The beginnings – In Europe, during pagan times, people in need sought out ‘sorcerers’, who often lived a little apart, and who would wander around the woods in search of herbs that could be used for cures. They might collect willow bark, that was helpful for the relief of pain, or wormwood and mint for sickness. Or, perhaps, some liquorice to help with breathing difficulties, or blackberries for gout. Comfrey was useful for all sorts of things – healing wounds, muscle and joint complaints. Some dill might also be useful for minor complaints, such as wind or hiccoughs, and a bit of dandelion for the common cold.  Although wealthier clients looked down on the use of common garlic, ordinary people welcomed it as a cure for everything.

Of course, during their foraging, these sorcerers might also find items that were extremely poisonous – foxglove, deadly nightshade, hemlock, monkshood. And that is not to mention the many mushrooms that were highly toxic. As a result, people might have been understandably cautious about sorcerers. And yet the knowledge of the cunning folk was often required.

For some time, such folk belief existed alongside the growing power of the Church. Despite the belief that sickness was a punishment for sin, monks were busy cultivating herb gardens, enabling some control over the body as well as the mind. Increasingly, the old healers were pushed out to the margins. And yet, when approved remedies failed, where else was there to turn? In particular, the perils of childbirth required the presence of cunning women, experienced in the process. As time passed, and a belief in witchcraft became entrenched, the death of a baby or mother meant that the unsuccessful midwife was in an increasingly dangerous position. Some who persevered in this role outside their own family circles would have done so because they were outcasts, desperate for the modest payments, whatever the risk. For others, some combination of courage and common decency might have been the explanation.

There was an increasingly ambivalent attitude to traditional folklore custom, a mingling of fear with fascination. An instance of this might be in attitudes towards the pre-Christian superstitions about the ‘Wild Hunt’, led by a disorderly spirit who could have been female or male. The spectral caper might result in wild revelry, or alternatively, in the destruction of anything in its path. The followers included fairies, elves, Valkyries, and the souls of the dead. It was believed that humans they met were likely to be absconded, swept away to the Underworld or the kingdom of fairies. Fairies, trolls, dwarves and kobolds … which could be helpful, mischievous or malign – they would in time morph into new figures, witches’ familiars. For with the growing authority of Christian belief, there could be only two kinds of spirits – angels and demons. Yet, still, somewhere beneath, in the collective memory, there lurked the tattered remnants of these older spirits.

A clue to this is in the names that would be given to imps and familiars by later witch hunters. Names such as Haussibut or Rumpelstiltskin or Robin Goodfellow, imps and hobgoblins, are the names of familiars that preceded Christianity in European consciousness – and yet, they became listed by Christian theologians as part of Satan’s horde. As such, they could no longer be sometimes playful, sometimes friendly. They embodied pure and constant malevolence.

In the early Middle Ages, while sorcery was condemned, there remained some tolerance of older practices. Those who transgressed might be ordered to observe a couple of years of penance. Nevertheless, in the ninth century, Alfred the Great threatened wiccan with the death penalty. Shortly afterwards, the Canon Episcopi condemned ‘wicked women … perverted by the Devil and led astray by illusions and fantasies induced by demons, so that they believe that they ride out at night on beasts with Diana, the pagan goddess, and a horde of women’.

We begin to see the tropes that would be repeated time and again in the coming centuries. Those who will be most easily drawn in are female, who ‘believe that in the silence of the night they cross huge distances’, and who are deceived by Satan, who ‘transforms himself into the shapes of various different people’. There is one critical difference at this stage. While the Canon Episcopi refers to the women’s ‘weird journeys’, it is stated: ‘It is only in the mind that does this, but faithless people believe that these things happen to the body as well’.

The move to hunt down witches, in earnest, began in the thirteenth century when the Roman Catholic Church established an Inquisition to root out heretics. The Latin word, ‘hairesis’, was a somewhat bland term. Taken from the original Greek αἵρεσις, it signified a choice or the act of choosing. If an individual could not be brought back into the fold, the punishment referred to in the Bible was exclusion.

More ominous connotations arose when the concept evolved to signify factions or sects that could be perceived as constituting a threat to conventional belief and the unity of faith. As such, ‘heresy’ became the crime of holding a belief or opinion contrary to orthodox religious doctrine. Charges of heresy had been used, traditionally, by the Catholic church against religious sects who challenged the authority of Rome, such as Cathars, in Western France close to the Pyrenees, and the Waldensians, dwelling across the French, Italian and Swiss borders of the Alps. In 1258 Pope Alexander IV determined that sorcery and interaction with demons was, similarly, a form of heresy. It would not be until the fifteenth century, however, that the systematic persecution of witches began.

By this time a new idea had crept in: that of a pact, wilfully entered into by those concerned. Drawing on the sixth-century fragment from the legend of Theophilus, in which the protagonist is saved from a deal with Satan through the intercession of the Virgin Mary, the story got recirculated in the thirteenth century. Later, it would evolve into the more detailed Faust myth – the ill-fated doctor who sells his soul in exchange for universal knowledge, sensual pleasure and magical powers that mark him out as a sorcerer. By the fourteenth century, it was becoming just about impossible to separate the concept of sorcery from that of liaison with the Devil.

Valais trials – The first mass trials to be recorded took place in Switzerland, which began in 1428. In dark, shadowy valleys, enclosed by silent mountains, whispers began to spread of vile events. Arrests were made. Sorcery was still a key ingredient in the subsequent charges. Those prosecuted were accused of causing miscarriages, madness, blindness and lameness. It was said that they had murdered children. It was said that they had flown across mountain passes to meet with one another and with other malevolent creatures. It was said they took potions to make themselves invisible or transform into werewolves, in which shape they could kill livestock. Few appeared to believe that such things seemed unlikely. Or if they believed it, they were afraid to speak out.

There was another element to these cases – a pact between each of the accused and the Devil, who appeared to them in the form of some black beast. It could be a bear or ram, a cat, if required, whatever took Satan’s fancy. The variation of guises was handy for accusers, for should any of these creatures be found anywhere close to the homes of the accused, it could be taken as proof of guilt.

Some aspects may seem not just fanciful, but comical. The Devil liked to meet his followers in people’s cellars, drink wine with them, then dress up as a schoolmaster and give them sermons deriding the Church. Cosy and banal though it may strike us, the fact remains that hundreds of people in Valais were burned at the stake for the supposed crime.

There was one further distinctive aspect. Most of the accused at these trials were male. Over time, the idea of the witch would evolve. In particular, it would target females, particularly older women. Charges made in the 1460s in Switzerland against two women, Joan Anyo and Perrissona Gappit, reveal how cases were moving away from the older accusations of sorcery into something darker. While, previously, supposed crimes entailed acts such as raising storms or using curses to make animals fall sick or to cause bad harvests, these cases focused far more on consorting with the Devil. They involved eating the flesh of murdered children and making love with the Devil and his demons. The inquisitors took especial interest in these matters.

Eerie and remote spaces, hidden away among forests and mountains, may have been ideal spaces for the spread of fear of things that lurked in the dark, but superstition and irrational belief was also prevalent in urban spaces. In 1474 a ‘rooster’ residing in Basel laid an egg. The unfortunate creature was prosecuted and there followed a trial, with a prosecutor, defence lawyer and judge. The case against the ‘rooster’ was, essentially, that its behaviour revealed it to be a minion of Satan. The defence case was that this was an unusual but natural occurrence, with hens in certain situations taking on male characteristics. The judge found the bird guilty. It was sentenced to execution and burned at the stake, an event witnessed by a huge crowd.

Innsbruck, Austria, 1485 – a Dominican inquisitor,  Heinrich Kramer, is giving a sermon in church. Not only does congregant, Helena Scheuberin, disagree with his ideas, but she speaks out against them. Boldly. Many would say, inadvisedly. At one point, she curses Kramer in the street. “Fie on you, you bad monk! May the falling evil take you.”

Soon Scheuberin finds herself accused, along with other women, of murdering a knight through the use of sorcery. There is resistance against Kramer from the local bishop, and those accused are released. Kramer remains to contest the decision but he is ordered to leave by the bishop, who accuses him of insanity and some perverse fixation on Scheuberin.

Kramer now returns to Cologne, where he pours his fury into writing a treatise. His Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer  of Witches) is published in 1486. Despite condemnation from leading theologians, Kramer’s prestige grows. The text gains influence, with later editions bearing the name of (the more respected) Jacob Sprenger as an associate writer. Most importantly of all, Kramer has the support of Pope Innocent VIII.

The book suggests that witches are all around, that not only do they work alongside the Devil and his demons, but they are the main instruments of evil in the world. Kramer’s loathing of women will lead him to argue that the huge majority of witches are female. Females are, by their very nature, corrupt and evil, he argues, lustful creatures who entice innocent men into temptation.

Kramer’s book offers a step-by-step guide into how to identify and prosecute witches. He advocates the use of torture to extract confessions. Thousands of women and girls will be tortured and murdered in the coming two centuries. Kramer, himself, will be honoured and given the title of Papal Nuncio. He will live into his mid-seventies, in the context of his time, a grand old age

A mania raging across Europe – a great number of the witch hunts took place in Central Europe, especially, the Holy Roman Empire. This was mainly numerous small German states and Bohemia. Around half of those slaughtered for witchcraft were in Germany. There was a reason for this. It was in that part of Europe where the most intense battle was taking place between the medieval authorities and dissenters.

Although the priest and reformer, Jan Huss, had been burned at the stake in 1415, his followers in Bohemia had continued the fight against the Catholic church. Huss had criticised the corruption of the clergy, and a century later, Martin Luther, a German friar, began his campaign to reform the Church. In 1517 he nailed his ‘theses’ to the door of All Saints’ Church in Wittenberg. Protestantism spread through the voices of Huldrych Zwingli and John Calvin in Switzerland. Central Europe was the heartland of a battle between the churches for followers. Enmities grew increasingly bitter, and there was an advantage in building up the idea of an enemy within, Satan’s legions, who could only be vanquished by the ‘true’ church. When Luther declared that ‘where God built a church there, the Devil would also build a chapel’, it was, in effect, a challenge to the Church of Rome, which could not allow itself to look weaker than the upstart Protestant religion in the face of God’s adversaries.

The trials in Catholic Southern Germany were the biggest spectacles – Eichstätt (1562-1630), Trier (1587-93), Fulda (1603-6), Alzenau (1605), Ellwangen (1611-18), Würzburg (1625-31), Mainz (1626-31), Bamberg (1626-31), Cologne (1639) ... Thousands of people arrested, tortured, burned. As accusations spread, prominent citizens were drawn in. This differed from the normal situation across the rest of Europe, in which the poor were those who were put to death.

The terror of identification would have been intense. It was almost certainly safer to fall in step with the mood. In the height of the mania, there were numerous occasions when accusations were made simply to make the accuser appear pious beyond reproach, a person who so detested enemies of the Church that they were beyond suspicion. For, once accused, it took very little to establish confirmation of guilt.