Witchcraft Act 1735

Witchcraft Act 1735^[1]

Act of Parliament
Parliament of Great Britain
Long title	An Act to repeal the statute made in the first year of the reign of King James the First, intitutled, An Act against conjuration, witchcraft, and dealing with evil and wicked spirits, except so much thereof as repeals an Act of the fifth year of the reign of Queen Elizabeth, Against conjurations, inchantments and witchcrafts, and to repeal, an Act passed in the parliament of Scotland in the ninth parliament of Queen Mary, intituled, Anentis witchcrafts, and for punishing such persons as pretend to exercise or use any kind of witchcraft, sorcery, inchantment, or conjuration.
Citation	9 Geo. 2. c. 5
Introduced by	John Conduitt Sir John Crosse George Heathcote
Territorial extent	Great Britain
Dates
Royal assent	24 March 1736
Commencement	24 June 1736 (1736-06-24)
Repealed	22 June 1951 (1951-06-22)
Other legislation
Repeals/revokes	Witchcraft Act 1603
Repealed by	Fraudulent Mediums Act 1951
Relates to	Vagrancy Act 1824 s. 4
Status: Repealed
Text of statute as originally enacted

The Witchcraft Act 1735 (9 Geo. 2. c. 5) was an Act of the Parliament of the Kingdom of Great Britain in 1735 which made it a crime for a person to claim that any human being had magical powers or was guilty of practising witchcraft. With this, the law abolished the hunting and executions of witches in Great Britain. The maximum penalty set out by the Act was a year's imprisonment.

It thus marks the end point of the witch trials in the Early Modern period for Great Britain and the beginning of the "modern legal history of witchcraft", repealing the earlier Witchcraft Acts which were originally based in an intolerance toward practitioners of magic but became mired in contested Christian doctrine and superstitious witch-phobia.^[2] Instead of assuming as the earlier laws did that witches were real and had real magical power derived from pacts with Satan, the new law assumed that there were no real witches, no one had real magic power and those claiming such powers were cheaters extorting money from gullible people.

The law was a reversion to the view of the primitive and the medieval Church, expressed from at least the 8th century, at the Council of Paderborn, but contested by witch-phobic Dominican Inquisitors beginning in the mid 15th century, with some success in forwarding a new doctrine among the popes, as seen in the papal bull Summis desiderantes affectibus (1484), but with far less success among the bishops. Thus the Act of 1735 reflected the general trend in Europe, where after a peak around 1600, and a series of outbursts in the late 17th century, witch-trials quickly subsided after 1700. The last person executed for witchcraft in Great Britain was Janet Horne in 1727.