Witchcraft and Devil Lore in the Channel Islands

1712, when the jury convicted an old woman named Jane Wenham of Walkerne, a little village in the north of Hertfordshire, and she was sentenced to be hanged. The judge, however, quietly procured a reprieve for her, and a kind-hearted gentleman in the neighbourhood gave her a cottage to live in, where she ended her days in peace. About the mobbing of reputed sorcerers, it is recorded that in the year 1628, Dr Lamb, a so-called wizard who had been under the protection of the Duke of Buckingham, was torn to pieces by a London mob.

While even as late as April 22nd, 1751, a wild and tossing rabble of about 5,000 persons beset and broke into the work-house at Tring, in Hertfordshire, where seizing Luke Osborne and his wife, two inoffensive old people suspected of witchcraft, they ducked them in a pond till the old woman died. After which, her corpse was put to bed to her husband by the mob, of whom only one person—a chimney-sweeper named Colley, who was the ringleader—was brought to trial and hanged for the detestable outrage. The laws against witchcraft in England had lain dormant for many years when an ignorant person attempted to revive them by filing a bill against a poor old woman in Surrey, accused as a witch; this led to the repeal of the laws by the statute 10 George II. 1736.

Credulity in witchcraft, however, still lingers in some of the country districts of the United Kingdom. On September 4th, 1863, a poor old paralyzed Frenchman died in consequence of having been ducked as a wizard at Castle Hedingham, in Essex, and similar cases have since occurred; while on September 17th, 1875,—only ten years ago—an old woman named Ann Turner, was killed as a witch, by a half-insane man, at Long Compton, Warwickshire. In Scotland, thousands of persons were burnt for witchcraft within a period of about a hundred years in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

Among the victims were persons of the highest rank, while all orders of the state concurred. James I even caused a whole assize to be prosecuted because of an acquittal; the king published his work on Dæmonologie in Edinburgh in 1597; the last sufferer for witchcraft in Scotland was at Dornoch in 1722.