There were, however, no regular enactments against witchcraft until the reign of Henry VIII. Up to that time, unless the supposed sorceress was also accused of the crime of poisoning, she was not condemned to death. But in 1541, conjuring, sorcery, and witchcraft were all put together as crimes for which capital punishment could be inflicted. Statutes against witchcraft were also enacted in the reigns of Elizabeth and James I.
John Wier, a physician of Cleves, wrote a treatise in 1563, in which he described witches as lunatics labouring under Satanic influence. All women he considered to be peculiarly subject to delusions created by malignant agency, and witches he regarded, in fact, as exaggerated examples of the inherent moral weakness of the female sex.
With the rise of Puritanism in the seventeenth century came a second great wave of superstition. The stern theology of the men of the Commonwealth was embittered by the darkest of beliefs. They were always looking for direct manifestations of the power of evil. It was their conviction that Satan was embodied in the persons of the unhappy women who were called witches, and that to hound them to death was a religious duty. The Puritans held with great firmness that a curse rested on womanhood. They found it quite easy to believe that certain women were specially chosen instruments of evil, for the whole sex they regarded as created for the trial and temptation of men. Undoubtedly the Puritans did much to enforce respect for women at a period when licentiousness was rife. They had an honest desire to raise the standard of public morals, and preserve order and decency. But they were actuated more by a desire to guard men from evil than by a reverence for womanhood. Though individually they made good husbands and fathers, their theology was a relentless creed, which permeated their lives with hard, unsympathetic views, and condemned sinners without mercy. The intense vitality of their belief in the omnipresence of evil clouded their perceptions and blurred their judgment. Hence their readiness to believe in witchcraft, and the savagery of their persecution.
Scripture, they said, was on their side. They pointed to the Witch of Endor, and to the declaration, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” All sorts of gruesome ideas had grown up and been handed down as to the power of witches, and became more widespread and intensified by the fanatical zeal of the Puritans. It was not until the second half of the seventeenth century that the full fury of the persecution blazed forth, though previously there had been frequent trials and executions. Thus in the early part of the reign of James I., who was responsible for much of the persecution, a woman was tried and hanged at King’s Lynn. A sailor had thrown a stone at her boy, whereupon she cursed the sailor roundly, and hoped his fingers would rot off, which happened two years later. Then she got into a quarrel with a neighbour, who was seized with violent pains, and felt the bed rocking up and down. The woman was denounced as a witch and condemned to death. Like other innocent persons accused of crime, she at last got to believe what her enemies said of her, and actually brought herself to confess that she had practised unholy arts.