ABSTRACT
This chapter is dedicated to three categories of witnesses in witchcraft cases: children, accomplices and expert witnesses. The testimony of children under the age of 14 was not generally allowed. Sir Matthew Hale remarked that the testimony of a child between the ages of 9 and 13 might be admitted in some cases. The issue of children's testimony was even more problematic in many cases where children were required to give testimony against their own parents. Accomplices were another category of problematic witnesses. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, confessions of accomplices were admitted against each other and even considered as 'specially cogent evidence'. From a legal point of view, the possibility of proving a case by the accomplice's testimony was legitimate and even applauded. The involvement of experts in witch trials generated a debate in which three main elite discourses, the medical, the legal and the theological, interacted, sometimes competing with, and sometimes complementing, one another.
