r to the gallows unless
some death in the vicinity could be laid to her charge. The community
that hustled a suspicious woman to court was likely to suffer the
expense of her imprisonment for a year. It had no assurance that it
could be finally rid of her.

Under the new statute it was only necessary to prove that the woman made
use of evil spirits, and she was put out of the way. It was a simpler
thing to charge a woman with keeping a "familiar" than to accuse her of
murder. The stories that the village gossips gathered in their rounds
had the keeping of "familiars" for their central interest.[15] It was
only necessary to produce a few of these gossips in court and the woman
was doomed.

To be sure, this is theory. The practical question is, not how would the
law operate, but how did it operate? This brings us again into the
dangerous field of statistics. Now, if we may suppose that the witch
cases known to us are a safe basis of comparison, the reign of James, as
has already been intimated, shows a notable increase in witch executions
over that of Elizabeth. We have records of between forty and fifty
people who suffered for the crime during the reign of James, all but one
of them within the first fifteen years. It will be seen that the average
per year is nearly double that of the executions known to us in the
first part of Elizabeth's rule, and of course several times that of
those known in the last part. This increased number we are at once
inclined to assign to the direct and indirect influence of the new king.
But it may very fairly be asked whether the new statute passed at the
king's suggestion had not been in part responsible for the increased
number. This question can be answered from an examination of those cases
where we have the charges given. Of thirty-seven such cases in the reign
of James I, where the capital sentence was given, seventeen were on
indictments for witchcrafts that had not caused death. In the other
twenty cases, the accused were charged with murder.[16]

This means that over two-fifths of those who are known to have been
convicted under the new law would have escaped death under the
Elizabethan statute. With all due allowance for the incompleteness of
our statistics, it seems certain that the new law had added very
considerably to the number of capital sentences. Subtract the seventeen
death sentences for crimes of witchcraft that were not murder from the
total number of such sentences,