Jon
Elbourne, University of Wollongong
The manuscript record of Justices interviews with witches and their accusers from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries provide a fascinating insight into the world of village witchcraft. This paper will examine some of these original documents, collected from record offices in England. These documents were written as a record of interview and could be read into the court as evidence in a witch-trial
Do they record the voices of the witches or are they a distorted version of the evidence, designed to produce a conviction by people who had little or no interest in recording witchcraft for posterity?
This paper will examine documents from trials involving the witch-finder, John Stearne, from Essex in 1647, from a witches' sabbat in Somerset in 1669 and from Gloucestershire immediately after the repeal of the Statute in 1736