1616: Witchcraft Revisited
Things are different in 1616. The trial of Northampton with its five victims set a near craze all over the country. Another trial in York, also in July, ended up with an acquittal, but the following month, the Lancaster Assizes sentenced ten more witches to death.22 In 1613 two more were hanged in Bedford; in 1614 another trial of unknown sentence took place against Richard Ellson; in 1615 a witch was executed in the Middlesex.
1616 was to be the busiest year for hanging witches: another one executed in the Middlesex, one in Norfolk, one in Enfield and in July a great trial started in Leicester, which was fortunately interrupted by King James himself. While finishing A Discoverie, Cotta had witnessed the trial of Northampton during which five witches were hanged, but it came too late to radically affect the structure of the book, and resulted in the insertion of the chapter on witchcraft. Similarly, if we are to trust the Stationers' Register date of 26 November 161523 for The Triall, Cotta wrote his second bookjust before the 1616 peak, but nevertheless, he does so in a climate of witch-hunts, especially as one of the two most memorable and lethal trials that took place in his own town must still have been fresh in his memory.Yet Cotta never explicitly mentions those trials, while he alludes to two older ones: that of Simon Penbrooke in 1578 (found in Holinshed's Chronicles), and that of the Witches of Warboys in 1593 (taken from the eponymous pamphlet). Marion Gibson had also suggested a few allusions to the Northampton trial, recently confirmed by Peter Elmer, which rest on the assumption that the case of the possessed gentlewoman, already described in A Discovery, may be identified with Elizabeth Belcher’s.[1122] [1123] [1124] [1125] [1126] [1127] Another trial which seems to inspire Cotta is the one that took place in Bedford, and which lengthily describes the practice of floating the witches, also given a lengthy commentary in The Triall.25 His rationale is temptingly founded on “a more direct and certaine module and methode of iudging,”26 but in fact Cotta resorts to a series of syllogisms. Certainely, if men would more industriously exercise their sharper wits, exquisite sense, and awaked iudgements, according vnto the former reasonable, religious, and iudicious wayes, exempt from the burden and incumbrance of blinde superstitions; traditionarie and imaginarie inuentions and customes, no doubt, but experience would yeeld and bring forth in short time, a much more rich increase of satisfaction, and more happy detection in iudiciall proceedings.33 What sounds like Scot-like scepticism is immediately flawed by what follows: “It is true, that in the case of Witch-craft many things are very difficult, hidden and infolded in mists and clouds, ouershadowing our reason and best vnderstanding.”3[1132] It is interesting here that Cotta keeps on insisting on the importance of discernment, of judicious and prudent judgment, but at the same time puts forward constantly the “just and reasonable proofe, or at least liuely and faire presumption”, thus drawing close to the authors of Malleus Maleficarum and to Bodin[1133] [1134] The difference observed between the two treatises is reminiscent of Gibson's commentary on Cotta's Triall. Gibson sees in Cotta “an early natural scientist, working on the boundaries of the Galenic medicine of the past, in the difficult new territory of inductive reasoning...”36 She is right to note a tension, which she terms “epistemological confusion”, between the deductive and inductive methods, concluding that when “Cotta discusses demonology... the deductive method takes over”. I would like to argue here that this shift is not inherent in The Triall, but exists between the two texts due to a different focus in each work.