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Liber XXXV · Witchcraft & Wicca

Liber XXXV · Witchcraft & Wicca · Chapter IV: History of Witchcraft

The Witchcraft Act of 1735: How Britain Ended Witch Trials

The Witchcraft Act of 1735 explained: how Britain stopped prosecuting witches, punished pretended magic instead, and kept the law until 1951.

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The Witchcraft Act of 1735, passed by the Parliament of Great Britain and in force from 1736, ended the prosecution of witchcraft as a real crime in England, Wales and Scotland. Instead of punishing witches, it punished people who pretended to use witchcraft, sorcery, enchantment or conjuration, or who claimed to tell fortunes or find stolen goods by occult skill. The Act turned the witch from a servant of the Devil into a fraud in the eyes of the law, and it remained on the statute book until 1951.

What the Witchcraft Act of 1735 Said§

The statute is short. Its long title announced that it repealed the English Act of 1604, "An Act against Conjuration, Witchcraft, and dealing with evil and wicked Spirits", and the Scottish Act passed under Mary Queen of Scots in 1563, and that it provided for punishing "such Persons as pretend to exercise or use any kind of Witchcraft, Sorcery, Inchantment, or Conjuration".

Two provisions mattered most. First, no prosecution, suit or proceeding could be brought against any person for witchcraft, sorcery, enchantment or conjuration, or for charging another with such an offence. In practice this meant that the courts would no longer hear accusations of harmful magic at all. Second, anyone who pretended to exercise these arts, undertook to tell fortunes, or claimed by any occult or crafty science to discover where lost or stolen goods might be found, could be prosecuted as a cheat. On conviction they faced a year's imprisonment without bail and, once in every quarter of that year, an hour in the pillory on a market day; the court could also require sureties for good behaviour. The pillory was abolished in 1837, but the rest of the penalty remained.

Why 1735 and not 1736?§

The Act is cited as 9 Geo. II c. 5, from the ninth year of the reign of George II. Until 1752 the English legal year began on 25 March, so a statute passed in the early months of what we now call 1736 was dated to the parliamentary session of 1735. It took effect in June 1736. Both dates appear in modern books, and both are correct in their own way.

The Laws It Replaced: 1542, 1563 and 1604§

England's first witchcraft statute, passed under Henry VIII in 1542, was repealed five years later. An Elizabethan Act of 1563 made harmful witchcraft causing death a capital crime and lesser offences punishable by imprisonment and the pillory. In 1604, early in the reign of James I — who as James VI of Scotland had written Daemonologie — a harsher Act extended the death penalty to anyone who consulted, covenanted with, entertained or fed an evil spirit, or took up a corpse for use in magic. This was the law under which the Essex and East Anglian trials of the 1640s were held, and under which most English executions took place.

Scotland's Act of 1563 was briefer and more sweeping, making the use of witchcraft and the consulting of witches capital offences. It underpinned the large Scottish panics of the seventeenth century, discussed in Janet Horne and the Last Witch Execution in Scotland. Ireland had a separate statute of 1586, which the 1735 Act did not touch; it lingered on the books until 1821.

Why Parliament Repealed the Witchcraft Laws§

By the 1730s prosecutions had nearly stopped. The last executions in England for which reliable evidence survives took place at Exeter in 1682, when three women from Bideford were hanged. The last English conviction, of Jane Wenham at Hertford in 1712, ended with a royal pardon after the trial judge made clear his disbelief. Scotland's last execution, at Dornoch, came in the 1720s.

Several currents lay behind this decline. Judges had grown increasingly reluctant to accept spectral evidence, the Devil's mark or confessions as proof. Scepticism, voiced in England as early as Reginald Scot's Discoverie of Witchcraft in 1584, became respectable among educated elites. Francis Hutchinson's Historical Essay Concerning Witchcraft (1718) collected past cases to show how often the accused had been innocent. The mechanical philosophy of the new science made a world run by demonic intervention seem less plausible to many, though scientists and clergy were by no means uniformly sceptical.

Politics played a part too. The historian Ian Bostridge has argued that belief in witchcraft became associated with High Church and Tory positions, and scepticism with Whig and latitudinarian ones, so that repeal under the Whig government of Robert Walpole carried a political message as well as a philosophical one. The measure passed with little resistance. The best-known opponent was the Scottish judge James Erskine, Lord Grange, whose speech in defence of the old law was treated by many contemporaries as eccentric.

Belief After the Law: Cunning Folk and Mob Violence§

Repeal changed the law, not popular belief. Many villagers continued to fear witches, to consult cunning folk for protection and to use charms against bewitchment — the world described in Folk Magic and Protective Magic. What the Act removed was the legal outlet for those fears. When communities could no longer prosecute a suspected witch, some took matters into their own hands.

The most notorious case occurred at Tring in Hertfordshire in 1751. An elderly couple, John and Ruth Osborne, were accused of bewitching a local farmer; a crowd seized them and subjected them to the "swimming" ordeal in a pond, and Ruth Osborne died. Thomas Colley, a leader of the mob, was convicted of murder and hanged. The case was widely reported and seen by the authorities as proof that the law must protect suspected witches from their neighbours. Similar assaults, though rarely fatal, were recorded throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and in each case the suspected witch was now the victim in court rather than the accused.

Prosecuting fortune-tellers and cunning folk§

The Act's own offence of pretended witchcraft was used relatively seldom. The historian Owen Davies, who traced its enforcement, found that most prosecutions targeted fortune-tellers and cunning folk accused of defrauding clients — for example by taking money to identify a thief or lift a curse. From 1824 the Vagrancy Act, which treated anyone "pretending or professing to tell fortunes" as a rogue and vagabond, offered magistrates a simpler summary procedure and became the more common charge.

Mediums, Helen Duncan and the Repeal of 1951§

In the twentieth century the Act found an unexpected new target: Spiritualist mediums who claimed to contact the dead. The most famous case was that of the Scottish medium Helen Duncan, convicted at the Old Bailey in 1944 on charges that included conspiracy to contravene the Act, followed later that year by Jane Rebecca Yorke, usually described as the last person convicted under it. The spectacle of an eighteenth-century witchcraft law used in a wartime court strengthened the Spiritualist campaign for reform. In 1951 the Act was repealed and replaced by the Fraudulent Mediums Act, which punished only fraudulent claims made for gain; that story, and the later repeal of 2008, is told in Fraudulent Mediums Act 1951.

The repeal also mattered for the birth of modern Pagan witchcraft. Gerald Gardner published Witchcraft Today in 1954, three years later, and he and his early followers often presented the end of the old Act as the moment when witches could speak openly. Historians such as Ronald Hutton note that the legal risk had been small for some time, but the symbolism was powerful, as described in Wicca and Gerald Gardner.

Legal descendants of the English approach survived elsewhere. Canada's Criminal Code, for example, kept an offence of pretending to practise witchcraft or to tell fortunes until it was repealed in 2018, a reminder of how long the logic of 1736 — magic as fraud rather than as diabolical crime — endured in the common-law world.

Frequently asked questions§

What did the Witchcraft Act of 1735 do?§

It abolished prosecution for witchcraft as a real crime in Great Britain and repealed the English Act of 1604 and the Scottish Act of 1563. In their place it created an offence of pretending to use magic, tell fortunes or find lost goods by occult means.

Was anyone executed under the Witchcraft Act of 1735?§

No. The Act did not provide for execution at all; its maximum penalty was a year's imprisonment, originally with periodic exposure in the pillory. The last British execution for witchcraft took place under the earlier Scottish law in the 1720s.

When was the Witchcraft Act repealed?§

It was repealed in 1951 and replaced by the Fraudulent Mediums Act, after Spiritualists campaigned against its use in cases such as Helen Duncan's trial of 1944.

Did people stop believing in witches after 1736?§

No. Belief in witches and cunning folk persisted in many communities, and some suspected witches were assaulted or even killed by neighbours, as at Tring in 1751. The change was in the law and in elite opinion rather than in popular belief.

Sources and further reading§