The Witchcraft Act of 1735

The 1735 Act did something more radical than decriminalising witchcraft. It repealed the earlier statutes under which people had been tried and executed, and replaced them with an offence of pretending to exercise magical powers or to tell fortunes. In doing so it made a statement about reality: the law would no longer entertain the proposition that anyone could do these things, so a person who claimed to could only be a deceiver. The accused changed from the witch to the fraudster, and the penalty changed from death to imprisonment.

Brian Levack's work on the European witch hunts sets this in the general pattern by which prosecutions across Europe collapsed before the statutes were repealed, driven by judges and by rules of evidence rather than by legislatures, so that by 1735 the courts had already largely stopped convicting. The Act ratified a change that had happened. It also had a long afterlife its drafters cannot have anticipated, because the offence of pretending to exercise magical powers remained on the books, available for use against anyone whose religion or livelihood involved claiming contact with the unseen. That is the point at which a piece of Enlightenment scepticism turned into an instrument of religious regulation, and it stayed one for more than two centuries.

The Act was used against spiritualist mediums well into the twentieth century, and the best known case is that of Helen Duncan, convicted in 1944 for offences under it after wartime seances. That prosecution, and another the same year, are the last of their kind and they made the statute look absurd to a public that regarded spiritualism as a matter for belief rather than for the criminal courts. In 1951 the Act was repealed and replaced by the Fraudulent Mediums Act, which required proof of intent to deceive and of payment.

Ronald Hutton's history of modern pagan witchcraft treats the repeal as the practical precondition for what followed. Gerald Gardner published Witchcraft Today in 1954, presenting a surviving witch religion he claimed to have been initiated into, and the modern Wiccan movement grew from that publication and from the books and initiations that followed it. Hutton's own conclusion, argued at length from the sources, is that the religion Gardner described is a twentieth century construction assembled from folklore, ceremonial magic and Romantic scholarship rather than an unbroken survival, and the atlas records that as the scholarly position while noting that Wicca is a living religion whose practitioners hold various views of their own origins.