In the history of witchcraft the years from 1688 to 1718 may be grouped together as comprising a period. This is not to say that the year of the Revolution marked any transition in the course of the superstition. It did not. But we have ventured to employ it as a convenient date with which to bound the influences of the Restoration. The year 1718 derives its importance for us from the publication, in that year, of Francis Hutchinson's _Historical Essay on Witchcraft_, a book which, it is not too much to say, gave the final blow to the belief in England.[1] We speak of fixing a date by which to bound the influences of the Restoration. Now, as a matter of fact, there is something arbitrary about any date. The influences at work during the previous period went steadily on. The heathen raged, and the people imagined a vain thing. The great proletariat hated witches as much as ever. But the justices of the peace and the itinerant judges were getting over their fear of popular opinion and were refusing to listen to the accusations that were brought before them. The situation was in some respects the same as it had been in the later seventies and throughout the eighties. Yet there were certain features that distinguished the period. One of them was the increased use of exorcism. The expelling of evil spirits had been a subject of great controversy almost a century before. The practice had by no means been forgotten in the mean time, but it had gained little public notice. Now the dispossessors of the Devil came to the front again long enough to whet the animosity between Puritans and Anglicans in Lancashire. But this never became more than a pamphlet controversy. The other feature of the period was far more significant. The last executions for witchcraft in England were probably those at Exeter in 1682.[2] For a whole generation the courts had been frowning on witch prosecution. Now there arose in England judges who definitely nullified the law on the statute-book. By the decisions of Powell and Parker, and most of all by those of Holt, the statute of the first year of James I was practically made obsolete twenty-five or fifty years before its actual repeal in 1736. We shall see that the gradual breaking down of the law by the judges did not take place without a struggle. At the famous trial in Hertford in 1712 the whole subject of the Devil and his relation to witches came up again in its most definite form, and was fought out in the court room and at the bar of public opinion. It was, however, but the last rallying and counter-charging on a battle-field where Webster and Glanvill had led the hosts at mid-day. The issue, indeed, was now very specific. Over the abstract question of witchcraft there was nothing new to be said. Here, however, was a specific instance. What was to be done with it? Over that there was waged a merry war. Of course the conclusion was foregone. It had indeed been anticipated by the action of the bench.