Torture seems to have touched villages whenever cold did. Historian Wolfgang Behringer studied the European witch trials and found a correlation between the peaks of witch prosecutions and accumulative sequences of coldness in the years 1560-1574, 1583-1589, 1623-1630 and 1678-1698. From 1730 on the climate became more stable, and so did the general mood. Isolated witch-trials continued in Central Europe until the 1770s, but nothing on as grand a scale as the hey-day of the Little Ice Age.
