On 29 July 1566, Agnes Waterhouse of Hatfield Peverel in Essex was hanged at Chelmsford — the first person executed for witchcraft in England under the Elizabethan Witchcraft Act of 1562. Her trial was one of three heard together that summer in what became known as the Chelmsford witch trials, alongside those of her neighbour Elizabeth Francis and Agnes's own daughter Joan Waterhouse. All three women were said to have shared the same familiar spirit: a cat named Sathan which could perform malicious services in exchange for a drop of the witch's blood.
The story
The pamphlet account of the trial, published shortly after the hanging, gives a vivid portrait of Agnes's alleged practices. She confessed to having received Sathan from Elizabeth Francis after converting the cat into a toad for easier concealment. In its toad form, she kept it in a pot and fed it on bread and milk. The familiar was credited with drowning a neighbour's livestock, killing her own husband, and destroying the property of those against whom she bore ill-will. The pamphlet — 'The Examination and Confession of certaine Wytches at Chensford' — is one of the earliest and most detailed English witch-trial documents and was reprinted extensively, helping establish the template for subsequent witch pamphlet literature over the following century.
Agnes was sixty-three at the time of her trial, described in the pamphlet as 'a very old woman.' Her confession was extracted without formal torture — English law generally forbade it — though the testimony of a twelve-year-old child witness, Agnes Brown, who claimed Sathan had appeared to her as a black dog, must have made resistance extremely difficult. The Essex Record Office holds the original documentary record and has published detailed academic analysis; the trials preceded the more famous Pendle witch crisis of 1612 by nearly fifty years and are considered foundational in the development of English witch-trial procedure and literature.