In Roman law it was provided by the Twelve Tables that no one should remove his neighbour’s crops to another field by incantation or conjure away his corn. At a later date the Lex Cornelia de Sicariis et Veneficis was extended by decree of the senate to cases of offering sacrifice to injure a neighbour. Exercise of magical and diabolical arts rendered the magicians themselves liable to be burned alive, and those who consulted them to crucifixion. Even the possession of magical books was criminal. To administer a love potion, even though harmless, was punished by labour in the mines, or relegation and fine in the case of persons of rank. One title of the Code of Justinian is entirely taken up with the subject. Astrologers (mathematici) seem to have been specially objectionable to both the pagan and Christian emperors. Sorcery was punished by Constantine with banishment, or death by burning; and an accusation of witchcraft, as of treason, rendered every one, whatever his rank, liable to torture. To teach or to learn magic art was equally criminal. The only exceptions allowed (and these were afterwards removed by Leo) were magic remedies for disease and for drought, storms, and other natural phenomena injurious to agriculture. A constitution of Honorius and Theodosius in 409 rendered mathematici liable to banishment unless they gave up their books to be burned in the presence of a bishop. The trial of Apuleius (q,vf for magic in 150 A.D. is the most familiar instance occurring under Roman law.

The church followed and amplified Roman law. The graver forms of witchcraft constituted Heresy {q.v.), and jurisdiction over such offences was claimed by the church courts to a comparatively late date. This authorization of belief in witchcraft was based partly on well-known texts of the Mosaic law—especially Exodus xxii. 18,— partly on peculiar constructions of other parts of Scripture, such as 1 Cor. xi. 10, where the words “because of the ange!s” were supposed to prove the reality of the class of demons called incubi. What kinds of witchcraft were heresy was a question learnedly discussed by Farinaccius and other writers on criminal law. The practical effect of this mode of regarding witchcraft was that, although according to the better opinion the offence was in itself the subject of both secular and ecclesiastical cognizance, in fact it was on the continent of Europe seldom punished by the secular power, except as the mere executive of ecclesiastical sentences. The earliest ecclesiastical decree appears to have been that of Ancyra, 315 a.d., condemning soothsayers to five years’ penance. In canon law the Decretum subjected them to excommunication as idolaters and enemies of Christ, and the bishop was to take all means in his power to put down the practice of divination. The Decretals contained, among others, the provision that a priest seeking to recover stolen goods by inspection of an astrolabe might be suspended from his office and benefice. In the 14th century John XXII. published a bull against witchcraft. In the 15th a vigorous crusade was begun by the bull “Summis desiderantes affectibus” of Innocent VIII. in 1484. Under the authority of this bull Sprenger and Kramer (Latinized into “Institor ”) were appointed inquisitors, and five years later they published the famous work Malleus Maleficarum or Hexenhammer, the great text-book on procedure in witchcraft cases, especially in Germany. The third part of the work deals with the practice at length. One or two of the more interesting points of practice deserve a brief notice. Witnesses incompetent in ordinary cases were on account of the gravity of the offence admissible on a charge of witchcraft against but not for the accused. An alleged witch was to be conjured by the tears of our Saviour and of our Lady and the saints to weep, which she could not do if she were guilty. The authors explain that witchcraft is more natural to women than to men, on account of the inherent wickedness of their hearts. In the Roman and Greek Churches the form of Exorcism {q.vf still survives, and was acknowledged by the Church of England as lately as 1603. The 72d canon of that year forbade attempts by the clergy at casting out devils by fasting and prayer unless by special licence from the bishop. No such canon appears among the Irish canons of 1634. On one occasion in 1612 punishment of the exorcised demons was attempted. The bishop of Beauvais, in a document which Garinet has preserved, pronounced sentence of excommunication against five such demons. England.— As in other countries, ecclesiastical law claimed cognizance of witchcraft as a crime against God. The Penitentials of Archbishops Theodore and Egbert and the Confessional of Egbert are full of condemnations of magic divinations, diabolical incantations, love-philtres, &c. An exception is made in favour of incantation by a priest by means of the Lord’s prayer or the creed. The practice of magic by women is set out in the same document with minute and disgusting detail. After the Conquest, commissions were from time to time issued empowering bishops to search for sorcerers. A form of such a commission to the bishop of Lincoln in 1406 is given by Rymer. The ecclesiastical courts punished by penance and fine up to 1542. For graver punishments the secular power acted as executive. Many persons guilty of sorcery were, according to Sir Edward Coke, burned by the king’s writ de haeretico comburendo after condemnation in the ecclesiastical courts. The secular courts dealt with witchcraft from a very early period. It was an indictable offence at common law and later by statute, though apparently not a felony until the Act of Henry VIII. The earliest trial recorded in England was in a secular court. In 1324 several persons were appealed before the coroners of the king’s household, and the record, certifying acquittal by a jury, was then brought up by writ of certiοrari.

In proceedings against a woman the doctrine of coercion by the husband (see Women) did not apply. A distinction, more curious than important, was drawn between conjurers, witches, and sorcerers. Conjurers by force of magic words endeavoured to raise the devil and compel him to execute their commands. Witches by way of friendly conference bargained with an evil spirit that he should do what they desired of him. Sorcerers or charmers, by the use of superstitious forms of words or by means of images or other representations of persons or things, produced strange effects above the ordinary course of nature. Legislation on the subject began in the pre-Conquest codes. Thus the laws of Ethelred banished witches, soothsayers, and magicians. The laws of Canute included love-witchcraft under heathendom. It was evidently regarded as a survival of paganism. The first Act after the Conquest was passed in 1541 (33 Hen. VIII. c. 8), which dealt with a somewhat remarkable mixture of offences. It declared felony without benefit of clergy various kinds of sorceries, discovery of hidden treasure, destruction of a neighbour’s person or goods, making images and pictures of men, women, children, angels, devils, beasts, and fowls, and pulling down crosses. The Act having been repealed at the accession of Edward VI., another Act on similar lines but distinguishing different grades of witchcraft was passed in 1562. By this Act, 5 Eliz. c. 16, conjuration and invocation of evil spirits, and the practice of sorceries, enchantments, charms, and witchcrafts, whereby death ensued, were made felonies without benefit of clergy and punishable with death. If only bodily harm ensued, the punishment for a first offence was a year’s imprisonment and the pillory, and for a second death. If the practice was to discover hidden treasure or to provoke to unlawful love, the punishment for a first offence was the same as in the last case, for a second imprisonment for life and forfeiture of goods. At the accession of James L, perhaps in compliment to the king’s position as an expert and specialist in the matter, was passed 1 Jac. I. c. 12, which continued law for more than a century. The strange verbiage of the most important section of the Act is worth quoting in full. “If any person or persons shall use, practise, or exercise any invocation or conjuration of any evil and wicked spirit, or shall consult, covenant with, entertain, employ, feed, or reward any evil and wicked spirit to or for any intent or purpose, or take up any dead man, woman, or child out of his, her, or their grave or any other place where the dead body resteth, or the skin, bone, or any part of any dead person, to be employed or used in any manner of witchcraft, sorcery, charm, or enchantment, or shall use, practise, or exercise any witchcraft, enchantment, charm, or sorcery, whereby any person shall be killed, destroyed, wasted, consumed, pined, or lamed in his or her body or any part thereof,” every such offender is a felon without benefit of clergy. The Act further punished with imprisonment for a first offence, and for a second made it felony without benefit of clergy, to declare by witchcraft where treasure was, to provoke to unlawful love, or to attempt to hurt cattle, goods, or persons. This Act was repealed in 1736 by 9 Geo. II. c. 5. It will be noticed that in all the Acts it was necessary (except in the case of love-philtres) that injury should have been caused or intended or gain made. There were statutes which, although not directly concerned with witchcraft, aimed at the suppression of analogous offences. Thus multiplication of gold and silver (by means of the philosopher’s stone) was made felony in 1403 by 5 Hen. IV. c. 4. This was repealed by 1 Will, and Μ. c. 30,—it is said, by the influence of Robert Boyle. Numerous Acts dealing with the practice of palmistry and fortune-telling by Egyptians or Gipsies were passed at different times, beginning in 1530 with 22 Hen. VIII. c. 10. They are now superseded by the provisions of the Vagrant Act of 1824.

Trials for witchcraft in England do not seem to have been proportionately as numerous or to have been accompanied with such circumstances of cruelty as those in most other countries. This may be accounted for partly by the diminishing authority of the church courts, partly by the absence of Torture (g ’.u) as a recognized means of procedure, though no doubt it was too often used in an informal manner. The pricking of the body of an alleged witch by Hopkins the witch-finder and similar wretches in order to find the insensible spot or devil’s mark, the proof by water (a popular survival of the old water ordeal), and similar proceedings, if not judicial torture, at least caused as much pain to the victims. Charges of witchcraft seem to have been made with great frequency against persons of rank during the Wars of the Roses for political purposes. The cases of the duchess of Gloucester and Jane Shore will at once occur to the mind, and neither Edward IV. nor his queen were exempt. The duke of Clarence was accused of imputing witchcraft to the former; and the latter and her mother, the duchess of Bedford, were charged with having obtained the promise of marriage from the king by magical means. Trials in England were most numerous in the 17th century. In the case of the Lancashire witches in 1634 seventeen persons were condemned on the evidence of one boy. In the period from 1645 to 1647 between two and three hundred are said to have been indicted in Suffolk and Essex alone, of whom more than half were convicted. The State Trials contain several instances of such trials, viz., those of Anne Turner in 1615, and the countess of Somerset in 1616 (where a charge of witchcraft was joined with the charge of poisoning Sir Thomas Overbury), Mary Smith in 1616, the Essex witches in 1645, the Suffolk witches in 1665, and the Devon witches in 1682. The most interesting trial is that of the Suffolk witches, because Sir Matthew Hale was the judge and Sir Thomas

Browne was the medical expert witness. In many of these trials the accused confessed before execution. The reasons which urged them to confess not only impossibilities, but impossibilities of the most revolting kind, are not very easy to discover. In some cases, no doubt, the object was to escape the misery of life as a reputed witch. The theory of witchcraft, too, was universal and well known, and the revolting details of worship of the devil and of the witches’ sabbath must have been familiar to all. Torture, as the Milan case shows (see Torture), might force from the accused confession of an impossible crime, and even without torture instances have been known in modern times where women have charged themselves with offences in which they were the only believers. These considerations may partially, if not fully, solve a difficulty which has been felt ever since the time of Cardan.

Towards the end of the 17th century the feeling towards witchcraft began to change. The case of Hathaway in 1702 no doubt accelerated the decay of the old belief. He was convicted of cheating and assault by falsely pretending to be bewitched and by making an attack on an alleged witch. The last trial in England was that of Jane Wenham in 1712, convicted at Hertford, but not executed. A case said to have occurred in 1716 does not rest on good authority. This change of feeling was no doubt caused to a great extent by the works of writers, few in number but strong in argument, who from the time of Reginald Scot (j.v.) struck at the very foundations of the popular belief. One of the most interesting but least-known writers is George Gifford, whose views are in the nature of a compromise. His point is that the devil may deceive not only witches but their accusers. The jury who convict may sometimes be right, but it must be very seldom. As lately as 1718 Dr Hutchinson, bishop of Down and Connor, thought it worth while to argue against witchcraft, but rather from the popular than the scientific point of view. Legal writers did little to shake the prevailing opinion. Coke, Bacon, and Hale certainly admitted the possibility of witchcraft; Selden at least approved the statutory provisions on the subject; and Blackstone in guarded language said that its exclusion from the list of crimes was not to be understood as implying a denial of the possibility of such an offence, though, following Addison, he would not give credit to any particular modern instance.

In the present state of the law pretended supernatural powers may be such as to bring those professing them under the criminal law, or to make void a transfer of property caused by belief in their existence. The Act of 1736 enacted that any person pretending to use witchcraft, tell fortunes, or discover stolen goods by skill in any occult or crafty science, was to be imprisoned for a year, to stand in the pillory, and to find sureties for good behaviour. This is still law, except as to the pillory. By the Vagrant Act of 1824, 5 Geo. IV. c. 83, s. 4, any person pretending or professing to tell fortunes, or using any subtle craft, means, or device, by palmistry or otherwise, to deceive and impose on any of Her Majesty’s subjects, is to be deemed a rogue and vagabond. Under this Act a person may be convicted for attempting to deceive by falsely pretending to have the supernatural faculty of obtaining from invisible agents and the spirits of the dead answers, messages, and manifestations of power, viz., noises, raps, and the winding up of a musical box. So may one who issues an advertisement professing to forecast the future, though no money is received, and the future of a particular person is not told. A false pretence of witchcraft is also punishable under the Larceny Act of 1861, 24 and 25 Vict. c. 96. It has been held that a false pretence that the defendant had the power to bring back the husband of the prosecutrix over hedges and ditches was within the statute. In a case in Chancery in 1868 a widow lady, aged seventy-five, was induced by the defendant, a spiritual medium, to transfer a large sum of money to him, under the belief that such was the wish of her deceased husband as declared in spiritualistic manifestations. The court held that his claim of supernatural power constituted undue influence, and that the gift must be set aside.

See, in addition to the authorities cited, Sir Walter Scott’s Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft ; Stephen, Hist. of the Criminal Law, vol. ii. ch. XXV.; Pike, Hist, of Crime in England, esp. vol. ii. p. 131 sq. ; Dr Nicholson’s Introduction to Reginald Scot’s Discovery of Witchcraft ; Spalding, Elizabethan Demonology, ch. iii.; also reports of particular cases, such as the trial of the Suffolk witches, published in a separate form in 1682, and the indictment of the astrologer Lilly for advising to recover stolen goods (when the grand jury threw out the bill), to be found in his autobiography.

Scotland.— The principal Act of the Scottish parliament was 1563, c. 73 (ratified and confirmed in 1649), making it a capital offence to use witchcraft, sorcery, or necromancy, or to pretend to such knowledge, or to seek help from witches. It was repealed by 9 Geo. II. c. 5. Trials were either before the ordinary courts or, more frequently, before special tribunals erected by the authority of commissions from time to time issued by the privy council, often on the petition of a presbytery or the General Assembly. Boxes were placed in the churches to receive accusations. The frequency of cases is shown by an order of parliament in 1661 that justices depute should go once a week at least to Musselburgh and Dalkeith to try persons accused of witchcraft. In these trials evidence of the wildest description was admitted. Anything was relevant, especially if sworn to by a professed witch-finder or witch-pricker, a position in which one Kincaid, like Hopkins in England, attained special eminence. Torture was used in most cases, and in an aggravated form, as it was supposed that the devil protected his votaries from the effects of ordinary torture. A special form of iron collar and gag called “the witch’s bridle” was generally used. The details of the trials in Pitcairn’s Criminal Trials are utterly revolting, especially those of Bessie Dunlop in 1576 and of Dr Fian in 1590. One of the charges in the former case is very remarkable, and the accused herself confessed it, that she acted under the guidance of the spirit of Thome Reid who had been killed at Pinkie in 1547. In some cases a charge of witchcraft was joined with a charge of another crime, as of murder in the master of Orkney’s case, of treason in Dr Fian’s, accused of raising a storm at sea when the king was on a voyage. James VI. was frequently present in person at trials for witchcraft, and the most horrible cases recorded are those which occurred in his reign. The full pleadings in a charge are given in the case of Margaret Wallace. It is noticeable that the articles of dittay began by resting the criminality of sorcery upon the divine law as contained in the 20th chapter of Leviticus and the 18th chapter of Deuteronomy. The punishment was generally burning. The last execution took place in 1722, after conviction before the sheriff of Sutherland. As to pretended powers, the Act...