Witchcraft in Early North America - Alison Games [10]
In many respects, these deviations from normal legal procedures contradicted other prevailing trends in the legal culture of the era. In these centuries, law became transformed in ways that would seem familiar to Americans in the twenty-first century. Courts became more centralized, thus applying standard policies and punishments to guilty parties. Courts expected witnesses to see the crimes of which they spoke; juries were not supposed to have an active interest in the outcome of trials; confessions were not to be compelled by force; witnesses, likewise, should not endure pressure to provide testimony.23
Where courts banned torture, executions tended to be less frequent and accused witches rarely confessed to diabolical practices. The relative absence of torture in the Netherlands, where less than 150 people were executed out of a population of 1 million, for example, might explain the low number of executions there. In England, juries (not judges) tended to determine a witch’s guilt or innocence, and they tended to be lenient. The English also rarely employed torture: it was used once (illegally) during the English Civil War. In Scotland, torture was employed more frequently (but still illegally). There were some significant panics in Scotland in the sixteenth century, and a large witch hunt in England in the 1640s, but there was never anything like the massive hunts that occurred in central Europe. The kingdoms of England and Scotland experienced perhaps 5,000 prosecutions for witchcraft during the era of the witch hunt, and probably half of those were in Scotland, with perhaps 1,500 to 2,500 executions.24
Another key to acquittal was the rise of centralized states, as people with a greater distance from the personal conflicts that expressed themselves in witch accusations tended to bring greater skepticism not to witchcraft in general but rather to the particular features of any given case. The lack of centralization in the Holy Roman Empire, composed of a collection of individual political entities, is one explanation that historians have offered for the high number of accusations, trials, and especially executions there (20,000–25,000), in contrast, for example, to France, where the Parlement of Paris, the kingdom’s main judicial body, gradually gained control over reviews of regional jurisdictions’ decisions about guilt and overturned local sentences. Between 1588 and 1624, the Parlement ended up dismissing 36 percent of cases, and confirmed only 24 percent.25 By 1640, the Parlement no longer prosecuted witches, and this termination of prosecutions extended to the whole kingdom in an edict in 1682. There were perhaps only 1,000 executions in France. Likewise, although ecclesiastical courts employed torture in Spain and Italy, executions there were infrequent, largely because the Inquisition was a centralized institution. In the kingdoms of Spain and the Italian states, there were about 10,000 prosecutions altogether, many for minor offenses, with very few executions. Iberian and Italian authorities, for the most part, had little interest in allegations of Devil worship, the most serious offense witches committed. Most crimes there pertained