ABSTRACT
The great European witch-hunt was essentially a judicial operation. Theentire process of discovering and eliminating witches, from denunciation to punishment, usually occurred under judicial auspices. Even when witches took their own lives, they usually did so in order to avoid the often gruesome and apparently inevitable processes of the law.1 Occasionally, agitated villagers took justice into their own hands and executed witches in vigilante style. In 1453 a number of sorcerers from the French village of Marmande perished in this manner, and during the Basque witch-hunt of 1609-11, large crowds broke into the houses of those who had been named and subjected them to violent torture, killing at least one woman.2 In 1662 an angry mob at Auxonne in France lynched a group of women who were considered responsible for the demonic possession of an entire convent of nuns.3 There is no way of determining how many suspected witches died in this illegal manner. In the Polish countryside the numbers may have been fairly high.4 Central governments, however, were very much opposed to this type of rough country justice, since it constituted a challenge to their authority, and they took steps to prevent its recurrence.5 We can be fairly certain, therefore, that a large majority of those persons who were executed for witchcraft during the great hunt were formally and legally tried and sentenced.
