Were witches actually burned at the stake?
In songs, stories, horror films and detective fiction, the witch always burns. In continental Europe, people convicted of witchcraft certainly did burn: approximately 40,000 victims, the majority of them women, went to the stake between 1428 and 1782. Indeed, a German chronicler, writing in 1590 in the aftermath of a hunt, described the execution ground as looking “like a small wood from the number of stakes” driven into the earth.
Witchcraft was seen as an “exceptional” crime that struck at the foundations of society, Christian belief and governance. As such, it demanded exceptional punishment. Death by fire, previously reserved for heretics, suggested ritual purification and destroyed any hope of a bodily resurrection for the accused at the Last Judgment. The punishment was intended to terrify and obliterate a witch in both the present and the hereafter.
However, this picture requires some important qualifications. In France, the German princely states, Scotland and Switzerland, the “witch” was usually strangled before the flames took hold. And in Sweden, “witches” were beheaded before being burned.
Conversely, in England – as in North America – where cases were tried as felonies in secular courts, those convicted did not burn but were hanged. The English legislation of 1542, 1563 and 1604 focused upon harmful magic – where people, crops or animals had been allegedly damaged by magic – rather than on putting suspects on trial for expressly concluding a pact with the devil. This, combined with the refusal to sanction judicial torture, acted as brakes on large-scale hunts.
Not that this came as much consolation to the “Bideford witches”, who, in 1683, became the last women to hang in England. They died at the very moment that Newtonian physics, the politics of Locke, and judicial scepticism promised the dawning of a new age based not upon fear and hatred but upon hope and human reason.
John Callow, author of The Last Witches of England (Bloomsbury, 2021)