udge of Nancy,
boasted that he put to death eight hundred witches in sixteen years....
In Italy, a thousand persons were executed in a single year in the
province of Como; and in other parts of the country the severity of the
inquisitors at last created an absolute rebellion.... In Geneva, which
was then ruled by a bishop, five hundred alleged witches were executed
in three months; forty-eight were burned at Constance or Ravensburg, and
eighty in the little town of Valery in Saxony. In 1670, seventy persons
were condemned in Sweden, and a large proportion of them burnt."[189]

In England, from 1603 to 1680, it is estimated that seventy thousand
persons were put to death for sorcery.[190] Grey, the editor of
_Hudibras_, says that he had himself seen a list of three thousand who
were put to death during the Long Parliament. The celebrated
witch-finder, Mathew Hopkins, hung sixty in one year in the county of
Suffolk. In Scotland, for thirty-nine years, the number killed annually
averaged about two hundred. This, of course, does not take into account
the number who were hounded to death by persecution of a popular kind,
or whose lives were made so wearisome that death must have come as a
release. But the most remarkable, and the most horrible, of witchcraft
executions occurred in Wuerzburg in February 1629. No less than one
hundred and sixty-two witches were burned in a succession of
_autos-da-fe_. Among these, the reports disclose that there were
actually thirty-four children. The following details give the actual
ages of some of them:--

+----------+---------+---------------------------------+
| Burning. | Number. | Children. |
+----------+---------+---------------------------------+
| 7th | 7 | 1 Girl, aged 12. |
| 13th | 4 | 1 Girl of 10 and another. |
| 15th | 2 | 1 Boy of 12. |
| 18th | 6 | 2 Boys of 10, girl of 14. |
| 19th | 6 | 2 Boys, 10 and 12. |
| 20th | 6 | 2 Boys. |
| 23rd | 9 | 3 Boys, 9, 10, and 14. |
| 24th | 7 | 2 Boys, brought from hospital. |
| 26th | 8 | Little boy and girl. |
| 27th | 7 | 2 Boys, 8 and 9. |
| 28th | 6 | Blind girl and infant.[191] |
+----------+---------+---------------------------------+

The vast m