Early modern crime: heresy, treason and witchcraft

A Period of New Crimes

Between c1500 and c1700, England did not stop punishing the old crimes — theft, assault, murder and treason were still serious offences, still tried in royal courts, and still punished harshly. The framework of tithings, parish constables and royal courts continued. What changed was that whole new categories of crime were created. Religious change made heresy a major capital offence. Economic change criminalised the wandering poor as vagabondage. And from 1542, social anxieties were channelled into the formal prosecution of witchcraft. This lesson examines all three.

Key Fact

Three new crimes defined the early modern period: heresy (Henry VIII’s Reformation onwards), vagabondage (1547 Vagrancy Act, refined by the 1601 Poor Law) and witchcraft (1542 Witchcraft Act).

Heresy and Treason: The Reformation Reshapes Crime

Until the 1530s, English Christianity was Catholic and answered to the Pope in Rome. Henry VIII’s break with Rome (1534) made the king, not the pope, the head of the English Church. From then on, refusing to accept this could be treason as well as heresy — and the line between the two became blurred.

Under Mary I, England returned briefly to Rome. The heresy laws were revived and roughly 280 Protestants were burnt at the stake between 1555 and 1558 — the so-called ‘Protestant martyrs’ whose stories John Foxe later collected in his Book of Martyrs. When Elizabeth I succeeded, the wheel turned again. The Religious Settlement of 1559 fixed England as a Protestant country. Catholic priests who entered the realm risked being executed for treason — not strictly for what they believed (heresy), but for owing political loyalty to a foreign power, the Pope.

Students often blur heresy and treason together because both could be punished by death and both featured in the same religious upheavals. They are linked but distinct. Heresy is a crime against religious doctrine — holding beliefs the Church declares wrong. Treason is a crime against political authority — betraying loyalty to the monarch. Mary I burnt Protestants for heresy. Elizabeth I executed Catholic priests for treason. Keep the two terms separate, and show how the Tudors used both to police religious change.

Vagabondage: Criminalising the Wandering Poor

In the early sixteenth century, England’s population grew rapidly while wages stagnated. The dissolution of the monasteries (1536–41) closed the largest providers of poor relief almost overnight. The ‘enclosure’ of common land for sheep farming pushed peasants off ancestral plots. The result was a sharp increase in homeless, jobless people travelling the roads in search of work.

Tudor authorities saw this not as poverty but as a criminal problem. The 1547 Vagrancy Act ordered that any sturdy beggar — a healthy person without work or settled home — could be branded with a ‘V’ on the chest and enslaved for two years on a first offence. A second offence meant death. The law lumped together the genuinely unfortunate and the small minority of professional thieves, treating both as a public danger.

The 1601 Poor Law took a more careful approach. It distinguished between the ‘impotent poor’ — the elderly, the sick, orphaned children — who deserved parish relief, and the ‘sturdy beggars’ or able-bodied poor, who were to be put to work or punished. The split between deserving and undeserving poor would shape English social policy for the next 300 years.

Students often assume that wandering and begging were always criminal. They were not. In the medieval period, wandering pilgrims, journeymen and even beggars at monastery gates were a normal part of life. Vagabondage became a crime in the sixteenth century because economic and religious change — population growth, enclosure, the closure of the monasteries — produced more wanderers than the system could absorb. The state responded by re-classifying their movement as crime. Same behaviour; new law. The point to make is that vagrancy was a redefinition of crime, not a new behaviour.

Witchcraft: Why Prosecutions Surged

The first English Witchcraft Act was passed in 1542 under Henry VIII. It made witchcraft a felony — a capital crime tried in the king’s courts rather than the Church courts. Further Acts in 1563 (under Elizabeth I) and 1604 (under James I) tightened the law and increased the penalties.

Several factors drove the surge in prosecutions. Religious anxiety after the Reformation: Protestants and Catholics each suspected the other’s use of supernatural power. Fear of social disorder: a wandering poor and a series of bad harvests in the late sixteenth century created scapegoats. The printing press: cheap pamphlets spread sensational stories of witches who killed cattle, made men impotent, and raised storms. James I’s personal interest: his book Daemonologie (1597) treated witchcraft as a real and pressing danger. Most accused witches were poor, elderly, single women — the people most easily suspected by their neighbours.

In England, witches were typically hanged rather than burnt — burning was reserved for heresy. The largest concentrated witch-hunt would come during the chaos of the Civil War, in the East Anglia hunts of 1645–47 led by Matthew Hopkins (a later lesson). Witchcraft prosecutions wound down in the late seventeenth century as scepticism grew among judges, and the law was finally repealed in 1736.

Continuity: The Old System Still Worked

Alongside these new crimes, much of the older system continued. Tithings and the hue and cry persisted in many villages. Parish constables remained the day-to-day enforcers. In towns, watchmen patrolled the streets after dark, calling out the hour and warning of fires — the closest thing to a town police force, but unarmed and often elderly. Royal courts still handled serious offences; Church courts still handled moral cases. What had changed was the menu of crimes, not the basic machinery for trying them.