A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718Notestein, Wallace
History
A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718
Notestein, Wallace
Witchcraft -- England -- History
The use of marks as evidence was not as new as the water ordeal. But it
is a rather curious thing that in the two series of cases involving
water ordeal the other process was also emphasized. In these two
instances it would seem as if the advice of the _Dæmonologie_ had been
taken very directly by the accusers.[19] There was one other instance of
this test.[20] The remarkable thing, however, is that in the most
important trial of the time, that at Lancaster in 1612, there was an
utter absence, at least so far as the extant record goes, of female
juries or of reports from them.[21] This method of determining guilt was
not as yet widely accepted in the courts. We can hardly doubt that it
had been definitely forbidden at Lancaster.[22] The evidence of the use
of evil spirits, against which the statute of the first year of James I
had been especially framed, was employed in such a large proportion of
trials that it is not worth while to go over the cases in detail.
The law forbade to take up any dead person or the skin, bone, or other
part thereof for use in witchcraft. Presumably some instance of this
form of witchcraft had been responsible for the phrase, but we have on
record no case of the sort until a few years after the passage of the
statute. It was one of the principal charges against Johanna Harrison
of Royston in 1606 that the officers found in her possession "all the
bones due to the Anatomy of man and woman."[23] This discovery brought
out other charges and she was hanged. At the famous Lancashire trials in
1612 the arch-witch Chattox was declared to have had in her possession
three scalps and eight teeth. She was guilty on other counts, but she
escaped the executioner by death.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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