Trials

[Dept of PMM Artists & things]

 

There were extensive efforts to root out the supposed influence of Satan by various measures aimed at the people who were accused of being servants of Satan. To a lesser degree, animals were also targeted for prosecution: see animal trial. People suspected of being "possessed by Satan" were put on trial. These trials were biased against the alleged witch. On the other hand, the church also attempted to extirpate the superstitious belief in witchcraft and sorcery, considering it as fraud in most cases.

The evidence required to convict an alleged witch varied from country to country - but prosecutions everywhere were most frequently sparked off by denunciations, while convictions invariably required a confession. The latter was often obtained by extremely violent methods. Although Europe's witch-frenzy did not begin until the late 1400s - long after the formal abolition of "trial by ordeal" in 1215 - brutal techniques were routinely used to extract the required admission of guilt. They included hot pincers, the thumbscrew, and the 'swimming' of suspects (an old superstition whereby innocence was established by immersing the accused in water for a sufficiently long period of time). Investigators were consequently able to establish many fantastic crimes that could never have occurred, even in theory. That said, many judicial procedures of the time required proof of a causative link between the alleged act of witchcraft and an identifiable injury, such as a death or property damage.

The flexibility of the crime and the methods of proving it resulted in easy convictions. Any reckoning of the death toll should take account of the facts that rules of evidence varied from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, and that a significant number of witch trials always ended in acquittal. :"In York, England, at the height of the Great Hunt (1567–1640) one half of all witchcraft cases brought before church courts were dismissed for lack of evidence. No torture was used, and the accused could clear himself by providing four to eight "compurgators", people who were willing to swear that he wasn't a witch. Only 21% of the cases ended with convictions, and the Church did not impose any kind of corporal or capital punishment." In the Pays de Vaud, nine of every ten people tried were put to death, but in Finland, the corresponding figure was about one in six (16%). A breakdown of conviction rates (along with statistics on death tolls, gender bias, and much else) can be found in Brian Levack, The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe (2nd ed, 1995).

 

There are particularly important differences between the English and continental witch-hunting traditions. The checks and balances inherent in the jury system, which required a 23-strong body (the grand jury) to indict and a 12-strong one (the petit jury) to convict, always had a restraining effect on prosecutions. Another restraining influence was its relatively rare use of torture: the country formally permitted it only when authorised by the monarch, and no more than 81 torture warrants were issued (for all offences) throughout English history.Continental European courts, while varying from region to region, tended to concentrate power in individual judges and place far more reliance on torture. The significance of the institutional difference is most clearly established by a comparison of the witch-hunts of England and Scotland, for the death toll inflicted by the courts north of the border always dwarfed that of England. It is also apparent from an episode of English history during the early 1640s, when the Civil War resulted in the suspension of jury courts for three years. Several freelance witch-hunters emerged during this period, the most notorious of whom was Matthew Hopkins, who emerged out of East Anglia and proclaimed himself "Witchfinder General". uch men were inquisitors in all but name, proceeding pursuant to denunciations and torture and claiming a mastery of the supposed science of demonology that allowed for identification of the guilty by, for example, the discovery of witches' marks. Research into the laws and records of the time show that the witchfinders often used peine forte et dure and other torture to extract confessions and condemnations of friends, relatives and neighbors.

Besides torture, at trial certain "proofs" were taken as valid to establish that a person practiced witchcraft. Peter Binsfeld contributed to the establishment of many of these proofs, described in his book Commentarius de Maleficius (Comments on Witchcraft).

• The diabolical mark. Usually, this was a mole or a birthmark. If no such mark was visible, the examiner would claim to have found an invisible mark.
• Diabolical pact. This was an alleged pact with Satan to perform evil acts in return for rewards.
• Denouncement by another witch. This was common, since the accused could often avoid execution by naming accomplices.
• Relationship with other convicted witch/witches
• Blasphemy
• Participation in Sabbaths
• To cause harm that could only be done by means of sorcery
• Possession of elements necessary for the practice of black magic
• To have one or more witches in the family
• To be afraid during the interrogatories
• Not to cry under torment (supposedly by means of the Devil's aid)
• To have had sexual relationships with a demon

Burning of three witches in Baden, Switzerland (1585), by Johann Jakob Wick

Legal treatises on witchcraft that were widely referred to in continental European trials include the popular Malleus Maleficarum (1487) by Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger, the Tractatus de sortilegiis (1536) by Paolo Grillandi and the Praxis rerum criminalium (1554) by Joos de Damhouder.

Gender

Gender played an important part in the witch trials because on the whole the vast majority of the victims were women. According to the historian R.W. Thurston, 75-80% of the victims across both Europe and North America were women, whilst according to Anne Llewellyn Barstow, 80% of those accused and 85% of those executed in Europe alone were allegedly women. Barstow claimed that a combination of factors, including the greater value placed on men as workers in the increasingly wage-oriented economy, and a greater fear of women as inherently evil, loaded the scales against women, even when the charges against them were identical to those against men. Thurston saw this as a part of the general misogyny of the Late Mediaeval and Early Modern periods, which had increased during what he described as "the persecuting culture" from that which it had been in the Early Mediaeval. He noted that at the time, women were generally considered less intelligent and more susceptible to sin than men, an idea influenced by the character of Eve in the Bible. Whilst not all of those who condemned witchcraft in this period specifically condemned women as well, there were those who did, for instance, in the Malleus Malificarum, Sprenger and Kramer stated that:

All wickedness is but little to the wickedness of a woman… What else is woman but a foe to friendship, an inescapable punishment, a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, a domestic danger, a delectable detriment, an evil of nature, painted with fair colours!

 

In a few countries however, men accounted for the majority of the accused. In Iceland, for instance, 92% of the accused were men, and in Estonia 60% of the accused victims were male, mainly middle-aged or elderly married peasants, and known healers or sorcerers.

Executions

Punishments for witchcraft in 16th century Germany. Woodcut from Tengler's Laienspiegel, Mainz, 1508.

The sentence generally was death (as Exodus 22:18 states, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live"). There were other sentences, the most common to be chained for years to the oars of a ship, or excommunicated then imprisoned.

The most common death sentence was to be burnt at the stake. In only a few cases were the alleged witches still alive while the stake was set on fire^. The garrote was sometimes used in England to execute religious heretics before they were burned at the stake. In England it was common to hang the person first and then burn the corpse, a practice adopted sometimes in other countries (in many cases the hanging was replaced by strangling). Drowning was sometimes used as a means of execution. England was also the only country in which the accused had the right to appeal the sentence.

The most common methods used to execute alleged witches were burning and hanging. The frequent use of 'swimming' to test innocence/guilt means that an unknown number also drowned more or less accidentally prior to conviction. Burning at the stake was common on the Continent as a penalty for heresy, but the common-law jurisdictions of England and colonial America invariably sent people convicted of witchcraft to the gallows. (In a handful of exceptional cases, such as that of Giles Corey at Salem, alleged witches who refused to plead were pressed to death without trial.) The measures employed against alleged witches were some of the worst ever to be legally sanctioned in the Western world.

In A History of Torture, George Ryley Scott says:

"The peculiar beliefs and superstitions attached to or associated with witchcraft caused those who were suspected of practising the craft to be extremely likely to be subjected to tortures of greater degree than any ordinary heretic or criminal. More, certain specific torments were invented for use against them."

It has been suggested that the execution of persons associated with witchcraft resulted in the loss of much traditional knowledge and folklore, which was often regarded with suspicion and tainted by association.

Number of executions

Ever since the ending of the Witch Hunt, various scholars have estimated how many men, women and children were executed for witchcraft across Europe and North America, with numbers varying wildly depending on the method used to generate the estimate. In the nineteenth century, historians were still unsure as to the exact number, for instance the German folklorist Jacob Grimm claimed that the number was simply "countless" whilst the Scottish journalist Charles Mackay believed that it was "thousands upon thousands." Within several decades, the American suffragette Matilda Joslyn Gage had claimed that nine million women had been killed in the European trials, a figure which would be repeated by a number of later writers such as Gerald Gardner, although it has since been described as having "no rational basis whatsoever" by the professional historian Ronald Hutton.

In the latter part of the twentieth century, as historians began to study the witch trials in greater depth, the estimated number of executions began to be reduced, with the historian Norman Cohn, in Europe's Inner Demons (1975) criticising claims that they were in the hundreds of thousands, calling these "fantastic exaggerations". Attempting to come to an accurate figure, the historian Brian Levack, author of The Witch Hunt in Early Modern Europe (1987), took the number of known European witch trials and multiplied it by the average rate of conviction and execution. This provided him with a figure of around 60,000 deaths, however, for the third edition of the work (2006) he later reassessed that number to 45,000. This number was criticised as being too low by Anne Llewellyn Barstow, author of Witchcraze: A New History of the European Witch Hunts (1994) - a work which was derided as un-scholarly and "largely ignored by academics"- who herself arrived at a number of approximately 100,000 deaths by attempting to adjust Levack's estimate to account for what she believed were unaccounted lost records, although historians have pointed out that Levack's estimate had already been adjusted for these.

Ronald Hutton, in his unpublished essay "Counting the Witch Hunt", counted local estimates, and in areas where estimates were unavailable attempted to extrapolate from nearby regions with similar demographics and attitudes towards witch hunting. He reached an estimate of 40,000 total executions. Table of recorded and estimated executions according to Hutton's estimates

Country	Recorded	Estimated
American Colonies	36	35 - 37
Austria	??	1,500 - 3,000
Belgium	??	250
Bohemia	??	1,000 - 2,000
Channel Islands	66	66 - 80
Denmark	??	1,000
England	228	300 - 1,000
Estonia	65	100
Finland	115	115
France	775	5,000 - 6,000
Germany	8,188	17,324 - 26,000
Hungary	449	800
Iceland	22	22
Ireland	4	4 - 10
Italy	95	800
Latvia	??	100
Luxembourg	358	355 - 358
Netherlands	203	203 - 238
Norway	280	350
Poland	???	1,000 - 5,000
Portugal	7	7
Russia	10	10
Scotland	599	1,100 - 2,000
Spain	6	40 - 50
Sweden	??	200 - 250
Switzerland	1,039	4,000 - 5,000
Grand Total:	12,545	35,184 - 63,850

Assuming 40,000 executions over 250 years in Europe, which had a population of approximately 150 million at the time with a life expectancy of about 40 years, suggests roughly one execution for witchcraft per 25,000 deaths, ranking about 3.5 times higher as cause of death than death by capital punishment (for any offense) in the U.S. in the late 20th century,

Legacy

The Witch-Cult Hypothesis

Main article: Witch-cult hypothesis

Whilst the Enlightenment-era scholars had declared the witch trials to be nothing more than mass hysteria, some began to speculate that in fact the witches had been real, and that they had been members of a non-Christian religion, which was not Satanic, but a remnant of pre-Christian paganism. This theory had originated in 1749, when the Italian Girolamo Tartarotti speculated that the idea of the Satanic witch had been influenced by surviving pagan iconography, although was first put forward by the German Karl Ernst Jarcke in 1828, when he published the claim that the witch religion had been originally pagan, but had developed into a form of Satanism as the Christian Churches portrayed it as such.

In 1862, the Frenchman Jules Michelet published La Sorciere, in which he put forth the idea that the witches had been following a pagan religion that opposed the Roman Catholic hierarchy and upper classes. However, the theory achieved greater attention when it was taken up by the Egyptologist Margaret Murray, who published both The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921) and The God of the Witches (1931) in which she claimed that the witches had been following a pre-Christian religion which she termed "the Witch-Cult" and "Ritual Witchcraft". She claimed that this faith was devoted to a pagan Horned God and involved the celebration of four Witches' Sabbaths each year: Halloween, Imbolc, Beltane and Lughnasadh.

Neopaganism and Satanism

The phrase "the burning times" was used in reference to the European and North American witch trials by Gerald Gardner in 1954. Gardner claimed he had discovered an Old Religion based on an ancient tradition of witchcraft; the "burning times" were its period of greatest persecution, and a major reason for the secrecy maintained within the religion ever since. His account relied heavily on the theories of Margaret Murray, now regarded as highly flawed; he also repeated Murray's figure of nine million victims.

The nine million figure is ultimately due to Gottfried Christian Voigt, who based his estimate on twenty cases recorded over fifty years in the archives Quedlinburg, Germany. Voigt then extrapolated this number to the entire population of Europe over the full 1,800 years of Christian history. Voigt's number was rounded off to nine million by Gustav Roskoff in his 1869 Geschichte des Teufels ("History of the Devil"). It was subsequently repeated by various German and English historians, notably the 19th century women's rights campaigner Matilda Joslyn Gage and notoriously in Nazi propaganda, which in the 1930s used witches as a symbol of northern völkisch culture, as opposed to Mediterranean or "Semitic" Christianity. The 1935 Der christliche Hexenwahn ("The Christian Witch Craze") claimed that the witch-hunts were a Christian, and thus ultimately Jewish, attempt to exterminate "Aryan womanhood". The survey of judicial records taken by Himmler's Hexen-Sonderkommando within the SS has proven useful for modern estimates of the number of victims. Mathilde Ludendorff in her 1934 Christliche Grausamkeit an Deutschen Frauen ("Christian cruelty against German women") also repeated the figure of nine million victims.

This figure is now known to be a massive overestimate, about a hundred times the estimates of most modern researchers. While Gardner referred to the witch hunts in general as "the burning times", he noted that burning was only practiced on the Continent and in Scotland; in England accused witches were hanged.

Modern historians agree the witchhunts had nothing to do with persecuting a pagan cult, but were largely the result of an interplay of a series of complex historical and societal factors.

It is probable that the majority of the accused identified as Christian. Casualty figures generally accepted amongst historians are also dramatically lower, ranging from Levack at around 60,000 to Hutton at around 40,000; the entire adult female population in Europe at the time was no more than 20-22 million. Victims of the witchhunt were not always female, though women were the majority. In some countries, especially in Scandinavia, the majority of the accused were male; in Finland some 70% and in Iceland almost 80% of the accused were men.However taking Europe as a whole between 1450 and 1700, only 20-25% of those accused were males.Misogyny is usually considered an important factor in the witch-hunts, along with social unrest and religious conflicts between Protestants and Catholics.

Most contemporary practitioners of Wicca and related Neo-Pagan religions no longer subscribe to Gardner's or Margaret Murray's theories, and see Wicca as a modern development based on a variety of sources, rather than an unbroken tradition dating from ancient times.^{[citation needed]}

The term The Burning Times was further popularised by Mary Daly in her 1978 book, Gyn/Ecology: The Meta-Ethics of Radical Feminism, who maintained that the trials were fundamentally a persecution of women by patriarchy; she expanded the term's meaning to include not only the witch-hunts but the "entire patriarchal rule". Neo-Pagan author Starhawk subsequently introduced the term into her book The Spiral Dance in 1979. The term was adopted by various American feminist historians and popularised in the 1970s for all historical persecution of witches and pagans, again often quoting nine million casualties. They also referred to it as the "Women's Holocaust".