i64 RECORDS OF OLD TIMES 



of London, was burnt on a charge of having 

 bewitched a whole convent of nuns in 1634. Even 

 in America the beHef existed, and at Salem, in New 

 England, nineteen persons were hung by the 

 Puritans, eight more condemned, and fifty confessed 

 themselves to be witches, and were pardoned. As 

 late as the year 1775, at Kalisk, in Poland, nine 

 old women were burnt for having bewitched, and 

 thus rendered the land unfruitful in that Palatinate. 

 It is, therefore, not surprising that this superstition 

 should have existed in England. As a matter of 

 fact, we find that Henry VIII. enacted that witch- 

 craft and sorcery should be felony without benefit of 

 clergy. Barrington estimated the judicial murder 

 for witchcraft in 200 years as having reached 

 30,000 ! Sir Matthew Hale burnt two persons for 

 this crime in 1664. Seventeen persons were burnt 

 at St. Osyth, in Essex, about 1676, two witches were 

 burnt at Northampton in 1705, and five others two 

 years afterwards; whilst at Huntingdon, in 17 16, 

 Mrs. Hicks and her daughter, only nine years old, 

 were hanged. In Scotland it is asserted that 

 thousands were burnt in 100 years. The laws had 

 lain dormant for many years when, it is said, that 

 some ignorant person attempted to revive them by 

 finding a bill against a poor old woman in Surrey, 

 and they were repealed in 1736 ; and even so late as 

 September 4, 1763, a poor paralysed old French- 

 man died, in consequence of having been ducked as 

 a wizard at Castle Hedingham, in Essex ; and similar 

 cases have again occurred. 



