MINOR SUPERSTITIONS. 



plished hypocrite, young as she was, quarrelled 

 -with a maid-servant, and to be revenged, fell 

 into convulsions, saw spirits, and, in short, feigned 

 herself bewitched. To sustain her story, she 

 accused one person after another, till not less 

 than twenty were implicated, some of them 

 children of the ages of twelve and fourteen ! 

 They were tried on the evidence of the girl, and 

 five human beings perished through her malicious 

 impostures. 



The last justiciary trial for witchcraft in Scot- 

 land was in the case of Elspeth Rule, who was 

 convicted in 1708, and banished. The last regu- 

 lar execution for the crime is said to have taken 

 place at Dornoch in 1722, when an old woman 

 was condemned by David Ross, sheriff of Caith- 

 ness. The number of its victims, for reasons 

 previously stated, it would be difficult accurately 

 to compute ; but the black scroll would include, 

 according to those who have most attentively 

 inquired into the subject, upwards of FOUR 

 THOUSAND persons! 



Witchcraft in England. 



Witchcraft, though always penal, became the 

 subject of the express statutes of Henry VIII. 

 1541, Elizabeth, 1562, and also of James I. This 

 latter monarch, who, as we have seen, was a great 

 witch-fancier while in Scotland, brought with him 

 to England a keen sense of the duty of finding 

 out and punishing all sorts of diablery. The act 

 passed in the first year of his reign in England 

 defines the crime with a degree of minuteness 

 worthy of the adept from whose pen it un- 

 doubtedly proceeded. 'Any one that shall use, 

 practise, or exercise any invocation of any evil or 

 wicked spirit, or consult or covenant with, enter- 

 tain or employ, feed or reward any evil or wicked 

 spirit, to or for ANY purpose; or take up any dead 

 man, &c. &c. &c. ; such offenders, duly and law- 

 fully convicted and attainted, shall suffer death.' 

 We have here witchcraft first distinctly made, of 

 itself, a capital crime. Many years had not 

 passed away after the passing of this statute, ere 

 the delusion, which had heretofore committed but 

 occasional and local mischief, became an epidemi- 

 cal frenzy, devastating every corner of England. 

 Leaving out of sight single executions, we find 

 such wholesale murders as the following in 

 abundance on the record. In 1612, twelve 

 persons were condemned at once at Lancaster, 

 and many more in 1613, when the whole kingdom 

 rang with the fame of the ' Lancashire witches ; ' 

 in 1622, six at York; in 1634, seventeen in Lanca- 

 shire ; in 1644, sixteen at Yarmouth ; in 1645, 

 fifteen at Chelmsford ; and in 1645 an d 1646, 

 sixty persons perished in Suffolk, and nearly an 

 equal number at the same time in Huntingdon. 

 These are but a few selected cases. The tests 

 and tortures for the discovery of witches, sanc- 

 tioned by the law, were administered by a class of 

 wretches, who, with one Matthew Hopkins at 

 their head, sprung up in England in the middle 

 of the seventeenth century, and took the profes- 

 sional name of "witch-finders. The practices of 

 'the monster Hopkins, who, with his assistants, 

 moved from place to place in the regular and 

 authorised pursuit of his trade, will give a full 

 idea of the tests referred to, as well as of the 

 horrible fruits of the witchcraft frenzy in general 



From each town which he visited, Hopkins ex- 

 acted the stated fee of twenty shillings, and in 

 consideration thereof, he cleared the locality of 

 all suspected persons, bringing them to confes- 

 sion and the stake in the following manner : He 

 stripped them naked, shaved them, and thrust 

 pins into their bodies to discover the witch's 

 mark ; he wrapped them in sheets, with the great 

 toes and thumbs tied together, and dragged them 

 through ponds or rivers, when, if they sank, it was 

 held as a sign that the baptismal element did not 

 reject them, and they were cleared ; but if they 

 floated as they usually would do for a time 

 they were then set down as guilty, and doomed : 

 he kept them fasting and awake, and sometimes 

 incessantly walking, for twenty-four or forty-eight 

 hours, as an inducement to confession ; and, in 

 short, practised on the accused such abominable 

 cruelties, that they were glad to escape from life 

 by confession. If a witch could not shed tears at 

 command (said the further items of this wretch's 

 creed), or if she hesitated at a single word in 

 repeating the Lord's Prayer, she was in league 

 with the Evil One. 



After he had murdered hundreds, and pursued 

 his trade for many years from 1644 downwards 

 the tide of popular opinion finally turned against 

 Hopkins, and he was subjected, by a party of 

 indignant experimenters, to his own favourite test 

 of swimming. It is said that he escaped with life, 

 but from that time forth he was never heard of 

 again. 



The era of the Long Parliament was that per- 

 haps which witnessed the greatest number of 

 executions for witchcraft. Three thousand persons 

 are said to have perished during the continuance 

 of the sittings of that body, by legal executions, 

 independently of summary deaths at the hands of 

 the mob. Witch-executions, however, were con- 

 tinued with nearly equal frequency long after- 

 wards. Chief-justices North and Holt, to their 

 lasting credit, were the first individuals occupying 

 the high places of the law, who had at once the 

 good sense and the courage to set their faces 

 against the continuance of this destructive delu- 

 sion. It was under Holt's justiceship that the 

 first acquittal is supposed to have taken place, 

 in despite of all evidence, and upon the fair ground 

 of the general absurdity of. such a charge. In the 

 case of Mother Munnings, tried in 1694, the un- 

 fortunate panel would assuredly have perished, 

 had not Chief-justice Holt summed up in a tone 

 so decidedly adverse to the prosecution, that the 

 verdict of not guilty was called forth from the 

 jury. In about ten other trials before Holt, 

 between the years 1694 and 1701, the result was 

 the same through the same influences. It must 

 be remembered, however, that these were merely 

 noted cases, in which the parties withstood all 

 preliminary inducements to confession, and came 

 to the bar with the plea of not guilty. About the 

 same period that is, during the latter years of the 

 seventeenth century summary executions were 

 still common, in consequence of confessions ex- 

 tracted after the Hopkins fashion, yet too much 

 in favour with the lower classes. The acquittals 

 mentioned only prove that the regular ministers of 

 the law were growing too enlightened to counten- 

 ance such barbarities. 



After the time of Holt, the ministers of the law 

 went a step further in their course of improvement, 



