5 things you (probably) didn’t know about the history of witchcraft

Some suspects belonged to fundamentalist Christian sects. At Salem in 1692, the convicted witches Rebecca Nurse and Martha Corey were among the most pious worshippers at their Congregational church. Joan Balls, accused in Suffolk in 1645, “professed Anabaptism” and was a “runner after the new sects” of Puritanism. Christian ministers in both Suffolk and Salem were accused of witchcraft. The vicar of Brandeston, John Lowis, was deemed to be insufficiently puritanical and was charged with only reading state-approved lessons in church. He recited his own burial service before he was hanged.

• Quiz | Would you have been accused of witchcraft?

At Salem, Reverend George Burroughs repeated the text of the Lord’s Prayer – something thought impossible for witches – when he, too, was hanged. These good Christians were accused largely because they didn’t follow the same religious teachings as those who suspected them.

Thousands of those accused of witchcraft were men

Ask someone to imagine a witch, and the chances are that that witch will be a woman. However, a significant minority – an estimated one in four – of those put on trial for witchcraft were men. Men were sometimes the target of witchhunts because they were related to accused women, or romantically involved with them. In Innsbruck, Austria, in the mid-1480s, a male potter was suspected primarily because he was allegedly the lover of an accused witch, Barbara Selachin.

A significant minority – an estimated one in four – of those put on trial for witchcraft were men

Other men fell under suspicion because they were thought to have turned their godly learning to bad ends. In late 16th-century East Lothian, the schoolmaster John Fian was said to have studied magical texts so that he could unlock doors without a key, and light candles with his breath. He was also accused of learning love spells and using his literacy skills to serve as a minute-taker at satanic meetings.

In some countries, men actually accounted for the majority of those put on trial for witchcraft. In Iceland, for example, they were often accused of acting as priest-like shamans and seers.

Witchhunts targeted Indigenous people

The most famous witch trials in history were undoubtedly those that took place in Salem from 1692–93. Salem was a small coastal town in colonial Massachusetts. Yet not all of those accused were colonists. One of the people ensnared by the accusations was a woman known as Tituba of Salem. Tituba was probably a native South American, enslaved on Barbados and transported to Massachusetts by her employer Samuel Parris. Parris subsequently became minister of Salem village church.

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Tituba was accused while she worked in the minister’s house (she was imprisoned for more than a year, but never faced trial). She no doubt conformed to her enslavers’ religion but doubts lingered that she was not wholly Christian. European settlers associated Native American religions, as well as those of enslaved Africans, with witchcraft because they were not Christian creeds.

Such prejudices were almost certainly a factor in the accusations of witchcraft levelled against several Sami people – migratory herders who lived in the Arctic circle – by their Norwegian neighbours. Among those accused was a Sami woman called Kari Edisdatter. In 1620, Edisdatter confessed to meeting the devil in the form of a ghost, before being burned at the stake.

Lions and bears were thought to practise satanic magic

In the popular imagination, familiars, the demonic animals believed to assist witches in casting spells, are most commonly cats and dogs. Yet those accused of practising magic could, it seems, call upon an entire menagerie of creatures. In 1582, Essex woman Elizabeth Bennett confessed she had a red lion as a familiar.

In Suffolk, 60 years later, Margaret Wyard claimed she had called on the services of “flies, dores, spiders, mice” (dores were bumble bees, known as dumbledores). Margaret’s neighbour Anne Usher said her familiars were butterflies and a polecat, while another Suffolk woman, Mary Scrutton, revealed that her familiar was a bear.

• Read more | A sweeping history of magic – from witchcraft to shamanism

The bear and lion might be explained by people weaving into their confessions images from inn signs or in heraldry, or remembering a travelling entertainer with a chained animal. Smaller creatures were more often cited during interrogations in which the accused was kept awake for days and nights under constant surveillance to see if demonic spirits visited them. Any tiny creature that came near might be identified as a familiar, and once that was suggested to a tortured suspect they might agree that the insects were devils.

Not all witches were old, widowed and isolated

Accused witches were often wives and mothers, fathers and sons with large families – and they could be surprisingly young. Eighteen-year-old Joan Waterhouse was put on trial in Essex in 1566, alongside her mother and a woman who may have been her aunt. Joan confessed to witchcraft but was acquitted, possibly because of her age. It was widely believed that witchcraft was an inherited skill and that witches’ children couldn’t escape indoctrination, and so juries showed mercy for some first offences.

In France in the 1730s, a young religious mystic called Marie-Catherine Cadiere was sentenced to death for witchcraft against a Jesuit priest. But such was the outcry against the verdict in her home city of Toulon that the court decided to free her. In 1640s Suffolk, a boy as young as nine was questioned on suspicion of witchcraft. We don’t know what happened to him – he may not have been tried – but it’s reported that his mother was executed as a witch.

This article first appeared in the May 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine