The final installment on the burning times.

                                    Local Authorities

What They Did-- It was the local authorities who killed the vast majority of Witches, mostly in community-based courts.Some of these courts were virtual slaughterhouses, killing ninty percent of all accused Witches. Germany offers the most horrific evidence of the dangers of local courts. Most countries had a national court that squelched the excesses of the local courts. But since Germany did not, it killed nearly half of alll Witches who died in these times. Panics were noy uncommon in Germant, and all of these panics occured in local courts.

What They Didn't Do--The local authorities didn't kill millions of people. Historians are confident that somewhere between 40,000 and 60,000 witches died. This is mainly because, in the past, no one had counted the number of Witch trials in court records. There are millions of trials from this period, and only a small number have anything to do with Witchcraft. Estimates of the numbers of Witches executed were based on wildly varying guesswork. Once historians actually began to count the number of executions, they found that trials were far less common than they thought. To date, fewer than 15,000 definite executions have been found. Compensating for lost records and unrecorded deaths, this suggests that the death toll was nowhere near the millions once suggested. Of course, the true horror of a Witch trial cannot be found in the cold statistics, but in the sad tales of Witches like Anne Gamperle, tortured to death in front of her husband and sons. That is, each individual unjustified death is a tragedy that we should remember, even if the number of tragadies is not so great as we once thought.

                                                National Governments

What They Did--Contrary to what most people believe, Witch hunting was worst where the Church and State were weakest. Governments generally don't like panics and chaos. The persecution of Witches, then, was worst when and where the authorites couldn't stop it in places alond national borders, at times during periods of civil war, and in loose confederacies like Germany and Switzerland. There are some exceptions, cush as in Scotland, where King James introduced Witch hunting. But in most areas, a strong government decreased Witch hunting.

What They Didn't do--The national Government didn't kill many Witches. National courts killed more Witches than Church courts did, but nowhere as many as the local courts. In many areas, roughly thirty percent of the Witches tried by national courts were killed.

Well I guess I will finish this last piese on Common folks and traditional witches in another installment.