ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the crime of witchcraft in England from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth century. The crime was both exceptionally serious and extremely hard to prove. In early modern Europe it was considered one of the most serious crimes, highly dangerous in several respects. Despite a widespread agreement as to its seriousness, proving a clandestine and often witnessless crime was extremely thorny. The period in which witchcraft was a crime coincided with major developments in legal procedure, criminal evidence and the structure of the English legal system. The legal literature routinely presumes the rules of evidence to be general and unaffected by the severity of the crime. The common-law rules of evidence do not necessarily possess real objective value and do not develop exclusively by virtue of their inner judicial logic. The experiments, at the pre-trial stage and judicial approval at the official proceedings, consisted of methodical, rational and carefully constructed procedures employed in the discovery of facts.
