New research suggests a radical religious proposal, stifled by the premature death of Edward VI, could have fundamentally changed how witches were treated in England
On 29 July 1566, a widow from a small village in Essex was brought before a crowd of people gathered at the gallows in Chelmsford and hanged. She had been convicted of a shocking crime: using witchcraft to kill her husband and one of her neighbours, aided by a demonic cat called Satan (at the time, spelled Sathan).
Agnes Waterhouse was not quite the first person to be executed as a sorceress in England, but her trial – alongside Elizabeth Fraunces and her own daughter, Joan – was the first major witch hunt under the new Witchcraft Act of 1563.
It did not take long for witch-mania to grip England. Details of Waterhouse’s magical crimes were outlined in a popular pamphlet, complete with vivid woodcut illustrations of the alleged witch and her feline accomplice, which later turned into a toad and then a dog with horns.
Although some 500 people (90 per cent of them women) were executed as witches over the next century, historians have long pointed out that Tudor England’s attitude towards witchcraft was lenient compared to other countries.
About 75 per cent of those accused were not executed. Killing by witchcraft was a capital offence, but those found to have used magic to injure others or seek treasure were initially imprisoned for a year, with regular appearances in the pillory. Others were acquitted and walked free because of a lack of evidence.
In contrast, Switzerland saw tens of thousands of cases of witchcraft, with up to 3,500 people executed as a result. In Scotland, following a Witchcraft Act also passed in 1563, around 2,500 witches were executed by strangulation and their bodies burned.
But new research suggests England was only a few crucial decisions – and one untimely royal death – away from seeing an incredibly violent witch hunt in which thousands of women could have been interrogated, possibly tortured, and burned at the stake for even the most minor acts of sorcery.
How Tudor England narrowly escaped a regime of “unbridled religious zealotry”
In their recent study, The English Witchcraft Act of 1563 Revisited, published in The English Historical Review, Oxford University historians Alexandra Gajda and George Southcombe reexamine the fiery debates that resulted in the 1563 Witchcraft Act.
The researchers argue that the legislation was not, as some historians suggest, targeted at Catholic plotters who sometimes used spells and enchantments in their conspiracies against Elizabeth I. Instead, they contend it was the result of “a series of paths not taken” that almost “made the history of English witchcraft look very different”.
When Elizabeth came to the throne in 1558, Protestant reformers viewed witchcraft as a burning issue that required radical action from parliament.
MPs in the House of Commons attempted to resurrect an old religious proposal devised by Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer in the early 1550s and which would have had a profound impact on the history of England’s witch hunts.
The Reformatio Legum Ecclesiasticarum defined witchcraft as “a pact or treaty with the devil and his servants”, for which the punishment was being burned at the stake as a heretic, as happened in Germany, France and Switzerland.
This proposed revision of ecclesiastical law also mandated severe punishments for, among other sins, blasphemy, bigamy, drunkenness and adultery. This was to be enforced across the country by church wardens and priests granted new, authoritarian powers.
“Had this law code been implemented in any meaningful way, England would have become one of the most closely policed confessional states in Europe,” Gajda and Southcombe write, adding that this could have enabled a brutal witch hunt “inspired by unbridled religious zealotry”.
- Read more | Scotland's season of the witch
By 1553, the Reformation had the vocal support of the country’s evangelical clergy and seemed destined to succeed. It was only due to Edward’s death at the age of 15 in July that this radical proposal was never entered onto the statute books.
“This is by far the most interesting part of the article, and the most valuable,” Diane Purkiss, professor of English literature at the University of Oxford and author of The Witch in History (Routledge, 1996), tells HistoryExtra.
“It certainly looks as if England could have ended up with something like the Geneva code on witchcraft, which in a comparative study with nearby Catholic regions comes off as remarkably violent.”
So why did the effort by some MPs in 1563 to revive this law and launch a more ferocious witch hunt fail?
It was partly for practical reasons: unlike in continental Europe, English courts dismissed evidence where torture was used to obtain confessions of having made a diabolical pact. Thus, the eventual 1563 Act stressed the tangible harms caused by sorcery, such as illness and death, rather than treating it as a spiritual crime.
Some clergymen also worried about legislation impinging on spiritual matters, while many lawyers argued there was no legal precedent for burning witches as apostates, and some judges doubted the existence of magical powers entirely.
The Witchcraft Act of 1563 nonetheless angered Puritans, who wanted legislation which condemned both malevolent witches and “cunning folk” who claimed to use magic for good. But efforts to introduce amendments in 1566 failed and it was soon clear that the more moderate act was here to stay.
What can historians learn from the persecution of “lonely old women talking to their cats”?
Historian and folklorist Francis Young thinks this new research shows that the relative leniency of England’s witch hunts was not inevitable. “What I found really interesting about the study is the stuff about the attempts to draft a law during Edward VI’s reign,” he tells HistoryExtra.
“We might have very possibly ended up with something more like the 1563 Scottish Act, which effectively criminalises superstition itself.”
Purkiss suggests the study ought to have gone into more detail on the potential paths the English witch hunt could have gone down had earlier legislation been different. But, she adds, it nonetheless paves the way for “really useful” future research “on witchcraft prosecutions under the early Tudors – that is, before Elizabeth I”.
Although Tudor popular culture often imagined witches gathering with Satan, forming diabolical pacts and setting out to destroy the Christian realm, it tended to be elderly women who faced accusations because of personal grudges and community tensions.
For Young, whose books on the supernatural include Magic as a Political Crime in Medieval and Early Modern England, the new research is just one piece in a larger puzzle about how a landmark statute was ultimately most used “to catch lonely old women talking to their cats”.
He concludes: “There’s always this question about the gap between the intention behind the Act and how it played out, and I think that gap remains a problem. This study looks like it goes a way towards resolving that, but I don’t think it’s completely resolved.”
Authors
Piers is a journalist with a BA in History from the University of Exeter and a master’s degree in Early Modern History from the University of Oxford.