Says James
Howell in his _Familiar Letters_, in 1646:
"We have multitudes of witches among us; for in Essex and Suffolk there
were above two hundred indicted within these two years, and above the
half of them executed."
"Within the compass of two years (1645-7), near upon three hundred
witches were arraigned, and the major part of them executed in Essex and
Suffolk only. Scotland swarms with them more and more, and persons of
good quality are executed daily."
Scotland set its seal on witchcraft as a crime by an act of its
parliament so early as 1563, amended in 1649. The ministers were the
inquisitors and persecutors. They heard the confessions, and inflicted
the tortures, and their cruelties were commensurate with the hard and
fast theology that froze the blood of mercy in their veins.
The trials were often held by special commissions issued by the privy
council, on the petition of a presbytery or general assembly. It was
here that those terrible instruments of torture, the caschielawis, the
lang irnis, the boot and the pilliewinkis, were used to wring
confessions from the wretched victims. It is all a strange and gruesome
story of horrors told in detail in the state trial records, and
elsewhere, from the execution of Janet Douglas--Lady Glammis--to that of
the poor old woman at Dornoch who warmed herself at the fire set for her
burning. So firmly seated in the Scotch mind was the belief in
witchcraft as a sin and crime, that when the laws against it were
repealed in 1736, Scotchmen in the highest stations of church and state
remonstrated against the repeal as contrary to the law of God; and
William Forbes, in his "Institutes of the Law of Scotland," calls
witchcraft "that black art whereby strange and wonderful things are
wrought by a power derived from the devil.
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