Chronicles of Persecution: King James I's Dark Mission | Parable

four hundred years ago one man launched a crusade against the forces of darkness to people who believe literally in magic these are murder weapons and they're terrifyingly effective that man was king james the first ruler of both scotland and england he believed that satan and a conspiracy of witches were trying to kill him i do not know satan sir what powers did satan offer you what diabolical promises did he make to you he even wrote a manual on the dangers of witchcraft this is the story of how one man's paranoia sparked persecution across the british isles the witch hunts have to be one of the greatest injustices ever seen in british history it involved hundreds if not thousands of women being put to death for crimes they could never have committed in this film we reveal extraordinary archaeological discoveries showing that belief in witches survived the king's crusade they knew that it was dangerous but if you believe something deeply enough then the fact that your life is in danger of doing it is not going to stop you in 1590 the british isles were ruled by two monarchs the english queen elizabeth the first and king james vi of scotland in may of that year james was returning home from denmark with his new wife anne but this honeymoon voyage turned into a nightmare as the flotilla crossed the north sea an enormous storm blew up according to a sensational account of the incident the king's ship in particular was buffeted by extreme winds and huge waves it said that the ship behaved differently from all the other ships in the flotilla that was coming across with with the royal ship itself that the winds affected it differently that it couldn't be controlled by the sailors in a natural way and therefore it was thought that the storm must have been caused unnaturally that james and anne must be its target the idea that the storm had been generated specifically to kill the royal couple seeded a terrible fear in james's mind the young king was already nervous with good reason he had powerful enemies and he had been abandoned as a baby when his mother mary queen of scots was forced to flee the country james grew up in a pretty terrible context for a young monarch he succeeded a mother who gets a head hacked off an english jail his dad's already dead strangled off an attempt to blow him up there are four guys in charge of scotland while james is growing up and all of them are either murdered or executed or driven into exile and when james becomes a man before he leaves scotland there are apparently two attempts to kidnap or assassinate him one of which is foiled only by him pinning the assassin's head under an arm and screaming for help no wonder he's edgy as james brooded on the storm that had almost killed him he became convinced that this was another assassination attempt but this time it had been orchestrated by sorcerers and witches his fear of the threat posed by witchcraft had grown during his stay in the danish royal court denmark is one of the intellectual centers of witch hunting and the age so it's probable that he's been discussing witches and demons with some of the most interesting minds in europe and come back to scotland interested in putting this into practice there's no doubt that he's simply reflecting a europe-wide trend this is the very period in which which trials are starting to boom all over the continent witches were believed to be allies of satan and his demons in the late 16th century fear of satan's power was at its height because of hatred between rival factions in the church and altogether in europe the period of most witch trials is that in which protestant and catholic are most at each other's throats where the traditional western christian church is being torn in half between warring creeds who truly believe that the others inspired by the devil the urge to eradicate evil lit fires of hatred throughout western europe in france and germany tens of thousands were sentenced to a terrible death there's one description that talks about a forest of stakes where basically people have just been burnt in vast numbers and there's a sense that the whole thing has got out of control a real panic sweeps certain parts of europe if you want a quintessence of horror go to a small north german town called kedlinburg in 1589 where 133 women were burned alive in one day it's a horrifyingly painful way to die you're lucky if it's quick you only need to burn about 20 or 30 people at a time an average-sized north european town of the age to create the impression of a forest of flaming stakes and to ensure that if there's the slightest breeze blowing the houses on the leeward side of the square opposite the wind are going to be coated from the cobblestones the pavement the roofs of human fat in 1590 the full horrors of mass witch purges had not reached the british isles but king james was about to change that the storm that had almost sunk his ship convinced james that satan was trying to destroy him the king now unleashed a war on satanic terror that would bring persecution and death to hundreds of his subjects his fear extended to the widespread popular belief in magic this now became a thought crime punishable by death in the 16th century every village had folk magicians who used herbs and spells to cure illnesses solve people's problems or even influence the weather these men and women were called wise or cunning folk in the museum of witchcraft in boss castle cornwall there is remarkable evidence of the importance of magic in daily life this is a handwritten book of magic dating from the late 16th century and it's the personal notebook of a wise woman or cunning man and it is fascinating evidence of the role that magic played in people's everyday lives it's a real mixture of herbal remedies love charms how to obtain magical objects so this is a spell for obtaining magical stones out of a swallow take him out of the nest and cut him in the middle and you shall find within the belly of it three stones of diverse colours virtue of the first is if thou wilt give it to any woman that travis the child she shall be speedily delivered the virtue of the redstone is if thou put it in thy mouth thou shalt obtain anything that wilt demand [Music] healing magic was particularly important because doctors were very expensive these traditional healers they were really very central people in their communities right at the heart of people's lives and magic actually liberated and empowered ordinary people and helped them to cope with the challenges that they faced one of these healers was agnes sampson who practiced in keith in scotland during the 1580s her clients included wealthy gentry as well as the very poorest she had won wide respect for her work as a healer and a midwife but she would soon become ensnared in one of the biggest witch trials in scottish history healing magic could shield people from illness and misfortune but it could also have darker purposes it was believed to have the power to injure as well as cure this is a very striking spell because it shows how protection magic could blur into cursing people did use curses but generally in retaliation when someone had done them some wrong and this is a spell to make a thief confess you make a picture of an eye and then you drive a nail into the eye the thief will then suffer pain in his eye until he comes and confesses to the theft most of the objects here are for destructive magic they're the classic image of a victim into which the person making the image inserts pins or daggers or other means of destroying their lives [Music] the church made no distinction between the good and the evil forms of magic so people who believe literally in magic these are murder weapons and they're terrifyingly effective orthodox elite christian belief can't really believe that magic can come from anywhere but the devil the old practical folk distinction between good and bad magic with magic being a neutral force rod like any technology is completely transformed in established christian belief into a part of the all-out war between good and evil [Music] in 1590 james vi became a crusader in that war on evil he presided over the arrests of dozens of people who he suspected had raised the storm that had almost drowned him [Music] one of the women caught in this troll for suspects was agnes sampson the respected healer from keith in north east scotland james's obsession with rooting out evil drove him to interrogate her himself when did satan first come to you i do not know satan sir what diabolical promises did he make to you what form did his imps take one of the extraordinary things about what happens in scotland in the 1590s is that james the king gets personally involved in the interrogation of the suspected witches and actually himself conducts the questioning of agnes sampson this is a very strange thing for a monarch to be doing at this time but it's a reflection of how deeply involved james is with the subject of demonology and not just with the abstract intellectual idea of demonology but the practical application of witchcraft in his own kingdom he's an academic scholar conducting research and wants to do it first hand and also he found it fascinating unaware on your body did you suckle these imps i know no answer what powers did satan offer you and did you believe his lies no sir to start with agnes says that she's a healer she says that she's not a witch she doesn't do any of that kind of thing but then she's taken away and tortured agnes was subjected to excruciating pain she tried to explain to her torturers the techniques that she had used to treat the sick [Applause] she even recited a healing prayer all kinds of ills that ever may be in christ's name like unjustly forth of the flesh and of the bone and in the earth and in the stone come to thee in god's name it combines magic with christianity which was a very important part of folk magic most people who practice magic regarded themselves as devout christians and that the magic that they were using was a gift from god part of the way that god's power manifested itself in the natural world for witch hunters this mixture of religion and magic suggested that christianity had become corrupted by demonic forces with the king's permission agnes sampson's torturers inflicted pain and sleep deprivation to extract a confession under this pressure she accepted that she had made a pact with the devil she was brought back for further interrogation her bizarre confessions were used as evidence against her so you took this black toad and hung it by its heels for three days and collected the venom as it fell into an oyster shell yes sir and if you had obtained a piece of linen cloth that i had worn you would have bewitched me to death yes sir but agnes confessions of spells and devilry were so extraordinary that james struggled to believe them well this is so miraculous and strange that i can only believe that you are an extreme liar come closer sir then agnes shared a secret that convinced james she was indeed guilty of witchcraft she whispered details of james's intimate conversation with anne on his wedding night in denmark but at the time agnes had been hundreds of miles away in scotland this revelation seems to have persuaded james that she must have supernatural powers i think that moment is really significant for james it's a moment of he's being convinced that what is going on is witchcraft and that he's the target of it james seems to have ignored the most obvious explanation for agnes knowledge about his pillow talk with anne one of the things i think to remember about early modern marriages is they were not as private as modern ones are especially if you were a king and a queen so it's quite likely that perhaps a servant would have overheard something that was said there may be gossip about what was said she might have picked it up that way but i don't think she got it from magic according to a detailed account of the trial in a sensational pamphlet called news from scotland agnes sampson also confessed that she was part of a demonic conspiracy of 200 witches summoned by satan to worship him in a church witchers would meet the devil renounce their christianity and pay homage to him often in the most gross form involving kissing the devil's backside the devil had even offered this unholy assembly an image of the king to try to destroy him james was convinced that satan was leading the witches in an assassination plot against him agnes sampson and several others were burned to the stake her death marked the beginning of a series of witch panics scotland executed a higher proportion of its population than almost every other european country it's estimated that two and a half thousand women and men were hanged or burnt at the stake the witch hunts came in waves as suspects under torture incriminated dozens of others but in 1597 scotland's witch-hunting crusade was thrown into chaos it began when margaret aitken a suspect herself turned informer she claimed to be able to identify witches by a secret mark in their eyes but then aitkin destroyed her own credibility she was taken around officially for three or four months and asked to do this so she incriminates quite a lot of people the problem is that on one occasion she starts to identify somebody as a witch and somebody says to her but you've identified this person's not being witch before they've just got different clothes on and at that point the whole thing collapses of course and there is a worry that all of the witches have not been witches all of the trials have been mistrials it was a pivotal moment the exposure of margaret aitken as an unreliable witness threatened to discredit the witch trials james left to defend his belief in the satanic threat he published an extraordinary call to arms against witchcraft he called his book demonology [Music] the fearful abounding at this time in this country of these detestable slaves of the devil james's book is incredibly short and incredibly lucid and incredibly well structured it's a good piece of literature but only to dispel the doubting hearts of many both such assaults of satan are most readily practiced james's book demonology really becomes a handbook for the hunting and the persecution of witches it's enormously influential and remains so for the next 50 to 60 years at least and there are a number of very high profile trials that draw directly on the influence of james's book [Music] demonology's influence might have remained in scotland but in 1603 queen elizabeth the first died and james vi of scotland inherited her throne as james the first of england he brought his terrifying book with him demonology puts the king himself in the forefront of witch hunting as a result it makes witch hunting an official part of the new british state there is now a line to be followed it provides a brief simple text which all sorts of further ideas and publications can spring in 1604 james passed a new witchcraft act in both england and scotland the titan penalties for this supernatural crime he even ordered the burning of a book written by an englishman called reginald scott scott's volume the discovery of witches argued that philosophy and science disproved their powers i think that scott got to james he angered him he was good enough to make james worried and affronted and came just the wrong point which is when james himself is trying to convince everybody of the reality of the evil he is describing james inherited a kingdom crackling with religious tensions in 1605 catholic conspirators including guy fawkes almost succeeded in assassinating the king in the gunpowder plot to a devout protestant like james catholic images and rituals could easily become acquainted with magic and even witchcraft catholicism was still widely practiced in areas like pendle in lancashire this created a perfect breeding ground for demonology's deadly ideas this is a county where there is a lot of political and religious deviance and that so this is really this is the kind of powder keg really what you really need on top of this is an incident that touches the whole thing off and you also need crucially you need a magistrate in this case a man called roger nowell who is very keen to persecute those who are associated with catholicism and this is a situation a very feverish and fraught situation where catholics and witches can be associated with one another in this climate of intolerance and suspicion it took just one incident to trigger a witch hunt alison devis a girl from a poor family in pendle would be at the center of the nightmare to come alison's the granddaughter of somebody called elizabeth dem dyke who is thought to be a witch or a cunning person and her mother also is thought to be a witch as well so she has this background where she's part of a family who are cunning people who are magicians of one kind or another and who are also very poor so that they often come into conflict with their local community alison met a peddler called john law who was traveling to a nearby town she asked him for some pins which had uses both in white and black magic there are records from time of people using an apple or an onion as an image of the heart of the person who they wanted to fall in love with them and sticking pins into it as a form of sympathetic magic as she was a teenage girl that may well have been what she and her friends were particularly interested in but john law refused allison's request as he left her he was stricken by paralysis on one side of his body he later complained that he had been bewitched alison was brought before the pendle magistrate roger nowell when alison davis is interrogated she confesses that she did it she may be shocked that her magic can have such power she may even feel guilty um but confess she does and this this mixture of the misfortune the accusation of witchcraft and the confession and also the magistrate who's prepared to take it seriously is a very kind of toxic mix which starts this whole witch hunt going searches of alison's home discovered a human effigy the family claimed it was for healing magic but it was seized on as physical evidence of witchcraft i think it's very important the way that demonology demonized traditional folk magic it is really quite remarkable that someone's healing charm a charm that they specifically said they used to heal the sick could be produced in evidence at their trial alison's entire family was questioned in the search for more evidence of witchcraft including her younger sister janet devis but janet was just nine years old and under english law child testimony was inadmissible in a normal trial james notoriously says that special kinds of evidence are permissible and witch trials because proof is so hard to find including for example the evidence of children and the evidence of a child is absolutely central to the pendle trials king james's own book demonology had fed the fear that would consume the pendle witches when you look at the record of the pendlewitch trials point by point it's virtually a checklist of james's main arguments about witchcraft if james is the theory then pendle is the practice james describes the different kinds of witches poor and rich so do the penal trials james describes the process by which people become witches the pendle trials tick those off point by point in the confessions janet devis gave evidence against her mother and brother they were hanged with her sister alison next to seven others ensnared in the witch hunt but despite james's efforts to stamp out witchcraft it still seemed to have the power to strike close to the king in 1618 francis manners the sixth earl of rutland one of the king's privy council accused witches of murdering his young son henry [Music] manners was lord lieutenant of lincolnshire and frequently entertained king james in beaver castle historian tracy bormann is investigating the bizarre tragedy that struck the earl's family i first became aware of the witches of beaver through the pages of a novel actually which i was reading for pleasure and i was just absolutely gripped by the story from day one and i thought this can't be true i knew it was loosely based on a real legend a local legend and therefore i sort of set out on this quest to find out more about the witchcraft case francis manners had travelled in europe at the height of the witch hunts when witchcraft was seen as the terrorism of its day striking innocents with deadly fools one of the most remarkable elements of this is that here on this tomb in black and white is a statement by the earl himself saying that my two sons were done to death by wicked practice and sorcery it was incredibly rare to find on any tomb such an accusation let alone on one of the most noble families in the country it's a statement and he wanted everybody in the future to know that this is what had happened to his sons and his sons are also depicted here on this tomb in rather solemn procession the eldest of the sons henry holding a skull to represent his fate but behind the sad tale of loss recorded on the tomb lies a disturbing mystery the earl blamed witchcraft for the death of both of his young sons and he found suspects close at hand a single mother joan flower and her two daughters had all been employed as lowly servants of beaver castle margaret the eldest daughter was found guilty of stealing provisions from the castle and they were all dismissed and it was that that supposedly prompted the mother to set out on a path of revenge and destruction against the family at beaver castle the women were arrested in 1618 and charged with killing young henry manners by witchcraft the sensational pamphlet reporting the case recorded that while margaret and philippa were working in the castle they had stolen the boy's glove they had given it to their mother who treated the glove as if it represented the boy himself she repeatedly stabbed it and then she burnt it but the boy had died five years before these charges were brought so why had the earl waited so long to accuse the women of witchcraft one clue lies in manor's close relationship with the king james's book demonology had recently been republished it does seem that it was a bit of a setup and probably i think it was the earl of rutland who was doing his king james a favor by bringing james's work demonology back into the public eye because the pamphlet that describes the case actually refers to demonology upfront in the preface it reminds people of this king's great work on the history of witchcraft and exactly how which is ought to be dealt with the pamphlet claimed that the women had taken wool from a mattress at beaver castle joan flower then allegedly mixed the wool with blood and water and boiled it to curse the earl and his wife with [Music] infertility the flower family were taken to lincoln castle for trial the prison where they were held is as forbidding today as it was 400 years ago coming down into this dungeon the atmosphere immediately changes it's very cold there's a real sense still hundreds of years later of desolation of the desperation that the prisoners must have felt down here and still we see where the chains would have been bolted back to the walls and the prisoners tethered there it really is quite a miserable wretched place the judge who tried margaret and philippa flower and several others caught up in the beaver case may have been the same man who had sent the pendle witches to the gallows six years earlier even the evidence laid before him closely matched the claims made in the pendle trial you can see very similar evidence brought forward it was very formulaic there was all the sort of classic elements of the witchcraft case they're familiars they're packed with the devil the curses that were uttered by the accused they all come out in this case as they did in several others at around this time the chief witness for the prosecution was king james's close friend and ally the earl of rutland there would have been one witness in the case of the beaver witches and that was the earl himself francis manners who was the first up on the witness stand and of course you can imagine how his evidence was heard by the you know the hush in the courtroom there could be only one outcome with such a high profile witness as the earl margaret and philippa flower were executed their mother died in custody the pendle and beaver trials demonstrate how demonology had become a handbook for witch hunting james's belief in which is very much flattered his own view of himself as king because he was setting himself up as satan's chief opponent on earth so there was very much a political undertone to his persecution of witches it gave him a very powerful role as king what he's actually doing as well is establishing a reputation for a king who is absolutely certain of his views absolutely unyielding upon them and thereby in fact going to cause people who don't entirely agree to make their views as rigid and flexible and articulated in return the stage being set for a colossal clash between the monarch and his nation but by the end of his reign james himself was beginning to question some of the bizarre evidence and confessions used to convict witches the growing interest in science in the early 17th century made it harder to believe in such fantastical tales of demons and devilry by the time james died in 1625 almost 30 years after demonology was published witch hunts in england seemed to be dying out the king had done his best to root out witchcraft but amazing new evidence from an excavation in cornwall suggests that his campaign failed archaeologist jackie wood has uncovered a series of pits which appear to contain disturbing ritual offerings the earliest date from the 1640s long after james had died these three pits are actually grouped together and that she got a radio carbon date for this one and what's really amazing about this one it's the only one of the only round pits we've got as the most of them rectangular they've skinned the swan put the swan pelt lined the pit with the swamp pelt you can actually see the swamp pelt still in here they put two magpie birds either side and then between it 55 eggs seven with with baby chicks ready to hatch inside from bantam to duck egg size and that's a lot of commitment this was at the time when people were hunting witches and anybody doing anything pagan it was a really dangerous thing to be doing jackie has found further evidence of magical practices at the same site she has discovered a specially dug pool filled with strange offerings these are the contents of a votive pool we've got an incredible selection of textiles heather branches cherry stones human fingernail pairings usually when they throw pins into votive pools they bend them and then make a wish this seems to be a traditional thing but all our pins are straight so we think that possibly the pins have been actually used as a pin by pinning things like the human fingernail pairings and the human hair to the textile and throwing it in therefore throwing a part of themselves into this pool this wishing well seems to have been destroyed in the 1640s probably as part of a crackdown on magic and witchcraft the pit was dug from the medieval period and the thing is it was capped it was purposely filled in the evidence suggests that it was filled in during the english civil war this exploded in 1642 when parliament took up arms against king james's son charles there was a parliamentarian called major seeley based in cintavs during the civil war and he employed local men to fill in all these ritual pools um these pagan pools and we think this was actually filled in then because we've got ceramics from the top dating from that period in the chaos caused by the war witch hunts burst out again in england and scotland claiming hundreds more lives [Music] the legal system broke down so that experienced judges who might have dismissed witchcraft cases could no longer tour the country on circuit into this vacuum in east anglia steps a nobody a minor gentleman who isn't a judge isn't even a professional lawyer called matthew hopkins who's dying of tuberculosis probably he's certainly dying he's raised his consciousness by reading continental stuff on witchcraft and he is determined before he dies to purge his region of evil hopkins lived in manning tree in essex in 1645 one of the most murderous witch hunts in british history began here when he teamed up with another puritan gentleman called john stern there's something incredibly evocative about this foreshore in manning tree as you can see this is kind of one support you can see there's still boats here today it was once an incredibly thriving place where there was trade being brought in from the north sea and the continent but also ideas too radical ideas political ideas religious ideas which partly explains why this in the stower valley was a hotbed of puritanism in the first half of the 17th century and exactly the sort of place where witchfinders like hopkins and stern could have played out some of their demonic fantasies matthew hopkins even claimed that he had heard witches gathering in manning tree some seven or eight of that horrible sect of witches had their meeting close by his house and had several solemn sacrifices there offered to the devil he left a record of his actions starting with a chilling verse from the bible thou shalt not suffer a witch to live hopkins and stern harnessed existing grievances and fears of witchcraft between neighbors the witch hunters brought these disputes before essex magistrates as full-blown criminal charges one of the most shocking occurred in the nearby parish of lawford one sunday morning in the spring of 1645 prudence hart a pregnant woman of the parish was worshipping here in the church behind us and experienced severe abdominal pain she staggered from the church in agony and collapsed somewhere out in the lane over there immediately went into labor and gave birth to a stillborn child now this was incredibly powerful evidence that the hearts had been bewitched a local widow ann west and her daughter rebecca were blamed for causing the miscarriage they were arrested and charged with witchcraft hopkins and stern now toured other towns in the east of england looking for more suspects their accusations became wilder as they were bewitched by their own fears [Music] their modus operandi would be to get the suspect isolated to keep them awake for as long as three days three nights to march them up and down to use a form of brutal leading questioning which didn't leave much room for denials and for protestations of innocence hopkins recorded some of these interrogations in an account he wrote soon afterwards in it he claims to have witnessed the monstrous creatures summoned by the suspected witches elizabeth clark this old woman disabled woman is interrogated personally by hopkins and after the period of three days she cracks and she says i'm ready for my imps to come and she gives them names they're called things like sack and sugar and grizzle reedy gut and pie whack it the accounts basically say that this parade of animals comes into the room but they are obviously not natural animals which seems to confirm that finally this old woman is a witch and that these are the creatures through which she commits her crimes hopkins pamphlet shows how victim and accuser could share the delusion that their hallucinations were demonically real there are these watchers who are watching day and night possibly by candlelight who are expecting that something is going to happen they are actually very afraid maybe then when a mouse walks into the room or a dog or a cat their minds play tricks with them and i think that there are reasons for thinking that the descriptions of these weird creatures are honest and sincere even if it was nothing other than a cat casting a long shadow or something the self-styled witch finder general arrested and tortured as many as 300 women across eastern england about 100 were executed but in the late 17th century the witch panics fueled by demonology began to burn out the last execution for witchcraft in england was in 1682 almost a century after james's book was published but the remarkable finds in savioc cornwall showed that the king's fanatical crusade failed the site proves that magical beliefs lived on for centuries afterwards i believe that this is a really unique site and from the archaeology there doesn't seem to be any more pits found like this in britain or in europe as far as we know but they give us a brief insight a special insight into somebody's belief system that's very private and very sort of secret until now over the last 12 years jackie has discovered more than 40 pits lined with the skins of different birds and animals they are all within yards of the one containing swan feathers that dates from 1640 and this is a hundred years later than that one it's dated to 1740s and it's lined with fur not feathers and when we actually analyzed it it's lined with cat fur so they've skinned a cat lined the pit with this black cat fur um put a piece of quartz two thirds of the way up and extraordinarily above the quartz was 22 eggs and every single egg had a baby chick in it ready to hatch i do believe that it is some kind of witchcraft these bizarre ritual burials appear to span 350 years from the 17th century right up until remarkably recent times this is the latest one we had and this is really exciting because this one is actually lined with different colored brown and black fur all the way around the outside of it and then it's got the legs of a goat put around the inside of the base of it and then at the head of the goat with its teeth and around its head under its head with a piece of plastic and a piece of orange bailey twine now the thing is bailey's time was invented in the 60s and basically didn't come to cornwall to the 1970s so i've got 1970s pit so we've got we're dating from the civil war 1640 to 1970 of people putting these pits in this valley the animals and birds buried in the saviock pits seem to be part of a lost tradition of belief but none of the fines on the site show any association with satanic rituals they were a terrible myth that cost thousands of lives there is no evidence whatsoever that anybody who was tried for witchcraft in early modern england actually worshipped the devil there's a fair amount of evidence that some of the people who were put on trial did practice magic in a folky kind of way some of them almost certainly did curse their neighbors in fits of ill temper and for purposes of revenge but the satanic conspiracy the anti-religion imagined by witch hunters was purely a fantasy one of the great ironies of the witch hunt is that the demonological descriptions of what witchers do at the sabbath of all these terrible things of killing children of a world being disturbed and turned on its head actually those things are do really happen but they happen in those episodes of witch hunting so that the fantasy of the witch's sabbath never existed but actually in a strange way it is projected onto the witchers and that these scenes of the mass burnings are actually visions of hell made real on earth the horror of what was done to women like agnes sampson has given us the term witch hunt as a shockingly vivid description of the worst kind of injustice this really was such an unjustified persecution of these poor women who really had done no wrong other than being slightly different to their neighbours they may be older they were often poorer or single unmarried women and they were seen as a threat therefore because they didn't quite conform to the usual pattern of society king james's book demonology provoked an ideological war that swept up thousands of innocents it's a warning from history that we dare not ignore

Channel: Parable - Religious History Documentaries

Views: 63,099

Keywords: Parable - Religious History Documentaries, ancient beliefs, criminal justice system, documentary series, gender studies, history hit, occult history, pendle witches history, personal war on witchcraft, political power struggles, religious persecution history, religious wars, salem witch trials, salem witch trials influence, supernatural beliefs, vendetta, violent history, witch history lessons, witch hunt fever, witch trials of britain, witch trials scene recreation

Id: U0pONVbIFsE

Length: 47min 4sec (2824 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 23 2021