the current superstitions and are not very strong in their wits. One of these beldames is mentioned as the bewitcher, perhaps because the patient's distempered fancy has seen a face and called a name. Then old rumors are revived: Smith's cattle died year before last, or Jones's little son. For there is ever at hand a huge mass of such latent evidence, all connected with the primitive doctrine of maleficium, and only waiting for a prosecution to bring it before the courts. When the trial begins, we may hear of compacts with Satan, of flights through the air, of sordid and hideous revels at the Witches' Sabbath. But such things are mere confirmatory details. The essential point, the really efficient impulse, is always maleficium—injury to goods or body or life through supernatural means.
For England, the worst period of witch-prosecution is, by common consent, the seventeenth century—the century of the Lancashire witches, of Matthew Hopkins and John Stearne, of Glanvill's Saducismus Triumphatus. The reign of James, we remember, covers exactly twenty-two years, from March, 1603, to March, 1625. In 1604 Parliament enacted a famous statute against witchcraft, usually called the statute of James I. The idea has been prevalent that the delusion was dying out at the close of Elizabeth's reign, and that the advent of the British Solomon gave it fresh vigor.[1]
My purpose is to report an extremely interesting case of alleged witchcraft which occurred in Devonshire in 1601 and 1602, just before James came to the throne. This alone would make it significant enough. But it is still further noteworthy because it exhibits the phenomena in what we may call a pure form. We have only the testimony of voluntary, and for the most part aggrieved, witnesses. There are no arguments, no confessions, no comments from the bench. There is nothing but the beliefs and experiences of the witnesses themselves, honestly detailed according to their lights. Hence the documents afford us a perfect picture of the witchcraft creed as held by the common people. And we find, as we should expect, that the sum and substance of it all was maleficium—injury to the property and the health of the victims, amounting even to ruin and death.
The documents have never been printed.[2] They consist of eleven "examinations",[3] taken before a Devon justice of the peace,
- ↑ For arguments against this idea see Studies in the History of Religions presented to Crawford Howell Toy (1912), pp. 1–65; cf. American Historical Review, XX. 570 (1915).
- ↑ I have mentioned the case in the Studies in the History of Religions, p. 17. Apart from this mention it seems to have eluded investigators of the subject.
- ↑ One of these includes the testimony of a man and his wife, so that we really have twelve witnesses.
