The European Witch Trials

Three different things get called witchcraft and the trials concerned only one of them.

There was folk magic, which existed everywhere: charmers, cunning folk and healers who cured cattle, found lost property, made love charms and lifted curses. This was a common trade, largely tolerated, and it is not what the courts were prosecuting. Villagers went to such people for protection against witchcraft.

There is modern Pagan witchcraft, which is a twentieth century religion and has no connection to any of this except a borrowed name.

And there was the crime the courts tried, which was none of the above. It was a theological construction: a pact with the Devil, the renunciation of baptism, gathering with others in his service, and the working of harm through that power. It was assembled by learned demonologists in the fifteenth century out of older heresy accusations, and it was fitted onto ordinary village suspicion, where a neighbour had been blamed for a dead cow or a sick child for as long as anyone could remember. The fit was the disaster. A local quarrel about a dead cow became, once it entered a court holding this theory, an entry point into a conspiracy with accomplices.

Nobody committed the crime. That is not a soft way of saying the evidence was thin. There was no sect, no pact and no harm worked by any of it.

The single most useful thing to know about the trials is how uneven they were. A traveller could cross from a territory that had executed hundreds into one that had executed almost nobody, among people of the same language, the same faith and the same beliefs about witches. What differed was not belief. It was jurisdiction and procedure.

Three things predict severity. The first is judicial torture. Under the Roman-canon procedure used across much of continental Europe a capital conviction effectively required a confession, and torture was how confessions were obtained; each confession then had to yield accomplices, and each accomplice was arrested. England did not use torture in ordinary criminal procedure, and its totals are a small fraction of Scotland's. The second is review. Where a higher court examined verdicts, local panics were checked; where a small court could try and burn without review, they were not. The Spanish Inquisition, of all institutions, largely stopped witch executions after 1614 precisely by centralising review. The third is political weakness: fragmented territories with many small courts and no strong central authority produced the worst episodes.

The chronology matters too. The heaviest prosecution falls in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, alongside the Reformation and the beginnings of modern science, not in the Middle Ages, whose canon law had held for five hundred years that the night flight was a dream.