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Witchfinders were people who were paid to test whether someone was a witch. The witchfinder in Newcastle witch trials came from Scotland. [5] He was paid 20 shillings [2] per "witch" he found. In the end, the witchfinder in Newcastle trials was cast into prison. [1]
He is regularly identified as a witch-pricker in court documents from 1649 to 1662, when his career came to a sudden end after the Privy Council found him guilty of fraud and deceit. [5] Kincaid managed to secure bail after spending just over two months in prison, but did so on the condition that he would not engage in any further torture or ...
Geillis Duncan also spelled Gillis Duncan (b. unknown d. 4 December 1591) was a young maidservant in 16th century Scotland who was accused of being a witch. [1] [2] She was also the first recorded British named player of the mouth harp.
Woodcut image from Newes from Scotland (1591) depicting the devil with Agnes Sampson, one of the witches detailed in the survey [1]. The Survey of Scottish Witchcraft is an online database of witch trials in early modern Scotland, containing details of 3,837 accused gathered from contemporary court documents covering the period from 1563 until the repeal of the Scottish Witchcraft Act in 1736. [2]
Witch trials were most frequent in England in the first half of the 17th century. They reached their most intense phase during the English Civil War of the 1640s and the Puritan era of the 1650s. This was a period of intense witch hunts, known for witch hunters such as Matthew Hopkins .
In the Nordic countries, the late 17th century saw the peak of the trials in a number of areas: the Torsåker witch trials of Sweden (1674), where 71 people were executed for witchcraft in a single day, the peak of witch hunting in Swedish Finland, [41] and the Salzburg witch trials in Austria (where 139 people were executed from 1675 to 1690).
Malkin Tower (or the Malking Tower or Mocking Tower) was the home of Elizabeth Southerns, also known as Demdike, and her granddaughter Alizon Device, two of the chief protagonists in the Lancashire witch trials of 1612. Perhaps the best-known alleged witches' coven in English legal history took place in Malkin Tower on 10 April 1612.
[a] The number of witch trials in Europe known to have ended in executions is around 12,000. [70] There were an estimated 110,000 witchcraft trials in Europe between 1450 and 1750, with half of the cases seeing the accused being executed. [71] Witch hunts began to increase first in southern France and Switzerland, during the 14th and 15th ...