Elizabethan Witchcraft and Witches. Elizabethan Superstitions Who were the people accused of being Elizabethan Witches?
Women were those most often accused of being witches. There were 270 Elizabethan witch trials of 247 were women and only 23 were men. Those accused of witchcraft were generally: King James I: Demonologist. By Mary Sharratt Even by the standards of his age,” King James VI of Scotland, later James I of England, stood out as a deeply superstitious man, obsessed with the occult.
Before his reign, witchcraft persecutions had been rare in Britain. But that all changed in 1590 when James personally oversaw the trials by torture for around seventy individuals implicated in the North Berwick Witch Trials, the biggest Scotland had known. Their alleged crime? Macbeth, King James and the Witches.