A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 Part 4

[20] It is some relief in this trial to read the testimony of John Tendering about William Byett. He had a cow "in a strange case." He could not lift it. He put fire under the cow, she got up and "there stood still and fell a byting of stickes larger than any man's finger and after lived and did well."

[21] Second wife of Sir Henry Cromwell, who was the grandfather of Oliver.

[22] The children were strangely inconsistent. At the first they had fits when Mother Samuel appeared. Later they were troubled unless Mother Samuel were kept in the house, or unless they were taken to her house.

[23] This device seems to have been originally suggested by the children to try Mother Samuel's guilt.

[24] The clergyman, "Doctor Dorrington," had been one of the leaders in prosecuting them.

[25] Harsnett, _Discovery of the Fraudulent Practises of John Darrel_ (London, 1599), 92, 97.

[26] Among the ma.n.u.scripts on witchcraft in the Bodleian Library are three such pardons of witches for their witchcraft--one of Jane Mortimer in 1595, one of Rosa Bexwell in 1600, and one of "Alice S.," without date but under Elizabeth.

[27] In 1595 he was made warden of the Manchester Collegiate Church. Dee has in our days found a biographer. See _John Dee_ (1527-1608), by Charlotte Fell Smith (London, 1909).

[28] For the particular case, see Mary Bateson, ed., _Records of the Borough of Leicester_ (Cambridge, 1899), III. 335; for the general letters patent covering such cases see _id._, II, 365, 366.

[29] For this story see Ralph Holinshed, _Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland_ (London, 1577, reprinted 1586-1587 and 1807-1808), ed. of 1807-1808, IV, 891, 893. Faversham was then "Feversham."

[30] Justice Anderson, when sentencing a witch to a year's imprisonment, declared that this was the twenty-fifth or twenty-sixth witch he had condemned. This is good evidence that the records of many cases have been lost. See Brit. Mus., Sloane MS. 831, f. 38.

CHAPTER III.

REGINALD SCOT.

From the chronicling of witch trials we turn aside in this chapter to follow the career of the first great English opponent of the superst.i.tion. We have seen how the attack upon the supposed creatures of the Devil was growing stronger throughout the reign of Elizabeth. We shall see how that attack was checked, at least in some degree, by the resistance of one man. Few men of so quiet and studious life have wrought so effectively as Reginald Scot. He came of a family well known in Kent, but not politically aggressive. As a young man he studied at Hart Hall[1] in Oxford, but left without taking his degree and returned to Scots-Hall, where he settled down to the routine duties of managing his estate. He gave himself over, we are told, to husbandry and gardening and to a solid course of general reading in the obscure authors that had "by the generality been neglected." In 1574 his studies in horticulture resulted in the publication of _A Perfect Platforme of a Hoppe-Garden and necessary instructions for the making and maintaining thereof_. That the book ministered to a practical interest was evidenced by the call for three editions within five years. Whether he now applied himself to the study of that subject which was to be the theme of his _Discoverie_, we do not know. It was a matter which had doubtless arrested his attention even earlier and had enlisted a growing interest upon his part. Not until a decade after his _Hoppe-Garden_, however, did he put forth the epoch-making _Discoverie_. Nor does it seem likely that he had been engaged for a long period on the actual composition. Rather, the style and matter of the book seem to evince traces of hurry in preparation. If this theory be true--and Mr. Brinsley Nicholson, his modern commentator, has adduced excellent reasons for accepting it[2]--there can be but one explanation, the St. Oses affair. That tragedy, occurring within a short distance of his own home, had no doubt so outraged his sense of justice, that the work which he had perhaps long been contemplating he now set himself to complete as soon as possible.[3] Even he who runs may read in Scot's strong sentences that he was not writing for instruction only, to propound a new doctrine, but that he was battling with the single purpose to stop a detestable and wicked practice. Something of a dilettante in real life, he became in his writing a man with an absorbing mission. That mission sprang not indeed from indignation at the St. Oses affair alone. From the days of childhood his experience had been of a kind to encourage skepticism. He had been reared in a county where Elizabeth Barton, the Holy Maid of Kent, first came into prominence, and he had seen the downfall that followed her public exposure.[4] In the year after he brought out his _Hoppe-garden_, his county was again stirred by performances of a supposedly supernatural character. Mildred Norrington, a girl of seventeen,[5] used ventriloquism with such skill that she convinced two clergymen and all her neighbors that she was possessed. In answer to queries, the evil spirit that spoke through Mildred declared that "old Alice of Westwell"[6] had sent him to possess the girl. Alice, the spirit admitted, stood guilty of terrible witchcrafts. The demon's word was taken, and Alice seems to have been "arraigned upon this evidence."[7] But, through the justices' adroit management of the trial, the fraud of the accuser was exposed. She confessed herself a pretender and suffered "condign punishment." This case happened within six miles of Scot's home and opened his eyes to the possibility of humbug. In the very same year two pretenders, Agnes Bridges and Rachel Pinder, were convicted in London. By vomiting pins and straws[8] they had convinced many that they were bewitched, but the trickery was soon found out and they were compelled to do public penance at St. Paul's.[9] We are not told what was the fate of a detestable Mother Baker, who, when consulted by the parents of a sick girl at New Romney in Kent, accused a neighbor woman.[10] She said that the woman had made a waxen heart and p.r.i.c.ked it and by this means accomplished her evil purpose. In order to prove her accusation, she had in the mean time concealed the wax figure of a heart in the house of the woman she accused, and then pretended to find it.[11] It is some satisfaction to know that the malicious creature--who, during the history of witchcraft, had many imitators--was caught and compelled to confess.

Scot learned, indeed, by observing marvels of this sort[12]--what it is strange that many others did not learn--to look upon displays of the supernatural with a good deal of doubt. How much he had ever believed in them we do not know. It is not unlikely that in common with his generation he had, as a young man, held a somewhat ill-defined opinion about the Devil's use of witches. The belief in that had come down, a comparatively innocuous tradition, from a primitive period. It was a subject that had not been raised in speculation or for that matter in court rooms. But since Scot's early manhood all this had been changed.

England had been swept by a tidal wave of suspicion. Hazy theological notions had been tightened into rigid convictions. Convictions had pa.s.sed into legislative statutes and instructions to judges. The bench, which had at first acted on the new laws with caution and a desire to detect imposture, became infected with the fear and grew more ready to discover witchcraft and to punish it. It is unnecessary to recapitulate the progress of a movement already traced in the previous chapter.

Suffice it to say that the Kentish gentleman, familiarized with accounts of imposture, was unwilling to follow the rising current of superst.i.tion. Of course this is merely another way of saying that Scot was unconventional in his mental operations and thought the subject out for himself with results variant from those of his own generation. Here was a new abuse in England, here was a wrong that he had seen spring up within his own lifetime and in his own part of England. He made it his mission as far as possible to right the wrong. "For so much," he says, "as the mightie helpe themselves together, and the poore widowes crie, though it reach to heaven, is sca.r.s.e heard here upon earth: I thought good (according to my poore abilitie) to make intercession, that some part of common rigor, and some points of hastie judgement may be advised upon."[13]

It was indeed a splendid mission and he was singularly well equipped for it. He had the qualifications--scholarly training and the power of scientific observation, a background of broad theological and scriptural information, a familiarity with legal learning and practice, as well as a command of vigorous and incisive language--which were certain to make his work effective towards its object.

That he was a scholar is true in more senses than one. In his use of deduction from cla.s.sical writers he was something of a scholastic, in his willingness to venture into new fields of thought he was a product of the Renaissance, in his thorough use of research he reminds us of a modern investigator. He gives in his book a bibliography of the works consulted by him and one counts over two hundred Latin and thirty English t.i.tles. His reading had covered the whole field of superst.i.tion.

To Cornelius Agrippa and to Wierus (Johann Weyer),[14] who had attacked the tyranny of superst.i.tion upon the Continent, he owed an especial debt. He had not, however, borrowed enough from them to impair in any serious way the value of his own original contribution.

In respect to law, Scot was less a student than a man of experience. The _Discoverie_, however, bristled with references which indicated a legal way of thinking. He was almost certainly a man who had used the law.

Brinsley Nicholson believes that he had been a justice of the peace. In any case he had a lawyer's sense of the value of evidence and a lawyer's way of putting his case.

No less practical was his knowledge of theology and scripture. Here he had to meet the baffling problems of the Witch of Endor. The story of the witch who had called up before the frightened King Saul the spirit of the dead Samuel and made him speak, stood as a lion in the path of all opponents of witch persecution. When Scot dared to explain this Old Testament tale as an instance of ventriloquism, and to compare it to the celebrated case of Mildred Norrington, he showed a boldness in interpretation of the Bible far in advance of his contemporaries.

His antic.i.p.ation of present-day points of view cropped out perhaps more in his scientific spirit than in any other way. For years before he put pen to paper he had been conducting investigations into alleged cases of conjuring and witchcraft, attending trials,[15] and questioning clergymen and magistrates. For such observation he was most favorably situated and he used his position in his community to further his knowledge. A man almost impertinently curious was this sixteenth-century student. When he learned of a conjurer whose sentence of death had been remitted by the queen and who professed penitence for his crimes, he opened a correspondence and obtained from the man the clear statement that his conjuries were all impostures. The prisoner referred him to "a booke written in the old Saxon toong by one Sir John Malborne, a divine of Oxenford, three hundred yeares past," in which all these trickeries are cleared up. Scot put forth his best efforts to procure the work from the parson to whom it had been entrusted, but without success.[16] In another case he attended the a.s.sizes at Rochester, where a woman was on trial. One of her accusers was the vicar of the parish, who made several charges, not the least of which was that he could not enunciate clearly in church owing to enchantment. This explanation Scot carried to her and she was able to give him an explanation much less creditable to the clergyman of the ailment, an explanation which Scot found confirmed by an enquiry among the neighbors. To quiet such rumors in the community about the nature of the illness the vicar had to procure from London a medical certificate that it was a lung trouble.[17]

Can we wonder that a student at such pains to discover the fact as to a wrong done should have used barbed words in the portrayal of injustice?

Strong convictions spurred on his pen, already taught to shape vigorous and incisive sentences. Not a stylist, as measured by the highest Elizabethan standards of charm and mellifluence, he possessed a clearness and directness which win the modern reader. By his methods of a.n.a.lysis he displayed a quality of mind akin to and probably influenced by that of Calvin, while his intellectual att.i.tude showed the stimulus of the Reformation.

He was indeed in his own restricted field a reformer. He was not only the protagonist of a new cause, but a pioneer who had to cut through the underbrush of opinion a pathway for speculation to follow. So far as England was concerned, Scot found no philosophy of the subject, no systematic defences or a.s.saults upon the loosely constructed theory of demonic agency. It was for him to state in definite terms the beliefs he was seeking to overthrow. The Roman church knew fairly well by this time what it meant by witchcraft, but English theologians and philosophers would hardly have found common ground on any one tenet about the matter.[18] Without exaggeration it may be a.s.serted that Scot by his a.s.sault all along the front forced the enemy's advance and in some sense dictated his line of battle.

The a.s.sault was directed indeed against the centre of the opposing entrenchments, the belief in the continuance of miracles. Scot declared that with Christ and his apostles the age of miracles had pa.s.sed, an opinion which he supported by the authority of Calvin and of St.

Augustine. What was counted the supernatural a.s.sumed two forms--the phenomena exhibited by those whom he cla.s.sed under the wide term of "couseners," and the phenomena said to be exhibited by the "poor doting women" known as witches. The tricks and deceits of the "couseners" he was at great pains to explain. Not less than one-third of his work is given up to setting forth the methods of conjurers, card tricks, sleight-of-hand performances, illusions of magic, materializations of spirits, and the wonders of alchemy and astrology. In the range of his information about these subjects, the discoverer was encyclopedic. No current form of dabbling with the supernatural was left unexposed.

In his attack upon the phenomena of witchcraft he had a different problem. He had to deal with phenomena the so-called facts of which were not susceptible of any material explanation. The theory of a Devil who had intimate relations with human beings, who controlled them and sent them out upon maleficent errands, was in its essence a theological conception and could not be absolutely disproved by scientific observation. It was necessary instead to attack the idea on its _a priori_ grounds. This attack Scot attempted to base on the nature of spirits. Spirits and bodies, he urged, are ant.i.thetical and inconvertible, nor can any one save G.o.d give spirit a bodily form. The Devil, a something beyond our comprehension, cannot change spirit into body, nor can he himself a.s.sume a bodily form, nor has he any power save that granted him by G.o.d for vengeance. This being true, the whole belief in the Devil's intercourse with witches is undermined. Such, very briefly, were the philosophic bases of Scot's skepticism. Yet the more cogent parts of his work were those in which he denied the validity of any evidence so far offered for the existence of witches. What is witchcraft? he asked; and his answer is worth quoting. "Witchcraft is in truth a cousening art, wherin the name of G.o.d is abused, prophaned and blasphemed, and his power attributed to a vile creature. In estimation of the vulgar people, it is a supernaturall worke, contrived betweene a corporall old woman, and a spirituall divell. The maner thereof is so secret, mysticall, and strange, that to this daie there hath never beene any credible witnes thereof."[19] The want of credible evidence was indeed a point upon which Scot continually insisted with great force. He pictured vividly the course which a witchcraft case often ran: "One sort of such as are said to bee witches are women which be commonly old, lame, bleare-eied, pale, fowle, and full of wrinkles; ... they are leane and deformed, shewing melancholie in their faces; ... they are doting, scolds, mad, divelish.... These miserable wretches are so odious unto all their neighbors, and so feared, as few dare offend them, or denie them anie thing they aske: whereby they take upon them, yea, and sometimes thinke, that they can doo such things as are beyond the abilitie of humane nature. These go from house to house, and from doore to doore for a pot of milke, yest, drinke, pottage, or some such releefe; without the which they could hardlie live.... It falleth out many times, that neither their necessities, nor their expectation is answered.... In tract of time the witch waxeth odious and tedious to hir neighbors; ... she cursseth one, and sometimes another; and that from the maister of the house, his wife, children, cattell, etc. to the little pig that lieth in the stie.... Doubtlesse (at length) some of hir neighbours die, or fall sicke."[20] Then they suspect her, says Scot, and grow convinced that she is the author of their mishaps. "The witch, ... seeing things sometimes come to pa.s.se according to hir wishes, ...

being called before a Justice, ... confesseth that she hath brought such things to pa.s.se. Wherein, not onelie she, but the accuser, and also the Justice are fowlie deceived and abused."[21] Such indeed was the epitome of many cases. The process from beginning to end was never better described; the ease with which confessions were dragged from weak-spirited women was never pictured more truly. With quite as keen insight he displayed the motives that animated witnesses and described the prejudices and fears that worked on jurors and judges. It was, indeed, upon these factors that he rested the weight of his argument for the negative.[22]

The affirmative opinion was grounded, he believed, upon the ignorance of the common people, "a.s.sotted and bewitched" by the jesting or serious words of poets, by the inventions of "lowd liers and couseners," and by "tales they have heard from old doting women, or from their mother's maids, and with whatsoever the grandfoole their ghostlie father or anie other morrow ma.s.se preest had informed them."[23]

By the same method by which he opposed the belief in witchcraft he opposed the belief in possession by an evil spirit. The known cases, when examined, proved frauds. The instances in the New Testament he seemed inclined to explain by the a.s.sumption that possession merely meant disease.[24]

That Scot should maintain an absolute negative in the face of all strange phenomena would have been too much to expect. He seems to have believed, though not without some difficulty, that stones had in them "certaine proper vertues which are given them of a speciall influence of the planets." The unicorn's horn, he thought, had certain curative properties. And he had heard "by credible report" and the affirmation of "many grave authors" that "the wound of a man murthered reneweth bleeding at the presence of a deere freend, or of a mortall enimie."[25]

His credulity in these points may be disappointing to the reader who hopes to find in Scot a scientific rationalist. That, of course, he was not; and his leaning towards superst.i.tion on these points makes one ask, What did he really believe about witchcraft? When all the fraud and false testimony and self-deception were excluded, what about the remaining cases of witchcraft? Scot was very careful never to deny _in toto_ the existence of witches. That would have been to deny the Bible.

What were these witches, then? Doubtless he would have answered that he had already cla.s.sified them under two heads: they were either "couseners" or "poor doting women"--and by "couseners" he seems to have meant those who used trickery and fraud. In other words, Scot distinctly implied that there were no real witches--with powers given them by the Devil. Would he have stood by this when pushed into a corner? It is just possible that he would have done so, that he understood his own implications, but hardly dared to utter a straighforward denial of the reality of witchcraft. It is more likely that he had not altogether thought himself out.

The immediate impression of Scot's book we know little about. Such contemporary comment as we have is neutral.[26] That his book was read painstakingly by every later writer on the subject, that it shortly became the great support of one party in the controversy, that King James deemed it worth while to write an answer, and that on his accession to the throne he almost certainly ordered the book to be burned by the common hangman,[27] these are better evidence than absolutely contemporary notices to show that the _Discoverie_ exerted an influence.

We cannot better suggest how radical Scot's position must have seemed to his own time than by showing the point of view of another opponent of witchcraft, George Gifford, a non-conformist clergyman.[28] He had read the _Discoverie_ and probably felt that the theological aspect of the subject had been neglected. Moreover it had probably been his fortune, as Scot's, to attend the St. Oses trials. Three years after Scot's book he brought out _A Discourse of the Subtill Practises of Devilles by Witches_, and followed it six years later by _A Dialogue concerning Witches_,[29] a book in which he expounded his opinions in somewhat more popular fashion. Like Scot, he wrote to end, so far as possible, the punishment of innocent women;[30] like Scot, he believed that most of the evidence presented against them was worthless.[31] But on other points he was far less radical. There were witches. He found them in the Bible.[32] To be sure they were nothing more than p.a.w.ns for the Devil. He uses them "onely for a colour,"[33] that is, puts them forward to cover his own dealings, and then he deludes them and makes them "beleeve things which are nothing so."[34] In consequence they frequently at their executions falsely accuse others of dreadful witchcrafts. It is all the work of the Devil. But he himself cannot do anything except through the power of G.o.d,[35] who, sometimes for vengeance upon His enemies and sometimes to try His own people,[36]

permits the Evil One to do harm.[37]

Gifford of course never made the impression that Scot had made.[38] But he represented the more conservative position and was the first in a long line of writers who deprecated persecution while they accepted the current view as to witchcraft; and therefore he furnishes a standard by which to measure Scot, who had nothing of the conservative about him.

Scot had many readers and exerted a strong influence even upon those who disagreed with him; but he had few or none to follow in his steps. It was not until nearly a century later that there came upon the scene a man who dared to speak as Scot had spoken. Few men have been so far ahead of their time.

[1] Where George Gifford, who wrote a little later on the subject, was also a student.

[2] _Discoverie of Witchcraft_, Nicholson ed., introd., x.x.xv.

[3] That at least a part of it was written in 1583 appears from his own words, where he speaks of the treatise of Leonardus Vairus on fascination as "now this present yeare 1583 newlie published," _ibid._, 124.

[4] Elizabeth Barton (1506-1534) suffered from a nervous derangement which developed into a religious mania. She was taught by some monks, and then professed to be in communion with the Virgin Mary and performed miracles at stated times. She denounced Henry VIII's divorce and gained wide recognition as a champion of the queen and the Catholic church. She was granted interviews by Archbishop Warham, by Thomas More, and by Wolsey. She was finally induced by Cranmer to make confession, was compelled publicly to repeat her confession in various places, and was then executed; see _Dict. Nat. Biog._

[5] Illegitimate child.

[6] That is, very probably, Alice Norrington, the mother of Mildred.

[7] _Discoverie of Witchcraft_, 130.

[8] _Ibid._, 132.

[9] See _The discloysing of a late counterfeyted possession by the devyl in two maydens within the Citie of London_; see also Holinshed, _Chronicles_, ed. of 1807-1808, IV, 325, and John Stow, _Annals ... of England_ (London, 1615), 678.

[10] _Discoverie of Witchcraft_, 258, 259.

[11] The spot she chose for concealing the token of guilt had been previously searched.