were burned together.[1] There were notorious cases in which witches under torture had confessed things which the whole neighborhood knew to be false. For instance, a woman confessed that she had put her husband to death by witchcraft, when it was a matter of public notoriety that he was run over by a heavily laden wagon.[2] It must be supposed that such cases gradually affected popular faith about witch-doctrines, although that faith was never directly affected by anything. The belief in witches was due to hysteria and suggestion. The books, dramas and preaching of the later Middle Ages and the sixteenth century were full of it, and they fed the daimonistic notions which are at the basis of all popular religion.[3] Witchcraft became the popular philosophy for the whole aleatory element in life. This put it into the heads of a class of people to be witches if they could[4]; hysterical women, for instance, courted the notoriety and power and loved the consciousness of causing fear, in spite of the risk. Many perfectly sound-minded and innocent women could not be sure that they were not witches. They had had dreams suggested by the popular notions, or had suffered from nervous affections which fell in with the popular superstitions. The whole subject and the mode of treatment of witchcraft is thoroughly popular, and the suggestion in it is clear. Western Europe was overrun by persons who offered cures for all the ills of life, and the cures were always magical or partly magical. No one would have believed in any other. People of both sexes of the criminal, vicious, and vagabond classes enacted, sometimes in costume, what they had heard about witch-orgies.[5] Many herbs were in com-
