely state quite simply how various words will be used in the following analysis while recognizing that such usage does not entirely reflect all shades of opinion in either the past or present. It has been remarked that, ‘No social phenomenon can be adequately studied merely in the language and categories of thought in which the people among whom it is found represent it to themselves’.³ This has been found to be especially true in the study of the history of English witchcraft beliefs.

The word ‘witchcraft’ has, in fact, been used in this book in two ways. Firstly, it has been employed as an undifferentiated term to cover all the activities which came within the scope of the English Witchcraft Statutes of 1542, 1563, and 1604, or the ecclesiastical visitation articles which enquired about ‘witchcraft, conjuring, southsaying, charmes’. In this broad sense a ‘witchcraft prosecution’ might as easily be for looking in a crystal ball to discover where lost goods were as for supposedly injuring a person by evil and supernatural means. Witches, in this sense, are merely those called ‘witches’ in a society. The second use of the word ‘witchcraft’ is more precise. It is supernatural activity, believed to be the result of power given by some external force (for instance, the Devil) and to result in physical injury to the person or object attacked by it. There is not necessarily any outward action or words on the part of the ‘witch’. It is basically an internal power. The opposite to this is ‘white witchcraft’, which is the reverse, both because its ends are ‘good’ rather than ‘bad’, healing rather than hurting, and because it employs outward means-for instance, gazing into a crystal ball. In this sense some of the offences in the Witchcraft Acts were ‘white witchcraft’. Between these two terms lies a third, ‘sorcery’. This combines the explicit means of ‘white witchcraft’-for instance, a sorcerer makes an image of his enemy in wax-with the evil ends of witchcraft: he sticks pins into the image to cripple his victim. The relevance and detailed application of these distinctions will emerge during the analysis of witchcraft prosecutions. It is hoped that the context will indicate whether ‘witchcraft’ is being used in its general or specific sense. Both definitions are left wide enough to allow comparison between ‘witchcraft’ in sixteenth-century England and that in modern societies.⁴

Figure 1 Definitions of terminology

The phenomena broadly labelled ‘witchcraft’ may be studied at a number of levels. The geographical and temporal unit selected for study will obviously be interrelated with the type of questions asked by the investigator and the nature of the sources he uses. If very detailed questions are asked about particular individuals accused as witches, the records used will be of a different nature to those employed by the historian who seeks to cover the whole of European witchcraft over several centuries. The following study has expanded the area of investigation in one direction-by posing questions uninvestigated by previous historians and by using sources untapped for the history of witchcraft. But a new intensity of investigation has forced a narrowing of the geographical and spatial horizon. As we will see, instead of the majestic sweep through hundreds of years of European history, we are confined often to one English county, or even one village.

In recent years the sources available to the historian of witchcraft have increased dramatically. Such an expansion is well illustrated by research in England. Until the publication of Wallace Notestein’s History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 in 1911, studies of English witchcraft had been based almost exclusively on two types of record: literary accounts and descriptions of witchcraft trials in contemporary pamphlets. Notestein not only provided a far more detailed description of the literary controversy and of the famous trials, but also made an attempt to use other legal records. Since he tried to cover the whole of England for 160 years, he was, on the whole, only able to look at cases already in print. These included witchcraft prosecutions from a number of central and local courts, yet he admitted that ‘no history of the subject has the right to be called final’ until someone had been round English counties and searched ‘the masses of gaol delivery records and municipal archives’. His prediction that ‘it seems improbable that such a search would uncover so many unlisted trials as seriously to modify the narrative’⁵ was shown to be incorrect in 1929, when C.L.Ewen published the Home Circuit Assize court indictments for witchcraft.⁶ Of the 790 indictments Ewen listed, only a few had been discovered by Notestein. The difference made can be seen from the fact that, from all sources and for the whole of England, Notestein had only been able to compile a list of approximately 400 references. In Essex, for example, this meant that, instead of the fifteen trials listed by Notestein, in which there are references to about forty individuals, Ewen provided some 473 indictments, referring to 299 persons. These indictments usually included crucial details, such as the exact nature of the offence and the place of residence of both ‘witch’⁷ and victim. These facts were often unobtainable from many of Notestein’s references. In his second work on the subject, Ewen supplemented Notestein’s list by adding further cases from other printed and imprinted legal records.⁸

The first aim of this study is to extend the work of Ewen and Notestein on the sources for the study of witchcraft. They made it clear that no adequate history of the subject could be written without a detailed analysis of the actual prosecutions, and Ewen provided a review of one important and unused source, the Assize records. Yet printed cases in Ewen’s works suggested that material from at least three other types of court, borough, quarter session, and ecclesiastical, needed investigation. The first part of this book is therefore a survey of all the possible sources for the study of the history of witchcraft. The jurisdiction and procedure of the various courts are analysed so that the actual prosecutions can be more easily understood and the relative value of statistics derived from different sources can be estimated. Furthermore, the accuracy of the impression derived from literary sources is tested.

Witchcraft beliefs and accusations occurred throughout most of Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The major figures in Continental witchcraft-for instance, the authors of the Malleus Maleficarum, Weyer, Bodin, Del Rio, Boguet, and Balthasar Bekker-as well as the general outline of the prosecution of witches, have already received considerable attention from historians.⁹ One reason for limiting this study to England is that English witchcraft appears to be very different from that on the Continent and in Scotland. The methods of detecting and trying witches differed from country to country and, partly as a result of this, the type of person believed to be a witch, the numbers accused, the punishments inflicted, and the myths which surrounded their activities differed. As we will see, witches in the county of Essex were not believed to fly, did not meet for ‘Sabbats’ or orgies, dance and feast, indulge in sexual perversions, like some of their Continental counterparts. There were, in Essex, no possessed convents, no financial profits to be made from witch-hunting, no professional inquisitors. Only during the year 1645, when the witch-hunter Matthew Hopkins was active, do the Essex trials bear a resemblance to the more sensational descriptions of French or German witchcraft trials.¹⁰ An account of English witchcraft which draws information from European records would soon become distorted.

For a number of subjects-for instance, court procedure or legal enactments on witchcraft-England is a convenient unit for study. As a result there are already a number of general studies of witchcraft in England which describe the more famous trials, some of the legal background, and some of the political and religious conflicts with which prosecutions coincided. The best of these accounts, that by Notestein already mentioned, makes more than a very general survey of the literary and legal controversies unnecessary. For this reason alone it is not worth writing another general account of English witchcraft until far more local research has been undertaken.¹¹ But there are also other reasons why a geographical area smaller than a nation which contained several million people, over 150 years, is the subject of this study. English historians are increasingly aware of the importance of regional variations and the consequent necessity for regional studies in topics ranging from agrarian to political hist...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Preface
• Abbreviations and conventions
• Abbreviated Titles
• Essex Pamphlets
• Other Abbreviations and Conventions
• 1 Sources and statistics
• 2 Countering witchcraft
• 3 Witchcraft and the social background
• 4 A comparative framework: Anthropological studies
• Appendix 1: Abstracts of Essex witchcraft cases, 1560–1680
• Appendix 2: Definitions of witchcraft
• Bibliography
• Place index of Essex witchcraft references
• Index