The Bizarre Tests Used in Witch Trials, and the People Who Faced Them

Witch trial tests were procedures used in Britain and Europe from the late Middle Ages to the eighteenth century to prove witchcraft without a confession. They included swimming, pricking for the Devil's mark, sleep deprivation, the touch test and weighing. Most were built so that almost any result counted against the accused, which is why they supplied convictions at Pendle, in East Anglia and at Salem.

Key Facts About The Tests Used in Witch Trials

• Swimming: the accused was bound and lowered into water. Floating was read as guilt, because water was thought to reject a witch.
• Pricking: a pin or bodkin was pushed into a suspected Devil's mark. A spot that felt no pain or stayed dry of blood was read as proof.
• Watching: suspects were kept awake for days while watchers waited for a familiar spirit to appear. Sleep deprivation produced many of the confessions in East Anglia in 1645.
• Touch test: a murdered body was believed to bleed if its killer touched it. Jennet Preston faced this test in 1612 and was hanged at York.
• Weighing: the Dutch town of Oudewater issued certificates of normal weight to accused people. By local tradition, nobody weighed there was ever condemned.
• Matthew Hopkins and John Stearne ran the East Anglian witch hunt from 1645 to 1647. Estimates of the executions linked to them run from about 100 to 300.
• John Kincaid of Tranent was Scotland's most notorious professional pricker. He was recorded from 1649 and was imprisoned by the Privy Council in 1662.
• Gwen ferch Ellis was hanged at Denbigh in October 1594, the first recorded execution for witchcraft in Wales. The country recorded about 35 trials and five executions in total.
• George Burroughs recited the Lord's Prayer without error on the gallows at Salem on 19 August 1692, and was hanged anyway.
• The Witchcraft Act 1735 ended prosecutions for the crime of witchcraft. A mob still killed Ruth Osborne at Tring in 1751 after ducking her as a witch.

A test that can only come out one way is a verdict with a ritual attached, and most of the tests used against suspected witches in Britain and Europe were built like that. Float in the pond and you were guilty, because water refused the servants of the Devil. Sink and you might drown, which settled the question in a different fashion. Feel nothing when a pin went into a mole and you carried the Devil's mark. Cry too little under questioning and your dry eyes counted against you.

Magistrates, ministers, a king and a succession of professionals paid for results all took these tests up, so they cannot be written off as the folklore of a credulous countryside. This article sets out the main tests, the reasoning behind each one, and the cases in which they were used, from Denbigh in 1594 and Pendle in 1612 to East Anglia, Salem and a Hertfordshire pond in 1751.

Where the tests came from

Britain had been testing guilt by supernatural verdict centuries before anyone was hanged as a witch. Anglo-Saxon and Norman courts used the ordeal. A suspect might carry a hot iron, lift a stone from boiling water, or be lowered bound into a pool, and the outcome was read as God's judgement. In the cold-water version the innocent were expected to sink, since water blessed by a priest would receive them, and the guilty to float. The Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 forbade clergy to bless ordeals. In 1219 the English justices were told to find other methods, and the trial jury took its place over the following decades.

The logic outlived the ritual. Under the Witchcraft Acts of 1563 and 1604, harming people by magic could mean the gallows, yet the crime left no body, no stolen goods and rarely any witness except a neighbour who had quarrelled with the accused. Folk tests filled the gap, and a king gave them respectability. James VI of Scotland, who attended the North Berwick examinations in 1590 and 1591 and published Daemonologie in 1597, argued in print that water would refuse those who had renounced their baptism. A village practice now had a theory behind it, and the theory had a royal author.

Swimming: the test that punished both outcomes

The usual procedure ran as follows. The accused was stripped to a shift, bound (accounts commonly give the right thumb to the left toe), and lowered into a pond, river or moat on a rope. A body that floated was guilty. A body that sank was innocent, provided the people holding the rope pulled it out before the lungs filled. English law never gave swimming formal standing as proof, and some judges disliked it, but the test usually took place before a case reached a courtroom. A suspect who floated arrived at the assizes already marked.

Matthew Hopkins used it hard. A Manningtree man who styled himself Witchfinder General, a title Parliament never gave him, Hopkins worked with John Stearne to run the largest witch hunt in English history across Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk and neighbouring counties between 1645 and 1647. Estimates of the number executed on their evidence run from just over 100 to around 300, depending on how the East Anglian records are counted. By the end of 1645 the authorities had moved against swimming, and Hopkins was warned off using it without the suspect's consent.

Among those swum was John Lowes, parson of Brandeston in Suffolk, a man of about seventy and unpopular with his parishioners. Hopkins had him searched for marks and then swum in the moat at Framlingham Castle. Lowes began to confess, and he was hanged at Bury St Edmunds in August 1645 with others condemned in the same sessions.

A popular story says that angry villagers finally swum Hopkins himself. No reliable evidence supports it. He died at Manningtree in August 1647, probably of tuberculosis.

Pricking: a pin, a mole and a fee

Pricking rested on the belief that the Devil sealed his pact with a witch by leaving a mark on her body. It might be a blemish, a mole, or an extra teat from which a familiar spirit was said to suckle. Searchers, often women, stripped the suspect and looked. Where looking proved nothing, a pricker drove a pin or bodkin into the suspect spot, which was expected to be numb and to stay dry of blood.

Pricking became a trade. In Scotland the men who did it were called brodders, after the brod, or bodkin, and they moved from burgh to burgh for a fee. John Kincaid of Tranent is recorded as a pricker from 1649 and was the most notorious of them. In 1662, after complaints that he had found the Devil's mark on an innocent person, the Privy Council imprisoned him, then released him on condition that he stopped pricking without its permission. By then many of the people he had pricked were dead.

The temptation to cheat was built into the system, because a pricker was paid when he found a mark. Accounts of the trade describe bodkins with retractable points, where the blade slid back into the handle so that the pin appeared to sink into the flesh without pain. A pricker working in the north-east in 1662 under the name John Dickson was reportedly exposed as a woman, Christian Caddell, who had been taking fees in men's clothes. Two women she had pricked, Isobel Elder and Isabel Simson, had already been burned at Forres.

Watching: how sleeplessness produced confessions

English common law allowed judicial torture only under a royal warrant, which put the obvious ways of obtaining a confession out of reach. The East Anglian hunters found one that left no marks. Watching meant keeping the suspect awake, sometimes for days, sometimes walked up and down a room, while watchers waited for a familiar to arrive: a fly, a mouse, a cat or a dog that had come to feed from the witch's body. Hopkins defended the practice in his 1647 pamphlet as a way of seeing the imps and not a means of forcing a confession. Three or four sleepless nights are enough to make almost anyone see things, and the records show it working.

Elizabeth Clarke, an elderly woman of Manningtree in Essex who is reported to have had only one leg, was watched in March 1645 and began naming the spirits that visited her, among them Vinegar Tom, Sack and Sugar and Newes. She named other women in turn. Those accusations opened the Essex campaign, and Clarke was among those hanged at Chelmsford that summer.

The touch test and a bleeding corpse

The touch test, or cruentation, came from the belief that a murdered body would bleed afresh if its killer touched it. It was used across Europe wherever a death had no obvious cause.

Jennet Preston of Gisburn had worked in the household of the Lister family at Westby Hall. After Thomas Lister's death, a witness claimed he had cried out in his last hours that she lay heavy on him, and when she was brought to his corpse and touched it, the body was said to bleed fresh blood. Thomas Potts, the clerk who wrote the official account of the Lancashire trials, set it down as proof. Gisburn then lay in Yorkshire, so she was tried at York on 27 July 1612, separately from the Pendle accused, and hanged on the Knavesmire. Ten of the Pendle defendants were hanged at Lancaster on 20 August. The case against several of them leaned heavily on the testimony of nine-year-old Jennet Device, who spoke against her own mother and brother.

At Salem in 1692 the idea ran in reverse. The girls who claimed to be afflicted fell into fits at the sight of an accused person, and the fits were said to stop the moment that person touched them. The court treated the sudden calm as proof.

Tears and the Lord's Prayer

Some tests worked on the face and the voice. Heinrich Kramer's Malleus Maleficarum of 1486 held that witches could not shed genuine tears, so a woman who stayed dry-eyed while being questioned about her life could be read as guilty, and one who wept could be accused of faking it. Shock dries some people's eyes and floods others. On that logic neither reaction cleared her.

Salem tested another belief: that a witch could not recite the Lord's Prayer without stumbling. George Burroughs, a Harvard-educated former minister of Salem Village, was convicted in August 1692 and stood on the ladder at Gallows Hill on the 19th to recite it, without error. According to the critic Robert Calef, some in the crowd called for the execution to stop. Cotton Mather, watching from horseback, told them that Burroughs had been lawfully convicted and had never been ordained, and that the Devil could appear as an angel of light. Burroughs was hanged, and so were four others that day.

Weighing: the test that could acquit

The belief behind weighing was that a witch, lacking a soul or lightened by her pact with the Devil, would weigh less than an honest person. Every market town had scales, and any weigh-house could be pressed into service. Oudewater, a small town in the province of Utrecht, became famous for doing it fairly. Local tradition says the Emperor Charles V granted the town the right in 1545 to weigh suspects and certify the result. Accused people travelled from across Europe, paid for the weighing, and left with a certificate declaring them of normal weight. The town's museum says nobody weighed there was ever condemned.

Weighing is the exception that shows what the other tests lacked: a result that could go in the accused's favour. It worked only because the officials running it chose to read an honest scale honestly.

The witch cake

Not every test was applied to the accused directly. In February 1692, in Salem Village, Mary Sibley, a neighbour of the minister Samuel Parris, told two of his enslaved servants, Tituba and John Indian, to bake a cake of rye meal and the urine of the girls who had begun to suffer fits, and to feed it to a dog. The folk theory held that the dog, linked to the witch through the afflicted girls' own bodily fluid, would reveal her. Formal complaints against Tituba, Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne followed within days. Nineteen people were eventually hanged at Salem, and Giles Corey was pressed to death for refusing to plead.

Wales: Gwen ferch Ellis and a charm written backwards

Wales offers a useful contrast. Surviving records list about 35 witchcraft trials and five executions in the whole country, all of them in the north. The first recorded execution was Gwen ferch Ellis, hanged in Denbigh town square in October 1594.

Gwen came from Llandyrnog in the Vale of Clwyd and earned her living as a cloth spinner and healer, treating people with charms, salves, drinks and plasters and taking payment in wool, corn and butter, according to the Dictionary of Welsh Biography. She was arrested in June 1594 on the authority of William Hughes, Bishop of St Asaph. Her name had come into the record through a quarrel between the gentleman Thomas Mostyn and Jane Conwy, a gentlewoman who counted Gwen as a friend. A written charm, reported to have been written backwards, was found in Mostyn's household and attributed to her. The charges that followed included bewitching a man by breaking his arm, laming a woman and murdering another man by witchcraft.

As far as the surviving record shows, no swimming or pricking decided her case. Neighbours' testimony, a charm and a feud among the gentry did the work. If that reading is right, it points to a wider pattern: the elaborate tests were often decoration, applied to an accusation already made for reasons of reputation, money or grievance. Gwen, a healer who earned her own income, fitted the kind of person on whom such accusations settled.

The last swimming

Parliament repealed the Witchcraft Acts in 1735 and replaced them with an offence of pretending to have magical powers. By then the courts had largely stopped hanging witches; the last execution in England had taken place at Exeter in 1682. The tests carried on among people who no longer trusted the courts to do the work for them.

In April 1751 a crier in the market towns around Tring in Hertfordshire announced that a man and a woman would be publicly ducked as witches. They were John and Ruth Osborne, both in their seventies. Ruth had begged buttermilk from a farmer at Gubblecote and been refused, and when the farmer and some of his cattle fell ill she took the blame. The parish overseer put the couple in the workhouse for safety, and the workhouse master moved them to the vestry of the church, but a crowd reported at several thousand threatened to burn the town down unless they were handed over. They were stripped and dragged through a pond. Ruth Osborne died there. Thomas Colley, a chimney sweep who had pushed her under with a stick and collected money from the onlookers for the sport, was tried at Hertford. On 24 August 1751 he was hanged at Gubblecote Cross and left in chains on the same gallows.

Sources

• Thomas Potts, 1613 account of the Lancashire trials, including the arraignment of Jennet Preston at York (Oxford Text Creation Partnership edition)
• James VI of Scotland, Daemonologie (1597)
• Heinrich Kramer, Malleus Maleficarum (1486)
• Robert Calef, More Wonders of the Invisible World (1700), on the execution of George Burroughs
• Malcolm Gaskill, Witchfinders: A Seventeenth-Century English Tragedy (2005), on Hopkins, Stearne and John Lowes
• Julian Goodare and others, The Survey of Scottish Witchcraft, University of Edinburgh, for John Kincaid
• Dictionary of Welsh Biography, entry for Gwen ferch Ellis
• Hertfordshire Archives and Local Studies, material on Thomas Colley and the death of Ruth Osborne

Useful for GCSE and A Level History

This article gives background for the courses below. Check your exam board's current specification for the exact content and dates you need.

The tests described here are examples of the evidence used against accused witches. Exam answers should follow the specific content, case studies and dates set by your own specification.

Regular podcasts by Histories and Castles to help you get a deep dive understanding of histories events and figures.