Page 90 - All About History - Issue 08-14

Witch-hunting

Are you Start here

Death
1
a Witch? Test 1 You are burned at

You have been the stake for the
accused of
Not crime of being
Guilty
witchcraft: how
guilty a witch
do you plead?

Test 2 There were many ways someone found
guilty of witchcraft could be executed:
You are tried hanging and beheading were common
and drowning was merciful compared
by ducking, to being burned to death. This was a
method employed by the zealous Prince-
do you? Bishops of Bavaria, who believed that
fire was the only way to purge the evil of
witchcraft from the land.

Float
No
plea

Sink Cry
‘guilty’
Cry ‘not
Test 3
guilty’
You are
Common law in 17th-century
sentenced to Britain and its colonies meant
One way to determine pressing, the defendant could only
whether a person was in do you: be tried if they submitted
themselves to a trial – if they
Death 2 league with the devil or Death 3 entered a plea. To coerce a
not was to bind their right
plea out of the accused, they
You drown: thumb to their left toe and You are pressed to would be stripped naked and
throw them into a pond.
If they were rejected by a plank placed on their chest,
clearly you were the ‘baptismal waters’ death and before rocks and other heavy
innocent of this and floated, they were your estate passes weights were piled onto it.
convicted of witchcraft. If There was a genuine incentive
Enter
crime they sank without trace, to your heirs for defendants to ‘stand
they were innocent – No mute’: the Crown was unable
unfortunately that also to forfeit the property if they
plea
meant they would drown. weren’t found guilty.

As the creation of Protestant churches swept as a means of social control by the authorities or Torture was a common means of extracting
across Europe, witch-hunting took place in earnest, to confiscate the property of the accused. In the information from those who weren’t immediately
encouraged by many royal houses like Denmark witch-hunting boom in Scotland that lasted up cleared by the courts. Although the height of the
and Scotland. Fuelled by religious persecution, until the 18th century, those practising witchcraft witch trial era was marked by general disregard for
the hysteria among the people came in waves went from being thought superstitious crackpots real evidence and irrational hysteria, torture wasn’t
marked by a spike in executions. A witch could be to dangerous devil-worshippers: they had sold a completely arbitrary practice and there was a
accused of causing disease, death, disaster (natural their souls to Satan and held anti-Christian certain method to be followed: generally speaking,
or otherwise), for living in a remote location, being services called a witches’ Sabbath. Witchcraft was the torture came in several degrees of increasing
thought strange or foreign or simply being in the legislated against in 1563 and over the course of intensity and brutality, observed and recorded
wrong place and time. The motives of the accuser the next 150 years or so, the ‘witch-prickers’ went by a clerk. The idea was to extract a confession
could be equally arbitrary, from genuine belief about their business of pricking the body of a and have the accused repeat the confession
that a witch brought some misfortune upon the person accused of witchcraft: if they didn’t bleed, outside of the torture: the accused was presumed
community, to even more sinister motives, such it was viable evidence for the court to try them. guilty and often, even those convinced of their
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