condemned man down with a heavy oak slab on top of him. Stones were then
piled on top of the slab until the prisoner was crushed to death. The story goes
that an old retainer was present and, affected by Sir Walter’s cries, piled more
stones on the slab as quickly as he could, to end the torture more quickly. The
servant was hanged for interfering with the course of justice.
Religion, treason and the scourge of witches
When Henry VIII broke with the Catholic Church in the 1530s, the scene was
set for more than a century of religious dissent and the criminalisation of
matters of belief. A number of important people were executed for failing to
support the religious stance of the ruling monarch–Protestantism under
Henry and his son Edward VI, Catholicism under Mary, and a return to
Protestantism under Elizabeth, followed by the rise of more extreme forms of
nonconformism in the seventeenth century. Under Mary, some 280
Protestants were burned to death for the crime of heresy; Elizabeth was more
tolerant of religion, but not of treason. When the Pope encouraged English
Catholics to rebel against the queen, they were sought out, tried and executed
for this crime, not for their faith. The failure of James I to support the
Catholics to the extent that they hoped led to the Gunpowder Plot of 1605,
when a group of conspirators hoped to blow up the king, along with other
influential lords, at the Houses of Parliament.
This period also saw the largescale persecution of people accused of
witchcraft across Europe. Before the fifteenth century, witchcraft was seen as
a relatively minor offence, based on selfdelusion or superstition, which had
no place in a Christian society. People turned to witches for help with ailments
and domestic problems, in lieu of other forms of help. Even the church
authorities did so–in Thatcham in Berkshire in 1583, the churchwardens sent
for a‘cunning woman’to help them find the thief who had stolen the
communion cloth from the church. However, papal condemnation of
witchcraft began to grow and the practice was strongly outlawed by 1484. The
Inquisition was given the power to persecute witches, and two inquisitors in
Germany produced a book in 1486, theMalleus Maleficarum,or theHammer
of the Witches, describing their beliefs about the practices of witches, how to
identify witches, and how to try and execute them.
It is believed that half a million people were subsequently condemned to
death across Western Europe. Belief in witchcraft and its powers was
widespread, and few were prepared to oppose the Inquisition’s actions.
There was no Inquisition in England. Queen Elizabeth’s religious tolerance
also extended to witches–only if the bewitched person died was the death
EARLY MODERN CRIME