Was life easy for witches in medieval times?

Answer 1

People who had practices that might be interpreted as witchcraft, or who might have been accused, were much more likely to be treated well during the Middle Ages than they were later.

A superstitious fear of witches has existed in many societies, and medieval Europe was no exception. There were cases of witches being killed by various groups of people, at times. And so it was necessary for governments to step in. The laws of the Franks and the Lombards, at the time of Charlemagne, explicitly made belief in witchcraft a superstition, and made killing a person for practicing witchcraft murder, unless it could be proven that the witch had actually killed someone.

The Middle Ages lasted a thousand years, and there were many countries, with many different legal codes, in it. There were countries where witchcraft was considered a crime. But this was not general over all of Europe, or even over all of Western Europe.

Inquisitions, or investigations, into witchcraft began in various parts of Europe at just about the same time as the Italian Renaissance. The early inquisitions were not aimed at large parts of populations, and were not witch hunts, as they only took place where there were accusations against individuals. No one was actively trying to look through everyone in town to find out who were witches, and who were not.

The inquisitions in which entire populations were put to the test did not happen until the Middle Ages were over. The first set of instructions on how to identify witches began to circulate in 1487, a year after the end date most historians use for the Middle Ages. Witch hunts, with large numbers of people identified as witches and punished for that practice, came after that.

I have seen estimates of that there were about 1000 people executed as witches during the Middle Ages, though such estimates are really professional guesses. The best estimates for the number of people executed as witches during the time of 1450 to 1750 seem to run from about 35000.

So the people of medieval Europe, who are commonly called superstitious, executed an average of one person per year in the entire continent. But the people of the European Renaissance and the years following, who are thought of as enlightened, executed an average of about 1100 to 1200.