In this vessel there was a burning coal, and the dreadful portent striking the terrified Mourton with an impression that it was a charm being wrought against him, he concluded, in the vein of William Bulwer, that the witch was not fit to live.
So he gave information, and Beatrix Laing, having been first tortured with the boots, the capsie-claws, the pilniewinks, and other instruments conducive to confession, was ultimately, by the ministers and magistrates, delivered over to the rabble, who had “three hours’ sport” before they finally tormented the life out of her.
When we read of a parish, gathered, with the connivance of its clergy, to press a wrenched old woman to death under a door, and then drive loaded waggons backward and forward over her body, on the suspicion that she has been, by demoniac arts, causing the crops to fail, the kine to perish, and the fair and happy to pine and die, it seems that the Christian Englishman of the First George was quite another being from his descendant of the Victoria era.
But this case of Martins v. Bulwer shows that there are good folk among us yet who believe in witchcraft, and would, if they had their way, make short work of its professors.
It was noticed that the sixty or seventy persons who lynched the suspected wizard in Essex, in 1863, were all of the small tradesmen class, not a single agricultural labourer being concerned in the tragedy.
Perhaps it is too soon to expect that a superstition which was gravely treated by a British monarch only two centuries earlier, and which fired judges like Sir Matthew Hale and jurists like Sir Thomas Browne to hang scores of women whose only crime was being old, ugly, eccentric, or morose, should have entirely disappeared from the masses of the population.
Nevertheless its existence, especially as William Bulwer betrayed it, is well worth the study of those social reformers who wish, as their cant has it, to exalt the people before correcting their ignorance.
That witchcraft in this country was believed in, and punishable by death, is borne out by our judicial statistics.
Barrington estimates that the judicial murders for witchcraft in England was thirty thousand in two hundred years.
Matthew Hopkins, the “witch finder,” caused the judicial murder of about one hundred persons in Essex, Norfolk, and Suffolk, in 1645-7.