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Witchcraft Past and Present
her request for bread and cheese. Fortunately for Waterhouse, the court
accepted that the charges against her were based on the spiteful fantasies
of an untrustworthy child and the charges against her were dropped.
The Salem Witch Trials
The 1563 Act and a subsequent one passed in 1600, after James VI of
Scotland had acceded to the English throne as James I, were in force not
just throughout the British Isles but in the colonies in North America. It
was there that the spiteful accusations of not one but three children led
to perhaps the most famous witchcraft trials of all time.
It seems that, to get themselves out of trouble, the daughter of the
minister and his two nieces accused their Caribbean slave, Tabita, and
two others, Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne, of making them possessed
by the Devil. When brought before the court to give evidence, the girls
fell into (probably) self-induced fits – evidence that the Devil was within
them – and the three unfortunate women were found guilty.
In the hysteria that followed, innocent men and women in the town and
surrounding area found themselves accused of being in league with the
Devil and forced to face their accusers in court. The first trial had set the
course for all subsequent ones. The accused were presumed guilty, unless
the townspeople could be convinced otherwise. Fortunately many were
able to convince the court that the charges against them were based on
little more than ill-founded, spiteful gossip. But several were not so
lucky and were executed for their supposed crimes. Execution was
mostly by hanging, but one man was sentenced to death by being
crushed by boulders!
The Dawn of a New Age
With the gradual emergence of scientific thinking in the 18th century
and the emergence of rational thinking in Europe, witchcraft became
widely seen as little more than superstitious nonsense and eventually,
witch-hunts came to an end.The last person to be convicted of witchcraft
in England was Jane Wenham, in 1712. The hunts lasted longer on
mainland Europe where an unfortunate Polish woman swung her way
into history when she was hanged for witchcraft in 1782 – the last
officially sanctioned execution for witchcraft on record.
Witchcraft ceased to be a crime – or at least, where it remained one in
the statute books, the laws against it fell into disuse. But despite the fact
that logical thought was dispelling the ancient art as superstitious
nonsense, the old ways did persist. All over the world either on their
own, or in groups, or covens, men and women carried on making magic
as their ancestors had done since the dawn of human civilization.
Among them was a woman called Margaret Murray, an anthropologist
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