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The Witchcraft Act 1735 (9 Geo. 2. c. 5) was an Act of the Parliament of the Kingdom of Great Britain in 1735 which made it a crime for a person to claim that any human being had magical powers or was guilty of practising witchcraft. With this, the law abolished the hunting and executions of witches in Great Britain.
Under the Scottish Witchcraft Act 1563, enacted effective 4 June 1563, [7] both the practice of witchcraft and consulting with witches were capital offences. [8] This Act remained on Scottish statute books until it was repealed as a result of a House of Lords amendment to the bill for the post-union Witchcraft Act 1735.
Duncan's trial almost certainly contributed to the repeal of the Witchcraft Act 1735, which was contained in the Fraudulent Mediums Act 1951 (14 & 15 Geo. 6. c. 33) promoted by Walter Monslow, Labour Member of Parliament for Barrow-in-Furness. The campaign to repeal the Act had largely been led by Thomas Brooks, another Labour MP, who was a ...
The Witchcraft Act 1735 (9 Geo. 2. c. 5) put an end to the traditional form of witchcraft as a legal offense in Britain. [53] Those accused under the new act were restricted to those that pretended to be able to conjure spirits (generally being the most dubious professional fortune tellers and mediums), and punishment was light. [54]
In 1735, under George II, it became a crime to claim that someone else was practising witchcraft or in the possession of magic powers. This Act, the Witchcraft Act 1735, repealed all previous acts and ended the hunt for witches and executions for witchcraft. The maximum penalty after this was one year in prison.
The Witchcraft Act 1735 (9 Geo. 2. c. 5) reversed the law, making it illegal not to practice witchcraft but to either claim that there were people with magical powers or to accuse someone of being a witch in Great Britain, [3] (though these crimes were no longer punishable by death).
Conduitt, together with fellow MP's Sir John Crosse and George Heathcote, introduced the Witchcraft Act 1735, an enlightened piece of legislation that abolished the death penalty for witchcraft. The Act marked the definitive end of witch-hunting in Great Britain, introducing instead a maximum penalty of one year's imprisonment for pretending to ...
The Witchcraft Act 1735 finally concluded prosecutions for alleged witchcraft in England after sceptical jurists, especially Sir John Holt (1642–1710), had already largely ended convictions of alleged witches under English law.