How many witches have been executed in the UK?

Between the mid-sixteenth and early eighteenth centuries, an estimated 2,500 to 3,000 people were executed for witchcraft in Britain. Roughly 500 died in England, more than 2,000 in Scotland and five in Wales. English and Welsh courts hanged them. Scottish courts usually strangled the condemned at the stake and then burned the body.

Key Facts

• Estimated total: around 2,500 to 3,000 executions across Britain. No complete count exists.
• England: about 500 executions, almost all by hanging, because English law treated witchcraft as a felony and not as heresy.
• Scotland: the University of Edinburgh's Survey of Scottish Witchcraft lists 3,837 accused. Where a sentence survives, about two thirds ended in execution, which points to more than 2,000 deaths.
• Wales: five executions, all by hanging, between 1594 and 1655, out of roughly 35 to 37 prosecutions.
• Burning in England: reserved for petty treason (a woman killing her husband) and heresy. Mary Lakeland of Ipswich, burned in 1645, is the best-known witchcraft case that ended this way.
• The law: English statutes of 1542, 1563 and 1604 and a Scottish statute of 1563, replaced by the Witchcraft Act 1735, in force from 1736, which ended prosecutions for witchcraft itself.
• Last executions: Temperance Lloyd, Susannah Edwards and Mary Trembles, hanged at Exeter in 1682, are the last confirmed in England. Janet Horne, burned at Dornoch in 1727, is traditionally the last in Britain, though the case is thinly documented.

Why Nobody Can Give an Exact Number

Any single figure for British witch executions is a rounded guess. No central register was ever kept. English cases went to the county assizes, Welsh cases to the Courts of Great Sessions, and Scottish cases to a patchwork of burgh courts, kirk sessions and special commissions. Each kept its own papers, and many of those papers have been lost, destroyed or were never written up at all.

Scotland offers the best data, and even there the gaps are wide. The Survey of Scottish Witchcraft has identified 3,837 accused people, yet it knows the sentence in only about one case in ten of its 3,212 named individuals. In that sample, 205 people were executed, roughly two thirds. Scale that proportion up and the Scottish toll lands above 2,000. The Survey's compilers caution against leaning too hard on the figure, because their list includes people who were only examined by church authorities and never faced a criminal court, and because the executions they can document are probably fewer than those that actually took place.

England's estimate of about 500 rests on a similar patchwork of assize records, pamphlets and local chronicles. Wales, with a small and closely studied body of cases, is the only nation where the count looks close to firm. Add the three together and the British total sits somewhere between 2,500 and 3,000.

The figure covers executions only. Elizabeth Southerns, known as Old Demdike, died in Lancaster Castle in 1612 before she could be tried with the other Pendle defendants, and the records cannot say how many others died of cold, hunger and disease in gaol while they waited. A note on terms: Great Britain only existed as a single state from 1707, and the United Kingdom as we know it later still, so this article gives the figures nation by nation.

England: Hanged at the Assizes

England's first witchcraft statute came in 1542 under Henry VIII. It was repealed in 1547, replaced under Elizabeth I in 1563 and widened under James I in 1604. All three treated witchcraft as a felony, and that single legal detail decided how English witches died. Heresy was a matter for the Church and ended at the stake. A felony was tried by judge and jury at the assizes and ended on the gallows.

An English hanging of the period was nothing like the quick drop of the Victorian scaffold. The condemned stood on a ladder or a cart, the noose was fixed, and the ladder was turned or the cart driven away, leaving them to strangle over several minutes.

Pendle is the case most people know. Ten of the accused were hanged at Lancaster on 20 August 1612, and Jennet Preston had been hanged at York a few weeks earlier. The trials are so well documented because Thomas Potts, clerk to the court, published an account in 1613. He was the court's own officer, and his book reads as a justification of the verdicts, so it has to be treated as a prosecution document and not as a neutral record.

The worst single episode came in East Anglia between 1645 and 1647, when Matthew Hopkins and John Stearne, working as professional witch-finders, helped drive a panic that probably cost more than a hundred lives. Historians disagree on the figure, and on how much of the blame belongs to Hopkins himself. The panic coincided with the First Civil War, which on the usual argument loosened the normal legal checks. English courts did not sanction torture in witchcraft cases, but interrogators in 1645 got round the rule by keeping suspects awake for days.

Burning did happen in England, but not for witchcraft as such. Mary Lakeland was burned at the stake in Ipswich on 9 September 1645 after confessing that she had killed her husband by magic. A woman who killed her husband committed petty treason, and the penalty for petty treason was burning. Margaret Read at King's Lynn in 1590 and Mary Oliver at Norwich in 1659 are usually listed as the same kind of exception.

The last confirmed English executions were the three Bideford women, Temperance Lloyd, Susannah Edwards and Mary Trembles, hanged at Exeter in 1682. The last conviction came in 1712, when Jane Wenham of Hertfordshire was found guilty by a jury and then reprieved.

Scotland: Strangled, Then Burned

Scotland passed its own Witchcraft Act in 1563 and prosecuted on a scale England never approached, in a country with a fraction of England's population. The prosecutions came in waves, with the heaviest panics clustering around 1590 to 1591, 1649 to 1650 and 1661 to 1662.

The standard sentence was to be taken to a stake, strangled and then burned. The Survey of Scottish Witchcraft notes that many of the burning sentences probably involved strangulation first, and that a small number of people were burned alive. Its data record hanging in a single case, and that alongside other crimes.

Several features of Scottish practice pushed the toll up. Torture could be authorised by warrant of the Privy Council. Church courts and kirk sessions worked alongside the civil courts in building cases. Ideas of a pact with the Devil, which James VI set out in his Daemonologie of 1597, carried more weight in Scotland than in England. Historians weigh these factors differently, but together they form the usual explanation for why Scotland executed so many more people.

The traditional last victim was Janet Horne, burned at Dornoch in Sutherland in 1727 after neighbours accused her of using her daughter as a pony, shod by the Devil, to ride to his gatherings. The case is thinly documented, the memorial stone in Dornoch carries the wrong date (1722), and some of the best-known details cannot be confirmed from the records. Nine years later the Act was gone.

Wales: Five Executions

Wales prosecuted roughly 35 to 37 people for witchcraft in the early modern period, depending on how the surviving records are counted, and executed five. Why Wales prosecuted so few remains debated.

The first was Gwen ferch Ellis of Llandyrnog in Denbighshire. She was a cloth spinner who also treated the sick with charms, salves, drinks and plasters, and was paid in wool, corn and butter. In June 1594 she was arrested on the authority of William Hughes, Bishop of St Asaph, and imprisoned at Flint. She was accused of breaking one man's arm, crippling a woman and killing another man by witchcraft. In October 1594 she was hanged in Denbigh town square. Historians of her case argue that her standing as a paid healer made her a prime target for accusation. The last recorded Welsh execution was that of Margaret ferch Richard in 1655.

In what is now Northern Ireland, the best-known case, at Islandmagee in County Antrim in 1711, ended with eight women convicted and sentenced to prison and the pillory, not the gallows.

Were Most Witches Burned or Hanged?

The answer depends on which side of the border you ask. In England and Wales, hanging was the normal punishment. The picture of the English witch tied to a stake owes more to the burnings of Protestant heretics in the 1550s, and to the continental witch hunts, than to the assize records. In Scotland, strangling and burning was the norm.

Counting heads shifts the picture. England and Wales together account for roughly 500 hangings. If the Scottish estimate of more than 2,000 deaths is anywhere near right, and most of those people died at the stake, then more people were burned than hanged across Britain as a whole, by something like four to one. That is an argument built on estimates and the margin could be narrower, but no plausible reading of the surviving evidence puts Scotland's toll below England's.

The popular image of the British witch as a woman burned alive is therefore wrong for England and broadly accurate for Scotland, with the grim qualification that many of those who burned were strangled first.

What Is a White Witch in the UK?

Historically, a white witch was a cunning man or cunning woman: a village practitioner who used charms, herbs, prayers and ritual to heal people and animals, find stolen goods, break curses and sometimes foretell the future. In Wales they were dynion hysbys (a dyn hysbys is a 'man who knows'), and in Cornwall they were called pellars. Neighbours spoke of 'good' or 'white' witches in contrast to the 'black' witch, who was believed to do harm.

The law was not impressed by the distinction. The 1563 Act named using magic to find treasure or to provoke unlawful love as offences in their own right, with death for a second conviction, and the 1604 Act made it a capital offence to consult or employ an evil spirit for any purpose at all. Churchmen went further. William Perkins, the Cambridge Puritan, argued in 1608 that the helpful witch deserved death before the harmful one, because her cures drew ordinary people into dealings with the Devil.

Today the term mostly describes practitioners of modern witchcraft who say they work magic to help and not to harm, and some of them reject the colour labels altogether. Modern Wicca took public shape in England in the 1950s, after the Fraudulent Mediums Act of 1951 repealed the Witchcraft Act 1735. That Act had spent more than two centuries punishing people who merely claimed magical powers. In 1944, a Scottish medium named Helen Duncan was jailed for nine months under it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Were most witches burned or hung?

In England and Wales, witches were hanged, because witchcraft was a felony and not heresy. In Scotland, most were strangled at the stake and then burned. Scotland executed far more people than England (more than 2,000 against about 500), so more witches were probably burned than hanged across Britain as a whole, though every figure is an estimate.

What was the most common execution for witches?

Hanging was the standard in England and Wales. Burning, usually after strangulation, was the standard in Scotland. In England, burning was used only when a witchcraft case also involved petty treason, such as a woman who confessed to killing her husband by magic.

What is a white witch in the UK?

Historically, a white witch was a cunning man or woman who used charms, herbs and prayers to heal, find lost property and break curses, as opposed to a 'black' witch believed to cause harm. The law made no such distinction, and healers such as Gwen ferch Ellis were prosecuted and sometimes executed. Today the term is used loosely for practitioners of modern witchcraft who say they work to help and not to harm.

Sources and Further Reading

• The Survey of Scottish Witchcraft, University of Edinburgh
• Dictionary of Welsh Biography, 'Gwen ferch Ellis' 
• Richard Suggett, A History of Magic and Witchcraft in Wales (2008)
• John Callow, The Last Witches of England (2022)
• Historic England, 'Witchcraft and Witch Trials in England'
• Thomas Potts, The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster (1613)
• The Lawes against Witches, and Conjuration (1645), including the confession of Mother Lakeland, Cornell University Library Digital Witchcraft Collection
• Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft (1999)

This article is part of a series on the history of witches.

Useful background for GCSE and A Level History

• Edexcel GCSE History (1HI0), Option 10, Crime and punishment in Britain, c1000 to present: Key Topic 2 (c1500 to c1700) includes a case study of Matthew Hopkins and witchcraft. The article's sections on English hangings, the Witchcraft Acts and the 1645 to 1647 East Anglian panic fit this topic best.
• Edexcel A Level History, Paper 3: The witch craze in Britain, Europe and North America, c1580 to c1750. This course has a dedicated Hopkins and East Anglia unit, and the Scottish, Welsh and "how many died" material suits its Britain-wide scope.
• OCR A Level History: Popular Culture and the Witchcraze of the 16th and 17th Centuries. The white witch and cunning folk section is the closest match, since the course covers magic in popular culture and the reasons witchcraft was prosecuted.

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