Francis Osborne, a literary man whose reputation hardly survived his century, but an essayist of great fame in his own time,[59] was a man who made his fortune by sailing against rather than with the wind. It was conventional to believe in witches and Osborne would not for any consideration be conventional. He assumed the skeptical attitude,[60] and perhaps was as influential as any one man in making that attitude fashionable.

From these lesser lights of the literary world we may pass to notice the attitude assumed by three men of influence in their own day, whose reputations have hardly been dimmed by time, Bacon, Selden, and Hobbes. Not that their views would be representative of their times, for each of the three men thought in his own way, and all three were in many respects in advance of their day. At some time in the reign of James I Francis Bacon wrote his Sylva Sylvarum and rather incidentally touched upon witchcraft. He warned judges to be wary about believing the confessions of witches and the evidence against them. "For the witches themselves are imaginative and believe oft-times they do that which they do not; and people are credulous in that point, and ready to impute accidents and natural operations to witchcraft. It is worthy the observing, that ... the great wonders which they tell, of carrying in the air, transporting themselves into other bodies, &c., are still reported to be wrought, not by incantations, or ceremonies, but by ointments, and anointing themselves all over. This may justly move a man to think that these fables are the effects of imagination."[61]

Surely all this has a skeptical sound. Yet largely on the strength of another passage, which has been carelessly read, the great Bacon has been tearfully numbered among the blindest leaders of the blind.[62] A careful comparison of his various allusions to witchcraft will convince one that, while he assumed a belief in the practice,[63] partly perhaps in deference to James's views,[64] he inclined to explain many reported phenomena from the effects of the imagination[65] and from the operation of "natural causes" as yet unknown.[66]

Bacon, though a lawyer and man of affairs, had the point of view of a philosopher. With John Selden we get more directly the standpoint of a legal man. In his Table Talk[67] that eminent jurist wrote a paragraph on witches. "The Law against Witches," he declared, "does not prove there be any; but it punishes the Malice of those people that use such means to take away mens Lives. If one should profess that by turning his Hat thrice and crying Buz, he could take away a man's life (though in truth he could do no such thing) yet this were a just Law made by the State, that whosoever should turn his Hat thrice and cry Buz, with an intention to take away a man's life, shall be put to death."[68] As to the merits of this legal quip the less said the better; but it is exceedingly hard to see in the passage anything but downright skepticism as to the witch's power.[69]

It is not without interest that Selden's point of view was exactly that of the philosopher Hobbes. There is no man of the seventeenth century, unless it be Oliver Cromwell or John Milton, whose opinion on this subject we would rather know than that of Hobbes. In 1651 Hobbes had issued his great Leviathan. It is unnecessary here to insist upon the widespread influence of that work. Let it be said, however, that Hobbes was not only to set in motion new philosophies, but that he had been tutor to Prince Charles[70] and was to become a figure in the reign of that prince.[71] Hobbes's work was directed against superstition in many forms, but we need only notice his statement about witchcraft, a statement that did not by any means escape his contemporaries. "As for Witches," he wrote, "I think not that their witchcraft is any reall power; but yet that they are justly punished for the false beliefe they have that they can do such mischief, joined with their purpose to do it if they can."[72] Perhaps the great philosopher had in mind those pretenders to diabolic arts who had suffered punishment, and was so defending the community that had rid itself of a preying class. In any case, while he defended the law, he put himself among the disbelievers in witchcraft.

From these opinions of the great we may turn to mark the more trivial indications of the shifting of opinion to be found in the pamphlet literature. It goes without saying that the pamphlet-writers believed in that whereof they spoke. It is not in their outspoken faith that we are interested, but rather in their mention of those opponents at whose numbers they marvelled, and whose incredulity they undertook to shake. Nowhere better than in the prefaces of the pamphleteers can evidence be found of the growing skepticism. The narrator of the Northampton cases in 1612 avowed it his purpose in writing to convince the "many that remaine yet in doubt whether there be any Witches or no."[73] That ardent busybody, Mr. Potts, who reported the Lancaster cases of 1612, very incidentally lets us know that the kinsfolk and friends of Jennet Preston, who, it will be remembered, suffered at York, declared the whole prosecution to be an act of malice.[74] The Yorkshire poet and gentleman, Edward Fairfax, who made such an ado about the sickness of his two daughters in 1622 and would have sent six creatures to the gallows for it, was very frank in describing the opposition he met. The accused women found supporters among the "best able and most understanding."[75] There were, he thought, three kinds of people who were doubters in these matters: those who attributed too much to natural causes and who were content to call clear cases of bewitchment convulsions, those who when witchcraft was broached talked about fairies and "walking ghosts," and lastly those who believed there were no witches. "Of this opinion I hear and see there be many, some of them men of worth, religious and honest."[76]

The pamphlet-writers of James's reign had adjusted themselves to meet opposition. Those of the Civil Wars and the Commonwealth were prepared to meet ridicule.[77] "There are some," says the narrator of a Yorkshire story, "who are of opinion that there are no Divells nor any witches.... Men in this Age are grown so wicked, that they are apt to believe there are no greater Divells than themselves."[78] Another writer, to bolster up his story before a skeptical public, declares that he is "very chary and hard enough to believe passages of this nature."[79]

We have said that the narrators of witch stories fortified themselves against ridicule. That ridicule obviously must have found frequent expression in conversation, but sometimes it even crept into the newspapers and tracts of the day. The Civil Wars had developed a regular London press. We have already met with expressions of serious opinion from it.[80] But not all were of that sort. In 1654 the Mercurius Democritus, the Punch of its time, took occasion to make fun of the stories of the supernatural then in circulation. There was, it declared, a strange story of a trance and apparition, a ghost was said to be abroad, a woman had hanged herself in a tobacco pipe. With very broad humor the journal took off the strange reports of the time and concluded with the warning that in "these distempered times" it was not safe for an "idle-pated woman" to look up at the skies.[81]

The same mocking incredulity had manifested itself in 1648 in a little brochure entitled, The Devil seen at St. Albans, Being a true Relation how the Devill was seen there in a Cellar, in the likeness of a Ram; and how a Butcher came and cut his throat, and sold some of it, and dressed the rest for himselfe, inviting many to supper, who did eat of it.[82] The story was a clever parody of the demon tracts that had come out so frequently in the exciting times of the wars. The writer made his point clear when he declared that his story was of equal value with anything that "Britannicus" ever wrote.[83] The importance of these indications may be overestimated. But they do mean that there were those bold enough to make fun. A decade or two later ridicule became a two-edged knife, cutting superstition right and left. But even under the terribly serious Puritans skepticism began to avail itself of that weapon, a weapon of which it could hardly be disarmed.

In following the history of opinion we must needs mention again some of the incidents of certain cases dealt with in earlier chapters, incidents that indicate the growing force of doubt. The reader has hardly forgotten the outcome of the Lancashire cases in 1633. There Bishop Bridgeman and the king, if they did not discredit witchcraft, discredited its manifestation in the particular instance.[84] As for William Harvey, he had probably given up his faith in the whole business after the little incident at Newmarket.[85] When we come to the time of the Civil Wars we cannot forget that Stearne and Hopkins met opposition, not alone from the Huntingdon minister, but from a large party in Norfolk, who finally forced the witchfinder to defend himself in court. Nor can we forget the witch-pricker of Berwick who was sent a-flying back to his native northern soil, nor the persistent Mrs. Muschamp who tramped over Northumberland seeking a warrant and finding none.

The course of opinion is a circuitous one. We have followed its windings in and out through more than half a century. We have listened as respectfully as possible to the vagaries of country parsons and university preachers, we have heard from scholars, from gentlemen, from jurists and men of affairs, from physicians and philosophers. It matters little now what they thought or said, but it did matter then. We have seen how easy a thing it was to fall into the error that a middle course was nearest truth. Broad was the way and many there were that walked therein. Yet even those who travelled that highway found their direction shifting. For there was progress in opinion. With every decade the travellers, as well those who strayed aside as those who followed the crowd, were getting a little nearer to truth.

[1] "Printed by Cantrel Legge, Printer to the Universitie of Cambridge" (1608, 1610).

[2] See Discourse of the Damned Art of Witchcraft, ch. VII, sect. I.

[3] His literary executor, Thomas Pickering, late of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and now "Minister of Finchingfield in Essex," who prepared the Discourse for the press (both in its separate form and as a part of Perkins's collected works), and who dedicates it to Sir Edward Coke, is, however, equally silent as to James, though in his preface he mentions Scot by name.

[4] Ibid., ch. IV, sect. I. See also ch. II.

[5] Ibid., ch. VII, sect. II.

[6] Ibid., ch. VI.

[7] Ibid., ch. VII, sect. II.

[8] Ibid., ch. VII, sect. II.

[9] James Mason, "Master of Artes," whose Anatomie of Sorcerie ("printed at London by John Legatte, Printer to the Universitie of Cambridge," 1612), puts him next to Perkins in chronological order, needs only mention in passing. He takes the reality of sorcery for granted, and devotes himself to argument against its use.

[10] ... Shewing the True and Right Methode of the Discovery. Cotta was familiar with the more important trials of his time. He knew of the Warboys, Lancaster, and York trials and he probably had come into close contact with the Northampton cases. He had read, too, several of the books on the subject, such as Scot, Wier, and Perkins. His omission of King James's work is therefore not only curious but significant. A second edition of his book was published in 1625.

[11] See Triall of Witchcraft, ch. XIV.

[12] See ibid., p. 48.

[13] Ibid., 66-67.

[14] See ibid., ch. VI. Cotta speaks of the case as six years earlier.

[15] Ibid., 62, 66.

[16] A Short Discoverie, 70.

[17] Triall of Witchcraft, 83-84.

[18] A Short Discoverie, 51-53.

[19] Triall of Witchcraft, 70.

[20] Roberts's explanation of the proneness of women to witchcraft deserves mention in passing. Women are more credulous, more curious, "their complection is softer," they have "greater facility to fall," greater desire for revenge, and "are of a slippery tongue." Treatise of Witchcraft, 42-43.

[21] "In Cheshire and Coventry," he tells us. "Hath not Coventrie," he asks (p. 16), "beene usually haunted by these hellish Sorcerers, where it was confessed by one of them, that no lesse than three-score were of that confedracie?... And was I not there enjoyned by a necessity to the discoverie of this Brood?"

[22] For the whole case see Howell, State Trials, II.

[23] See article on Bernard in Dict. Nat. Biog.

[24] See below, appendix C, list of witch cases, under 1626.

[25] See Guide to Grand-Jurymen, Dedication.

[26] Ibid., 11-12.

[27] Ibid., 53.

[28] Ibid., 214.

[29] This he did on the authority of a repentant Mr. Edmonds, of Cambridge, who had once been questioned by the University authorities for witchcraft. Ibid., 136-138.

[30] Guide to Grand-Jurymen, 22-28.

[31] He was "for the law, but agin' its enforcement."

[32] Select Cases of Conscience Touching Witches and Witchcraft (London, 1646).

[33] Ibid., 92.

[34] Ibid., 94, 97. That Gaule was a Puritan, as has been asserted, appears from nothing in his book. If he dedicated his Select Cases to his townsman Colonel Walton, a brother-in-law of Cromwell, and his Mag-astro-mancer (a later diatribe against current superstitions) to Oliver himself, there is nothing in his prefatory letters to show him of their party. Nor does the tone of his writings suggest a Calvinist. That in 1649 we find Gaule chosen to preach before the assizes of Huntingdon points perhaps only to his popularity as a leader of the reaction against the work of Hopkins.

[35] Antidote to Atheisme, 129.

[36] Ibid., 127-130.

[37] Ibid., ch. VIII, 134.

[38] Ibid., 135.

[39] See p. 118. This Treatise was first published in 1655. Four years later, in 1659, he published A True and faithful Relation of what passed ... between Dr. John Dee, ... and some spirits. In the preface to this he announced his intention of writing the work which he later published as Of Credulity and Incredulity.

[40] In passing we must mention Richard Farnworth, who in 1655 issued a pamphlet called Witchcraft Cast out from the Religious Seed and Israel of God. Farnworth was a Quaker, and wrote merely to warn his brethren against magic and sorcery. He never questioned for a moment the facts of witchcraft and sorcery, nor the Devil's share in them. As for the witches, they were doomed everlastingly to the lake of fire.

[41] Daemonologie and Theologie. The first, the Malady ..., The Second, The Remedy (London, 1650).

[42] Ibid., 42.

[43] Ibid., 16.

[44] See the Introduction to the Advertisement.

[45] Filmer noted further that the Septuagint translates the Hebrew word for witch as "an Apothecary, a Druggister, one that compounds poysons."

[46] London, 1656.

[47] In Ady's second edition, A Perfect Discovery of Witches (1661), 134, Gaule's book having meanwhile come into his hands, he speaks of Gaule as "much inclining to the Truth" and yet swayed by traditions and the authority of the learned. He adds, "Mr. Gaule, if this work of mine shall come to your hand, as yours hath come to mine, be not angry with me for writing God's Truth."

[48] "... few men or women being tied hand and feet together can sink quite away till they be drowned" (Candle in the Dark, 100); "... very few people in the World are without privie Marks" (Ibid., 127).

[49] Ibid., 129.

[50] In giving "The Reason of the Book" he wrote, "The Grand Errour of these latter Ages is ascribing power to Witches."

[51] See a recent discussion of a nearly related topic by Professor Elmer Stoll in the Publications of the Modern Language Association, XXII, 201-233. Of the attitude of the English dramatists before Shakespeare something may be learned from Mr. L. W. Cushman's The Devil and the Vice in the English Dramatic Literature before Shakespeare (Halle, 1900).

[52] About 1622 or soon after.

[53] See, for instance, Mr. W. S. Johnson's introduction to his edition of The Devil is an Ass (New York, 1905).

[54] 1634. This play was written, of course, in cooperation with Brome; see above, pp. 158-160. For other expressions of Heywood's opinions on witchcraft see his Hierarchie of the Blessed Angels, 598, and his [Greek: GYNAIKEION]: or Nine Books of Various History concerning Women (London, 1624), lib. viii, 399, 407, etc.

[55] Act I, scene 1.

[56] In another part of the same scene: "They that thinke so dreame," i. e. they who believe in witchcraft.

[57] First published in 1621—I use, however, Shilleto's ed. of London, 1893, which follows that of 1651-1652; see pt. I, sect. II, memb. I, sub-sect. 3.

[58] James Howell, Familiar Letters, II, 548.

[59] His Advice to a Son, first published in 1656-1658, went through edition after edition. It is very entertaining. His strongly enforced advice not to marry made a sensation among young Oxford men.

[60] Works of Francis Osborne (London, 1673), 551-553.

[61] Works of Bacon (ed. Spedding, London, 1857-1858), II, 642-643.

[62] "The ointment that witches use is reported to be made of the fat of children digged out of their graves; of the juices of smallage, wolf-bane, and cinque-foil, mingled with the meal of fine wheat; but I suppose that the soporiferous medicines are likest to do it." See Sylva Sylvarum, cent. X, 975, in Works, ed. Spedding, II, 664. But even this passage shows Bacon a skeptic. His suggestion that the soporiferous medicines are likest to do it means that he thinks the delusions of witches subjective and produced by drugs. For other references to the subject see Works, II, 658, 660; VII, 738.

[63] De Argumentis, bk. II, ch. II, in Works, IV, 296; see also ibid., III, 490.

[64] Advancement of Learning, bk. II; ibid., III, 490.

[65] Works, IV, 400-401.

[66] Ibid., IV, 296.

[67] Selden, Table Talk (London, 1689). The book is supposed to have been written during the last twenty years of Selden's life, that is, between 1634 and 1654.

[68] Selden, Table Talk, s. v. "Witches."

[69] Nor did Selden believe in possessions. See his essay on Devils in the Table Talk.

[70] See article on Hobbes in Dict. Nat. Biog.

[71] See, for example, Bishop Burnet's History of his Own Time (Oxford, 1823), I, 172, 322-323.

[72] Leviathan (1651), 7. See also his Dialogue of the Common Laws of England, in Works (ed. of London, 1750), 626: "But I desire not to discourse of that subject; for, though without doubt there is some great Wickedness signified by those Crimes, yet have I ever found myself too dull to conceive the nature of them, or how the Devil hath power to do many things which Witches have been accused of." See also his chapter on Daemonology in the Leviathan, in Works, 384.

[73] He continues, "Some doe maintaine (but how wisely let the wiser judge) that all Witchcraft spoken of either by holy writers, or testified by other writers to have beene among the heathen or in later daies, hath beene and is no more but either meere Cousinage [he had been reading Scot], or Collusion, so that in the opinion of those men, the Devill hath never done, nor can do anything by Witches." The Witches of Northamptonshire, ... A 4.

[74] Potts, The Wonderfull Discoverie ..., X 4 verso.

[75] Fairfax, A Discourse of Witchcraft (Philobiblon Soc.), 12.

[76] Ibid., 20.

[77] One notable instance must be mentioned. "H. F.," the narrator of the Essex affair of 1645 (A true and exact Relation) not only recognized the strong position of those who doubted, but was by no means extreme himself. "I doubt not," he wrote, "but these things may seeme as incredible unto some, as they are matter of admiration unto others.... The greatest doubt and question will be, whether it be in the power of the Devil to perform such asportation and locall translation of the bodies of Witches.... And whether these supernaturall works, which are above the power of man to do, and proper only to Spirits, whether they are reall or only imaginary and fained." The writer concludes that the Devil has power to dispose and transport bodies, but, as to changing them into animals, he thinks these are "but jugling transmutations."

[78] The most true and wonderfull Narration of two women bewitched in Yorkshire; ... (1658).

[79] "Relation of a Memorable Piece of Witchcraft at Welton near Daventry," in Glanvill, Sadducismus Triumphatus (London, 1681), pt. ii, 263-268.

[80] See above, pp. 179-180, for an expression about the persecution in 1645.

[81] Mercurius Democritus, February 8-15, 1654.

[82] 1648. This must be distinguished from The Divels Delusion ..., 1649, (see above, ch. IX, note 8), which deals with two witches executed at St. Alban's.

[83] The truth is that the newspapers, pamphlets, etc., were full of such stories. And they were believed by many intelligent men. He who runs through Whitelocke's Memorials may read that the man was exceeding superstitious. Whether it be the report of the horseman seen in the air or the stories of witches at Berwick, Whitelocke was equally interested. While he was merely recording the reports of others, there is not a sign of skepticism.

[84] See above, pp. 152-157.

[85] See above, pp. 160-162.



CHAPTER XI.

WITCHCRAFT UNDER CHARLES II AND JAMES II.

No period of English history saw a wider interest in both the theory and the practice of witchcraft than the years that followed the Restoration. Throughout the course of the twenty-eight years that spanned the second rule of the Stuarts, the Devil manifested himself in many forms and with unusual frequency. Especially within the first half of that regime his appearances were so thrilling in character that the enemies of the new king might very well have said that the Evil One, like Charles, had come to his own again. All over the realm the witches were popping up. If the total number of trials and of executions did not foot up to the figures of James I's reign or to those of the Civil War, the alarm was nevertheless more widely distributed than ever before. In no less than twenty counties of England witches were discovered and fetched to court. Up to this time, so far at any rate as the printed records show, the southwestern counties had been but little troubled. Now Somerset, Devon, and Cornwall were the storm centre of the panic. In the north Yorkshire began to win for itself the reputation as a centre of activity that had long been held by Lancashire. Not that the witch was a new criminal in Yorkshire courts. During the Civil Wars and the troubled years that followed the discoverers had been active. But with the reign of Charles II their zeal increased mightily. Yet, if they had never before fetched in so many "suspected parties" to the court of the justice of the peace, they had never before been so often baffled by the outcome. Among the many such cases known to us during this time there is no mention of a conviction.[1] In Kent there was a flickering revival of the old hatred of witches. In the year that Charles gained the throne the city of Canterbury sent some women to the gibbet. Not so in Essex. In that county not a single case during this period has been left on record. In Middlesex, a county which from the days of Elizabeth through to the Restoration had maintained a very even pace—a stray conviction now and then among many acquittals—the reign of Charles II saw nothing more serious than some commitments and releases upon bail. In the Midland counties, where superstition had flourished in the days of James I, there were now occasional tales of possession and vague charges which rarely reached the ears of the assize judges. Northampton, where an incendiary witch was sentenced, constituted the single exception. In East Anglia there was just enough stir to prove that the days of Matthew Hopkins had not been forgotten.

It needs no pointing out that a large proportion of the cases were but a repetition of earlier trials. If a difference is discernible, it is in the increased number of accusations that took their start in strange diseases called possessions. Since the close of the sixteenth century and the end of John Darrel's activities, the accounts of possession had fallen off sensibly, but the last third of the seventeenth century saw a distinct revival of this tendency to assign certain forms of disease to the operation of the Devil. We have references to many cases, but only in exceptional instances are the details given. Oliver Heywood, one of the eminent Dissenters of northern England, fasted and prayed with his co-workers over the convulsive and hysterical boys and girls in the West Riding. Nathan Dodgson was left after long fastings in "a very sensible melting frame,"[2] but the troubles returned and led, as we shall see in another connection, to very tragic results. The Puritan clergymen do not seem, however, to have had any highly developed method of exorcism or to have looked upon cases of possession in a light very different from that in which they would have looked upon ordinary illnesses.

Among the Baptists of Yorkshire there was a possession that roused wide comment. Mary Hall of Little Gaddesden in Hertfordshire, daughter of a smith, was possessed in the fall of 1663 with two spirits who were said to have come to her riding down the chimney upon a stick. The spirits declared through the girl that Goodwife Harwood had sent them, and when that suspected woman was brought into the girl's presence the spirits cried out, "Oh, Goodwife Harwood, are you come?—that is well; ... we have endeavored to choak her but cannot," and, when Mistress Harwood left, the spirits begged to go with her.[3]

In Southwark James Barrow, the son of John Barrow, was long possessed, and neither "doctors, astrologers, nor apothecaries" could help him. He was taken to the Catholics, but to no purpose. Finally he was cast among a "poor dispirited people whom the Lord owned as instruments in his hand to do this great work."[4] By the "poor dispirited people" the Baptists were almost certainly meant.[5] By their assistance he seems to have been cured. So also was Hannah Crump of Warwick, who had been afflicted by witchcraft and put in a London hospital. Through prayer and fasting she was entirely recovered.

Mary Hall had been taken to Doctor Woodhouse of Berkhampstead, "a man famous for curing bewitched persons." Woodhouse's name comes up now and again in the records of his time. He was in fact a very typical specimen of the witch doctor. When Mary Hall's case had been submitted to him he had cut off the ends of her nails and "with somewhat he added" hung them in the chimney over night before making a diagnosis.[6] He professed to find stolen goods as well and fell foul of the courts in one instance, probably because the woman who consulted him could not pay the shilling fee.[7] He was arraigned and spent a term in prison. No doubt many of the witch physicians knew the inside of prisons and had returned afterwards to successful practice. Redman, "whom some say is a Conjurer, others say, He is an honest and able phisitian," had been in prison, but nevertheless he had afterwards "abundance of Practice" and was much talked about "in remote parts," all this in spite of the fact that he was "unlearned in the languages."[8]

Usually, of course, the witch doctor was a poor woman who was very happy to get a penny fee now and then, but who ran a greater risk of the gallows than her male competitors. Her reputation, which brought her a little money from the sick and from those who had lost valuables, made her at the same time a successful beggar. Those whom she importuned were afraid to refuse her. But she was in constant peril. If she resented ill treatment, if she gave in ill wishes as much as she took, she was sure to hear from it before a stern justice of the peace. It can hardly be doubted that a large proportion, after the Restoration as in every other period, of those finally hanged for witchcraft, had in fact made claims to skill in magic arts. Without question some of them had even traded on the fear they inspired. Not a few of the wretched creatures fetched to York castle to be tried were "inchanters."

Very often, indeed, a woman who was nothing more than a midwife, with some little knowledge of medicine perhaps, would easily be classed by the public among the regular witch doctors and so come to have a bad name. Whether she lived up to her name or not—and the temptation to do so would be great—she would from that time be subject to suspicion, and might at length become a prey to the justice of the peace. Mrs. Pepper was no more than a midwife who made also certain simple medical examinations, but when one of her patients was "strangely handled" she was taken to court.[9] Margaret Stothard was probably, so far as we can piece together her story, a woman who had been successful in calming fretful children and had so gained for herself a reputation as a witch. Doubtless she had acquired in time a few of the charmer's tricks that enhanced her reputation and increased her practice. This was all very well until one of her patients happened to die. Then she was carried to Newcastle and would probably have suffered death, had it not been for a wise judge.[10]

These are typical cases. The would-be healer of the sick ran a risk, and it was not always alone from failure to cure. If a witch doctor found himself unable to bring relief to a patient, it was easy to suggest that some other witch doctor—and such were usually women—was bewitching the patient. There are many instances, and they are not confined to the particular period with which we are dealing, in which one "good witch" started the run on the other's reputation. Even the regular physician may sometimes have yielded to the temptation to crush competition.

Of course, when all the cases are considered, only a very small part of the "good witches" ever fell into the clutches of the law. The law prescribed very definite penalties for their operations, but in most instances no action was taken until after a long accumulation of "suspicious circumstances," and, even if action was taken, the chances, as we have seen, were by this time distinctly in favor of the accused.

This is not to say, by any means, that the judges and juries of England had come over to the side of the witch. The period with which we are dealing was marked by a variety of decision which betrays the perplexity of judges and juries. It is true, indeed, that out of from eighty to one hundred cases where accusations are on record less than twenty witches were hanged. This does not mean that six times out of every seven the courts were ruling against the fact of witchcraft. In the case of the six released there was no very large body of evidence against them to be considered, or perhaps no strong popular current to be stemmed. In general, it may be said that the courts were still backing up the law of James I.

To show this, it is only necessary to run over some of the leading trials of the period. We shall briefly take up four trials conducted respectively by Justice Archer, Chief Baron Hale, Justice Rainsford, and Justice Raymond.

Julian Cox, who was but one of the "pestilent brood" of witches ferreted out in Somerset by the aggressive justice, Robert Hunt, was tried in 1663 at Taunton before Justice Archer.[11] The charges against her indeed excited such interest all over England, and elicited, upon the part of disbelievers, so much derision, that it will be worth our while to go over the principal points of evidence. The chief witness against her was a huntsman who told a strange tale. He had started a hare and chased it behind a bush. But when he came to the bush he had found Julian Cox there, stooped over and quite out of breath. Another witness had a strange story to tell about her. She had invited him to come up on her porch and take a pipe of tobacco with her. While he was with her, smoking, he saw a toad between his legs. On going home he had taken out a pipe and smoked again and had again seen what looked to be the same toad between his legs. "He took the Toad out to kill it, and to his thinking cut it in several pieces, but returning to his Pipe the Toad still appeared.... At length the Toad cryed, and vanish'd." A third witness had seen the accused fly in at her window "in her full proportion." This tissue of evidence was perhaps the absurdest ever used against even a witch, but the jury brought in a verdict of guilty. It is not unpleasant to know that Justice Archer met with a good deal of criticism for his part in the affair.

In the following year occurred the trials at Bury St. Edmunds, which derive their interest and importance largely from the position of the presiding judge, Sir Matthew Hale, who was at this time chief baron of the exchequer, and was later to be chief justice of the king's bench. He was allowed, according to the admission of one none too friendly to him, "on all hands to be the most profound lawyer of his time."[12] Hale had been a Puritan from his youth, though not of the rigid or theologically minded sort. In the Civil Wars and the events that followed he had remained non-partisan. He accepted office from Cromwell, though without doubt mildly sympathizing with the king. One of those who had assisted in recalling Charles II, he rose shortly to be chief baron of the exchequer. Famous for his careful and reasoned interpretation of law, he was to leave behind him a high reputation for his justice and for the exceptional precision of his judgments. It is not too much to say that he was one of the greatest legal figures of his century and that his decisions served in no small degree to fix the law.

We should like to know how far he had been brought into contact with the subject of witchcraft, but we can do no more than guess. His early career had been moulded in no small degree by Selden, who, as has been noted in an earlier chapter, believed in the punishment of those who claimed to be witches. It is not unreasonable to suppose that the Puritans with whom he had been thrown were all of them ready to quote Scripture against the minions of Satan. We know that he had read some of the works of Henry More,[13] and, whether or not familiar with his chapters on witchcraft, would have deduced from that writer's general philosophy of spirits the particular application.

The trial concerned two women of Lowestoft, Amy Duny and Rose Cullender. The first had been reputed a witch and a "person of very evil behaviour." She was in all probability related to some of those women who had suffered at the hands of Hopkins, and to that connection owed her ill name. Some six or seven years before the date of the trial she had got herself into trouble while taking care of the child of a tradesman in Lowestoft. It would seem that, contrary to the orders of the mother, she had suckled the child. The child had that same night been attacked by fits, and a witch doctor of Yarmouth, who was consulted, had prescribed for it. The reader will note that this "suspicious circumstance" happened seven years earlier, and a large part of the evidence presented in court concerned what had occurred from five to seven years before.

We can not go into the details of a trial which abounded in curious bits of evidence. The main plot indeed was an old one. The accused woman, after she had been discharged from employment and reproved, had been heard to mutter threats, close upon which the children of those she cursed, who were now the witnesses against her, had fallen ill. Two of the children had suffered severely and were still afflicted. They had thrown up pins and even a two-penny nail. The nail, which was duly offered as an exhibit in court, had been brought to one of the children by a bee and had been forced into the child's mouth, upon which she expelled it. This narrative was on a level with the other, that flies brought crooked pins to the child. Both flies and bee, it will be understood, were the witches in other form. A similar sort of evidence was that a toad, which had been found as the result of the witch doctor's directions, had been thrown into the fire, upon which a sharp crackling noise ensued. When this incident was testified to in the court the judge interrupted to ask if after the explosion the substance of the toad was not to be seen in the fire. He was answered in the negative. On the next day Amy Duny was found to have her face and body all scorched. She said to the witness that "she might thank her for it." There can be no doubt in the world that this testimony of the coincident burning of the woman and the toad was regarded as damning proof, nor is there any reason to believe that the court deemed it necessary to go behind the mere say-so of a single witness for the fact. Along with this sort of unsubstantial testimony there was presented a monotonous mass of spectral evidence. Apparitions of the witches were the constant occasions for the paroxysms of the children. In another connection it will be observed that this form of proof was becoming increasingly common in the last part of the seventeenth century. It can hardly be doubted that in one way or another the use of such evidence at Bury influenced other trials and more particularly the Salem cases in the New World, where great importance was attached to evidence of this sort.

The usual nauseating evidence as to the Devil's marks was introduced by the testimony of the mother of one of the children bewitched. She had been, a month before, a member of a jury of matrons appointed by a justice of the peace to examine the body of the accused. Most damning proof against the woman had been found. It is very hard for us to understand why Hale allowed to testify, as one of the jury of examining matrons, a woman who was at the same time mother of one of the bewitched children upon whom the prosecution largely depended.

So far the case for the prosecution had been very strong, but it was in the final experiments in court, which were expected to clinch the evidence, that a very serious mishap occurred. A bewitched child, eleven years old, had been fetched into court. With eyes closed and head reclining upon the bar she had remained quiet until one of the accused was brought up, when she at once became frantic in her effort to scratch her. This was tried again and again and in every instance produced the same result. The performance must have had telling effect. But there happened to be present at the trial three Serjeants of the law. One of them, Serjeant John Kelyng, a few years later to become chief justice of the king's bench, was "much dissatisfied." He urged the point that the mere fact that the children were bewitched did not establish their claim to designate the authors of their misfortune. There were others present who agreed with Kelyng in suspecting the actions of the girl on the stand. Baron Hale was induced, at length, to appoint a committee of several gentlemen, including Serjeant Kelyng, to make trial of the girl with her eyes covered. An outside party was brought up to her and touched her hand. The girl was expecting that Amy Duny would be brought up and flew into the usual paroxysms. This was what the committee had expected, and they declared their belief that the whole transaction was a mere imposture. One would have supposed that every one else must come to the same conclusion, but Mr. Pacy, the girl's father, offered an explanation of her mistake that seems to have found favor. The maid, he said, "might be deceived by a suspicion that the Witch touched her when she did not." One would suppose that this subtle suggestion would have broken the spell, and that Mr. Pacy would have been laughed out of court. Alas for the rarity of humor in seventeenth-century court rooms! Not only was the explanation received seriously, but it was, says the court reporter, afterwards found to be true.

In the mean time expert opinion had been called in. It is hard to say whether Dr. Browne had been requisitioned for the case or merely happened to be present. At all events, he was called upon to render his opinion as a medical man. The name of Thomas Browne is one eminent in English literature and not unknown in the annals of English medicine and science. More than twenty years earlier he had expressed faith in the reality of witchcraft.[14] In his Commonplace Book, a series of jottings made throughout his life, he reiterated his belief, but uttered a doubt as to the connection between possession and witchcraft.[15]

We should be glad to know at what time Browne wrote this deliverance; for, when called upon at Bury, he made no application of his principles of caution. He gave it as his opinion that the bewitchment of the two girls was genuine. The vomiting of needles and nails reminded him very much of a recent case in Denmark. For the moment the physician spoke, when he said that "these swounding Fits were Natural." But it was the student of seventeenth-century theology who went on: they were "heightened to a great excess by the subtilty of the Devil, co-operating with the Malice of these which we term Witches, at whose Instance he doth these Villanies."

No doubt Browne's words confirmed the sentiment of the court room and strengthened the case of the prosecution. But it will not be overlooked by the careful reader that he did not by any means commit himself as to the guilt of the parties at the bar.

When the judge found that the prisoners had "nothing material" to say for themselves he addressed the jury. Perhaps because he was not altogether clear in his own mind about the merits of the case, he refused to sum up the evidence. It is impossible for us to understand why he did not carry further the tests which had convinced Kelyng of the fraud, or why he did not ask questions which would have uncovered the weakness of the testimony. One cannot but suspect that North's criticism of him, that he had a "leaning towards the Popular" and that he had gained such "transcendent" authority as not easily to bear contradiction,[16] was altogether accurate. At all events he passed over the evidence and went on to declare that there were two problems before the jury: (1) were these children bewitched, (2) were the prisoners at the bar guilty of it? As to the existence of witches, he never doubted it. The Scriptures affirmed it, and all nations provided laws against such persons.

On the following Sunday Baron Hale composed a meditation upon the subject. Unfortunately it was simply a dissertation on Scripture texts and touched upon the law at no point.

It is obvious enough to the most casual student that Sir Matthew Hale had a chance to anticipate the work of Chief Justice Holt and missed it. In the nineties of the seventeenth century, as we shall see, there was a man in the chief justiceship who dared to nullify the law of James I. It is not too much to say that Matthew Hale by a different charge to the jury could as easily have made the current of judicial decisions run in favor of accused witches all over England. His weight was thrown in the other direction, and the witch-triers for a half-century to come invoked the name of Hale.[17]

There is an interesting though hardly trustworthy story told by Speaker Onslow[18]—writing a century later—that Hale "was afterwards much altered in his notions as to this matter, and had great concern upon him for what had befallen these persons." This seems the more doubtful because there is not a shred of proof that Hale's decisions occasioned a word of criticism among his contemporaries.[19] So great, indeed, was the spell of his name that not even a man like John Webster dared to comment upon his decision. Not indeed until nearly the middle of the eighteenth century does anyone seem to have felt that the decision called for apology.

The third noteworthy ruling in this period anent the crime of witchcraft was made a few years later in Wiltshire by Justice Rainsford. The story, as he himself told it to a colleague, was this: "A Witch was brought to Salisbury and tried before him. Sir James Long came to his Chamber, and made a heavy Complaint of this Witch, and said that if she escaped, his Estate would not be worth any Thing; for all the People would go away. It happen'd that the Witch was acquitted, and the Knight continued extremely concern'd; therefore the Judge, to save the poor Gentleman's Estate, order'd the Woman to be kept in Gaol, and that the Town should allow her 2s. 6d. per Week; for which he was very thankful. The very next Assizes, he came to the Judge to desire his lordship would let her come back to the Town. And why? They could keep her for 1s. 6d. there; and, in the Gaol, she cost them a shilling more."[20] Another case before Justice Rainsford showed him less lenient. By a mere chance we have a letter, written at the time by one of the justices of the peace in Malmesbury, which sheds no little light on this affair and on the legal status of witchcraft at that time.[21] A certain Ann Tilling had been taken into custody on the complaint of Mrs. Webb of Malmesbury. The latter's son had swooning fits in which he accused Ann of bewitching him. Ann Tilling made voluble confession, implicating Elizabeth Peacock and Judith Witchell, who had, she declared, inveigled her into the practice of their evil arts. Other witches were named, and in a short time twelve women and two men were under accusation. But the alderman of Malmesbury, who was the chief magistrate of that town, deemed it wise before going further to call in four of the justices of the peace in that subdivision of the county. Three of these justices of the peace came and listened to the confessions, and were about to make out a mittimus for sending eleven of the accused to Salisbury, when the fourth justice arrived, the man who has given us the story. He was, according to his own account, not "very credulous in matters of Witchcraft," and he made a speech to the other justices. "Gentlemen, what is done at this place, a Borough remote from the centre of this large County, and almost forty miles from Salisbury, will be expended [sic] both by the Reverend Judges, the learned Counsayle there ..., and the Gentry of the body of the County, so that if anything be done here rashly, it will be severely censured." He went on to urge the danger that the boy whose fits were the cause of so much excitement might be an impostor, and that Ann Tilling, who had freely confessed, might be in confederacy with the parents. The skeptical justice, who in spite of his boasted incredulity was a believer in the reality of witchcraft, was successful with his colleagues. All the accused were dismissed save Tilling, Peacock, and Witchell. They were sent to Salisbury and tried before Sir Richard Rainsford. Elizabeth Peacock, who had been tried on similar charges before, was dismissed. The other two were sentenced to be hanged.[22]

Ten years later came a fourth remarkable ruling against witchcraft, this time by Justice Raymond at Exeter. During the intervening years there had been cases a-plenty in England and a few hangings, but none that had attracted comment. It was not until the summer of 1682, when three Devonshire women were arraigned, tried, and sent to the gallows by Justice Raymond,[23] that the public again realized that witchcraft was still upheld by the courts.

The trials in themselves had no very striking features. At least two of the three women had been beggars; the other, who had been the first accused and who had in all probability involved her two companions, had on two different occasions before been arraigned but let off. The evidence submitted against them consisted of the usual sworn statements made by neighbors to the justice of the peace, as well as of hardly coherent confessions by the accused. The repetition of the Lord's Prayer was gone through with and the results of examinations by a female jury were detailed ad nauseam. The poor creatures on trial were remarkably stupid, even for beings of their grade. Their several confessions tallied with one another in hardly a single point.

Sir Thomas Raymond and Sir Francis North were the judges present at the Exeter assizes. Happily the latter has left his impressions of this trial.[24] He admits that witch trials worried him because the evidence was usually slight, but the people very intent upon a verdict of guilty. He was very glad that at Exeter his colleague who sat upon the "crown side" had to bear the responsibilities.[25] The two women (he seems to have known of no more) were scarce alive as to sense and understanding, but were "overwhelm'd with melancholy and waking Dreams." Barring confessions, the other evidence he considered trifling, and he cites the testimony of a witness that "he saw a cat leap in at her (the old woman's) window, when it was twilight; and this Informant farther saith that he verily believeth the said Cat to be the Devil, and more saith not." Raymond, declares his colleague, made no nice distinctions as to the possibility of melancholy women contracting an opinion of themselves that was false, but left the matter to the jury.[26]

We have already intimated that the rulings of the courts were by no means all of them adverse to the witches. Almost contemporaneous with the far-reaching sentence of Sir Matthew Hale at Bury were the trials in Somerset, where flies and nails and needles played a similar part, but where the outcome was very different. A zealous justice of the peace, Robert Hunt, had for the last eight years been on the lookout for witches. In 1663 he had turned Julian Cox over to the tender mercies of Justice Archer. By 1664 he had uncovered a "hellish knot" of the wicked women and was taking depositions against them, wringing confessions from them and sending them to gaol with all possible speed.[27] The women were of the usual class, a herd of poor quarrelsome, bickering females who went from house to house seeking alms. In the numbers of the accused the discovery resembled that at Lancaster in 1633-1634, as indeed it did in other ways. A witch meeting or conventicle was confessed to. The county was being terrified and entertained by the most horrible tales, when suddenly a quietus was put upon the affair "by some of them in authority." A witch chase, which during the Civil Wars would have led to a tragedy, was cut short, probably through the agency of a privy council less fearful of popular sentiment than the assize judges.

The Mompesson case[28] was of no less importance in its time, although it belongs rather in the annals of trickery than in those of witchcraft. But the sensation which it caused in England and the controversy waged over it between the upholders of witchcraft and the "Sadducees," give the story a considerable interest and render the outcome of the trial significant. The only case of its sort in its time, it was nevertheless most typical of the superstition of the time. A little town in Wiltshire had been disturbed by a stray drummer. The self-constituted noise-maker was called to account by a stranger in the village, a Mr. Mompesson of Tedworth, who on examining the man's license saw that it had been forged and took it away from him. This, at any rate, was Mr. Mompesson's story as to how he had incurred the ill will of the man. The drummer took his revenge in a singular way. Within a few days the Mompesson family at Tedworth began to be annoyed at night by strange noises or drummings on the roofs. All the phenomena and manifestations which we associate with a modern haunted-house story were observed by this alarmed family of the seventeenth century. The little girls were knocked about in their beds at night, a stout servant was forcibly held hand and foot, the children's shoes were thrown about, the chairs glided about the room. It would seem that all this bold horse-play must soon have been exposed, but it went on merrily. Whenever any tune was called for, it was given on the drum. The family Bible was thrown upside down into the ashes. For three weeks, however, the spirits ceased operations during the lying-in of Mrs. Mompesson. But they sedulously avoided the family servants, especially when those retainers happened to be armed with swords. Well they might, for we are told that on one occasion, after a pistol shot had been fired at the place where they were heard, blood was found on the spot. In another instance, according to Mr. Mompesson's own account, there were seen figures, "in the shape of Men, who, as soon as a Gun was discharg'd, would shuffle away together into an Arbour."

It is clear enough that a somewhat clumsy fraud was being imposed upon Mr. Mompesson. A contemporary writer tells us he was told that it was done by "two Young Women in the House with a design to scare thence Mr. Mompesson's Mother."[29] From other sources it is quite certain that the injured drummer had a hand in the affair. A very similar game had been played at Woodstock in 1649, and formed a comedy situation of which Scott makes brilliant use in his novel of that name. Indeed, it is quite possible that the drummer, who had been a soldier of Cromwell's, was inspired by a memory of that affair.

But there was no one to detect the fraud, as at Woodstock. Tedworth became a Mecca for those interested in the supernatural. One of the visitors was Joseph Glanvill, at this time a young man of twenty-seven, later to become a member of the Royal Society and chaplain in ordinary to the king. The spirits were less noisy; they were always somewhat restrained before visitors, but scratched on bed sheets and panted in dog fashion, till Glanvill was thoroughly taken in. For the rest of his life this psychic experimenter fought a literary war over this case with those who made fun of it. While we cannot prove it, we may guess with some confidence that this episode was the beginning of the special interest in the supernatural upon Glanvill's part which was later to make him the arch-defender of the witchcraft superstition in his generation.

How wide an interest the matter evoked may be judged from the warm discussions upon it at Cambridge, and from the royal interest in it which induced Charles to send down a committee of investigation. Curiously enough, the spirits were singularly and most extraordinarily quiet when the royal investigators were at work, a fact to which delighted skeptics pointed with satisfaction.

One wonders that the drummer, who must have known that his name would be connected with the affair, failed to realize the risk he was running from the witch hunters. He was indicted on minor felonies of another sort, but the charges which Mompesson brought against him seem to have been passed over. The man was condemned for stealing and was transported. With his departure the troubles at Tedworth ceased. But the drummer, in some way, escaped and returned to England. The angry Mompesson now brought him to the assizes as a felon on the strength of the statute of James I. Unhappily we have no details of this trial, nor do we know even the name of the judge; but we do know that the jury gave a verdict of acquittal.

In 1671 Cornwall was stirred up over a witch whose crimes were said to be directed against the state. She had hindered the English fleet in their war against the Dutch, she had caused a bull to kill one of the enemies in Parliament of the Non-Conformists, she had been responsible for the barrenness of the queen. And for all these political crimes the chief evidence was that some cats had been seen playing ("dancing") near her house. She was committed, along with several other women who were accused. Although at the assizes they were all proved to have had cats and rats about them, they went free.[30]

In 1682, the same year in which the three women of Devonshire had been condemned, there was a trial at Southwark, just outside of London, which resulted in a verdict of acquittal. The case had many of the usual features, but in two points was unique. Joan Butts was accused of having bewitched a child that had been taken with fits.[31] Nineteen or twenty witnesses testified against the witch. One of the witnesses heard her say that, if she had not bewitched the child, if all the devils in hell could help her, she would bewitch it. Joan admitted the words, but said that she had spoken them in passion. She then turned on one of the witnesses and declared that he had given himself to the Devil, body and soul. Chief Justice Pemberton was presiding, and he called her to order for this attack on a witness, and then catechized her as to her means of knowing the fact. The woman had thoughtlessly laid herself open by her own words to the most serious suspicion. In spite of this, however, the jury brought her in not guilty, "to the great amazement of some, ... yet others who consider the great difficulty in proving a Witch, thought the jury could do no less than acquit her."

This was, during the period, the one trial in or near London of which we have details. There can be no doubt that the courts in London and the vicinity were beginning to ignore cases of witchcraft. After 1670 there were no more trials of the sort in Middlesex.

The reader will remember that Justice North had questioned the equity of Justice Raymond's decision at Exeter. He has told us the story of a trial at Taunton-Dean, where he himself had to try a witch.[32] A ten-year-old girl, who was taking strange fits and spitting out pins, was the witness against an old man whom she accused of bewitching her. The defendant made "a Defence as orderly and well expressed as I ever heard spoke." The judge then asked the justice of the peace who had committed the man his opinion. He said that he believed the girl, "doubling herself in her Fit, as being convulsed, bent her Head down close to her Stomacher, and with her Mouth, took Pins out of the Edge of that, and then, righting herself a little, spit them into some By-stander's Hands." "The Sum of it was Malice, Threatening, and Circumstances of Imposture in the Girl." As the judge went downstairs after the man had been acquitted, "an hideous old woman" cried to him, "My Lord, Forty Years ago they would have hang'd me for a Witch, and they could not; and now they would have hang'd my poor Son."

The five cases we have cited, while not so celebrated as those on the other side, were quite as representative of what was going on in England. It is to be regretted that we have not the records by which to compute the acquittals of this period. In a large number of cases where we have depositions we have no statement of the outcome. This is particularly true of Yorkshire. As has been pointed out in the earlier part of the chapter, we can be sure that most of these cases were dismissed or were never brought to trial.

When we come to the question of the forms of evidence presented during this period, we have a story that has been told before. Female juries, convulsive children or child pretenders, we have met them all before. Two or three differences may nevertheless be noted. The use of spectral evidence was becoming increasingly common. The spectres, as always, assumed weird forms. Nicholas Rames's wife (at Longwitton, in the north) saw Elizabeth Fenwick and the Devil dancing together.[33] A sick boy in Cornwall saw a "Woman in a blue Jerkin and Red Petticoat with Yellow and Green patches," who was quickly identified and put in hold.[34] Sometimes the spectres were more material. Jane Milburne of Newcastle testified that Dorothy Stranger, in the form of a cat, had leaped upon her and held her to the ground for a quarter of an hour.[35] A "Barber's boy" in Cambridge had escaped from a spectral woman in the isle of Ely, but she followed him to Cambridge and killed him with a blow. "He had the exact mark in his forehead, being dead, where the Spiritual Woman did hit him alive."[36] It is unnecessary to multiply cases. The Collection of Modern Relations is full of the same sort of evidence.

It has been seen that in nearly every epoch of witch history the voluntary and involuntary confessions of the accused had greatly simplified the difficulties of prosecution. The witches whom Matthew Hopkins discovered were too ready to confess to enormous and unnatural crimes. In this respect there is a marked change in the period of the later Stuarts. Elizabeth Style of Somerset in 1663 and the three Devonshire witches of 1682 were the only ones who made confessions. Elizabeth Style[37] had probably been "watched," in spite of Glanvill's statement to the contrary, perhaps somewhat in the same torturing way as the Suffolk witches whom Hopkins "discovered," and her wild confession showed the effect. The Devonshire women were half-witted creatures, of the type that had always been most voluble in confession; but such were now exceptions.

This means one of two things. Either the witches of the Restoration were by some chance a more intelligent set, or they were showing more spirit than ever before because they had more supporters and fairer treatment in court. It is quite possible that both suppositions have in them some elements of truth. As the belief in the powers of witches developed in form and theory, it came to draw within its radius more groups of people. In its earlier stages the attack upon the witch had been in part the community's way of ridding itself of a disreputable member. By the time that the process of attack had been developed for a century, it had become less impersonal. Personal hatreds were now more often the occasion of accusation. Individual malice was playing a larger role. In consequence those who were accused were more often those who were capable of fighting for themselves or who had friends to back them. And those friends were more numerous and zealous because the attitude of the public and of the courts was more friendly to the accused witch. This explanation is at best, however, nothing more than a suggestion. We have not the material for confident generalization.

One other form of evidence must be mentioned. The town of Newcastle, which in 1649 had sent to Scotland for a witchfinder, was able in 1673 to make use of home-grown talent. In this instance it was a woman, Ann Armstrong, who implicated a score of her neighbors and at length went around pointing out witches. She was a smooth-witted woman who was probably taking a shrewd method of turning off charges against herself. Her testimony dealt with witch gatherings or conventicles held at various times and places. She told whom she had seen there and what they had said about their crimes. She told of their feasts and of their dances. Poor woman, she had herself been compelled to sing for them while they danced. Nor was this the worst. She had been terribly misused. She had been often turned into a horse, then bridled and ridden.[38]

It would not be worth while to go further into Ann Armstrong's stories. It is enough to remark that she offered details, as to harm done to certain individuals in certain ways, which tallied closely with the sworn statements of those individuals as to what had happened to them at the times specified. The conclusion cannot be avoided that the female witchfinder had been at no small pains to get even such minute details in exact form. She had gathered together all the witch stories of that part of Northumberland and had embodied them in her account of the confessions made at the "conventicles."

What was the ruling of the court on all this evidence we do not know. We have only one instance in which any evidence was ruled out. That was at the trial of Julian Cox in 1663. Justice Archer tried an experiment in that trial, but before doing so he explained to the court that no account was to be taken of the result in making up their verdict. He had heard that a witch could not repeat the petition in the Lord's Prayer, "Lead us not into temptation." The witch indeed failed to meet the test.[39]

In the course of this period we have two trials that reveal a connection between witchcraft and other crimes. Perhaps it would be fairer to say that the charge of witchcraft was sometimes made when other crimes were suspected, but could not be proved. The first case concerned a rich farmer in Northamptonshire who had gained the ill will of a woman named Ann Foster. Thirty of his sheep were found dead with their "Leggs broke in pieces, and their Bones all shattered in their Skins." A little later his house and barns were set on fire. Ann Foster was brought to trial for using witchcraft against him, confessed to it, and was hanged.[40]

The other case was at Brightling in Sussex, not far from London. There a woman who was suspected as the one who had told a servant that Joseph Cruther's house would be burned—a prophecy which came true very shortly—was accused as a witch. She had been accused years before at the Maidstone assizes, but had gone free. This time she was "watched" for twenty-four hours and four ministers kept a fast over the affair.[41]

These cases are worth something as an indication that the charge of witchcraft was still a method of getting rid of people whom the community feared.

At the beginning of this chapter the years 1660 to 1688 were marked off as constituting a single epoch in the history of the superstition. Yet those years were by no means characterized by the same sort of court verdicts. The sixties saw a decided increase over the years of the Commonwealth in the number of trials and in the number of executions. The seventies witnessed a rapid dropping off in both figures. Even more so the eighties. By the close of the eighties the accounts of witchcraft were exceedingly rare. The decisions of the courts in the matter were in a state of fluctuation. Two things were happening. The justices of the peace were growing much more reluctant to send accused witches to the assize courts; and the itinerant judges as a body were, in spite of the decisions of Hale and Raymond, more careful in witch trials than ever before, and more likely to withstand public sentiment.

The changes of opinion, as reflected in the literature of the time, especially in the literature of the subject, will show the same tendencies. We shall take them up in the next chapter.

[1] See Raine, ed., York Depositions (Surtees Soc.), preface, xxx.

[2] Joseph Hunter, Life of Heywood (London, 1842), 167, and Heywood's Diaries, ed. J. H. Turner (Brighouse, 1881-1885), I, 199; III, 100. Heywood, who was one of the leading Dissenters of his time, must not be credited with extreme superstition. In noting the death of a boy whom his parents believed bewitched, he wrote, "Oh that they saw the lords hand." Diary, I, 287.

[3] William Drage, Daimonomageia (London, 1665), 32-38.

[4] The Lord's Arm Stretched Out, ... or a True Relation of the wonderful Deliverance of James Barrow ... (London, 1664).

[5] Compare Drage, op. cit., 36, 39, 42, with The Lord's Arm Stretched Out, 17. Mary Hall, whose cure Drage celebrates, had friends among the Baptists. Drage seems to connect her case with those of Barrow and Hannah Crump, both of whom were helped by that "dispirited people" whom the author of The Lord's Arm Stretched Out exalts.

[6] Drage, op. cit., 34.

[7] Yorkshire Notes and Queries, I (Bradford, 1885), 26. But a physician in Winchester Park, whom Hannah Crump had consulted, had asked five pounds to unbewitch her.

[8] Drage, op. cit., 39.

[9] York Depositions, 127.

[10] See E. Mackenzie, History of Northumberland (Newcastle, 1825), II, 33-36. We do not know that the woman was excused, but the case was before Henry Ogle and we may fairly guess the outcome.

[11] Glanvill, Sadducismus Triumphatus, pt. ii, 191-209.

[12] This is the estimate of him by North, who adds: "and he knew it." Roger North, Life of the Rt. Hon. Francis North, Baron of Guilford ... (London, 1742), 62-63.

[13] Diary and Correspondence of Dr. John Worthington, II, pt. I (Chetham Soc., no. 36, 1855), 155.

[14] In his Religio Medici. See Sir Thomas Browne's Works (ed. S. Wilkin, London, 1851-1852), II, 43.

[15] Ibid., IV, 389.

[16] Roger North, op. cit., 61.

[17] Inderwick has given a good illustration of Hale's weakness of character: "I confess," he says, "to a feeling of pain at finding him in October, 1660, sitting as a judge at the Old Bailey, trying and condemning to death batches of the regicides, men under whose orders he had himself acted, who had been his colleagues in parliament, with whom he had sat on committees to alter the law." Interregnum, 217-218.

[18] Hist. MSS. Comm. Reports, XIV, 9, p. 480.

[19] Bishop Burnet, in his Life and Death of Sir Matthew Hale (London, 1682), does not seem to have felt called upon to mention the Bury trial at all. See also Lord Campbell, Lives of the Chief Justices (London, 1849), I, 563-567.

[20] Roger North, op. cit., 130, 131. The story, as here told, ascribes the event to the year preceding Lord Guilford's first western circuit—i. e., to 1674. But this perhaps need not be taken too exactly, and the witch was probably that Elizabeth Peacock who was acquitted in 1670 and again in the case of 1672 described above. At least the list of "Indictments for witchcraft on the Western Circuit from 1670 to 1712," published by Inderwick in his Sidelights on the Stuarts (London, 1888), shows no other acquittal in Wiltshire during this decade.

[21] For this letter see the Gentleman's Magazine, 1832, pt. I, 405-410, 489-402. The story is confirmed in part by Inderwick's finds in the western Gaol Delivery records. As to the trustworthiness of this unknown justice of the peace, see above, pp. 160, 162, and notes.

[22] That the judge was Sir Richard Rainsford appears from Inderwick's list, mentioned above, note 20.

[23] A True and Impartial Relation of the Informations against ... Temperance Lloyd, Mary Trembles, and Susanna Edwards (London, 1682). And The Tryal, Condemnation and Execution of Three Witches ... (London, 1682). See also below, note 26, and appendix A, Sec. 6.

[24] Roger North, op. cit., 130.

[25] At a trial at the York assizes in 1687 Sir John Reresby seems to have played about the same part that North played at Exeter. Serjeant Powell, later to be chief justice, was presiding over the case. "An old woman was condemned for a witch. Those who were more credulous in points of this nature than myself, conceived the evidence to be very strong against her. The boy she was said to have bewitched fell down on a sudden before all the court when he saw her, and would then as suddenly return to himself again, and very distinctly relate the several injuries she had done him: but in all this it was observed the boy was free from any distortion; that he did not foam at the mouth, and that his fits did not leave him gradually, but all at once; so that, upon the whole, the judge thought it proper to reprieve her." Memoirs and Travels of Sir John Reresby (London, 1813), 329.

[26] There is indeed some evidence that Raymond wished not to condemn the women, but yielded nevertheless to public opinion. In a pamphlet published five years later it is stated that the judge "in his charge to the jury gave his Opinion that these three poor Women (as he supposed) were weary of their Lives, and that he thought it proper for them to be carryed to the Parish from whence they came, and that the Parish should be charged with their Maintainance; for he thought their oppressing Poverty had constrained them to wish for Death." Unhappily the neighbors made such an outcry that the women were found guilty and sentenced. This is from a later and somewhat untrustworthy account, but it fits in well with what North says of the case. The Life and Conversation of Temperance Floyd, Mary Lloyd [sic], and Susanna Edwards: ... (London, 1687).

[27] The second part of Glanvill's Sadducismus Triumphatus is full of these depositions.

[28] For a full account of this affair see Glanvill's Sadducismus Triumphatus, pt. ii, preface and Relation I. Glanvill had investigated the matter and had diligently collected all the evidence. He was familiar also with what the "deriders" had to say, and we can discover their point of view from his answers. See also John Beaumont, An Historical, Physiological and Theological Treatise of Spirits, Apparitions, Witchcrafts, and other Magical Practices (London, 1705), 307-309.

[29] Ibid., 309.

[30] Cal. St. P., Dom., 1671, 105, 171.

[31] We have two accounts of this affair: Strange and Wonderful News from Yowell in Surry (1681), and An Account of the Tryal and Examination of Joan Buts (1682).

[32] Roger North, op. cit., 131-132.

[33] York Depositions, 247.

[34] A True Account ... of one John Tonken, of Pensans in Cornwall ... (1686). For other examples of spectral evidence see York Depositions, 88; Roberts, Southern Counties (London, 1856), 525-526; Gentleman's Magazine, 1832, pt. II, 489.

[35] York Depositions, 112, 113.

[36] Drage, Daimonomageia, 12.

[37] For an account of her case, see Glanvill, Sadducismus Triumphatus, pt. ii, 127-146.

[38] York Depositions, 191-201.

[39] For a complete account of the Julian Cox case see Glanvill, Sadducismus Triumphatus, pt. ii, 191-209.

[40] A Full and True Relation of the Tryal ... of Ann Foster ... (London, 1674).

[41] Sussex Archaeological Collections, XVIII, 111-113.



CHAPTER XII.

GLANVILL AND WEBSTER AND THE LITERARY WAR OVER WITCHCRAFT, 1660-1688.

In an earlier chapter we followed the progress of opinion from James I to the Restoration. We saw that in the course of little more than a half-century the centre of the controversy had been considerably shifted: we noted that there was a growing body of intelligent men who discredited the stories of witchcraft and were even inclined to laugh at them. It is now our purpose to go on with the history of opinion from the point at which we left off to the revolution of 1688. We shall discover that the body of literature on the subject was enormously increased. We shall see that a larger and more representative group of men were expressing themselves on the matter. The controversialists were no longer bushwhackers, but crafty warriors who joined battle after looking over the field and measuring their forces. The groundworks of philosophy were tested, the bases of religious faith examined. The days of skirmishing about the ordeal of water and the test of the Devil's marks were gone by. The combatants were now to fight over the reality or unreality of supernatural phenomena. We shall observe that the battle was less one-sided than ever before and that the assailants of superstition, who up to this time had been outnumbered, now fought on at least even terms with their enemies. We shall see too that the non-participants and onlookers were more ready than ever before to join themselves to the party of attack.

The struggle was indeed a miniature war and in the main was fought very fairly. But it was natural that those who disbelieved should resort to ridicule. It was a form of attack to which their opponents exposed themselves by their faith in the utterly absurd stories of silly women. Cervantes with his Don Quixote laughed chivalry out of Europe, and there was a class in society that would willingly have laughed witchcraft out of England. Their onslaught was one most difficult to repel. Nevertheless the defenders of witchcraft met the challenge squarely. With unwearying patience and absolute confidence in their cause they collected the testimonies for their narratives and then said to those who laughed: Here are the facts; what are you going to do about them?

The last chapter told of the alarms in Somerset and in Wilts and showed what a stir they produced in England. In connection with those affairs was mentioned the name of that brave researcher, Mr. Glanvill. The history of the witch literature of this period is little more than an account of Joseph Glanvill, of his opinions, of his controversies, of his disciples and his opponents. It is not too much to say that in Glanvill the superstition found its ablest advocate. In acuteness of logical distinction, in the cleverness and brilliance of his intellectual sword-play, he excelled all others before and after who sought to defend the belief in witchcraft. He was a man entitled to speak with some authority. A member of Exeter College at Oxford, he had been in 1664 elected a fellow of the recently founded Royal Society and was in sympathy with its point of view. At the same time he was a philosopher of no small influence in his generation.

His intellectual position is not difficult to determine. He was an opponent of the Oxford scholasticism and inclined towards a school of thought represented by Robert Fludd, the two Vaughans, Henry More, and Van Helmont,[1] men who had drunk deeply of the cabalistic writers, disciples of Paracelsus and Pico della Mirandola. It would be foolhardy indeed for a layman to attempt an elucidation of the subtleties either of this philosophy or of the processes of Glanvill's philosophical reasoning. His point of view was partially unfolded in the Scepsis Scientifica, published in 1665[2] and dedicated to the Royal Society. In this treatise he pointed out our present ignorance of phenomena and our inability to determine their real character, owing to the subjectivity of our perceptions of them, and insisted consequently upon the danger of dogmatism. He himself had drawn but a cockle-shell of water from the ocean of knowledge. His notion of spirit—if his works on witchcraft may be trusted—seems to have been that it is a light and invisible form of matter capable of detachment from or infusion into more solid substances—precisely the idea of Henry More. Religiously, it would not be far wrong to call him a reconstructionist—to use a much abused and exceedingly modern term. He did not, indeed, admit the existence of any gap between religion and science that needed bridging over, but the trend of his teaching, though he would hardly have admitted it, was to show that the mysteries of revealed religion belong in the field of unexplored science.[3] It was his confidence in the far possibilities opened by investigation in that field, together with the cabalistic notions he had absorbed, which rendered him so willing to become a student of psychical phenomena.

Little wonder, then, that he found the Mompesson and Somerset cases material to his hand and that he seized upon them eagerly as irrefutable proof of demoniacal agency. His first task, indeed, was to prove the alleged facts; these once established, they could be readily fitted into a comprehensive scheme of reasoning. In 1666 he issued a small volume, Some Philosophical Considerations touching Witches and Witchcraft. Most of the first edition was burned in the fire of London, but the book was reprinted. Already by 1668 it had reached a fourth impression.[4] In this edition the work took the new title A Blow at Modern Sadducism, and it was republished again in 1681 with further additions as Sadducismus Triumphatus, which might be translated "Unbelief Conquered."[5] The work continued to be called for faster than the publisher could supply the demand, and went through several more revisions and reimpressions. One of the most popular books of the generation, it proved to be Glanvill's greatest title to contemporary fame. The success of the work was no doubt due in large measure to the collection of witch stories; but these had been inserted by the author as the groundwork of his argument. He recognized, as no one on his side of the controversy had done before, the force of the arguments made by the opposition. They were good points, but to them all he offered one short answer—the evidence of proved fact.[6] That such transformations as were ascribed to the witches were ridiculous, that contracts between the Devil and agents who were already under his control were absurd, that the Devil would never put himself at the nod and beck of miserable women, and that Providence would not permit His children to be thus buffeted by the evil one: these were the current objections;[7] and to them all Glanvill replied that one positive fact is worth a thousand negative arguments. Innumerable frauds had been exposed. Yes, he knew it,[8] but here were well authenticated cases that were not fraud. Glanvill put the issue squarely. His confidence in his case at once wins admiration. He was thoroughly sincere. The fly in the ointment was of course that his best authenticated cases could not stand any careful criticism. He had been furnished the narratives which he used by "honest and honourable friends." Yet, if this scientific investigator could be duped, as he had been at Tedworth, much more those worthy but credulous friends whom he quoted.

From a simple assertion that he was presenting facts Glanvill went on to make a plea used often nowadays in another connection by defenders of miracles. If the ordinary mind, he said, could not understand "every thing done by Mathematics and Mechanical Artifice,"[9] how much more would even the most knowing of us fail to understand the power of witches. This proposition, the reader can see, was nothing more than a working out of one of the principles of his philosophy. There can be no doubt that he would have taken the same ground about miracles,[10] a position that must have alarmed many of his contemporaries.

In spite of his emphasis of fact, Glanvill was as ready as any to enter into a theological disquisition. Into those rarefied regions of thought we shall not follow him. It will perhaps not be out of order, however, to note two or three points that were thoroughly typical of his reasoning. To the contention that, if a wicked spirit could work harm by the use of a witch, it should be able to do so without any intermediary and so to harass all of mankind all of the time, he answered that the designs of demons are levelled at the soul and can in consequence best be carried on in secret.[11] To the argument that when one considers the "vileness of men" one would expect that the evil spirits would practise their arts not on a few but on a great many, he replied that men are not liable to be troubled by them till they have forfeited the "tutelary care and oversight of the better spirits," and, furthermore, spirits find it difficult to assume such shapes as are necessary for "their Correspondencie with Witches." It is a hard thing for spirits "to force their thin and tenuious bodies into a visible consistence.... For, in this Action, their Bodies must needs be exceedingly compress'd."[12] To the objection that the belief in evil beings makes it plausible that the miracles of the Bible were wrought by the agency of devils,[13] he replied that the miracles of the Gospel are notoriously contrary to the tendency, aims, and interests of the kingdom of darkness.[14] The suggestion that witches would not renounce eternal happiness for short and trivial pleasures here,[15] he silenced by saying that "Mankind acts sometimes to prodigious degrees of brutishness."

It is needless to go further in quoting his arguments. Doubtless both questions and answers seem quibbles to the present-day reader, but the force of Glanvill's replies from the point of view of his contemporaries must not be underestimated. He was indeed the first defender of witchcraft who in any reasoned manner tried to clear up the problems proposed by the opposition. His answers were without question the best that could be given.

It is easy for us to forget the theological background of seventeenth-century English thought. Given a personal Devil who is constantly intriguing against the kingdom of God (and who would then have dared to deny such a premise?), grant that the Devil has supernatural powers (and there were Scripture texts to prove it), and it was but a short step to the belief in witches. The truth is that Glanvill's theories were much more firmly grounded on the bedrock of seventeenth-century theology than those of his opponents. His opponents were attempting to use common sense, but it was a sort of common sense which, however little they saw it, must undermine the current religious convictions.

Glanvill was indeed exceedingly up-to-date in his own time. Not but that he had read the learned old authors. He was familiar with what "the great Episcopius" had to say, he had dipped into Reginald Scot and deemed him too "ridiculous" to answer.[16] But he cared far more about the arguments that he heard advanced in every-day conversation. These were the arguments that he attempted to answer. His work reflected the current discussions of the subject. It was, indeed, the growing opposition among those whom he met that stirred him most. Not without sadness he recognized that "most of the looser Gentry and small pretenders to Philosophy and Wit are generally deriders of the belief of Witches and Apparitions."[17] Like an animal at bay, he turned fiercely on them. "Let them enjoy the Opinion of their own Superlative Judgements" and run madly after Scot, Hobbes, and Osborne. It was, in truth, a danger to religion that he was trying to ward off. One of the fundamentals of religion was at stake. The denial of witchcraft was a phase of prevalent atheism. Those that give up the belief in witches, give up that in the Devil, then that in the immortality of the soul.[18] The question at issue was the reality of the spirit world.

It can be seen why the man was tremendously in earnest. One may indeed wonder if his intensity of feeling on the matter was not responsible for his accepting as bona fide narratives those which his common sense should have made him reject. In defending the authenticity of the remarkable stories told by the accusers of Julian Cox,[19] he was guilty of a degree of credulity that passes belief. Perhaps the reader will recall the incident of the hunted rabbit that vanished behind a bush and was transformed into a panting woman, no other than the accused Julian Cox. This tale must indeed have strained Glanvill's utmost capacity of belief. Yet he rose bravely to the occasion. Determined not to give up any well-supported fact, he urged that probably the Devil had sent a spirit to take the apparent form of the hare while he had hurried the woman to the bush and had presumably kept her invisible until she was found by the boy. It was the Nemesis of a bad cause that its greatest defender should have let himself indulge in such absurdities.

In truth we may be permitted to wonder if the philosopher was altogether true to his own position. In his Scepsis Scientifica he had talked hopefully about the possibility that science might explain what as yet seemed supernatural.[20] This came perilously near to saying that the realms of the supernatural, when explored, would turn out to be natural and subject to natural law. If this were true, what would become of all those bulwarks of religion furnished by the wonders of witchcraft? It looks very much as if Glanvill had let an inconsistency creep into his philosophy.

It was two years after Glanvill's first venture that Meric Casaubon issued his work entitled Of Credulity and Incredulity in Things Natural, Civil, and Divine.[21] On account of illness, however, as he tells the reader in his preface, he had been unable to complete the book, and it dealt only with "Things Natural" and "Things Civil." "Things Divine" became the theme of a separate volume, which appeared in 1670 under the title Of Credulity and Incredulity in Things Divine and Spiritual: wherein ... the business of Witches and Witchcraft, against a late Writer, [is] fully Argued and Disputed. The interest of this scholar in the subject of witchcraft was, as we have seen, by no means recent. When a young rector in Somerset he had attended a trial of witches, quite possibly the identical trial that had moved Bernard to appeal to grand jurymen. We have noted in an earlier chapter[22] that Casaubon in 1654, writing on Enthusiasm, had touched lightly upon the subject. It will be recalled that he had come very near to questioning the value of confessions. Five years later, in prefacing a Relation of what passed between Dr. Dee and some Spirits, he had anticipated the conclusions of his Credulity and Incredulity. Those conclusions were mainly in accord with Glanvill. With a good will he admitted that the denying of witches was a "very plausible cause." Nothing was more liable to be fraud than the exhibitions given at trials, nothing less trustworthy than the accounts of what witches had done. Too many cases originated in the ignorance of ministers who were on the look-out "in every wild notion or phansie" for a "suggestion of the Devil."[23] But, like Glanvill, and indeed like the spiritualists of to-day, he insisted that many cases of fraud do not establish a negative. There is a very large body of narratives so authentic that to doubt them would be evidence of infidelity. Casaubon rarely doubted, although he sought to keep the doubting spirit. It was hard for him not to believe what he had read or had been told. He was naturally credulous, particularly when he read the stories of the classical writers. For this attitude of mind he was hardly to be censured. Criticism was but beginning to be applied to the tales of Roman and Greek writers. Their works were full of stories of magic and enchantment, and it was not easy for a seventeenth-century student to shake himself free from their authority. Nor would Casaubon have wished to do so. He belonged to the past both by religion and raining, and he must be reckoned among the upholders of superstition.[24]