RedHanded - DAY 6: The European Witch Craze 1 & 2 (ShortHand’s 13 Days of Halloween)

Episode Date: October 23, 2025

In the last 13 days before Halloween, a different ShortHand will rise from the archives for 24 hours only – before disappearing back into the vault. Get exclusive access to every ShortHand episode ad free only on Amazon Music Unlimited.--For over a thousand years, witches were believed to be local soothsayers who used their powers for everyday charms and spells. But in the 16th and 17th centuries, Europe was suddenly gripped by a new idea: that witches were part of an organised demonic network, plotting with the devil himself to cloud the whole world in evil.And to stop the armies of darkness, more than 200,000 people were executed across Europe for the crime of witchcraft.In the first half of our two-parter on Europe's witch hunters, H&S look at how it grew into a state-sanctioned frenzy, why it lasted for over 200 years, and some of the more gruesome torture methods they used to extract confessions...In part two, we take a look at how the insanity spread to the UK thanks to a paranoid new king and a 19-year-old, self-styled Witchfinder General. Plus: what really goes down at a witches’ sabbath, and why did women make up 90% of the thousands killed?Exclusive bonus content:Wondery - Ad-free & ShortHandPatreon - Ad-free & Bonus EpisodesFollow us on social media:YouTubeTikTokInstagramVisit our website:WebsiteSources available on redhandedpodcast.comSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondry Plus subscribers can listen to Red Handed early and ad-free. Join Wondry Plus in the Wondry app or on Apple Podcasts. Grab a coffee and discover Vegas-level excitement with BetMGM Casino. Now introducing our hottest exclusive, friends, the one with the multi-drop. Your favorite classic television show is being reimagined into your new favorite casino game, featuring iconic images from the show. Spin our new exclusive because we are not on a break. Play Friends, the one with Multi-Drop, exclusively at BetMGM Casino.

Want even more options, pull up a seat and check out a wide variety of table games from blackjack to poker. Or head over to the arcade for nostalgic casino thrills. Download the BetMGM Ontario app today. You don't want to miss out. 19 plus to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly.

If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, Please contact Connects Ontario at 1-866-531-2,600, to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming, Ontario. What if I told you that the crime of the century is the one being waged on our planet? Introducing Lawless Planet, Wondry's new podcast exploring the dark side of the climate crisis. Uncover shocking tales of crime and corruption threatening our world. world's future. Follow Lawless Planet on the Wondry app or wherever you get your podcasts. Scams are everywhere. On your phone, in your inbox, even on your television screen, looking at you, Tinder Swindler.

What is it about scams that has pop culture so obsessed? Maybe it's because it could happen to anyone. Or maybe it's because we're all so deeply fascinated by the psyche of someone who can lie with ease, cheat with no guilt, and convince the world that they are who they say they are. even when they're not. Scambulancers is a weekly podcast that takes you into the world of deception, sharing the stories of today's most notorious scams. Like the recent episode of Natalie Cochran, the pharmacist Femfetal. It seemed like she had it all.

A good job, loving husband, and two kids. But behind the scenes, Natalie was scamming friends and family using fake contracts, fake government emails, and she even faked cancer. But when the wall start closing in, she'll do anything to keep the lie alive until someone ends up dead. Listen to scam influencers now, wherever you get your podcasts. Hello there, spooky listener. It's October, our favorite time of the year.

And so to celebrate and give you all a well-deserved treat, we're bringing you the 13 days of Halloween. Short-hand edition. Usually, every single week over on Amazon Music, we release brand-new episodes of our bite-sized sister show, Short-hand. It's like Red Hand's little friend. where we delve into all sorts of fascinating topics from hell in different religions

Haitian voodoo the death of Edgar Allan Poe Qatar's syndrome Japan suicide forest and so much more and this Halloween from the 19th of October to the 31st of October we are going to be pulling out

13 of our most terrifying episodes of shorthand to drop straight into your red-handed feed every single day but beware Each episode will only be available for 24 hours. So get listening or abandon or hope. Enjoy. Hello.

Hello. Coming to you not live from the podcast studios in nothing. Welcome to this week's shorthand, which is the first of possibly many two parties. Yes. Because even though the whole conceit of the show is short topics, this one was too big, so this is Witch Grace Part 1. We're on tour, that's why we're recording in Dublin,

and it is absolutely pissing it down outside. And on the walk here, some coachman decided it would be very fun to just drive through a puddle directly onto me in a comedic scene. I tried to warn you. It was one of those things that you watch, like, in slow motion. I was just like, okay, directions.

Need to look at directions, need to stop my phone getting too wet. Oh, no, now I'm soaking, and I'm going to get trench foot in one foot because my sock and my train are absolutely soaking. Oh, no. And much of the horror of anybody else in the building, I am now here barefoot. That's okay. So, yes, ignoring the mild, damp discomfort that I'm in, it's going to be great, because we're going to talk about witches today.

Belief in witches dates back for at least 2,000 years. The first mention of witchcraft that we know about was by the ancient Greeks in 330 BC in the region of Thessaly, which is the classical home of ancient witches. Socrates mentions the Thessalian enchantresses who bring down the moon from heaven at risk of their own perdition.

The Romans had witches too, and there were even a few mentions of them in the Bible. The Old Testament features the story of the witch of Endor, who advised King Saul before battle in the first book of Samuel. And the book of Exodus features the infamous command thou shalt not suffer a witch to live. For thousands of years, witches have been known as individual sorcerers who use their powers for specific purposes. They can affect the weather, people might visit them for spells to increase their wealth, or concoct a love potion to attract a prospective lover, or sometimes to commune with the spirits of the recently dead.

Mostly, the tricks of witches belonged to the every day, and had little effect on the rest of the world. But in the 16th and 17th century, Europe was gripped by a new idea. Witches became more than local soothsayers. They were part of an organised, demonic network in league with the devil himself, a negative supernatural force, directly opposed to the kingdom of heaven, one that threatened to cloud the whole world in evil and condemn all people to eternal suffering and help. So yeah, they're going big. The witches, they're not just fucking about with a bad crop, bad harvest in a small town. They're like, all of you going to hell. Yeah, well, they're going political as what they're doing. So this was a centuries-long war

waged by kings, popes and the greatest thinkers of the time against the Prince of Darkness himself. To stop the march of evil, more than 200,000 people were executed across Europe for the crime of witchcraft. Most of Europe's suspected witches were violently tortured for days on end to extract confessions and expose more dark agents across the continent. I was listening to a podcast about witches the other day. And obviously like in Western tradition, the idea of a witch this like haggard old crone and it's all to do with fertility. It's because after menopause, women are useless to society. so then they become these wise women and that's why our idea of witches

is always old and haggard. That's interesting. I guess there's so many theories I'm sure that we'll get into as to why the witch hunts across Europe happened. I'll save it for them. Good, because we're getting ahead of oneself. Here is this week's shorthand for you, part one.

First, it's important to say that this isn't a case of people believing weird shit in the pasto times. Christianity, which had taken root across Europe, saw itself as the great civiliser of names. nations, and for a while it had no time for old pagan superstitions. It just nicked all of their holidays so no one killed themselves in the winter. In the 9th century, the Pope released the canon Episcopi,

which set in stone the church's renunciation of witches and all of their powers. And for centuries, the church's top brass were spreading the word that pre-existing pagan beliefs, including were wolves, pixies, folk healing, and witchcraft were unchristian and even heretical. And this all continued into the 11th and 12th centuries. But in just 200 years, the position was completely reversed and the Pope himself sent a decree encouraging witch hunters to tackle this new demonic menace.

How? Well, in the 14th century, things were not pretty. Can you imagine living through a deadly pandemic, a raging war over disputed land, and intolerance and introversion spreading everywhere? Yeah, okay, well, us too. But this was way worse. The Black Death had wiped out between 30 and 60% of the whole population of Europe and the Hundred Years' War hadn't helped.

And it all resulted in a huge demographic shift, newly multiracial societies and sensitive borders between different communities. And that led to Inquisitions. And those were Christian movements through every corner of the continent working to suppress heresy. South of the Pyrenees, the Spanish Inquisition chose Jewish and North African immigrants as its scapegoats of social non-conformity.

There they believed that the Black Death had been the result of Jewish people poisoning the wells and hundreds were burnt. But the rest of Christian Europe chose the witch. In the late 15th century, a Dominican friar called Henrik Kramer wanted to go and hunt witches in the Rhineland. And these days, that is all Western Germany.

And a side note, most of the country names we're going to use were not what they were called at the time we are talking about. A lot of Central Europe was a part of the Holy Roman Empire until 1806. But to keep it simple, we're just going to say their modern day equivalents because you can't just be like, so in one bit of the Holy Roman Empire and then another bit, so we're going to use the words that we know. So Kramer wanted to go witch-bashing. And he went to the Pope himself for permission.

By then, changing attitudes in the church had led to superstition and blame and in 1484, to get the Dominican's office back, Pope Innocent the 8th, published an official decree on behalf of the Catholic Church called Subis deris desi God's fuck sake

Some is Desi Durante's Effectibus Nailed up, thank you, crushing it. And this described the terrifying spread of witchcraft through Germany and called on Heinrich Kramer and his other inquisitor Jacob Sprenger to go and sort it all out. So they set

off across Western Germany on their Holy Crusade. And based on their experiences, Kramer wrote maybe the most influential book ever written on the occult. The Malias Malifakarum, or hammer of the witches.

It's basically a beginner's guide to identifying witches, proving their guilt, and destroying them. It consolidated all of the superstitions into one book. On the first page, they reprinted the papal decree in its entirety,

giving it a legitimacy beyond the doubt of any god-fearing Christian. The book also suggested torture as a means to extract confessions and death as the only solution. And it told authorities that if they didn't assist in the hunt,

then they, were a part of the problem. This was huge, and word spread quickly across Europe. This was all shortly after the invention of the world-changing printing press, and the book soon reached the mountainous regions. The areas around the Alps and the Pyrenees are where the first rumblings of the real witch craze kicked off.

And there's a good reason for that. Mountains are obviously natural borders, and the people that lived on them were less tied to the religion of their state. Plus, up in the more rural, hard-to-reach places, minds can be hard to change. They hadn't completely escaped the Inquisitors, but they did tend to lapse more easily back into pagan rituals and beliefs. And those tenacious habits of thoughts drove the missionaries, bonkers,

so witchcraft became heresy. The Dominican Inquisitors saw social pressure bubbling, and they capitalised on it, to spread a hatred of witches throughout Europe. And they wrote mythology to prove it. How hard is it to kill a planet? Maybe all it takes is a little drilling, some mining, and a whole lot of carbon pumped into the atmosphere. When you see what's left, it starts to look like a crime scene.

Are we really safe? Is our water safe? You destroyed our town. And crimes like that, they don't just happen. We call things accidents. There is no accident. This was 100% preventable. They're the result of choices by people, ruthless oil tycoons, corrupt politicians, even organized crime. These are the stories we need to be telling about our changing planet. Stories of scams, murders, and cover-ups that are about us.

And the things we're doing to either protect the Earth or destroy it. Follow Lawless Planet on the Wondry app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to new episodes of Lawless Planet early. and ad free right now by joining Wondry Plus in the Wondry app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. It's all a lighthearted nightmare on our podcast, Morbid. We're your hosts. I'm Alina Urquhart. And I'm Ash Kelly. And our show is part true crime, part spooky, and part comedy.

The stories we cover are well researched. Of the 880 men who survived the attack, around 400 would eventually find their way to one another and merge into one larger group. With a touch of humor. Shout out to her. Shout out to all my therapists out there's been like eight of them. A dash of sarcasm and just garnished a bit with a little bit of cursing. That mother f***er is not real. And if you're a weirdo like us and love to cozy up to a creepy tale of the paranormal, or you love to hop in the way back machine and dissect the details of some of history's most notorious crimes.

You should tune in to our podcast. Morbid. Follow Morbid on the Wondry app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to episodes early and ad free by joining Wondry Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcast. So where did all that information come from? Details of the kingdom of heaven are all laid out in the book of revelation. But the Bible doesn't say much at all about the devil's own realm, not to mention his agents of evil on earth. I wrote an essay at university on the appearance of heaven and how,

and it's all to do with this. It's not in the Bible at all. The only thing that's in the Bible is the, the Jewish afterlife, which is like neither heaven or hell it's just sort of like grey. But the malleus was different. It was full of intricate details of witches, including their physical features, their rituals,

and all the sinful ins and outs of demonic orgies. Now we'll go into all the depraved stuff that goes down at a witch's Sabbath next week. But to answer the question of how one Dominican friar knew all that, you can probably guess. It was mostly all extracted by confession. And once again, we'll go back to that old chestnut that we love to brush off here at red-handed and on short-hand.

Shiny, shiny chestnut. It's been rubbed so much. It's a mere nub of a chestnut by now. But it goes a little something like this. If you go looking for the devil, you'll find him. And people at the time believed in strict good and evil. So they figured that there must be a whole dark system equivalent to the kingdom of God. It makes sense.

So each confession was just another piece of the puzzle. And as for why, they saw so much consistency in those answers. Well, firstly, they asked very similar, very leading questions. And secondly, they extracted those confessions through torture. And once again, the Pope was all over it. In 1468, Pope Paul III declared witchcraft to be crimin acceptum, which essentially removed all of the restrictions around torture. And it has been argued that those relaxed rules from the big man were a huge factor in the spread of the craze.

Because physical evidence was so hard to find, inquisitors had to find proof where they could. Everything you're about to hear could and was used to identify witches. The inability to shed tears, so anyone on antidepressants. a patch of skin that didn't bleed, a wart, which is obviously used to suckle their familiar, the tendency to look down when accused, or being old, ugly or stinky, they could all be used as reasons for torture. And I know why you're here. You want to know what that torture is.

Well, we thought you'd never ask over to the executioner. The gracilion was what they called thumbscrews, which I'm sure you will know. slowly crushed the tips of fingers and toes in a vice. The Scots gave it the way too cute name of the Penny Winkies, which is in some ways even more sinister because it's like it's more scary. It's like get the Penny Winkies. And everybody knows what they're talking about. You're going to destroy your fingers and your toes.

Yeah. The Scots are fucking full of it. Do you know what a poppet is? A poppet. Yeah. So when you call someone Poppet? No, all I'm thinking is Ian Brady and Myro Hindley's dog. Was that called Poppet?

I think it was called Poppet. Voodoo dolls, essentially, like a Celtic version. Creepy. Right, the next one, the Eschel, or Ladder, was a stretching rack, to which they could also add ropes around the arms and legs and slowly tighten to snap the limbs. The lift pulled the arms violently behind the back, and the witch chair, or ram, was a set of spikes heated from below,

that suspects would be forced to sit on. Then you've got the leg screw or Spanish boot, and this was all the rage in Germany and Scotland. The device was fitted around the foot and the calf of the suspected witch and squeezed until the shin bone shattered. And this has been described as the most severe and cruel pain in the world. And then you've got the bed of nails, which more or less speaks for itself. That brings us on to maybe the most.

widely used an effective form of torture, which used no cruel equipment at all. And it was called Tormentum Insomnia, which, I'm sure the Sharpeed among you will already have guessed, stands for sleep deprivation. And this would go on for days on end. And some that still insisted they weren't witches after hours on the rack would eventually cave. So the witch craze was mostly kicked off by Dominican Inquisites. who were building on the atmosphere of social unrest and wanting to wipe pagan rituals out in Europe. But if Christians versus pagans kicked it off, it was Protestants versus Catholics that made it into a bona fide centuries-long mania. What a surprise. When Martin Luther

nailed his 95 Theses to the door of a church in 1517, it started the split of the church into Protestantism and Catholicism. We don't have much time to go in into the differences for now, but the Reformation and its sequel the Counter-Reformation was an especially bloody part of European history, mostly because each side was absolutely convinced that they were fighting in the Lord's name and the opposition represented the devil himself. Similar thing happened in the Crusades, and both sides took the existence of witches as an incontrovertible fact. And Kelsa Preeze, the areas of Europe with the most Catholic versus Protestant friction

also had the most reports of witchcraft. In England it was Essex and Lancashire where Catholicism ran deep and Puritans did not fuck around giving rise to our own witch finder general but that is a story for next week. In France the whole of the southern region

was declared to be teeming with demonic witches and in the north Toulouse became the capital of witch burnings. A French law was written said children who were said to have attended the witch's mass with their mothers were flogged in front of the fire upon which their mums were burnt.

In Germany, the Protestant war against witchcraft was particularly savage. But the Catholic revenge was even worse. The Prince Abbot of Fulder, Balthazar von Derbach, had been driven out by Protestants. So when he returned, he was pissed. So he gave his minister, Balthazar Ross,

the name Malefitzmeister, or witchmaster and gave him pretty much carte blanche to hunt and execute as many witches as he could for increasing rewards. The witchmaster came up with a load of imaginative new torture methods

and in three years he sent more than 250 people to the gallows. And I think that the Salem witch trials that happened in my least favorite place to say Massachusetts gets a lot of attention when people are talking about witches and the history of witches. But this is a good time to remind everybody that in Europe, we were fucking mad for it. We were burning people, hanging people, torturing people, left, right and centre.

People died by the thousands here. At the Salem witch trials, a grand total of 19 people were killed. Yeah, I often wonder if we would talk about it at all, if the crucible had never been written. It's interesting. I think it is an interesting, like, study of a microcos. of how which accusations can blow up quickly because it happened within this very small community. It happened very quickly and it died out just as quickly.

It was over in a matter of months. It really didn't go on for that long because people were like, what the fuck are we doing? And they really regretted it as soon as it had happened. But in Europe it went on for fucking years. Over in Germany, Archbishop Elector Johann von Schoenberg dedicated his whole reign to rooting out dissenters. First, he went after the Protestants, then he went after the Jews,

and then, finally, he went after the witches. And this campaign swept the region. In six years, across 22 villages in Germany, 368 witches were burned alive. In the year 1585, two villages were left with only one female inhabitant apiece. One of the court's chief judge, Dietrich Flada, when he spotted that people of noble birth were starting to crop up amongst the accused

he was a lot more lenient when it came to their punishment and if there's one thing von Schoenberg hated it's leniency the judge was immediately accused of witchcraft himself and was subjected to hours of torture until he confessed to his heresy and then he was strangled and burnt to a crisp

and that meant that judges all over stopped being lenient and the main executioner of that area of Germany became a big man on campus and bought himself an expensive horse and strutted around in silver and gold clothes which I imagine is a new look for an executioner. Well, they were very wealthy often

because they were doing a job that nobody wanted to do and it became like big dynasties of executioners because typically their children weren't able to get any other jobs and they married within other executioner communities and they kind of just hoarded a lot of their wealth because nobody else wanted to enter their families. They didn't no one to go to the pub with They didn't no one to hang out with

So they just had a lot of money But let's continue with all of the horrible witch burnings So the Prince of Würzberg took it even further In his eight-year reign, eight years 900 people were sentenced to death for witchcraft 19 Catholic priests His own nephew and a group of seven-year-old children that he claimed had had intercourse with the devil.

You do have to wonder, like, how bored were these people? I mean, there wasn't that much going on. No, they're like, we've got to entertain ourselves somehow. Church only takes up one day of the week. And they're like, let's burn witches the rest of the time. And that brings us on to, last, but by no means least, the self-styled witch bishop, Prince Johann George, Fuchs von Dornheim. Yikes.

Yep. and he built his own dedicated witchhouse in the garden, complete with his own torture chamber, and Bible pages nailed to the wall. Everyone back then was a serial killer. Like, this is the most serial killer shit you're ever going to hear. And it was all state sanctioned. It was one of his officials.

Johann's Julius, after hours of unbearable pain, confessed that he had renounced God and was in cahoots with the Prince of Darkness himself. he also named for good measure 27 colleagues that he had seen at the witch's Sabbath and this is the thing when they're being tortured

it's not just to be like admit that you've been doing it admit that you're a witch they're also like give us as many names as you can while you can withstand the level of torture

that we're putting you through but before our friend here Julius was burnt he smuggled a note out of the witch house to his daughter Veronica and this is what it read my dearest child you have here all my acts and confessions for which I must die

it is all a falsehood and invention so help me God they never cease to torture until one says something if God sends no means of bringing the truth to light our whole kindred will be burned by 1620 the mania had reached fever pitch killings had broken all previous records lawyers judges and members of the were routinely being burnt at the stake. This hysteria was built on the idea that the witches of Europe were building a bigger army

than anyone could possibly imagine, and it had to be obliterated. Every witch that was interrogated would, under threat of torture, reveal the names of 15 or 16 other witches in the community, or perhaps in the next village over, and anyone showing a shred of doubt and disbelief would be put to death. And as it got bigger and bigger and more out of control, the massive scale of the massive scale brutality of the whole thing finally prompted some people to start asking questions and we mentioned the infamous Wersburg witch trials a bit earlier on where the court's chief confessor Friedrich Spie sent hundreds of suspected witches to the stake which

actually traumatized him so deeply that his hair turned prematurely white it's dramatic Friedrich and all too late he realized all the confessions that he had seen extracted under torture had obviously all been false. In 1631, he even wrote a book, Courtio Criminales, and secretly distributed it. He didn't even doubt the existence of witches, but he wrote that all Germany smokes everywhere with bonfires which obscure the light. And that, through the whole great persecution,

he had never actually seen any witchcraft with his own eyes. Like we said, the book was secret. spread far and wide, and those that read it wrote more about the excesses of torture and brutality in drawing out confessions. Now, we'd love to say that everyone read it and just changed their mind, but not quite. The witch-cray state a solid part of intellectual, religious and everyday social life throughout the whole 17th century. And that is only half the story.

To hear how the fear and violence spread through Scotland and England via a demonic storm conjured to drown the king himself and to hear how 19-year-old Matthew Hopkins became the self-styled which finder general responsible for more executions than anyone in the previous century and to understand why it was women

that took the brunt of the violence and to hear the sordid details of what was believed to go down on the witch's dark Sabbaths. I'll give you a breadcrumb spoiler to satiate your thirst for next week. The witch's mass includes kissing a goat on the bumhole

and we'll tell you all about that next week when you come back to our next dark gathering next Tuesdays, red-handed colon, shorthand. Bye. Hello. Hello. And welcome to the second part of the first ever two-part shorthand. We are coming to you from the past. We are still in Dublin by the time you listen to this.

Our tour will be over and we will be sad. we are currently still on the road having a great time I'm still damp but that's okay because you're not here to listen to me talk about that you're here to listen to me talk about witches exactly

last week we told you how witch hunting mania spread across mainland Europe but how did it get to the British Isles what did they believe went down at those satanic gatherings why did women make up 90% of those persecuted for sorcery in England

and what is the legacy of witch hunting today here is the shorthand part two For generations in England and Scotland, the state-sanctioned killing of anyone suspected of demonic activity thrived. Thousands were tortured and executed, and everyone from the village preacher to the king of the realm was eventually involved in sniffing them out.

But for a while, England resisted. It all began north of the border, in North Berwick, Scotland. In the year 1590, word spread of a gathering in the U.S. old kirk of St. Andrew. It was a witch's sabbath. On a rocky outcrop that jutted into the cold North Sea, a group of witches were said to have gathered. Apparently they drank flaggons of wine, and they all sang with one voice, and the devil himself was in attendance. Soon they began to concoct dangerous spells. They took a cat, christened it, and tied to it dismembered parts of a dead man.

It's not very busy, the devil, is he? No. He seems to be available for all of these. Sounds like a good party, though. He's like, I'll be there. But also, how are you tying dismembered parts of a dead man to a cat? I guess we don't know how big these parts are.

I don't know, maybe they chopped the cat up too. But what they did do is they whispered a spell and then threw this cat man concoction off the cliffs into the waves. And according to a pamphlet from the time, This is what it said. There did arise such a tempest in the sea as a greater have not been seen.

And apparently all of this, cat, killing, man chopping up, wine drinking, devil hanging out, business was all a plot to kill James I, 6th, king of Scotland, who had been returning by boat from Denmark. James' ship was pummeled on all sides by a violent storm and water started gushing into the ship. But James miraculously survived.

This story was told in a pamphlet called News from Scotland, and it was distributed far and wide by, of course, King James himself. The story was accompanied by pictures of witches staring a cauldron and a goat-legged devil preaching from a pulpit. James was deeply superstitious and considered himself an authority on witch-cordering. He even wrote a book on the subject, demonology in 1587, which actually provided some of the background characterisations

for the witches in Macbeth, which is a good fact. The Scottish Witchcraft Act had already been in place for decades making the practice a capital offence. And that act provided a legal framework for the prosecution of witches. Suspected witches were tried in the courts and sentenced to death. King James had heard from Europe

that the witch's numbers were fast growing and considered them to be a very real and serious threat to his kingdom's stability and James wanted to be the figurehead of a strong and stable Brexit at the time of huge religious upheaval and social change he'd been the king of Scotland since he was 13 months old and at 24 he had his eye on the English throne

Elizabeth I of England was getting on a bit and she had no children and he was her cousin so he thought he better positioned himself as a worthy successor which is why he printed and distributed all of the pamphlets that will hear him

so why had James been travelling back from Denmark well he's Hamlet he's Hamlet and he had gone there to meet the 14 year old Anne of Denmark who he had chosen to be his queen. But he came back with a lot more than just his child bride. If you listen last week, then you'll know how manic the witch craze had grown in Europe by the end of the 16th century.

Hundreds were being executed. And while he was there, at Cromberg Castle near Copenhagen, two witches were arrested and put to death for conjuring the storms that James had met on his way there. And when the second storm that almost killed him on the way back, happened. James returned even more fired up with righteous anger. It must be more witches. In November 1590, David Seton, the deputy bailiff of Trent, grew suspicious of his young housemaid, Gillis Duncan. He said that she'd acquired healing powers and had been slipping out at night and was sure that witchcraft was the only explanation. So he, with a few others, tortured the young woman. They used thumb screws to crush the flesh and bones on her fingers

and tightened a rope around her face until her skull almost fractured. But still, Gillist Duncan would not confess. So, they searched her body for the devil's mark, which is a mark on the skin that's less sensitive than the rest of it. The idea is that it's where the devil had touched her when they sealed their bargain. And they found a spot on her neck. She confirmed, She said that she'd gone to a town where a witch was present and danced with her, but in an evil way. And that was the first recorded instance of a Scottish witch confessing to being in league with the devil. Gillis was immediately taken to Tollwood Prison in Edinburgh, where more confessions were drawn. Now she told everyone that she was part of a coven who, with another coven from Copenhagen, had attempted to destroy the king's ship.

Gillis Duncan gave over a hundred names, and every single one of them were hunted down and tortured. I cannot believe that somebody back then knew 100 people. I don't know 100 people. No, could you give 100 names? No. Gillis was held alone in prison for a year before she was burned at the stake. One of the names that she gave was Agnes Sampson.

Record showed that she was a grace wife, which is essentially a midwife, and was also known as the wise wife of Keith. So Agnes seems to be some sort of folk healer, a wise woman who might use charms, amulets, potions to protect townsfolk, rid people of evil spirits, safely deliver babies, how dare she? And these weren't uncommon things to be doing. These figures were only concerned with smaller local problems. Folk beliefs, along with fairies and elves,

coexisted for centuries with a religious belief in God. But under this new campaign for Christian Valley, Folk powers took on a new sinister dimension. And now the king himself got involved. The people of Scotland were big into the divine rights of kings and believed that if witches weren't punished God might punish the country with famine, plague, pestilence and losses in battle. The divine right of kings for maybe if you haven't heard that before

it is a very British Isles thing. It means the king is appointed by God and therefore, anything the king says is also God. So the Scottish Church was in the hands of the radical Protestant reformer, John Knox. He believed in a new kind of religious puritanism and wanted to harshly crack down on things that he saw as frivolous and ungodly. Things like singing, dancing, drinking, fornication, all the fun stuff. So just weeks after the alleged gathering in North Berwick, Agnes was arrested

and accused of being the Coven's most senior witch. She was taken to Edinburgh, and she found herself face to face with King James himself. Reports say that at first, he was sceptical that Agnes was the witch she had confessed to be, but when she leaned over and whispered to him the words that Anne had said to him on their wedding night, he was convinced.

He was now sure that there was an international satanic conspiracy, out to kill him. Under even more torture, Agnes filled in more details of the gathering. She had her head shaven and her head crushed with the rope. She only confessed, though, when they found the devil's mark on her crotch. She was then subjected to more hours of sexual torture and later burned. Fifty-nine people were eventually killed in relation to the supposed gathering at Berwick. and it was the first large-scale witch trial in the British Isles and served as a blueprint for the next two centuries of massacre.

When Elizabeth I died in 1603, King James did become the King of England and the scale of the witch trials south of the border suddenly exploded. Parliament passed a new witchcraft statute, which made witchcraft a capital offence which had already been in Scotland for some time. Eight years later, ten women were hanged in Pendle for witchcraft. Four years after that, another nine were killed in Leicester. Suddenly, witches were being found in every town, and every time they confessed they would reveal more and more names of others,

who they claimed to be members of their coven, or people that they had seen at the witch's Sabbath. At these sabbaths, women would gather in cemeteries and the dark hours between Friday and Saturday in a sort of reverse communion to mock the Christian faith, which is why tabernacles have locks on. And apparently these witches would spit on the Bible, curse the cross, and their demon paramours would turn up and join in.

The devil would appear at every single one because he had nothing better to do. And sometimes he would appear as a big black-bearded man, sometimes as a stinky little goat and occasionally he would show up as a toad, depending on how he felt that day. According to the Malias, quote, And the devil appears to them in the assumed body of a man and urges them to keep faith with him. That means sex, by the way, promising them worldly prosperity and length of life.

Yeah, it's like that great line from the witch film that came out a couple of years ago. It's like, Black Philip talks to the girl in it, and he's like, would thou likes to live deliciously? That's what he's promising them. I'll give you a way better life. If you just do evil stuff, that's what people are accusing them of. And apparently, the witches would take it in turns to kiss the, Goat devil man. Oh, if he was a toad, they would kiss him on his toady mouth. And if he was a goat,

they would kiss him right on the bum hole. Goats also have mouths. Like I don't, I'm not questioning it. Moving on. And then after they'd kissed loads of bumholes, they would dance around the devil for a while. And soon enough, it would all descend into a massive mad orgy. You know those creepy stories that give you goosebumps? The ones that make you really question what's real? Well, what if I told you that some of the strangest, darkest, and most mysterious stories are not found in haunted houses or abandoned forests, but instead in hospital rooms and doctor's offices. Hi, I'm Mr. Ballin, the host of Mr. Ballin's medical mysteries.

And each week on my podcast, you can expect to hear stories about bizarre illnesses no one can explain, miraculous recoveries that shouldn't have happened, and cases so baffling they stumped even the best doctors. So if you crave totally true and thoroughly twisted horror stories, you crave totally true, and thoroughly twisted horror stories and mysteries. Mr. Ballin's Medical Mysteries should be your new go-to weekly show. Listen to Mr. Ballin's medical mysteries

on the Wondry app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen early and ad-free right now by joining Wondry Plus in the Wondry app or on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. All right, should we talk about the signal awards? Sure. That is the level of enthusiasm. We would love you guys to have for us, too.

Because if you remember, But we made the podcast series, Flesh and Code with Wondry. We were super excited like the minute they brought that story to us. Because if we haven't listened to Flesh and Code, it's essentially about following people who essentially fall in love with their like AI companions. It's about Russian interference and all sorts of crazy things and about how these AI companions are to be trusted, whether this is a good thing, how it was impacting on a larger scale and the ramifications when a replica that was the company at the heart of it took away

the erotic role play function and didn't go well. Spoilers. So we loved making it. We spent what 18 months making that show and we worked so, so hard on it. And so we are going to ask a very small favour of you guys shockingly to us. Flesh and Code has been put up for the listener's choice category of the Signal Awards 2025. So we would love you. you guys to please help us out and basically try get some more eyes and ears on flesh and code because it was a real labour of love for us. What you guys need to do is go to the Signal Awards website and vote for Flesh and Code. Again, it's in the listener's choice category and you can find us under documentaries. That's the category you're looking for and then under limited series

and specials. Voting is open until the 9th of October so you really don't have much time. Like literally go do this now. And we would just be so incredibly grateful because If we did win the listener's choice for Flesh and Code at the Signals Award, then it would just mean the world to us. Thank you. Then, when everyone was done, they'd have a great feast, either of turnips, which for some reason was mocking to God. I mean, this is just like a great representation of how fucking shit everything was back then

that they were like, and then they all ate turnips, that prized delicious fruit. So yes, apparently eating turnips is, um, A way to mock God, so, you know, ignore that hack I gave you of using turnips instead of green papyrs, which are very expensive, if you're of making a papaya salad. And apparently, they'd also just boil a human child and eat them, presumably with a side of turnips. I mean, I would argue that boiling a human child is more offensive than a turnip, but who the fuck am I? I mean, that's only on the big feast days, the big satanic feast days. The high night. Yes.

in the Alas region of France witches were a little more refined however and they ducked into a friccise of bats typical France always one up in now many of this information were set out in the Malius Malifacarum and many more details were hashed out by religious leaders

including one very divisive debate can the devil jizz Oh holy Jesus I don't No it's a big part of the conversation because when he had sex with his followers, as we told you he did, the devil could appear as either a succubus, which is a female demon, or an incubus, which is a male demon. And it was thought that he was freezing cold to the touch.

And to answer this question, we don't really have an answer, but basically there were some allegations made by some people that, quote, some items in the devil were lacking in his equipment. doctors have said that he could still come though but some have said that he only emitted worm-like creatures Oh my god This is also strange because Well because for very obvious reasons

But where are they getting this information from who is giving this Presumably this is just crazy shit that people are saying When they haven't been allowed to sleep And they're being tortured to death Very specific though Which again makes you realise These people were so fucking bored That they were just making up the craziest stuff

Read a book. They had books. This is all just Bible fanfiction. Also, probably most people were illiterate. I take that back. Well, they've had the Bible read to them, and then they've been like, but there's no dark, creepy, gory stuff, which we absolutely love and want to hear more of. So people are just writing this Malifas Malifakarum is just dark Bible fan fiction. And then they've all run with it.

So others, who were presumably tortured as witches, also said that the devil would squeeze the spunk out of the balls of recently dead men to use that as well. But thankfully Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine, the two founders of demonological science, settled the whole debate once and for all. The devil would appear as a succubus to have sex with a male witch. Then once he had the man's seed, chained into an incubus, which is a male demon, and bang a female witch. Simple. Yeah, that's it. And no joke. These debates were actually raging in the cathedrals of Europe. It's not just a joke that we're making up. These people were actually arguing about this. And according to the malleus, this is a quote, all witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is in women insatiable.

Bloody women. So why did the women catch it so badly? They already were having quite a difficult time in the Middle Ages. I think it was like, 50% chance you'd die in childbirth. But on top of that, the witch craze was almost a woman-only massacre. Definitely in the UK. Yeah. I was listening to another podcast, which was basically talking about how in other countries, such as Normandy, which is now in France, obviously, Estonia, which is now I know, also the name of a ship.

Burgundy, Russia and Iceland, the majority of people that were killed in the witch crazes there were all men. So it's interesting because I think there's... there's something about that society that tells you who they were going after and why they were going after them. Was it because of the church sanctioned reason? Was it because of misogyny? Was it because of power grabs?

It very much depends on the country. But in the UK, absolutely, the majority of people killed were women. Men were accused of being witches and found guilty of witchcraft, but they were less likely to die because of it. So why were 90% of those put to death women? Well, lots of reasons. The 13th the 14th century brought massive. social, economic, demographic and religious change to the British Isles, and the role of the

woman was in real flux. Many families had moved to cities from rural areas, and society was moving from the exchanging of goods to a more cash-based economy, and the population was booming on top of that. Wages were low, jobs were scarce, and many men just couldn't afford to get married, which meant families just couldn't afford to support unproductive members. So many women either had to get jobs spinning or weaving or were just sent off to a convent and the number of unmarried women grew and grew up to 40% of the women under 44 were unmarried

that is staggering and the stigma against spinsters and widows was pretty obvious then there was the black death the bubonic plague swept through Europe and killed almost half of the entire population of the continent obviously that's bad but for workers

it was kind of a turn-up wages were now higher job security was better there was plenty of food and lots of people inherited a bunch of money from their plagued relatives many people didn't want to squander

their new found prosperity plus the Renaissance was making everybody a bit more individualistic family shrunk casual sex grew and new contraceptive methods were all the rage All this sexual promiscuity came at the same time

as large numbers of unmarried women were suddenly not under the authority of their fathers or husbands. This led to quite a bit of fear and resentment. And when the witch hunt kicked in, that expressed itself squarely on women. A lot of the symbols of witchcraft, like broomsticks, cooking pots, household animals are symbols of domesticity

and related to the traditional role of women. It was still a hyper-religious society and the change is sweeping through Europe also represented a return to strict moral boundaries and in England that meant Puritanism. Which brings us to the infamous no-nonsense self-styled witch finder general himself, Matthew Hopkins. Hopkins was born in Wenham Suffolk in 1620

when Puritanism was really kicking off. If you don't know about Puritans, They were a reform movement of English Protestants who, like John Knox earlier, thought that anything fun and cool was a sin and they took themselves off to the New World because they didn't think England was boring enough, basically. Yeah, I mean, that whole, like, mythos of the Puritans

leaving the old world for the new world because they wanted to escape persecution is not true. They left so that they could persecute. Exactly. So take that, the Mayflower. Okay, moving on. King James died in 1625, and this is another particularly naughty period in British politics. Basically, there was a civil war between the new king, Charles I, and his parliament. And as war usually does, war hit England hard.

Poverty and famine were widespread, local courts were suspended, and law and order totally broke down. Hopkins's father, uncle and brother were all Puritan preachers so he was raised with a hell of a lot of fire in Brinstone and when his father died Hopkins moved to Manning Tree Essex and very unlike a Puritan bought a pub

when a landowner called Sir Harbottle Grimstone That is not your name That's not a real name Sir Harbottle Grimstone Okay fine It sounds like It sounds like a name that someone would give a very small dog.

You know, a half-bottle grimstone, the third. And he noticed that a mysterious illness was sweeping through his cattle, and he suspected foul play. Classic, a harbottle, grimstone. And in 1645, he pointed the finger at an elderly, one-legged widow who lived on his land. He accused Elizabeth Clark of being a witch. At the time, the witchcraft act was in. in place, but torture was still illegal.

So witches would be monitored by watchers to see if they shot off on a broomstick or started suckling rats or something else that looked witchy. But Clark had annoyingly not done any of that. So Hopkins and fellow witch-hating Puritan John Cern managed to convince watches to pass the case over to them. And they dragged this old one-legged widow, Elizabeth Clark, into Hopkins Pub, the Thorn Inn.

And they say that in the time they were there, they saw Clark summon many familiars in various animal forms, including a demonic rabbit called sugar. Why not? These people, imagine if they'd just written a young adult fantasy novel. Much better use of all of this imagination. But we can be pretty sure that all that really happened in that pub that day was the brutal torture of an old woman

until she admitted to witchcraft and named a slew of other witches too. And the Witchfinder General took this confession and a new list of names to the Earl of Hardwick. This Earl was impressed and he gave Hopkins a warrant to go after more of these witches.

And then Hopkins gave himself the name the Witchfinder General as we have discussed at length if you give yourself a nickname it is not cool. Like Elron Hubbard calling himself Flash it just makes you look lame. And soon, 23 women in the town of Manning Tree

had been arrested for witchcraft. They all confessed. Eighteen of them were hanged and four more died in jail. Only one of the accused, Rebecca West, was set free. And she was let go because she confessed that she had been forced by her mother

to lie with the devil and that only her mother's death would save Rebecca from Satan's spell. So she throws her own mum under the fucking bus, let her go. Word of the Essex trials spread like wildfire across England and just months before. Puritans had been doing more sweeping through the country. They were burning churches and vandalising anything they deemed too extravagant. Many towns and villages were decimated. As always, fear and uncertainty turned to blame and soon communities were inviting the witchfinder

general to rid them of their demons. And yes, he really did use the swimming test amongst his methods and what that was was suspects were thrown into a river and if they drowned they were innocent but dead and if they floated they were treated as witches and killed anyway so you're not coming out of it alive

and the way things would go down with Hopkins is that he'd come into a village he'd get these confessions once they were in he'd disappear he'd usually skip town before all the actual executions took place and like this Hopkins went to countless villages over the years and made over a thousand pounds

That's at a time when the average wage was 6p a day. He was personally responsible over the years for sending over 300 English women to their deaths. Hopkins Crusade eventually came to an end with the death of John Lowe's. In August 1645, the 80-year-old priest was forced to run on the spot without sleep until he collapsed from exhaustion. It was part of a witch panic that eventually saw 100 people in one town arrested. and that came to the attention of the government.

Soon they retried all 100, and only 18 people were found guilty. Suddenly, Hopkins seemed more dangerous than the evil he claimed to be fighting. The war was dying down, and the fear did too, and the country now started to turn against the witchfinders. It's hard to say what finally brought an end to Europe's witch craze For at least 200 years, all of Europe's brightest and most influential minds were part of a fight against witchcraft. And hundreds of thousands of women were killed in a meaningless holy war.

But across Europe, as the social and religious conditions calmed, so did the witch frenzy. Protestant countries like England and Holland were first, and by the mid-18th century, witchcraft was back to being a local superstition. Meanwhile, over in Salem, Massachusetts, there was their own cute mini version of the witch craze that lasted just 14 months. But in some ways, the craze has never really stopped. Stories of clandestine evil powers

gathering in groups to worship Satan, eat babies, and use their powers to disrupt the status quo, have lasted throughout the centuries. So the episodes that you have just listened to have been about a conspiracy theory, about fundamentalists wreaking havoc on a changing society and making a return to pure religious morals.

And when you think about it that way, it's not an old story at all, especially when 15% of Americans now believe that Satan-wishing paedophiles run the government and the media. And all they need to start hunting these Satan-worshipping lizard-pedophiles down is the right people in power.

Yeah. I mean, I think that the witch craze has been used. It's nothing new to use it as an allegory for other crazes that have come and will come and that we are living through. Obviously you can make direct comparisons to the witch craze to things like McCarthyism

and yes, if you want to be more literal, not even allegorous, you can look at the Q and on shit. And we have covered that in a two part if you go back and listen to it on red handed. Yeah. I mean I think this is the thing is you can sort of scoff and look at these people and be like

oh my God, weren't they stupid? But like We haven't evolved at all since this was happening. No. A few centuries ago, we haven't evolved at all. And I think there's a really interesting quote. I can't remember who said it. But I'm sure you'll be able to find it if you Google it, is the idea of the printing press really kicked off a lot of this stuff

because it made things like the Malias Malifakarum easily accessible by people all over the world. And obviously, we're not saying that the printing press was a bad invention. Of course, it's not. It's great. But the printing press did directly, indirectly lead to thousands of people. people being killed. And there is an interesting quote that these days we have a new technological advancement coming into society on the level of the printing press almost every few months.

Yeah. And how we are not adequately equipped or emotionally or psychologically mature enough to be able to not let that lead to more and more panic and craziness. And you wonder what somebody's going to invent that's going to kill us all. So there you go. Great. Wonderful. Sure. Well, on that, happy thought. We'll update you on what's going on in our shit show of a government later. The international embarrassment that is the United Kingdom. So we'll talk about that later, probably on Under the Duvee. If you would like to come check that out, join us at patreon.com slash red-handed where you can do that. Otherwise, we hope you enjoyed this two-parter on the witch hunt of Europe.

And, well, specifically in this part, especially the UK. And we'll eat some turnips. See you next week. Affront the Lord. Bye-bye. Thank you.