Yet another case, tried before Holt, was that of Elizabeth Horner at Exeter, in 1696. Three children of one William Borch were said to have been bewitched by her. One had died, the leg of another was twisted, all had vomited pins, been bitten, pricked, and pinched. Their mother deposed "that one of them walked up a smooth plaistered Wall till her Feet were nine foot high, her Head standing off from it. This," she said, "she did five or six times, and laughed and said Bess Horner held her up." Poor Elizabeth had a wart on her shoulder, which the children said was a witch-mark, and was sucked by her toad. But the Lord Chief Justice seems to have been of another opinion, for he directed the jury to acquit her. Indeed, of all the many cases of witchcraft brought before him, not one prisoner was convicted—a state of things which would certainly have resulted in a question being asked in Parliament had it happened in our time. The last woman found guilty of witchcraft in this country was Jane Wenham, the Witch of Walkerne, in Hertfordshire, who was tried in 1712. The witch-finder was called into requisition, and she was submitted to the usual inane and degrading tests. "They either did themselves or suffered others that were about them to scratch and tear her face and run Pins into her Flesh. They ... turned the Lord's Prayer into a Charm"—(the Vicar of Ardely was responsible for this part of the performance, by the way). "They turned to Spectre Evidence, they drave her to such Distraction that by leading Questions they drew from her what they called a Confession. They had her to Jail. The witnesses swore to vomiting Pins. The Jury found her Guilty, the Judge condemned her, and those clergymen wrote a Narrative of the Tryal, which was received and read with such Pleasure that in a Month's Time it had a Fourth Edition." But Jane Wenham was fortunate in her judge. Being a man of learning and experience, "he Valued not those Tricks and Tryals, and though he was forced to condemn her because a Silly Jury would find her guilty, he saved her Life. And that she might not afterwards be torn to pieces in an ignorant Town, a sensible Gentleman, who will for ever be in Honour for what he did, Colonel Plummer of Gilston, in the same County, took her into his protection and placed her in a little house near his own, where she now lives soberly and inoffensively, and keeps her church, and the whole county is now fully convinced that she was innocent, and that the Maid that was thought to be bewitched was an Idle Hussy ... and was well as soon as her sweetheart came and married her."
Thenceforward the law of England had no more terrors for the witch, though she was not yet quite out of danger. The Statute of James I. was not repealed until 1736, and long after that the mob was accustomed to take the law into its own hands. Thus, in 1751, a man and his wife named Osborn were ducked at Thring, having been dragged by the mob from the workhouse where they had been placed by the parish officers for safety. The woman lost her life in the process. She was, however, not unavenged, for a verdict of "Wilful Murder" was returned against the ringleader of the mob, a chimney-sweeper named Colley, and he was hanged, very much to his own and other people's indignation. There was indeed something to be said for the injured Colley when a man like Wesley, pinning his faith to the Bible, could find no means of evading the direct command, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live." The last case in which the blood of a witch was actually shed in this country, so far as I have been able to trace, was in 1875, when a certain Ann Turner, a reputed witch, was murdered by a man, who was, however, declared insane.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] "If any person, or persons, shall use, practise, or exercise any invocation or conjuration of any evil and wicked spirit, or shall consult, covenant with, entertain, employ, find, or reward any evil and wicked spirit, to or for any intent or purpose, or to take up any dead man, woman, or child out of his, her, or their grave, or any other place where the dead body resteth, or the skin, bone, or any part of any dead person to be employed or used in any manner of witchcraft, sorcery, charm or enchantment, or shall use, practise, or exercise any witchcraft, enchantment, charm, or sorcery whereby any person shall be killed, destroyed, wasted, consumed, pined, or lamed in his or her body, or any part thereof, every such offender is a felon without benefit of clergy." (This Act was not repealed until 1736.)
PERSECUTIONS IN SCOTLAND
The influence of longitude upon national tendencies in superstition is far too wide a subject to be here discussed in any detail, but speaking generally, it may be said that the superstitions of a people—as their religion—are largely a matter of climate—milder and more genial in temperate districts, carried to fiercer and more terrible lengths amid extremes of heat and cold. The man whose gods are based upon his conceptions of the thunderstorm, the grim northern winter or the tropical sun, evokes sterner and more dreadful images than he whose lot is cast amid mild skies and gentle breezes. How wide is the difference between the grim gods who ruled the inhospitable heavens of Scandinavian and Teuton from the tolerant Bohemians who tenanted the classical Olympus. The gentle dryads and light-hearted fauns of Italy would have perished in the first snows of a Baltic winter, just as the hungry ravens of Woden would have been metamorphosed into Venus' doves in one Italian generation.
Nowhere is the influence of climate upon national temperament more clearly typified than in the island of Great Britain. The Viking, settling amid the lush meadows and pleasant woodlands of England, laid aside his heathen sacrifices for the more climatically appropriate religion of Christ with scarcely a regret. Thor and Woden long held their own in the bare northern fastnesses, not to be finally driven out until they had tinged the Christianity which took their place with something of their own hopelessness and gloom. Just as the gods of Valhalla ever looked forward to the day of their destruction, so Hell rather than Heaven has always held the leading place in the Scottish imagination. So it came about that the superstitions of the Scot were gloomier than were those of his neighbour over the Border. The conviction of his own sinfulness was always with him; how much deeper and more certain that of his neighbours. And because he had a more imminent sense of sin, his belief in witches and their malignancy was more intimate and more resentful. The Englishman, again, feared the witch chiefly on his own personal account; the Scotsman took up the cudgels on behalf of his Creator as well. The Devil seemed so much more powerful to the dwellers of a bleak Highland glen than to the stout yeoman walking amid his opulent English pastures. In Scotland he was on terms almost of equality with God; it is scarcely too much to say that to the majority he was even more powerful, and his earthly agents all the more to be feared and hated.