The last Indictment for Witchcraft in England
On August 4, 1717, the last indictments for witchcraft in an English secular court occurred in the town of Leicester. Jane Clarke of the village of Wigston Magna along with her son and daughter, Mary and Joseph were dragged before the court by twenty-five of their neighbors who were convinced that they were witches. The villagers accused the Clarkes of harassing them through witchcraft, causing illness and even the death of one villager, Mary Hatchings.
The witnesses told the court, presided over by Justice Ashby, how the witches’ victims were stricken with unnatural seizures. The supernatural nature of their illness was further reinforced when they began to cough up dirt and stones. At night, the witches gave their victims no peace as they manifested before them, in either human or animal form. When the local Church minister failed to break the curse, the villagers were forced to turn to a local ‘white witch’ Thomas Wood for help. Wood attempted to remove the curse and identify the witches by boiling the victims’ urine. His curious cure summoned the shades of the Clarkes into the room where they grimaced threateningly at him before vanishing up the chimney.
Once identified, the Clarke’s were set upon by a mob of angry villagers. They were stripped and searched for witch’s marks and bled to try and break the curse. Then, having decided to bring the Wigston witches to justice, the villagers decided to gather definitive evidence of their witchery by swimming them in the village pond. Each of the Clarke’s floated ‘like a cork or an empty barrel, ” However, Judge Ashby was not convinced and threw the case out of court. Twenty years later, in England at least, witchcraft was off the statute books.
However, it was some 70 years before the last execution for witchcraft occurred in Europe.