33 Theme 1 - Changing attitudes to witchcraft in Britain

The Breadth Frame

This is a Paper 3 breadth theme, so the exam issue is change over time across c1580-c1750. Do not treat the topic as a list of strange cases. The central question is: why did witchcraft become less credible as a crime in Britain?

The answer has three connected strands.

Use this chronological spine:

This pattern is not a simple victory for "science". Witchcraft prosecutions declined because several supports were weakened at once: printed demonology was challenged, possession cases were exposed, judges became harder to convince, and elite culture became more willing to ridicule witchcraft evidence. Popular fear did not vanish, but it became less able to secure convictions in court.

Sources need careful judgement. Witchcraft pamphlets were often polemical, commercial or partisan. A pamphlet defending a prosecution may be useful evidence for what believers wanted readers to accept, but it is not neutral proof that witchcraft occurred. A sceptical pamphlet may expose weaknesses in evidence, but it may also serve religious or political rivalry. A strong historian uses these sources for attitudes, arguments and procedure, not just for facts.

Scot and Harsnett

Reginald Scot's The Discoverie of Witchcraft appeared in 1584, at a time when belief in witchcraft was still legally and socially powerful. The English statute of 1563 had made some kinds of witchcraft felony, and prosecutions in counties such as Essex showed that neighbourly suspicion could become deadly. Scot's importance was that he attacked the assumptions behind those prosecutions from inside late Elizabethan culture, not from a modern secular viewpoint.

Scot's argument had several layers. He insisted that much evidence against witches was weak: guesses, rumours, suspicious timing, accusations from children, and confessions extracted from frightened or vulnerable people. He also argued that many supposed wonders could be explained by fraud, illness, melancholy, natural causes or conjuring tricks. He was especially concerned for poor elderly women who could not defend themselves against more confident neighbours.

Scot was radical, but he was not simply a modern atheist before his time. He still wrote in a Christian framework. That made his attack more effective in one sense and more limited in another. It was effective because readers could accept that witch prosecutions were unjust without abandoning religion. It was limited because many people believed Scripture required them to accept the existence of witches. James VI of Scotland, later James I of England, wrote Daemonologie in 1597 against sceptical views, and the 1604 English Witchcraft Act showed that Scot had not ended official belief.

The Boy of Burton case in 1597 shows why Scot's kind of scepticism mattered. Thomas Darling, a boy from the Burton-upon-Trent area, suffered fits and visions after an illness. Local suspicion fell on Alice Gooderidge of Stapenhill and her mother Elizabeth Wright, both already vulnerable to accusations. Darling's symptoms were interpreted as bewitchment. Gooderidge was searched for witch-marks, pressured, convicted at Derby, and died in prison.

The case became more damaging to witchcraft belief because it was tied to the career of John Darrel, a Puritan minister associated with exorcism and the "dispossession" of those supposedly possessed by demons. Darrel's method encouraged a dangerous chain: a sufferer appeared possessed; the possession was linked to a witch; the accused person was then treated as the cause of the illness. If the possession was fraudulent or coached, the witchcraft accusation collapsed with it.

Samuel Harsnett's 1599 publication, A Discovery of the Fraudulent Practices of John Darrel, attacked Darrel's exorcisms as fraud. Harsnett treated cases such as William Somers of Nottingham, Thomas Darling of Burton and Katherine Wright as evidence that possession could be performed, learned and manipulated. His target was not only one minister. He was attacking a whole system in which dramatic fits, godly fasting, exorcism and accusations against suspected women reinforced each other.

Harsnett's influence mattered for three reasons.

The early turning point, then, was not that England stopped believing in witches. It was that some educated Protestants began to argue that witchcraft accusations could be produced by fraud, bad evidence, religious rivalry and social panic. That gave later sceptics a foundation.

Frauds and Doubtful Cases

The specification names three later doubtful cases before Jane Wenham: the Pendle Swindle in 1634, the Demon Drummer of Tedworth in 1662, and the wider impact of frauds and doubtful cases. These mattered because scepticism often grew through case experience. People did not need to reject every supernatural belief in order to ask: "Is this witness lying? Is this child repeating a story? Is this evidence physically possible?"

The Pendle Swindle of 1634 took place in Lancashire, a region already associated with the famous Pendle trials of 1612. That earlier memory mattered. It gave Edmund Robinson's accusations a ready-made local script: witches, meetings, familiar spirits and hidden gatherings near Pendle could sound plausible because they echoed a well-known story.

Robinson was a young boy whose accusations led to a new wave of arrests. His story helped send accused women towards trial, and some were convicted. But the case then moved beyond local pressure. The Crown and Privy Council intervened. Some of the accused were brought towards London; further examinations were made; Robinson was separated from his father; and he confessed that the story was invented. The episode became a classic example of how child testimony, local memory and family pressure could create apparently convincing witchcraft evidence.

The Pendle Swindle encouraged scepticism because it exposed several weaknesses in witchcraft prosecution:

The case did not end witch-hunting. Matthew Hopkins and John Stearne still helped produce a major East Anglian witch-hunt in 1645-47, during the disruption of civil war. That is the key limitation. Fraud exposed in 1634 did not automatically defeat belief in 1645. Scepticism grew unevenly and could be overwhelmed by fear, war, local disorder and zealous witch-finding.

The Demon Drummer of Tedworth in 1662 was different. It was less a conventional witch trial than a dispute over evidence. John Mompesson of Tedworth in Wiltshire had taken away the licence of a travelling drummer, apparently because it was forged. Soon afterwards, Mompesson's household was said to be troubled by mysterious drumming, noises, moving objects and other disturbances. The case attracted visitors and became one of the most famous "haunting" stories of Restoration England.

Joseph Glanvill, a clergyman and member of the Royal Society, investigated and defended the case as evidence for the reality of spirits. This is important because not all educated or "scientific" men were sceptics. Glanvill feared that denying spirits and witchcraft could lead to atheism. He used collected testimony as if it were empirical evidence for the supernatural.

Yet Tedworth also helped scepticism. Charles II sent investigators, and the disturbances were reportedly less impressive under official scrutiny. Sceptics mocked the case and treated it as trickery or household fraud. The drummer was later tried under the witchcraft statute but acquitted. The significance is subtle: Tedworth did not simply prove scepticism. It made the debate about standards of proof unavoidable.

By the 1660s, therefore, changing attitudes were visible in public argument. Believers still defended witchcraft vigorously, but they had to answer accusations of fraud, performance, coincidence and unreliable testimony. Sceptics were no longer only isolated writers. They were becoming a recognisable audience.