June 19, 2026· 6 min read
You Could No Longer Be Executed for Witchcraft in 1736. But Pretending to Be a Witch? That Would Cost You.
When the British Parliament repealed its witchcraft execution laws, it replaced them with something stranger: a crime of impersonation.
Strange Fact
In 1736, the British Parliament made a quiet but remarkable decision: it stopped treating witchcraft as a capital offense. No more executions. No more trials for consorting with the devil. The age of burning and hanging witches was, legally speaking, over.
But Parliament did not simply wipe the slate clean. In place of the old laws, it passed a new one. And the new law made it a criminal offense to pretend to use witchcraft.
In other words, the British government had officially decided that witches did not exist — but that fraudsters who claimed to be witches very much did. The act of performing actual witchcraft was now legally impossible. The act of faking it, however, could land you in prison for a year and earn you a spell in the public pillory.
The legal backflip was, by any measure, one of the stranger pivots in British legislative history.
Historical Background
To understand what made 1736 so significant, it helps to understand how seriously previous generations had taken the threat of witchcraft.
England's earlier witchcraft laws were no minor statutes. The Witchcraft Act of 1542, passed under Henry VIII, was the first to make witchcraft a felony punishable by death. Subsequent laws under Elizabeth I and James I expanded the scope further. James, who had a near-obsessive interest in demonology (he even wrote a book on the subject, Daemonologie, in 1597), pushed for some of the harshest provisions. Under the Witchcraft Act of 1604, even an attempt to invoke evil spirits was punishable by hanging.
The human cost was real. Historians estimate that somewhere between 500 and 1,000 people were executed for witchcraft in England over roughly two centuries, with the peak of prosecutions falling in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Scotland, which had its own statutes, saw far higher numbers.
By the early eighteenth century, however, the intellectual climate had shifted. The Enlightenment was well underway. Educated opinion had grown skeptical of supernatural explanations for disease, misfortune, and strange behavior. Judges were increasingly reluctant to convict. The last execution for witchcraft in England had taken place in 1682. The last in Scotland occurred in 1727, just nine years before Parliament acted.
The machinery of witch prosecution was rusting from disuse. Parliament moved to dismantle it officially.
What Happened
On June 19, 1736, the Witchcraft Act of 1736 received royal assent and came into force across England and Scotland.
The Act repealed three major pieces of earlier legislation:
- The Witchcraft Act of 1542 (Henry VIII)
- The Witchcraft Act of 1563 (Elizabeth I)
- The Witchcraft Act of 1604 (James I)
In their place, the new law introduced a single, carefully worded offense. It targeted any person who claimed to "use, practice, or exercise any kind of Witchcraft, Sorcery, Enchantment, or Conjuration." The operative word, buried in the legal language, was pretend. The law was not written to catch actual witches. It was written to catch con artists.
The penalty reflected this shift in thinking. Rather than execution, offenders now faced up to one year in prison, with the possibility of being placed in the pillory, a public humiliation device in which the convicted person was locked in a wooden frame in a public space and subjected to jeering, rotten vegetables, and worse.
It was a punishment designed for fraudsters, not heretics.
The law also made it illegal to charge money for finding stolen goods through supernatural means, for locating missing persons through divination, or for claiming to communicate with the dead. These provisions were squarely aimed at fortune tellers, cunning folk, and self-styled conjurers who made a living off credulous clients.
Why It Was Strange
The peculiarity of the 1736 Act lies in its internal logic, which managed to be both rational and absurd at the same time.
Parliament was, in effect, making two statements simultaneously. The first was progressive and grounded in Enlightenment thinking: witchcraft is not real, and the state should not execute people for something that does not exist. The second was more mundane but legally consequential: people who claim supernatural powers to defraud others are criminals, and the state will punish them accordingly.
The result was a law in which pretending to be a witch was more legally dangerous than being one. There was, under the new Act, no crime of witchcraft itself. But the performance of witchcraft, the pageantry of spells and supernatural claims, remained very much on the books as an offense.
This created a situation with a certain philosophical absurdity. A person who genuinely believed they were a witch and made no effort to profit from it was, technically, committing no crime at all. A person who skeptically but profitably pretended to commune with spirits was a criminal.
The law essentially codified the Enlightenment's contempt for superstition while simultaneously acknowledging that the social problem of supernatural belief had not gone away. People were still paying for curses to be lifted, for stolen property to be found by magical means, for dead relatives to be contacted. The 1736 Act treated this not as a spiritual crisis but as a consumer protection issue.
It was, in its own way, a deeply modern piece of thinking.
Historical Legacy
The Witchcraft Act of 1736 remained on the books for over two centuries. It was not repealed until 1951, when it was replaced by the Fraudulent Mediums Act, which took a nearly identical approach: prosecuting fraudulent claims of supernatural power rather than supernatural power itself.
In the intervening years, the 1736 Act was used sporadically but memorably. Perhaps its most famous prosecution came during World War II, when a Scottish spiritualist named Helen Duncan was tried and convicted in 1944, partly under its provisions. Duncan had allegedly revealed, during séances, classified military information about the sinking of HMS Barham, a warship whose loss had not yet been publicly announced. The government's decision to prosecute her under an eighteenth-century witchcraft statute attracted considerable public ridicule, but the conviction held.
Duncan's case prompted renewed calls for repeal, which eventually came with the 1951 Fraudulent Mediums Act. That law, in turn, was repealed in 2008 and replaced by consumer protection regulations — meaning that, by the twenty-first century, fake psychics were being handled by trading standards offices rather than courts with any historical connection to witch trials.
The arc from execution to pillory to trading standards is, in its own way, a surprisingly coherent line through British legal history. Each iteration accepted that the problem was not supernatural evil but ordinary human deception.
What makes 1736 the hinge point is that it was the first moment Parliament admitted, in statute, that the witches it had been executing for two centuries had never existed in the first place. It just took another two hundred years to fully work out what to do about the people who kept insisting they did.
Sources
Written by
The History, But Strange Team
We dig into the weirdest, strangest, and most forgotten corners of real history. From bizarre royal scandals to unusual medical practices and darkly funny disasters, our team researches and writes about the stories your textbooks left out.
