Since 1300, the English government had been concerned with witches, with sorcerers that predicted or made prophecies, which were a threat to the king’s life.
In 1308, Guichard, Bishop of Troyes, was accused of killing the Queen of France by sorcery. In 1419, King Henry V of England, who reigned from 1413 until his death in 1422, denounced his stepmother Joan of Navarre for attempting to kill him by means of spells and incantations, in 1418, she was imprisoned. Joan was released in 1422, and lived until 1437.
Malleus Meleficarum[The Hammer of Witches] was written in 1486 by two German Dominican Inquisitors named. Sprender and Karmer prepared strategies for the use of torture lies. They planned to torture and the offer freedom to those that
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On hearing the crossing had been abandoned, Witches were accused of attempting to drown James by calling up a storm while he was at sea with his new wife. Other charges include trying to kill James by melting a wax effigy of him. They were also accused of performing depraved rituals in a church in Berwick
Anne’s visit to Denmark, a country familiar with witch-hunts, may have inspired James interest in the study of witchcraft. Following his return to Scotland, in 1590 he personally oversaw the North Berwick witch trials, the first major persecution of witches in Scotland under the Witchcraft Act of 1563.
While the witches were accused of classic witchcraft, the main issue as far as James was concerned was the plan to murder him – treason. The trials also had a major political aspect, as there was an attempt to incriminate Earl of Bothwell in the proceedings.
In 1597, James published Daemonologie, his rebuttal of Reginald Scot’s skeptical work, The Discoveries of Witchcraft, which questioned the very existence of witches. Daemonologie was a pessimistic book, presenting the idea of a vast conspiracy of satanic witches threatening to undermine the