The term "witchcraft" is used both to describe the practises of witches and the popular beliefs about those practices. Many people still believe that witches possess supernatural powers - powers which are beyond the natural powers of man.

European witchcraft is frequently percieved as a medieval phenomenon as is the persecution of witches. In fact, the persecution of witches is closely linked to the persecution of heretics by the Catholic Church and, in Britain, was most vigorously prosecuted from about 1560 to 1650.

Statutes against witchcraft existed as early as the reign of William I ("the Conqueror").

De h�retico comburendo, passed in 1401 at the instigation of Archbishop Thomas Arundel, was the first Act of parliament to deal specifically with witchcraft. Witchcraft was specifically named sortilegium ("sorcery" or "divination") in the Act as a form of heresy and it provided that, unless the accused witch abjured these beliefs, he or she was to be burnt at the stake. The statute was directed against an ecclesiastical offence, and not technically a felony at common law and offenders were tried before an ecclesiastical tribunal with its procedure comparable to that of the Inquisition did not operate in England.

The penalty of burning at the stake was prescribed for ecclesiastical offences only because the Church daintily shied away from the physical shedding of blood.

People of medieval times believed that the Devil carried out his works on earth with the help of his minions, particularly "witches". It was, however, the bull "Summis desiderantes" of Pope Innocent VIII published in 1484 which declared this common belief to be the truth and started the European passion for the persecution of witches which lasted for over two centuries.

Thou shall not suffer a witch to live

- Exodus 22:18 In the Hebrew, the word kasaph is used and this has been translated to witch, although a better translation might be seer or diviner

While France, Scotland and the German-speaking territiories of Europe were the most active in hunting and killing witches, England, and particularly Essex, thrown into religious turmoil by the Reformation, the conflict between king and parliament which ed to the Civil War and the ravages of inflation, succumbed to the craze from the mid-16th century for about a hundred years.

In Essex alone, during the 120 years between 1560 and 1680, 317 women and 23 men were tried for witchcraft with over a hundred hanged. In 1645 there were 36 witch trials in this eastern county alone.

Matthew Hopkins (d.1647) The son of a minister from Wenham in Suffolk, Hopkins became a lawyer and witch-hunter, received a fee for every witch who was hanged. Soon becomming wealthy and famous as the "Witchfinder General', he is believed to have been responsible for the hanging of as many as four hundred people. His first victim, in March 1645 was Elizabeth Clark, an 80-year-old woman. Having succeeded in getting Elizabeth to name a 15-year-old girl as a witch and the girl her mother, by July of that year he had sent thirty-six women to imprisonment in Colchester Castle for witchcraft. His usual prey were elderly and lonely women who had no-one to defend them of the witchcraft they were charged with. He is reputed, among his methods, to prick the suspect's "witch mark" with a knife to see if it bled (if the mark did not bleed, the accused was guilty of being in league with the devil) although it is possible that this may have involved some trickery on his part in using a retractible blade or similar. In 1647, his lucrative career (he was paid �1 by the magistrates on the hanging of each witch) came to an end after he had secured the conviction of an 80-year-old preacher. Pamphlets against the witchhunts and Hopkins were published by John Gall who even suggested the witchhunter was a witch himself and Hopkins eventually came to the attention of parliament. Hopkins disappeared and tales of his fate vary, some claimed he was himself hanged after conviction for witchcraft, others maintain he died of consumption.

For over half a century, new English laws on witchcraft were made in almost each successive reign; 1542 (Henry VIII); 1547 (Edward VI); 1563 (Elizabeth I) and the most draconian in 1604 by James I which were finaly repealled in 1736. During the five-year reign of Queen Mary I (1553-1558), the country was too preoccupied with the burning of heretics as part of the Queen's Counter-Reformation to deal with legislation specifically covering witchcraft.

The acts of Elizabeth I and James I made witchcraft a felony and removed the jurisdiction from the ecclesiastical courts to the courts of common law. While, at least in theory, the accused enjoyed the benefits of ordinary criminal procedure as against that of the ecclesiastical courts, the Acts also invoked all the penalties of felonies against the convicted which including escheat (forfeiture of the convict's land and goods to the Crown). Burning at the stake in cases of witchcraft was eliminated in favour of hanging unless the case also involved petty treason.

Making witchcraft a felony and subject to escheat provided local officials with a financial reward for discovering witches and securing convictions which did nothing to temper any inclination they had to do so previously and could have played no small part in the mushrooming of cases brought before the courts.

. . . wretched creatures were compelled by the severity of the torture to confess things they have never done... and so by the cruel butchery innocent lives were tookn; and, by a new alchemy, gold and silver are coined from human blood.

- Father Cornelius Loos, 1592

Following the restoration of the monarchy in the person of King Charles II in 1660, the ardour for hunting witches died away not through any diminished belief in or fear witches, but because the enterprise now bore the flavour of the "fanatical" Puritanism which led to the Civil War, the regicide of Charles I and the Commonwealth which followed.

By the reign of George II attitudes to witchcraft had changed drastically and the witchcraft statute of 1604 was replaced by another in 1736 which, in an about turn, now made it illegal to "pretend" to call up spirits, foretell the future, or cast spells. Transgressors of the new law could be punished as vagrant or fraudsters and subject to fines and imprisonment rather than hanging as before.

In 1951, largely at the instigation of Spiritualist mediums, the Act of 1736 was repealed.

The most active period of persecution of witches in England was the 17th century. James I had a reputation for being a learned authority on the subject of witches;

Thou mayst at leaisure consult the Learned Monarch King James, in his Daemonlogia, fol. 91.

- A True and Impartial Relation of the Informations Against Three Witches . . .

The practice of witchcraft was punishable by law only only when actual or intended injury to the person, property or profit by the witch could be proved. All too frequently the 'agrieved'populace took matters into their own hands and, after being subjected to various ordeals, the witch was put to death by burning.

FORTUNE TELLING
By an Act of Parliament passed in 1736, any person convicted of fortune-telling may be punished by imprisonment for a year.

The last person to be tried for witchcraft in England was Jane Wenham in 1712, the last European witch to be burnt was executed in Switzerland in 1782.

English witches were often more fortunate than their European counterparts from the late 17th century, onwards. Not only did the common law of England prohibit the use of torutre to extract confessions, but the law was adminsitered by the aristoctracy as judges and magistrates who held much greater sway over the outcome of a trial than the jury - the educated upper classes were far more sceptical of charges and "evidence" brought against "witches" than the accused's peers who formed the jury. Indeed, when the obsolete law condemning the convicted "witch" to death was repealed by Parliament in 1736, much indignation was caused amongst the common populace.

King James VI of Scotland, on the death of Elizabeth I to become James I of England, married a Danish princess Anne by proxy. Despite setting out several times from Copenhagen to deliver the new queen of Scotland to Scotland at Edinburgh in 1589, the tiny fleet was beaten back to the coast of Norway repeatedly until the attempt was abandoned.

The failure of the Danes to deliver up the queen he had already married by proxy, led James to set sail in October 1589 to personally collect Anne from Denmark. The Scottish king stayed for six months and it was there that he had several discussuions with Niels Hemmingsen, the Danish expert on witchcraft. When the royal couple returned to Scotland on May 1st, 1590 with their entourage, the fleet was again battered by storms in the Firth of Forth and, although the king and queen made their landfall safely enough, one of the ships of the fleet was lost.

The failure of the Danish fleet was blamed by the admiral on witchcraft and Anna Koldings was arrested. Under interrogation she named five other women. All six confessed to sorcery and endangering Anne of Denmark's fleet by sending devils up the keel of her devil. News of the trial and condemnation of the witches reached Scotland in July.

In November and December 1590, over fourty men and women from East Lothian were rounded up and accused of witchcraft and treason in conspiring to kill the King by causing the storm in the Forth. All were tried in Edinburgh in what became known as the "North Berwick Witch Trials" and brutally executed.

The first of the accused to confess was a midwife with a reputation for healing from Keith near Soutra, Agnes Sampson, who became known as the "Great Witch". One of the accusations against her being that she "cured" people.

It may be that the "North Berwick" "witches" aroused the suspicion of the leaders of the Kirke and were targeted because of their use of herbal remedies produced by the Augustinian monks at the hosptial at Soutra, one of the largest in Europe at the time, and archaeologists have uncovered evidence that the Scottish monks used sophisticated remedies and even carried out major surgery. Seed of both cannabis and opium have been found on the site which may account for the monks' reputation for amputating the limbs of soldiers who didn't feel any pain during their ordeal.

Calderwood, in his Histories of the Kirk of Scotland describes how . . .

Sindrie of the witches confessed they had sindrie times companie with the devill at the kirk of Northberwick, where he appeared to them in the likeness of a man with a redde cappe, and a rumpe at his taill.

. . . and a pamphlet about the events, for the most part propaganda thought to have been penned by James Carmichael, the minister of Haddington who led the witch-hunts, was published in 1591, entitled "Newes from Scotland". It details the . . .

damnable life of Dr Fian, a notable sorcerer, who was burned at Edenborough in Januarie last . . . which doctor was register to the devill, that sundrie times preached at North Baricke Kirke, to a number of notorious witches . . .

John Cunningham ("Fian" was his witch-name) was a young schoolteacher

James VI seems to have had several motives for personally pursuing witch-hunts in Scotland; asserting his own position as King (he acceeded to the throne on the deposition of his mother, Mary, Queen of Scots); strengthening the Kirke of Scotland against the Catholics; and using the testimony of the alleged "witches" against his enemies who including the Earl of Bothwell, next in line to the Scottish throne, and who James was convinced was trying to kill him. In a time when doctors still studied astrology and the prevailing theory in medicine was the theory of humours, James VI's involvement in witchcraft may have been due to his belief in it, and in treason.

In 1599, James VI published his Demonologie which, written by the hand of a monarch, fanned the fear of witches throughout Europe.

With the death of Queen Elizabeth I in 1603, James succeeded to the throne of England as James I. Such was his fascination with witchcraft that Shakespeare wrote Macbeth for the king featuring the three witches and possibly using North Berwick witch trials as his inspiration.