Its chief provision was this:
"If any person or persons use, practice or exercise any invocation or
conjuration of any evil and wicked spirit, or shall consult, covenant
with, entertain, employ, feed or reward any evil and wicked spirit to or
for any intent or purpose, or take up any dead man, woman, or child out
of his, her or their grave, or any other place where the dead body
resteth or the skin, bone, or any part of any dead person, to be
employed or used in any manner of witchcraft, sorcery, charm, or
enchantment, or shall use, practise, or exercise any witchcraft,
enchantment, charm, or sorcery, whereby any person shall be killed,
destroyed, wasted, consumed, pined or lamed in his or her body or any
part thereof: every such offender is a felon without benefit of clergy."
Under this law, and the methods of its administration, witchcraft so
called increased; persecutions multiplied, especially under the
Commonwealth, and notably in the eastern counties of England, whence so
many of all estates, all sorts and conditions of men, had fled over seas
to set up the standard of independence in the Puritan colonies.
Many executions occurred in Lancashire, in Suffolk, Essex, and
Huntingdonshire, where the infamous scoundrel "Witch-finder-General"
Matthew Hopkins, under the sanction of the courts, was "pricking,"
"waking," "watching," and "testing" persons suspected or accused of
witchcraft, with fiendish ingenuity of indignity and torture.
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