Why English Law Hanged Witches and Scottish Law Burned Them

No one was burned at Salem. Mental Floss has answered that one before— it’s misconception No. 3 on our list about the trials—and the short version is that 19 of the 20 people the court killed in 1692 were hanged at a rocky outcrop called Proctor’s Ledge.

The fire you’re picturing isn’t pure invention, though. Pop culture has long reinforced this iconic image, from René Clair’s 1942 romantic comedy I Married a Witch, where Jennifer’s ancestors are burned at the stake in Salem, to countless Halloween movies.

But that image is filed under the wrong country. In the same decades, under the same monarch, a convicted witch in Scotland went to a stake and a convicted witch in England went to a rope. That difference wasn’t temperament or appetite for cruelty. It was a technicality in how each legal system classified the crime.

How the Legal Systems Differed

In England, witchcraft was legally codified as a secular felony under statutory law, and felons were hanged. The 1604 Act against Witchcraft—the statute The National Archives holds as C 65/181—hands the guilty over to “paines of death as a Felon or Felons,” and never mentions fire in the penalty at all.

England absolutely did burn people. It just burned them for other things: heresy (under ecclesiastical jurisdiction), and petty treason, which is what the law called a wife who killed her husband or a servant who killed a master. “On the continent and in Scotland, witchcraft was heresy, and heretics were burnt at the stake,” writes Stephanie Brown, a criminologist at the University of Hull. In England it was treated as a secular property and personal crime against your neighbor, and it was punished like one.

Scotland ran the other classification, and the executions followed, though not quite the way the picture in your head suggests.

Of the 141 Scottish cases in which the University of Edinburgh’s Survey of Scottish Witchcraft could recover a method of execution, 120 specify that the convicted was strangled at the stake first and the body burned afterward. Only a very small number are recorded as burned alive. The fire was mostly disposal: heresy’s penalty carried out on someone already dead. It’s a distinction that survives in the court records and essentially nowhere else.

Real Examples

The neatest evidence that this was law rather than national character is that one man presided over both versions of it. James VI of Scotland took a personal hand in the North Berwick witch trials of the 1590s, where the condemned went to a stake. Then he moved south, became James I of England, and put his name to the statute that sent English and colonial witches to a rope. Same king, same crime, two deaths—decided by which of his legal systems you happened to be standing in.

Massachusetts inherited the English version, which is why Salem hanged. It also inherited English procedure, which is why the 20th victim died in a way that has nothing to do with witchcraft at all.

Giles Corey refused to enter a plea, and the sentence for standing mute in an English court was peine forte et dure: weights piled on a board on the chest until the defendant spoke or stopped. Samuel Sewall, one of the judges, wrote it down that week: “Abt noon, at Salem, Giles Corey was pressed to death for standing mute Much pains was used with him two days one after another by ye court.”

Corey was never convicted of witchcraft. He was crushed for declining to be tried for it. Sara Butler, a historian at Ohio State, argues that pressing was built to coerce a plea rather than to punish the crime —one more piece of English legal machinery that traveled to Massachusetts intact and got used there.

So the burning is real, and it’s even roughly contemporary. It’s just about 3,100 miles east across the Atlantic. Salem got the rope because it got English felony law, and it has spent three centuries living down a fire that belonged to Scotland.