Taylor & Son's Northamptonshire Handbook.
was no better, and took to strange fancies and antics, which no one could interpret. Shortly after her departure, Lady Cromwell saw the unlucky individual who was supposed to be at the bottom of all the mischief. To use Hutchinson's words,[1] "She sent for the old woman and call'd her witch, and abused her, and pulled off her kerelier, and cut off some of her hair, and gave it to Mrs. Throgmorton for a charm. At night this lady, as was very likely she would after such an ill day's work, dreamt of Mother Samwell and a cat, and fell into fits; and about a year and a quarter after she died." This was another offence at the poor wretch's door. The mutterings of the children, in their disordered state, were carefully patched together, and they were found to tell a tale about some imps waiting upon Mother Samwell, their names, according to this version, being Pluck, Smack, Hardname, Catch, and Blew. Long conversations among these interesting little demons were detailed by Jane Throgmorton, according to the evidence of Dr. Dorrington, who had been called in to attend upon her. The daughter, Agnes Samwell, was duly scratched, and she stood the ordeal with a martyr's fortitude. Her mother was induced to utteranexorcism, on promise of forgiveness, and even had some sort of a confession of guilt extorted from her by the same means. But all was of no avail. Not only the old woman, but her husband and daughter, were put on their trial at Huntingdon, and all were condemned without hesitation. To obtain proof against the old man, the judge told him on his trial that "if he would not speak the words of the charm, the Court would hold him guilty of the crimes he was accused of." After some browbeating, he did repeat it, when the child's fit ceased, and the judge exclaimed, "You see, all, she is now well, but not by the music of David's harp." Hanging followed as a matter of course; and, to commemorate the event, Sir Henry Cromwell appropriated the sum of forty pounds as a fund to provide for the preaching of an annual sermon against witchcraft. Mr. Wright says, "I have not ascertained if this sermon is still continued."
But a new impulse was to be given to this crusade against the powers of darkness on the death of Elizabeth. James the First, the great detector of demoniacs and the arch enemy of the devil, had different ideas of kingcraft to many other monarchs, and he signalised his accession to the English throne by a terrific raid upon the agents of his mighty antagonist. In the very first year of his reign an Act was passed quite worthy of the man who had interpreted the Revelation before he was twenty, and who, at twenty-three, was told by a devil, speaking out of a witch's mouth, that he was a man of God whom demons had no power over. It enacted that any person who was convicted of employing sorcery, enchantments, or charms, or digging up dead bodies for this purpose, should be sentenced to death. The clause referring to the business of resurrection was inserted apparently because stewed children formed the proper ointment for smearing on the broomstick, to enable the witch to fly through the air. In Middleton's "Witch" we have the speech-
"Here, take this unbaptised brat;
Boil it well; preserve the fat;
You know 'tis precious to transfer
Our 'nointed flesh into the air,
In moonlight nights, on steeple tops,
Mountains and pine-trees, that like pricks or stops
Seem to our height."
The real history of witch prosecution begins and ends with the seventeenth century. Many cases occur both before and after that period, but this was the time when hounding down a poor old hag to death was most conspicuously a virtue. Northamptonshire was favoured with a strong dose of prosecutions as soon as the fruits of the new Act could fairly appear. It should be stated that the records we possess of the trials, both at this and a later period, are very imperfect, the information obtainable being derived almost exclusively from odd pamphlets accidentally preserved, stray allusions in contemporary authors, or other scattered data. At the end of the narrative of a trial at Northampton, to which we shall immediately refer, it is said that the unfortunate persons executed for witchcraft "left behind them in prison many others tainted with the same corruption, who, without much mercy and repentance, are like to follow them in the same tract of precedencie." But of the fate of these other poor creatures we have no further mention whatever in any work or document that has come down to us, and they do not appear to have been included in subsequent computations of the number charged with this offence. News travelled slowly in
63
- ↑ Historical Essay concerning Witchcraft, p. 132.
