Gradually, however, a disbelief in witchcraft grew up in the public mind, as intellectual inquiry widened its scope, and the relations of man to the Unseen World came to be better understood. Among the educated classes the old superstition expired much more rapidly than among the poorer; and so we find that though convictions became rarer, committals and trials continued tolerably frequent until the closing years of the eighteenth century. To the ghastly roll of victims, however, additions continued to be made. Thus in August, 1682, three women, named Temperance Lloyd, Susannah Edwards, and Mary Trembles, were tried at Exeter before Lord Chief Justice North and Mr. Justice Raymond, convicted of various acts of witchcraft, and sentenced to death. Before their trial they had confessed to frequent interviews with the devil, who appeared in the shape of a black man as long (or as short) as a man’s arm; and one of them acknowledged to have caused the death of four persons by witchcraft. Some portion of these monstrous fictions they recanted under the gallows; but even on the brink of the grave they persisted in claiming the character of witches, and in asserting that they had had personal intercourse with the devil.
In March, 1684, Alicia Welland was tried before Chief Baron Montague at Exeter, convicted, and executed.
To estimate the extent to which the belief in witchcraft, during the latter part of the seventeenth century, operated against the lives of the accused, Mr. Inderwick has searched the records of the Western Circuit, from 1670 to 1712 inclusive, and ascertained that out of fifty-two persons tried in that period on various charges of witchcraft, only seven were convicted, and one of these seven was reprieved. ‘What occurred on the Western,’ he remarks, ‘probably went on at each of the several circuits into which the country was then divided; and one cannot doubt that in Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, Huntingdon, and Lancashire, where the witches mostly abounded, the charges and convictions were far more numerous than in the West. The judges appear, however, not to have taken the line of Sir Matthew Hale, but, as far as possible, to have prevented convictions. Indeed, Lord Jeffreys—who, when not engaged on political business, was at least as good a judge as any of his contemporaries—and Chief Justice Herbert, tried and obtained acquittals of witches in 1685 and 1686 at the very time that they were engaged on the Bloody Assize in slaughtering the participators in Monmouth’s rebellion. It is also a remarkable fact that, from 1686 to 1712, when charges of witchcraft gradually ceased, charges and convictions of malicious injury to property in burning haystacks, barns, and houses, and malicious injuries to persons and to cattle, increased enormously, these being the sort of accusations freely made against the witches before this date.’
I think there can be little doubt that many evil-disposed persons availed themselves of the prevalent belief in witchcraft as a cover for their depredations on the property of their neighbours, diverting suspicion from themselves to the poor wretches who, through accidental circumstances, had acquired notoriety as the devil’s accomplices. It would also seem probable that not a few of the reputed witches similarly turned to account their bad reputation. It is not impossible, indeed, that there may be a certain degree of truth in the tales told of the witches’ meetings, and that in some rural neighbourhoods the individuals suspected of being witches occasionally assembled at an appointed rendezvous to consult upon their position and their line of operations. The practices at these gatherings may not always have been kept within the limits of decency and decorum; and in this way the loathsome details with which every account of the witches’ meetings are embellished may have had a real foundation.
That the judges at length began persistently to discourage convictions for witchcraft is seen in the action of Lord Chief Justice Holt at the Bury St. Edmunds Assize in 1694. An old woman, known as Mother Munnings, of Harks, in Suffolk, was brought before him, and the witnesses against her retailed the village talk—how that her landlord, Thomas Purnel, who, to get her out of the house she had rented from him, had removed the street-door, was told that ‘his nose should lie upward in the churchyard’ before the following Saturday; and how that he was taken ill on the Monday, died on the Tuesday, and was buried on the Thursday. How that she had a familiar in the shape of a polecat, and how that a neighbour, peeping in at her window one night, saw her take out of her basket a couple of imps—the one black, the other white. And how that a woman, named Sarah Wager, having quarrelled with her, was stricken dumb and lame. All this tittle-tattle was brushed aside in his charge by the strong common-sense of the judge; and the jury, under his direction, returned a verdict of ‘Not guilty.’ Dr. Hutchinson remarks: ‘Upon particular inquiry of several in or near the town, I find most are satisfied that it is a very right judgment. She lived about two years after, without doing any known harm to anybody, and died declaring her innocence. Her landlord was a consumptive-spent man, and the words not exactly as they swore them, and the whole thing seventeen years before.... The white imp is believed to have been a lock of wool, taken out of her basket to spin; and its shadow, it is supposed, was the black one.’
In the same year (1694) a woman, named Margaret Elmore, was tried at Ipswich; in 1695 one Mary Gay at Launceston; and in 1696 one Elizabeth Hume at Exeter; but in each case, under the direction of Chief Justice Holt, a verdict of acquittal was declared. Thus the seventeenth century went its way in an unaccustomed atmosphere of justice and humanity.
CHAPTER III.
THE DECLINE OF WITCHCRAFT IN ENGLAND.
The honour of discouraging prosecutions for witchcraft belongs in the first place to France, which abolished them as early as 1672, and for some years previously had refrained from sending any victims to the scaffold or the stake. In England, the same effect was partly due, perhaps, to the cynical humour of the Court of Charles II., where many, who before ventured only to doubt, no longer hesitated to treat the subject with ridicule. ‘Although,’ says Mr. Wright, ‘works like those of Baxter and Glanvil had still their weight with many people, yet in the controversy which was now carried on through the instrumentality of the press, those who wrote against the popular creed had certainly the best of the argument. Still, it happened from their form and character that the books written to expose the absurdity of the belief in sorcery were restricted in their circulation to the more educated classes, while popular tracts in defence of witchcraft and collections of cases were printed in a cheaper form, and widely distributed among that class in society where the belief was most firmly rooted. The effect of these popular publications has continued in some districts down to the present day. Thus the press, the natural tendency of which was to enlighten mankind, was made to increase ignorance by pandering to the credulity of the multitude.’
I have spoken of the seventeenth century as going out in an atmosphere of justice and humanity. But an ancient superstition dies hard, and the eighteenth century, when it dawned upon the earth, found the belief in witchcraft still widely extended in England. Even men of education could not wholly surrender their adhesion to it. We read with surprise Addison’s opinion in The Spectator, ‘that the arguments press equally on both sides,’ and see him balancing himself between the two aspects of the subject in a curious state of mental indecision. ‘When I hear the relations that are made from all parts of the world,’ he says, ‘I cannot forbear thinking that there is such an intercourse and commerce with evil spirits, as that which we express by the name of witchcraft. But when I consider,’ he adds, ‘that the ignorant and credulous parts of the world abound most in these relations, and that the persons among us who are supposed to engage in such an infernal commerce are people of a weak understanding and crazed imagination, and at the same time reflect upon the many impostures and delusions of this nature that have been detected in all ages, I endeavour to suspend my belief till I hear more certain accounts than any which have yet come to my knowledge.’ And then he comes to a halting and unsatisfactory conclusion, which will seem almost grotesque to the reader of the preceding pages, with their details of succubi and incubi, imps and familiars, black cats, pole-cats, goats, and the like: ‘In short, when I consider the question, whether there are such persons in the world as we call witches, my mind is divided between two opposite opinions, or, rather (to speak my thoughts freely), I believe in general that there is, and has been, such a thing as witchcraft, but, at the same time, can give no credit to any particular instance of it.’