EXECUTIONS FOR WITCHCRAFT. Curious Facts in the History of English Jurisprudence.

Te Aroha News, Volume VII, Issue 378, 19 June 1889, Page 6

EXECUTIONS FOR WITCHCRAFT. Curious Facts in the History of English Jurisprudence.

Lawykks dispute as to when the last trial | and conviction for witchcraft took place in England, and many of the profession; having so little respect for the memory of Sir Matthew Hale as to. be ashamed of these sentences, have endeavoured to make! out thab the last case occurred in the seventeenth century, in the reign ot Charles 11. Hntchinson, of the " Historical Essay on Witchcraft," writing in 1718, declares that theie had been no execution of a witch for thirty-six years. It is certain, howevoij, thab Jano Wenham was sentenced tb\ death for witchcraft at Hertford in 1712, and Dr. Pair declares that four years after,' at Huntingdon, Mr Justice Powoll, the bame iustice who had tried Jang Wenham, passed the capital sentence on Mary Hicks and her daughter Elizabeth (a child eleven years old), who were actually executed (Wenham got off on a point of law) the 17th of July, 1716. The same writer asserts that ' two unhappy wretches were hung at Northampton in March, 1705, and in July, 1712, five other witches suffered the same fate al the same p : ace.' Doubts have been thrown on Dr. Parr's assertion and on the source — certainly much later in date than liutchin&on's essay— from which he derived it ; and perhaps there we must abandon the imaginative contemplation of so piquant a contrast between enlightenment and barbarism as would be presented by the spectacle of witches being hanged while Spectators and Tatllen were being written, while Swift was pamphleteering on thecon3uet of the allies and Pope poetising the rape of Belinda's lock. Anyhow the act of James 1. continued in force for another twenty years. It was not repealed till 1,736, when at last it occurred to the Legislature that the real mischief of the offence of witchcraft was to be found in the manner of the witch's dealing, not with the devil but with the public. In repealing the ancient statute, therefore, punishment was wisely provided for ' persons pretending to exerci&e or use any kind of witchcraft, sorcery, enchantment, or conjuration, or to discover stolen or lost property by any occult or crafty science.' The former of these provisions would be operative against professors of chiromancy and cartomancy (though not, it is admitted, of astrology), while the latter seems to be aim-id specially at the use of the ' divining rod, J which, 1 believe, is still employed in the mining districts of Cornwall for discovering the whereabouts of unexplored mineral treasures, and the use of which within quite recent times In Somersetshire for the facilitation of wellsinking is discu&sed with due gravity, it may be remembered, by a famous British essayist.