Faery Harmony

Becoming

Religious Discrimination and misrepresentation

(including 'pagan'):

Under UK Law, since December 2003 it has been illegal for employers to discriminate against prospective and current employees because of their professed religion or the practices of their religion.

Witchcraft Laws

The first Act of Parliament directed against witchcraft was the act De hæretico comburendo, passed at the instigation of Archbishop Thomas Arundel in 1401. It specifically named witchcraft (sortilegium) "sorcery", or "divination", as a species of heresy and the accused witch was to be burnt at the stake. This law, however, was directed against an ecclesiastical offence, not technically a felony in common law and offenders were tried before an ecclesiastical tribunal.

Folk of Medieval times had long suspected that the Devil was carrying out his evil work on earth with the help of his minions and in 1484 Pope Innocent VIII declared this to be the truth in his Papal Bull. This led to the big European witch hunts notably in Germany, France and Scotland which lasted for nearly two centuries.

The start of the sixteenth century saw religious tensions that resulted in increased penalties for witchcraft in England. The Witchcraft Act 1541 provided that "It shall be Felony to practise, or cause to be practised Conjuration, Witchcraft, Enchantment or Sorcery, to get Money; or to consume any Person in his Body, Members or Goods; or to provoke any Person to unlawful Love; or for the Despight of Christ, or Lucre of Money, to pull down any Cross; or to declare where Goods stolen be." Felonies were punishable with death.

A later statute of Henry VIII provided the same death penalty for "invoking or conjuring an evil spirit". This statute was repealed by his more liberal son, Edward VI.

The persecutions were fuelled by difficult times for ordinary people in the early seventeenth century. Religious strife between Catholics and Protestants, political arguments leading up to the Civil War, rising inflation meaning higher food prices and a huge increase in the gap between rich and poor. Many people turned to spiritual and alternative guidance in these tough times and Henry VIII used witchcraft as a charge against his wife, Ann Boleyn.

England's most notorious Witchcraft Act was passed in 1563 by Elizabeth I.

It provided that anyone who should "use, practise, or exercise any Witchcraft, Enchantment, Charm, or Sorcery, whereby any person shall happen to be killed or destroyed", was guilty of felony without benefit of clergy and was to be put to death. This removed the accused witches from the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts to the courts of common law.

This law was broadened further in 1604 by Elizabeth's successor James I (James VI of Scotland), who wrote a treatise on Dæmonologie. It brought the penalty of death without benefit of clergy to any one who invoked evil spirits or communed with familiar spirits. It led to the most pervasive witchhunts in English history and was this statute that was enforced by Matthew Hopkins, born in Wenham (Suffolk), the son of a minister and the notorious "Witch-Finder General". He received a fee for every witch that was hanged and it is estimated that he had more that 400 people killed, predominantly elderly, lonely women of country ways who had no-one to defend them. In 1645 Essex was in the grip of witch fever when there were 36 witch trials.

Between 1560 and 1680 in Essex alone 317 women and 23 men were tried for witchcraft, and over 100 were hanged.

 After the Restoration, the witch hunting gradually died down, not because people had ceased to believe in or fear witches, but because the witch-hunting enterprise smacked of the "enthusiasm" and revolutionary Puritanism that led to the regicide of Charles I.
The last execution for witchcraft under the 1563 Witchcraft Act was in 1682 and the last trial was in 1712. The law was repealed in 1736. People had moved on due to the new rational way of thinking encouraged by new discoveries in science. Living standards also improved, reducing tensions in rural areas.

The statute was replaced under George II by the Witchcraft Act 1735 that marked a complete reversal in attitudes. No longer were people to be hanged for consorting with evil spirits. Rather, a person who pretended to have the power to call up spirits, or foretell the future, or cast spells, or discover the whereabouts of stolen goods was to be punished as a vagrant and a con artist, subject to fines and imprisonment.

In 1751 in Tring, Hertfordshire, villagers floated Ruth Osborne, a woman accused of witchcraft. She died in the ordeal and Thomas Colley, a local chimney-sweep and one of the ringleaders of the trial was hanged for murder.

In 1944, Helen Duncan was the jailed under the Witchcraft Act on the grounds that she had pretended to summon spirits. It is contested that her imprisonment was in fact at the behest of superstitious Intelligence officers who feared she would reveal the secret plans for D-Day. She came to the attention of the authorities after supposedly contacting a sailor of HMS Barham whose sinking was hidden from the general public at the time. She spent nine months in prison.
Later that year, Jane Rebecca Yorke was the last person convicted under the Act. The last threatened use of the Act was in 1950 against a medium.

The last Witchcraft Act was repealed with the enactment of the Fraudulent Mediums Act 1951, largely at the instigation of Spiritualists through the agency of Thomas Brooks MP and although it was still legally in force in the Republic of Ireland, it was never actually applied.

It is not illegal to be a witch in the UK!