be disabled from suing in any action, and over and above other
incapacities to suffer three years' imprisonment. As to witchcraft, it
was formerly punished in the same manner as heresy. In the time of
Edward the Third, one taken with the head and face of a dead man and a
book of sorcery about him, was brought into the King's Bench, and only
sworn that he would not thenceforth be a sorcerer, and so dismissed, the
head, however, being burnt at his charge. There was a law made against
conjurations, enchantments and witchcraft, in the days of Queen
Elizabeth, but it stands repealed by a statute of King James's time,
which is the law whereon all proceedings at this day are founded. By
this law, any person invoking or conjuring any evil spirit, covenanting
with, employing, feeding, or rewarding them, or taking up any dead
person out of their grave, or any part of them, and making use of it in
any witchcraft, sorcery, etc., shall suffer death as a felon, without
benefit of clergy, and this whether the spirits appear, or whether the
charm take effect or no. By the same statute those who take upon them by
witchcraft, etc., to tell where treasure is hid, or things lost or
stolen should be found, or to engage unlawful love, shall suffer for the
first offence a year's imprisonment, and stand in the pillory once every
quarter in that year six hours, and if guilty a second time, shall
suffer death; even though such discoveries should prove false, or
charms, etc., should have no effect. Executions upon this Act were
heretofore frequent, but of late years, prosecutions on these heads in
which vulgar opinion often goes a great way have been much discouraged
and discontinued. As for the last head it remains yet capital, by virtue
of a statute made in the reign of Henry VIII, which had been repealed in
the first of Queen Mary, and was revived in the fifth of Queen
Elizabeth, by which statute, after reciting that the laws then in being
in this realm were not sufficient for punishing that detestable vice, it
is enacted that such crimes for the future, whether committed with
mankind or beasts, should be punished as felonies without benefit of
clergy._

_It is wide of my purpose to dwell any longer on those crimes which are
by the laws styled properly against God, seeing none of the persons
mentioned in the following work were executed for doing anything against
them. Let us therefore pass on to the second great branch of the Crown
Law, viz.,