Witchcraft Acts

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Prompted in the first place by Hallowe’en, and then getting interested in the subject, I have put up the texts of the major statutes concerning witchcraft in the British Isles. For England, Great Britain, and the United Kingdom, these are:

1541-2: 33 Henry 8 c.8: The Act against Conjurations, Witchcraft, Sorcery and Enchantments

1563: 5 Elizabeth 1 c.16: An Act against Conjurations, Inchantments and Witchcraft

1580-1: 23 Elizabeth c.2: Against seditious words and rumours (This because it has clauses on prophesizing the Queen’s life span.)

1604: 1 James 1 c.12: An Act against Witchcraft

1735: 9 George 2 c.5: The Witchcraft Act

1821: 1 & 2 George 4 c.17: Repeal of the Irish Witchcraft Act

1951: 14 & 15 George 6 c. 33: Fraudulent Mediums Act

Also, I’ve added two acts from Ireland, and one from Scotland, from the legislatures previous to their respective acts of union. For Ireland, 1586: 28 Elizabeth 1 c. 2: An Act against Witchcraft and Sorcerie, repealed by the 1821 act above, and 10 Charles 1 s.2 c. 19: An act for the trial of murders, &c., as it mentions murders through bewitchment. And for Scotland, 1563: Mary c.73: Anentis Witchcraft.

Updates, October to December 2018.

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Work on the Statutes project for the last three months of 2018:

The big news is that I now have a complete set of volumes of statutes for the nineteenth century, courtesy of the Institute of Historical Research allowing me to photograph their copies. The OCR’d text, messy but undergoing correction, can be found on Github.

There is also now a complete set of tables of public acts for the Parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, 1801 to 1921. Again, find them on Github.

Laws added: the utterances of an oaf required the addition of  Statute of Praemunire; Hallowe’en led me to add some witchcraft acts from 1541, 1563, and 1604, and Bonfire night was marked with James I’s dictat for the Observance of November the 5th. Topical stuff, eh?

Also added: 1739 County Rates Act and 1838 Public Records Act.

A new section has been created for private, local and personal acts; the first text in it is the Lancashire Sessions Act of 1798.

And the usual round of automated OCR corrections.

 

Digitization of the missing late c19th volumes

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Although there are many digitized collections of statutes available online, and indeed many digitizations of the same publication, I have not found a number of volumes from the last two decades of the nineteenth century.

Happily, I have now been able to digitize these volumes myself, courtesy of the Institute of Historical Research, who very kindly allowed me to photograph their copies.

I copied them using an iphone and a selfie stick designed by Sussex Unversity Humanities Lab. Althugh SHL are developing a whole workflow for DIY scanning and OCRing documents through a modern smartphone, I simply took pictures, and later ran them through Abbyy Finereader, as I have been doing with the digital volumes downloaded from Google Books and Internet Archive.

The whole procedure took a full work day, which I think quite quick given the size and number of the volumes; once I got into the rhythm, the apparatus held firm, I averaged about one volume an hour, photographing two pages at a time.

The text of these volumes can be found on github; some automated correcting has been carried out, but it is still all pretty raw, especially the tables. No doubt there will be pages I have inadvertently photographed twice, photographed poorly, or accidentally omitted, but by and large I think the quality is as good as can be expected. As with all the other volumes I have OCRd, the text is public domain.

Once again, my thanks to the IHR for access to their books and a desk at which to copy them, and to Sussex Humanities Lab for the selfie sticks. Without such help, ‘unofficial’, grassroots, lone scholar projects such as this one would not be able to develop their potential.

Tables of Statutes of the United Kingdom, 1801 to 1921.

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I have now completed tables of the full, long titles of public statutes passed by the parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, from the Act of Union in 1801 up to 1921, when Ireland was divided and the south achieved independence. They can be found on github.  All these tables are public domain, and can be reused for any purpose and in any way one wishes.

I am currently working on generating tables of abbreviated titles of private and local acts for this period, using the annotated lists of local acts and private acts produced by Legislation.gov.uk.

This will be quicker than working through the full titles in the volumes of statutes for this period, although at the cost of less detail. (Tables giving full titles will be produced eventually as I work on correcting the OCR of the scanned volumes, but this will take some time.)

Once the private and local tables have been created, I will produce a more convenient package of these lists, easy to download and suitable for searching and text mining.

Updates: August and September 2018

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Work on the Statutes Project done over the last two months:

A blog post: on a satyrical law against make-up and adornments, sometimes taken as real, that I’ve dated back to 1785.

New tables: There is now a complete run of tables of public acts spanning 1807 to 1912, hosted on Github.

New acts added: three on the preservation of historical monuments from 1882, 1892 and 1900; the Corruption of Blood Act, 1814; and the Transportation Act, 1718.

And the usual round of automatic corrections to the OCR’d text of the collections of statutes. Whilst still very messy, the text is readable for those volumes in a modern font, and approaching readability for those in old, ‘long-s’ typefaces. Find them on Github.

The act to protect men from false adornments

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One reason I started this ridiculously ambitious project was that I found myself hearing some unbelievable tales about laws wild and wacky, none of which could actually cite the statute in question. An example of such is the following, sometimes entitled ‘The act to protect men from false adornments’:

That all women, of whatever age rank, profession, or degree, whether virgins, maids, or widows, that shall, from and after such act, impose upon, seduce, and betray into matrimony any of his Majesty’s male subjects, by the scents, paints, cosmetic washes, artificial teeth, false hair, Spanish wool, iron stays, hoops, high-heeled shoes, &c., shall incur the penalty of the law now in force against witchcraft and like misdemeanors and the marriage, upon upon conviction, shall stand null and void.

You can find a great many volumes citing this ‘act’, courtesy of Google Books, variously dating it to  1670, 1700, 1720 and 1770.

It is, however, a jest. Searching through all the volumes I have turned into plain text, absolutely nothing comes close to these words. Nor is there any trace of it in the tabulation of rejected bills, ‘Failed Legislation‘ (Hambledon Press, 1997).

Searching through the Burney collection of historic newspapers and the British Newspaper Archive turns up a clutch of newspapers printing this squib in August 1785. The original publisher is the Public Advertiser of Tuesday, August 23, 1785 (No. 15989), which uniquely gives a second clause:

And that such an act might be productive to the State, it might be further enacted, “that all men, boys, bachelors, widowers, or others, that shall have been so imposed upon, deceived, and seduced into matrimony, shall, upon the divorce taking place, forfeit unto our Sovereign Lord the King, one half or moiety of any sum or sums of money, lands, tenements, &c. that he or they shall have received as a marriage portion, with his or their said wife or wives; and, if no such portion or dowry as received, then shall they forfeit one hundred pounds of lawful money of Great Britain, as a penalty in recognizance of their extreme weakness, blindness, and imprudence, in being so deceived.

The first part is copied and pasted in quick succession by the Whitehall Evening Post of August 25, 1785 (No. 5973.), the Chelmsford Chronicle of August 26, 1785 (BNA link – behind paywall) and the Hampshire Chronicle of August 29. (BNA link – behind paywall).

Curiously, this item was passed off as fact in an execrable book of 1859, ‘Manners and Customs of the English Nation‘, dating it to 1770. As the Gentleman’s Magazine wrote, in an excoriating review, “We regret to say no authority is given”; it nevertheless found ironic praise for the author’s “air of originality.”

The spoof law is a genre in itself, and certainly this one can be cited as an example of late eighteenth century fears of the feminine. But it is not an example of statutory sexism.

Updates: June and July 2018.

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Work on the Statutes Project done in the last two months:

New Volumes: I have scanned, and uploaded to Github, 13 volumes of the series ‘The Law Reports: The Public General Statutes’, each covering one session of parliament held between 1880 and 1898. Note that this is raw, uncorrected OCR; as yet I haven’t run my corrections list over these files. And note that this isn’t a complete, or even consecutive, run; there are still 8 years of the nineteenth century missing.

New Tables: there is now a complete run of tables of legislation spanning 1814 to 1900, hosted on Github.

One new act: for the Relief of Insolvent Debtors, 1760.

New bibliographies, of the English Statutes of the Realm series, and – of a mere three items – for legislation of Antigua and the Leeward Islands. Also, updated are the Jamaican and Indian lists.

And the usual round of automated OCR corrections, and ‘garbage removal’, of random characters and symbols.

Updates, April and May 2018

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These last two months have mainly be spent making automated corrections to the OCRd volumes of the Statutes. Alongside correcting specific mistranscriptions, I’ve been working on correcting word endings, such as ‘fiire’ for shire and ‘mcnt’ for ment; and I have also been cleaning up random junk and stray marks generally interpreted by Abbyy Finereader as punctuation or symbols.

In other work, many new tables have been added, mainly for the nineteenth century. There is now a complete run from 1851 to 1880.  Find them on Github.

Added to this site: New bibliographies for the various collections of British statutes. See the blog post about them, and the bibliographies themselves.

Also added, just a couple of new laws: 1857 Time in Royal Marines, 1858 Abolition of Franchise Prisons.

Bibliographies of Collections of British Statutes

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I have now finished compiling the bibliographies of the several collections of British legislation I have used for this project. Each entry, due to the magic of Zotero, should have a link to the digitized version of the book, and each bibliography a link to the OCRd text I am currently correcting, hosted on Github.

These bibliographies are not complete, both in that there are other collections I have not made lists for, and that those I have do not list all the volumes. I have concentrated on books freely available online, and that I have used to generate the OCRd texts I am correcting. Given time, I may well expand this, but for the moment it provides at least one volume covering the period from Magna Carta until 1878. After that date, far fewer volumes are freely available, and so for all intents and purposes, the project stops there. But note that legislation for the twentieth and twenty first centuries is available via Matthew Williams marvelous datasets.

Not every law is to be found in full in these volumes. Some are abbreviated, giving the preamble, perhaps a few clauses, and a summary. Some are omitted entirely. Very few private, personal and local acts are given. And very annoyingly, volume 43 part 2 of Pickering’s Statutes at Large is the sole missing part of that long and useful series.

All this notwithstanding, I think these bibliographies will be of great help to anyone wanting to track down historic laws.

Go to the Index Page.

Updates, January and February 2018

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Over the past two months I have taken a look at the volumes of statutes published from 1820 on, that is, with a modern typeface and without the long s that OCR software interprets in a multitude of ways.

Overall, the standard of text generated from the digitized PDFs is good to very good. Part of this may simply be due to the books not being as old, and therefore printed better, on better paper and being less worn and torn, than older volumes. But the typeface is certainly more amenable to being OCR’d, and the raw text is generally quite readable. The major problem is the recognition of the page layout, which with the statutes means that the side annotations get integrated into the body of the text. Certainly, the speed with which I have corrected some of the lists of legislation is far greater than for the pre-1820 texts.

Consequently, I’m considering concentrating on these volumes, although the eighteenth century is where most of my interests lie. But apart from sorting the tables, this is a decision I shall put off.

Also this month:

The usual run of automatic corrections; find improved text on Github.

Added tables of statutes for 1703, 1713, 1790, and 1866 to 1878. Again, find them on Github.

New acts: the famous 1918 Representation of the People act, in honour of its centenary; the notorious Buggery Act of Henry VIII, the 1706 Escape from Prisons act and the Repeal of the South Sea Bubble Act.

Added a bibliography of volumes of statutes in the series ‘A Collection of Public general Statutes’, with links to the relevent Google Books page, for 1837 to 1869;

And finally, a blog post on ways of checking and correcting OCR’d text.

There will be a pause until after Easter, whilst work and PhD take priority. This is very much a one-person side project, without any funding, and as such has to take second (and third) place to other demands.