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The 1692 Salem witch trials were a brief outburst of witch panic that occurred in the New World when the practice was waning in Europe. In the 1690s, Winifred King Benham and her daughter Winifred were thrice tried for witchcraft in Wallingford, Connecticut, the last of such trials in New England.
The Salem witch trials were a series of hearings and prosecutions of people accused of witchcraft in colonial Massachusetts between February 1692 and May 1693. More than 200 people were accused. Thirty people were found guilty, nineteen of whom were executed by hanging (fourteen women and five men).
About eighty people were accused of practicing witchcraft in a witch-hunt that lasted throughout New England from 1647 to 1663. Thirteen women and two men were executed. [ 4 ] The Salem witch trials followed in 1692–93, culminating in the executions of 20 people.
The witch trials in Early Modern Europe came in waves and then subsided. There were trials in the 15th and early 16th centuries, but then the witch scare went into decline, before becoming a major issue again and peaking in the 17th century; particularly during the Thirty Years' War. What had previously been a belief that some people possessed ...
Witch trials were most frequent in England in the first half of the 17th century. They reached their most intense phase during the English Civil War of the 1640s and the Puritan era of the 1650s. This was a period of intense witch hunts, known for witch hunters such as Matthew Hopkins .
An 1562 [1] Act Against Conjurations, Enchantments and Witchcrafts (5 Eliz. 1.c. 16) was passed early in the reign of Elizabeth I.It was in some respects more merciful towards those found guilty of witchcraft than its predecessor, demanding the death penalty only where harm had been caused; lesser offences were punishable by a term of imprisonment.
The witch trials of the Catholic Prince Bishops of South West Germany were arguably the biggest in the world. Witch trials did occur in Protestant Germany as well, but were fewer and less extensive in comparison with Catholic Germany. The witch trials of Catholic Austria and Protestant Switzerland were both severe.
The Bury St Edmunds witch trials were a series of trials conducted intermittently between the years 1599 and 1694 in the town of Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk, England. Two specific trials in 1645 and 1662 became historically well known. The 1645 trial "facilitated" by the Witchfinder General saw 18 people executed in one day.