mar 24, 1735 - Witchcraft Act 1735

Description:

The Witchcraft Act 1735 (9 Geo. 2 c. 5) made it a crime for a person to claim that any human being had magical powers or was guilty of practising witchcraft. With this, the law abolished the hunting and executions of witches in Great Britain. The maximum penalty set out by the Act was imprisonment.

It thus marks the end point of the witch trials in the Early Modern period for Great Britain and the beginning of the "modern legal history of witchcraft", repealing the earlier Witchcraft Acts which were originally based in an intolerance toward practitioners of magic but became mired in contested Christian doctrine and superstitious witch-phobia. Instead of assuming as the earlier laws did that witches were real and had real magical power derived from pacts with Satan, the new law assumed that some individuals displayed abilities beyond the understanding of the court, and if they posed a danger to the realm, they needed to be imprisoned.

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