Reginald Scot

Reginald Scot had no obvious business writing this book. He was a country landowner in Kent who sat once in parliament, and his other published work was a practical guide to growing hops. He had no theological training, which his opponents used against him, and no professional stake in the question at all.

What he wrote in 1584 went further than anything else in English for a century. Johann Weyer had argued that the defendants were incapable of the crime. Scot argued that everybody is, because the crime is not a possible thing. The powers attributed to witches, control of weather, of health, of another person's body, belong to God. To say a poor woman in a Kentish village holds them is not just a mistake about her; it is a claim about the order of the world that Scot thought close to blasphemous.

Having taken the crime away he still had to account for the trials, and his account is the modern one. He describes an old woman who begs at a door and is refused, mutters as she leaves, and is remembered when the household's cow sickens a week later. He describes what happens to a frightened, isolated person questioned repeatedly by confident men who already know the answer. And he notes, drily, that the woman herself may come to believe it.

To prove that impossible-looking things have ordinary causes, Scot had to show how they are done, and so a book written to stop witch trials contains detailed working descriptions of conjuring tricks: forcing, substitution, concealment, and the illusion of a head cut off and restored. Stage magicians found it, and they have kept reprinting it for four hundred years. It is one of the earliest printed accounts of sleight of hand in English, and it survives for reasons that would have baffled its author.

There is a second, less comfortable afterlife. In describing the conjurations and charms he meant to discredit, Scot preserved them, and later occultists mined the book as a source for the material it was attacking. Seventeenth century reprintings made this worse by adding a discourse on devils and spirits that Scot did not write, so an edition on a shelf today may contain arguments the author would have rejected outright.

One story about the book should not be repeated as fact. It is often said that James VI and I ordered every copy burned when he came to the English throne in 1603. There is no contemporary evidence for it and modern scholarship treats it as a later tradition. What is documented is that James named Scot in the preface to Daemonologie in 1597 and wrote against him.

Scot died in 1599. Most of what he concluded about the trials is what historians conclude now, which is a remarkable thing to say of a hop farmer writing in 1584.