Witchcraft and the Act of 1604

Abstract

Eds.), Witchcraft and the Act of  [Studies in Medieval and Reformation Traditions ]. Brill, Leiden/Boston , xii +  pp. ISBN .  ; US .While witchcraft was not a felony under common law until , England in the late Middle Ages still experienced its share of "treason-cum-sorcery" trials involving members of its political elite. Perhaps the most famous case of this type came in , with the trial of Eleanor Cobham, second wife and former mistress of Duke Humphrey of Gloucester, the brother of King Henry V. Cobham escaped the death penalty, but one of her female associates was burned as a witch, while a reputed astrologer was hanged, and then drawn and quartered for treason. English monarchs thought themselves vulnerable to treasonous sorcery up to the reign of James I (ruled -).More prosaically, local court records contain scattered references to trials for witchcraft and sorcery. These references are too dispersed and insufficiently detailed to permit any comprehensive analysis of early witchcraft trials in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Most of the references survive in the records of ecclesiastical courts, which could only inflict light penalties. Our current state of knowledge suggests that many of the accused were "good" witches, local sorcerers, and cunning folk, rather than persons suspected of malefic witchcraft. Nevertheless, many aspects of witchcraft recorded in trial records from the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were familiar by .The legal position of witchcraft changed in  with an act defining witchcraft as a felony ( Hen. VIII, cap. ). This was the most draconian of English witchcraft statutes, probably prompted by several witch scares in the preceding years, and also part of a general tendency to remove offenses from ecclesiastical jurisdictions. The act was repealed, along with other Henrician legislation, after Edward VI came to the throne in . England had no secular laws against witchcraft until a further statute was passed in  early in Elizabeth I's reign. This law, among other provisions, imposed the death penalty for killing humans by witchcraft, but allowed those who were convinced of harming humans or killing animals the lesser punishment of a year's imprisonment and four sessions on the pillory for a first offense, a second offense of this type being punishable by death. A further act came in . The Jacobean statute eroded the possibility of lesser punishments on first offenses, included a clause intended to make keeping familiar spirits a capital offense, and, curiously, also made exhuming corpses for purposes of witchcraft a capital offense. This statute remained in force until , when