Making Witchcraft Impossible in Law

The 1735 Act did something more radical than decriminalising witchcraft. It repealed the earlier statutes under which people had been tried and executed, and replaced them with an offence of pretending to exercise magical powers or to tell fortunes. In doing so it made a statement about reality: the law would no longer entertain the proposition that anyone could do these things, so a person who claimed to could only be a deceiver. The accused changed from the witch to the fraudster, and the penalty changed from death to imprisonment.

Brian Levack's work on the European witch hunts sets this in the general pattern by which prosecutions across Europe collapsed before the statutes were repealed, driven by judges and by rules of evidence rather than by legislatures, so that by 1735 the courts had already largely stopped convicting. The Act ratified a change that had happened. It also had a long afterlife its drafters cannot have anticipated, because the offence of pretending to exercise magical powers remained on the books, available for use against anyone whose religion or livelihood involved claiming contact with the unseen. That is the point at which a piece of Enlightenment scepticism turned into an instrument of religious regulation, and it stayed one for more than two centuries.