ABSTRACT
In the 1630s, as we have seen, however tenacious witchcraft beliefs may have been among the population at large, witchcraft was becoming marginalised both as a matter of concern for central government and the criminal courts, and as a subject of intellectual and theological debate. No big demonological tracts were written, nor were any trial pamphlets, while on the strength of surviving documentation accusations of witchcraft were coming only very infrequently before both the secular and ecclesiastic courts, and when tried at the former were very unlikely to result in a capital conviction. Had the forces apparently at work in the 1630s been allowed to continue, historians of witchcraft in England might well have found little to concern them after that decade.
