I will now proceed in Mr. Davies' words, heading each incident with the title given it in the collec
- Date of account
- Published 1911
- Source
- Stranger Than Fiction: Being Tales from the Byways of Ghosts and Folk-lore
- Reference
- Stranger Than Fiction: Being Tales from the Byways of Ghosts and Folk-lore · selected passage 139
- Rights
- public_domain
- Language
- English
- Record updated
- 2026-08-24
Record summary
presided at the trial which resulted in the condemnation and hanging of two poor women as witches, and the last execution of the kind took place in 1682 when three other wretched women were executed at Exeter for the same offence, on their own confession
Published source text
Read the available text below. Archive transcriptions may contain OCR errors; later context is labelled separately. A recorded claim is not a finding that it happened.
Source passage
Source text · mention onlypresided at the trial which resulted in the condemnation and hanging of two poor women as witches, and the last execution of the kind took place in 1682 when three other wretched women were executed at Exeter for the same offence, on their own confession. And the statute against witchcraft passed under James the First was not repealed until the reign of George the Second, though by that time it was indeed practically a dead letter. Mental progress and education have since done their part in abolishing that panic fear of witchcraft which, supported by a bad law, caused the persecution and death of so many innocent persons for more than a century; but that belief--genuine if surreptitious--in the powers of "wise" men and women still lingers in the minds of the people in the West Country, one need only live in Wales for a few years to find out.
Historical context
Contextual commentary · mention onlyThis material belongs to a folklore tradition. Story type, collector, community, transmission and literary editing matter when comparing it with other sources.
Modern context
Contextual commentary · mention onlyLattice compares motifs and reported features without assuming that a traditional being is a biological species or that similar stories document one external cause.
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