Witchcraft as Crime in Early Modern England (1645)
This paper examines witchcraft as a capital crime in early modern England through two primary documents: the "Confession of Joan Williford" and the "Examination of Joan Carriden," originally published in 1645 and reprinted in Ken Macmillan's Stories of True Crime in Tudor and Stuart England. Drawing on these confessions and related scholarship, the paper identifies three core purposes of the early modern penal system — deterrence, retribution, and ritual cleansing — and evaluates how public executions served each function. The paper also critically notes the documents' limitations, particularly their silence on how class and gender shaped legal outcomes for accused witches.
- Introduction: Witchcraft and Crime in Early Modern England: Witchcraft as capital crime in early modern England
- Crime and Punishment in Tudor and Stuart Society: Elizabethan justice system and social context
- The Primary Documents: Williford and Carriden: Analysis of 1645 witch trial confessions
- Purposes of the Early Modern Penal System: Deterrence, retribution, and ritual cleansing explained
- Limitations of the Documents: Class and gender gaps in the sources
- Conclusion: Summary of penal system purposes and source limits
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What makes this paper effective
- It grounds its argument in specific primary sources — two 1645 confessions — rather than relying on secondary scholarship alone, giving the analysis a concrete evidentiary base.
- It applies a clear tripartite framework (deterrence, retribution, ritual cleansing) that organizes the discussion of the penal system in a memorable and logical way.
- The paper honestly acknowledges the limits of its sources, noting what the documents fail to reveal about class and gender, which demonstrates critical source analysis.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper models historical source criticism: it identifies the documents' purpose and intended audience, flags a specific bias (selectivity/imbalance), and notes what a more complete documentary record would have included. This move — using a source while simultaneously questioning its scope — is a core skill in historical writing.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens with a contextual introduction to crime and punishment in Elizabethan England, then introduces and evaluates the two primary documents, analyzes the three purposes of the penal system illustrated by those documents, critiques the documents' gaps regarding class and gender, and closes with a summary conclusion. The structure follows a classic introduce–analyze–critique–conclude pattern suitable for an undergraduate history essay.
Introduction: Witchcraft and Crime in Early Modern England
Witchcraft was a serious social problem in early modern England. It was classified as a capital offence, punishable by death. How punishment was executed, however, depended on a number of factors, including the individual's social status. This paper analyzes witchcraft as a crime in early modern England, illustrating how punishment was implemented and what purposes the penal system served, using two primary documents reprinted in Ken Macmillan's Stories of True Crime in Tudor and Stuart England.
Crime and Punishment in Tudor and Stuart Society
Queen Elizabeth I, on assuming the throne of England in 1558, inherited a number of things, including a judicial system that stretched back to the Anglo-Saxon era. Capital punishment was common at the time, and justice was brutal and swift. Crime and punishment were intertwined with the localized nature of social relations. Criminality could not be disconnected from who the individual was — their social status, their community, or their relations to family. Criminal law violation was therefore seen as a violation of localized norms of social obligation, kinship, and blood.
The Primary Documents: Williford and Carriden
The two documents selected for analysis are the "Confession of Joan Williford" and the "Examination of Joan Carriden." The documents were originally published by J. G. Publishers in 1645 in a book titled The Examination, Confession and Trial of Joan Williford, Joan Carriden and Jane Hott … Confession of Elizabeth Harris, Not Yet Executed. Ken Macmillan reprints the documents in his book Stories of True Crime. Together, the two documents present the confessions, trials, and executions of Joan Williford and Joan Carriden, self-confessed witches in early modern English society. They are intended to provide insight for history students, scholars, authors in the field of history, and anyone else interested in understanding how the legal system in early modern England operated.
The documents are focused on witchcraft as a crime punishable by death. The principal people involved in both cases are the self-confessed witch (the examinant), Robert Greenstreet (then mayor of Faversham), and the jurors tasked with hearing the case and pronouncing judgment. The documents, however, exhibit one notable form of bias: selectivity and imbalance. They present only one interpretation of events — confession — leaving much to be desired regarding what happened when an accused person failed to confess to the crime.
Judging from the tone of the documents, the authors' intention appears to have been to convey to their audience the seriousness associated with crime in early modern England. The author references God multiple times and seems to associate crime with sin, creating a somber mood designed to show the audience that, in the society in question, wrongs committed against a fellow human being were considered just as serious as those committed against God.
The plot of both cases can be summarized as follows: witchcraft was considered a serious crime in early modern England, punishable by death. Joan Williford and Joan Carriden were both witches who confessed to their crimes and were executed before Mayor Greenstreet and other jurors in 1645.2 In their confessions, the witches alleged that they had engaged in the practice to gain wealth and to take revenge on their enemies.3 They accused the devil of lying to them and considered themselves worthy of death for having forsaken God.4
Purposes of the Early Modern Penal System
The documents reveal crucial insights about the purposes of the legal system in early modern English society. Judging from the witch trials described, one can argue that the system served three main purposes: deterrence, retribution, and ritual cleansing.
As the cases of Williford and Carriden both illustrate, executions were not conducted in private but before large public gatherings. According to Briggs and colleagues, witchcraft was punished by hanging: the prisoner would stand on a ladder high above the crowd with a noose around their neck, the ladder would then be kicked away, and the victim strangled to death.5, 6 The spectacle served as a warning of the consequences of sin, and the spectators would carry the memory of that scene with them for the rest of their lives.7 Public execution thus served simultaneously as punishment for the wrongdoer (retribution) and as a deterrent to deviance among the rest of the population.
The early modern penal system also served the purpose of ritual cleansing. By flouting the laws that governed society, criminals cut themselves off from the rest of the community.8 In order for their crimes to be set aside, wrongdoers needed to be cleansed of their wrongdoings before being accepted back into society. Those facing execution were expected to undergo this cleansing so that their souls could be received into heaven.9 The ritual cleansing activity, as Williford's case demonstrates, involved acknowledging one's wrongdoing and the justice of one's punishment, and requesting forgiveness from both God and the community.10 In her ritual cleansing speech, Williford acknowledged that she had done wrong and deserved to die because she had forsaken God and allowed herself to be deceived by the devil.11
The documents, however, offer only an implicit commentary on the case of witchcraft in early modern English society. They leave the audience with doubts as to whether the penal system was truly fair, or whether the women were punished harshly in part because of their low social status. Both women confess to having joined witchcraft in order to gain wealth, which itself indicates their poverty and low standing in society.12
Conclusion
Witchcraft in early modern England was recognized as a capital offence, punishable by death. Women were punished harshly for engaging in witchcraft, and witch trials were conducted publicly before large crowds as a way of deterring deviance among the broader citizenry. The condemned were hanged as a form of retribution but were first given the opportunity to be cleansed of their wrongdoings and to obtain forgiveness from both God and the community. Deterrence, retribution, and ritual cleansing were thus the three core purposes of the penal system in early modern England. The documents analyzed here, however, do not provide an explicit commentary on all dimensions of the issue: they do not supply evidence on how class and gender influenced the treatment of the accused within the penal system of early modern English society.
Bibliography
Briggs, John, Harrison Christopher, McInnes Angus, and Vincent David. Crime and Punishment in England: An Introductory History. London: UCL Press, 2005.
Macmillan, Ken, ed. "Witches of Faversham." In Stories of True Crime in Tudor and Stuart England. London: Routledge, 2015.
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