Witchcraft tests have a long and dark history, dating back to the medieval and early modern periods. These tests were used to determine if a person was a witch or not, based on the belief that witches possessed supernatural powers and could use them to harm others. One commonly used test was the "swimming test," also known as the "ducking test" or "trial by water." The accused person would be bound and thrown into a body of water. If the person floated, it was believed to be a sign of guilt, as it was thought that witches were buoyant due to their "pact with the devil." On the other hand, if the person sank, it was seen as a sign of innocence, although this often led to death by drowning.
Sink or Swim: The Swimming Test in English Witchcraft
During the early modern period, Europe underwent what has often been described as a witch craze. A rise in the popular belief in witchcraft resulted in a feeling of underlying anxiety surrounding the presence of witches in a community, and these anxieties reached a degree to which communities decided to act.
Unlike other areas of Western Europe, England experienced a tamer version of witchcraft and witch hunts. Whilst tales of the Devil, demonic pacts and sabbats ruled the Continent, English witchcraft centred around maleficium, the fear of harmful magic in village communities, constructed from society’s own affairs and beliefs. The varying degree in the number of witchcraft confessions on the Continent and in England could also be attributed to the fact that judicial torture was not permitted in England. Many countries, such as the German-speaking territories of the Holy Roman Empire, which experienced severe witch prosecutions were those in which judicial torture was used, whether that be through sleep deprivation or more immediate methods such as pressing.
The crime of witchcraft was one which was simply not amenable to other forms of judicial proof, and therefore further evidence was needed from a more absolute, or in this case, divine point of view. The ordeal of the swimming test originated as an old Germanic rite and was later reinforced in Christian times by the use of water for baptisms. The doctrine of this method was that the purity of water as an element used in the rites for baptism would reject those who had turned to the Devil, thereby turning their back on God.
Prior to the witch craze of early modern Europe, the swimming test was used in the eleventh and twelfth centuries for crimes such as adultery and homicide. However, arguments were raised against the ordeal, primarily that it lacked any secure foundation in biblical texts or Church law. By the thirteenth century, the clergy had withdrawn their support from its use, leading to its widespread abandonment. It was not until the sixteenth century that the idea of the swimming test was resurrected, though historians have no conclusive evidence as to why that may be.
It is important to note that although the swimming test became a frequent method for identifying witches, it was never embraced by learned authorities. It has been suggested that as the belief in witchcraft began to quickly decline and judicial systems became increasingly reluctant to prosecute witchcraft cases, certain individuals (such as witch hunters) looked towards means such as the swimming test as alternative solutions to dealing with witches.
The ordeal usually involved the tying of a suspect’s wrists to their ankles and then throwing the individual into a body of water with ropes attached. Contrary to popular belief, if the suspect sank, they were presumed innocent and hauled up. It was not common for them to perish unless they did so accidentally. Should they float, however, this was taken as confirmation of their alliance with the Devil. The premise of this ordeal was that it provoked direct intervention from God in determining the guilt or innocence of the accused, and the result was therefore seen as a revelation of God’s judgement.
Contemporaries, however, had their doubts about the ordeal’s legitimacy. Theologian William Perkins argued that not all water was the water of baptism, but only that which was used in the very act of baptism, not before or after. Therefore, its sacredness and purity would only be applicable during the ritual of baptism, and it would hold no relevance in determining whether one was a witch or not. Physician John Cotta also wrote that the swimming test sought a miracle where there was none. He argued that people who used the test as a means of judicial evidence failed to grasp the concept of the natural world, which did not distinguish between good or bad people.
Witches and Devils Dancing Around in a Circle (1720): Woodcut, 1720. Wellcome Collection. Public Domain Mark
That is not to say, however, that there were not some who believed in the validity of the ordeal. Perhaps, most prominent was King James I, who became a firm believer in the presence of witches after suspecting that he had fallen victim to their wickedness. Daemonologie, essentially a manifesto detailing King James I’s beliefs in witchcraft and magic, written by James himself, mentions the swimming test. He asserts that the test was useful in confirming witchcraft accusations; as witches were in alliance with the Devil, they were refused the benefit of baptism and were essentially spat out of the water, which caused them to float. However, although he clearly approved of the swimming test, no evidence shows him enforcing the principle into practice once he came to the throne, and the practice did not reflect English law.
Nonetheless, James’ influence did seemingly resonate in pamphlets narrating witch trials. In 1612, a man named Arthur Bill, reputed to be a witch, was thrown into a pond with his parents and all of them floated. As a result, Arthur was executed. The author of this pamphlet repeated the arguments given by King James I and declared the swimming test as a certain sign of witchcraft that had been discovered with the help of God. However, this trial also raises an issue. Though Arthur and his parents were all thrown into the body of water, it was only Arthur who was executed for the crime of witchcraft; if his parents also floated, as stated by the pamphleteer, then why were they spared if this ordeal was a surety in discovering witches?
The absence of judicial torture meant that trials for English witchcraft took an alternative path to the stereotypical witchcraft trials we see in popular culture today. However, during the height of the English Civil War, individuals were able to take advantage of the disarray caused by the conflict for their own means. Cue infamous witch hunter Matthew Hopkins, associated with the East Anglian witch hunts of 1645. The accusations and confessions of the trials led by Hopkins, and his associate John Stearne, were very different in nature to previous English witch trials. They involved confessions entwined with demonic elements, such as intimacy with the Devil. This was primarily a result of the techniques Hopkins used when he interrogated the accused. His methods coincided with that of the Continent, such as keeping the accused witch under constant guard and forbidding them to sleep.
The History of Witches and Wizards: Giving a True Account of All Their Tryals in England, Scotland, Swedeland, France, and New England; With Their Confession and Condemnation. Collected from Bishop Hall, Bishop Morton, Sir Matthew Hale. By W.P. Wellcome Collection. Public Domain Mark
Hopkins also used the swimming test and specifically referenced King James I and Daemonologie in his own work, The Discovery of Witches. The sink or swim ordeal was used by Hopkins and Stearne until they were forced, by judicial authorities, to discontinue. Interestingly, Stearne had stated that he had never used the swimming test of his own accord unless it was specifically requested by the accused, who wished to clear themselves of any crime or wrongdoing.
As belief in witchcraft began to fade, so too did methods of trial and ordeal. By the end of the seventeenth century, courts began to view the swimming test as a form of assault, and if the accused were to drown, it was seen as murder.
Ultimately, the swimming test was used as a means of informal judicial evidence to identify witches throughout the seventeenth century. However, though frequently used, it was never embedded into the English judicial system, nor was it given the seal of approval by the Church. Instead, due to the absence of judicial torture in the English system, it was a means of informal violence that individuals were able to use as an alternative solution to the perceived problem of witchery.
Further Reading:- Brian Levack, The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe (London: Routledge, 2006)
- James Sharpe, Instruments of Darkness: Witchcraft in England 1550-1750 (Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997)
- Orna Darr, Marks of an Absolute Witch: Evidentiary Dilemmas in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 2011)
- Robert Bartlett, Trial by Fire and Water: The Medieval Judicial Ordeal (Vermont: Echo Point Books & Media, 2014)
- Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999)
Veena Patel is currently a GTA PhD student at the University of Leicester. Her research focuses on the role of water in healing during the Reformation.
Co-Geeking
There is an old story about how medieval people used to test whether or not someone was a witch, and it goes like this: Throw them in a pond. If they sink into the water and drown, that means they weren’t a witch. If they float, that means they are a witch, so you haul them out and burn them to death. Either way, just getting accused of witchcraft was a death sentence, but medieval people were too dumb to realize it.
This story is wrong. It was popularized by Victorian writers who spread many false stories depicting people of the European middle ages as ignorant, illogical, and stupid. At best, we might attribute this story to the intellectual laziness of Victorians who didn’t bother to distinguish between the use of ducking victims in water as punishment or torture and the use of immersion in water to test those accused of witchcraft or other crimes. At worst, we can see it as part of a concerted effort by Protestant English and American writers to paint contemporary Catholics as the benighted heirs to an age of barbarity and unreason. The truth about testing witches in water is more complicated, though in some ways even worse.
Here’s how the water test actually worked. In some places, a person accused of witchcraft, heresy, or a variety of other offenses was lowered into a small body of water like a pond or a still river, generally with a rope tied around their waist or something similar for lifting them out again. They were allowed to float for a moment and a jury selected from the surrounding community (or sometimes a priest) observed whether their body seemed to float on the surface or sink into the water. It was believed in some places and times that water would reject an unholy person, so their body would float high, while a blameless person would sink into the water. Once the jury had had a chance to observe the result, the accused was pulled out again and the jury gave its judgment.
No one was supposed to drown, neither the innocent nor the guilty. They were not left in the water for long, and whatever device was used to lower them in could quickly pull them up again. No doubt there were sometimes mishaps, as there can be whenever people are around the water, but being cleared of suspicion did not require drowning.
Trial by ordeal, which included not only the water test but other tests including carrying heavy stones or hot metal, reaching into a boiling cauldron, and similar challenges to physical endurance, was common in the legal traditions of some peoples in early medieval Europe. Such tests were an attempt to create objective tests for complicated questions about an accused person’s character, morals, and other hard-to-quantify qualities.
Trials by ordeal largely disappeared from European custom by the thirteenth century, but there was a revival during the witch-hunting hysteria of the early modern period when variations of the trial by water were used along with other methods of torture to extract false confessions from victims. In those cases the accusation alone was, for most people, a death sentence, since the point of the various “tests” was to compel a confession, not to arrive at a judgment.
The important element in a trial by ordeal is the community jury. Someone had to judge whether the accused was floating or not, which is not as obvious as it may sound. Human bodies are naturally buoyant, but not so much as to float on top of the water like a pool noodle. In the water, everyone kind of floats, and everyone kind of sinks. Distinguishing between how much floating is enough and how much is too much is no simple task. Those who were called for the jury were typically members of the accused’s village, extended family, or social network. They did not go into the test with an unbiased opinion but took with them all their knowledge, history, and feelings about the accused.
The floating ordeal gave the jury an objective external event to lodge those existing prejudices in. Those who went in with a poor opinion of the accused were likely to think that they floated too much, while those who went in well-disposed to the accused were likely to think they had adequately sunk into the water. Attaching those preexisting prejudices to an external event like the water test allowed the members of the jury to treat those prejudices as if they were objective facts and condemn or exonerate the accused with a clear conscience, as their own leanings dictated.
It is this fact about trials by ordeal that makes them, in some ways, even more horrible than the foolish heads-you-drown/tails-you-burn legend. If you were condemned by the water test it didn’t mean you just randomly floated too much. It meant that your own neighbors hated you so much they wanted to see you dead, they just didn’t feel comfortable saying so until the trial gave them permission to.
Post edited to correct a spelling error.
Image: Illustration of a trail by water via Wikimedia (late 12th c.; manuscript illustration)
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Witchcraft tests
Pixabay A person could be accused of being a witch if someone claimed that they fell ill and then were healed after that person touched them.
Another witch test that was used during the infamous Salem Witch Trials of 1692 was the “touch test.” This was used to identify witches who had cast a spell on a victim.
The idea behind this witch test was simple: if someone suddenly fell ill after being in contact with another person and then they were suddenly cured of their ailments after being touched again by that same person, then that individual who touched them was guaranteed to be a witch.
If, on the other hand, the victim was still not cured after a second touch by that person, then that person must be innocent.
But rules related to witch tests were usually self-determined by the judges and often bent to the will of the accusing public. For example, according to court documents from the Salem Witch Trials, Abigail Faulkner was among the accused after a number of people fell ill after being in contact with her.
Despite Faulkner’s denials and even her invocation of God, people were convinced that she was a witch, especially after the sick people were suddenly healed from their fits after being touched by her a second time.
De Agostini Picture Library/Getty Images The cursed touch witch test was well-documented in the Salem Witch Trials.
Faulkner did eventually confess, but only to the fact that she had wished ill upon people because they had made fun of her. She maintained that it was the Devil who had cast the spell during her ill thoughts, not her.
During the trials, one of the alleged victims of Abigail Faulkner, Mary Warren, fell into a convulsive fit that subsided only when she was touched by Faulkner. To the judges in Salem, this proved Faulkner’s culpability and she was imprisoned and sentenced to death for witchcraft.
Faulkner narrowly escaped execution because she was pregnant and later exonerated by the town, but at least 18 people in total were tried on the basis of the dubious touch test in the Salem Witch Trials alone.
" On the other hand, if the person sank, it was seen as a sign of innocence, although this often led to death by drowning. Another test was the "pricking test." This involved searching the accused person's body for so-called "witches' marks" or "devil's marks" - unusual moles, birthmarks, or scars that were believed to be evidence of a pact with the devil.
The accused would be pricked with needles or pins to see if they felt any pain. If they did not, it was seen as a sign of guilt, as witches were believed to be immune to pain. Other tests included the "witch's teat" test, in which the accused person's body would be searched for extra nipples or other abnormal growths believed to be used for sucking blood. The accused would also be subjected to "trial by fire," where they would be burned at the stake. If they survived the fire, it was seen as a sign of guilt, as it was believed that the fire would reject a witch. These witchcraft tests were based on superstition, fear, and ignorance. They often led to the torture and execution of innocent people, particularly women who were often targeted due to their gender and perceived vulnerability. Thankfully, as society became more enlightened and rational, belief in witchcraft and these tests began to fade. Today, witchcraft tests are seen as a dark and shameful chapter in history, reminding us of the dangers of intolerance and prejudice..
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