personal injuries (where it focused on the secret ways of harming
credited to women), well before the rooting out of pacts with the devil
became part of the ideology of the Protestant state.^277
(^277) SRiii. 837; cf. EHDiv. 720 (xxvii), for a case before the commissary of the bishop of
London in 1481 in which Joanna Beverley aliasCowcross was accused of working together
with two ‘accomplice witches’ to make two gentlemen of Gray’s Inn commit adultery with her;
Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 2nd edn. (Harmondsworth, 1973), 32, 60,
276, 278–82, 292 for the uncovering of buried treasure and the new meaning of ‘conjuration’.
Law of injuries and public peace 251