The Weigh House In The 16th Century [Witch Weighing Court]

The venture was built in 1482 as a freight range. In 1545, Emperor Charles V was the only place in Europe to give Oudewater the privilege of an honest weighing process. No one was ever condemned as a witch.

Historical research by Kurt Baschwitz and others has made it clear that this was a lucrative company that, at the time of the witch prosecutions in Europe, provided for "non-witch statements" on a large scale: certificates that allowed innocents to escape miscarriagesof justice for a fee .

The people who actually weighed themselves in Oudewater to show that they were not witches were small in number and mainly from the immediate vicinity of Oudewater. In 1987, on the basis of the available sources from the period 1674-1743, only 13 persons could be established with certainty that they had received a certificate proving that they could not be witches by reason of their weight. At the time of the witch trials in the regions of Holland and Utrecht in the last decades of the sixteenth century, the Heksenwaag was not used. The government in Oudewater carried out the weighing tests at a time when elsewhere in the Republic judges refused to carry out such tests with which accused of witchcraft wanted to prove their innocence. Allegations of witchcraft were then considered defamation rather than a complaint to be taken seriously. Since each certificate had to be paid for, possible economic motives played a role in this. After all, each weigh-in meant more revenue for the city of Oudewater.
Museum
Nowadays, the Heksenwaag is a tourist attraction. Visitors can still weigh themselves there and then receive a Certificaet from Weginghe stating that the weighted one is not too light and is therefore not a witch. An exhibition on witch persecution in Europe has been set up on the upper floor of the daredevil building.