North Berwick, the 1604 Statute, and a Later Turn

The book was printed at Edinburgh in 1597 by Robert Waldegrave, and reprinted in London in 1603 when James took the English throne. An English witchcraft statute followed in 1604, replacing the Elizabethan act with a harsher one that made a wider range of acts capital. It is easy to draw a straight line from the king's book to the king's law, and easy to overdraw it: parliaments legislate for their own reasons, and the 1604 act had its own drafting history.

What happened afterwards complicates the picture further. James has a documented later record of scepticism in individual English cases, including intervening where accusers or supposed victims turned out to be lying, and of at least one exposure of a fraudulent demoniac. Historians differ on how to read this. One camp sees a genuine change of mind, an ageing king who had watched the machinery produce nonsense often enough to distrust it. Another sees no change of position at all, only a consistent insistence that the crown, and not local enthusiasm, decides what is true, which cuts against a false accusation just as it cut against a doubting subject at North Berwick.

Either way the book stayed in print and stayed influential, and its most lasting effect may be indirect. Daemonologie is among the sources behind the witches in Shakespeare's Macbeth, which has done more than any statute to fix a picture of what a witch was supposed to be.