New research challenges the view that the 1563 Witchcraft Act targeted Catholic plotters

A new study in the English Historical Review argues that the Witchcraft Act of 1563 was not primarily a weapon against Catholic conspirators. Alexandra Gajda of Jesus College, Oxford, and George Southcombe of Sarah Lawrence College and Wadham College, Oxford, published the article on 9 June 2026. It is open access.

The older interpretation, developed by Norman Jones in 1998 and taken further by Michael Devine in 2015, linked the Act to plots in which priests used conjuring to forecast the queen's death. Gajda and Southcombe say the statute grew out of decades of effort to legislate against witchcraft. Henry VIII's 1542 law made every offence a capital crime, and it was repealed in 1547. Under Edward VI, churchmen including Thomas Cranmer and Peter Martyr Vermigli drafted the Reformatio Legum Ecclesiasticarum, which defined magic as a pact with the devil. That would have made witchcraft apostasy, punishable like heresy by burning. The Reformatio was never enacted, and Edward died in 1553.

The authors point to the common lawyers as the reason the Elizabethan Act was milder. Under Chief Justice Sir James Dyer, they concluded that sorcerers and conjurers might be punished by indictment, fine and imprisonment, but not by burning, "because no president ever seen of". Chief Justice Catelyn cited a case from 1371 to 1372, in which a Southwark man found with a dead man's head and a book of sorcery was made to swear he was no sorcerer. Bishop Edmund Grindal had complained that the secular law would "nott medle" with conjurers and that church punishment was too slight. The authors also show that the anti-Catholic measures of the same Parliament went through a separate statute on false prophecy.

Gajda and Southcombe conclude that had Edward lived to adulthood, it is "entirely possible" that English law would have enabled "a very large hunt, inspired by unbridled religious zealotry". The 1563 Act set hanging for killing by witchcraft and a year's imprisonment with the pillory for lesser harm.

The idea of witchcraft as a pact with the devil has a long history, traced in our guide to witchcraft in the Middle Ages. The 1563 Act stayed in force until 1604. The next law, and the flawed legal process it allowed, is covered in our review of the 1612 Lancashire trials, where a nine-year-old's testimony helped send people to the gallows.

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