Bartham was hanged at Bury St. Edmunds. Just a few names have been mentioned here and there at random; it were superfluous to give year after year in the various counties of England the long tale of executions for sorcery and black magic. It is plain that England swarmed with persons who were practising the most dangerous crafts, and we must remember that probably not a tithe of the guilty were discovered and brought to open justice.
From the earliest days there had been in Scotland prosecutions for witchcraft, and here the penalty was usually the stake, whether the crime involved high treason or whether there was no suspicion at all of any political intrigue. Thus among the laws attributed to Kenneth I (d. 860), and which even if this be not their exact original are doubtless very early, is one statute which directs that all witches and persons who invoke spirits “and use to seek upon them helpe, let them be burned to death.” These penalties remained permanently in force, although from time to time they were strengthened and renewed. Thus when, in 1563, the ninth parliament of Queen Mary passed an Act making all matters of witchcraft a capital offence there immediately followed a regular crusade against the guilty and the suspect. In 1590, under James VI, occurred one of the most famous episodes in the whole history of witchcraft, the prosecution of the North Berwick covens, when there had met at the old haunted church of North Berwick upon All Hallows E’en warlocks and Satanists to the number of at least one hundred and fifty—other and reliable accounts say nearly double that tale—who, it is now clearly established, were organized by the Earl of Bothwell, to assist him in his aiming at the
