The last witch executed in England

English assizes generated paper. A capital conviction produced indictment records, gaol delivery rolls, circuit records and, usually, correspondence. Historians of witchcraft — Owen Davies among them — have searched the relevant series for the Huntingdon assize of 1716 and found no trial of a Mary or Elizabeth Hicks, no committal, no execution.

The pamphlet is also wrong in the ways an invented document tends to be. Its account of the offence follows the conventions of earlier witchcraft literature rather than the practice of an early eighteenth-century court, and by 1716 English juries had effectively stopped convicting: the last widely accepted conviction and execution is Alice Molland at Exeter in 1685, and the Witchcraft Act of 1735 replaced the offence with a penalty for pretending to have magical powers. A pamphlet describing an enthusiastic 1716 hanging sits against the direction of the whole period.

The entry is here rather than in a footnote about bad sources because of what sustains it. This is a fabrication that survived by being repeated in reference works, each citing the last, with the original never re-examined — the same failure that put a false accusation about a living journalist into an encyclopedia for four months, documented separately in this archive, and the same one that lets a forged provenance clear an auction house.