Although women were commonly downtrodden and despised, this was not the paramount reason why this sex was to be disproportionately persecuted during the sixteenth century. This conviction was not absurd, when one considers it in the context of its medieval background. A constant theme during this period was that great men and rulers in history had recurringly been ruined by the nature of women. Witchcraft had been punished as a crime in the past, but this was on a much smaller scale when compared to the prosecutions undertaken by the English, Scottish and most European hierarchies in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. This increased intensity is not only supported by comparing the numbers convicted of this felony throughout history, but also by the sharp rise in the proportion of females (the majority of the respective individual hierarchies' chosen scapegoats) found guilty of this crime.