Part I, Cii, 489 Ff.; Inderwick, Side-Lights on the

Stuarts, 2d ed., 1891, pp. 171-172, 191.

York Depositions, pp. 192, 202-203.

The same, p. 247.

Margaret Stothard’s case, The Monthly Chronicle of North-Country Lore and Legend, 1888, p. 395.

See page 54.

F. Hutchinson, Historical Essay, 1718, pp. 44-45 (ed. 1720, pp. 61-62). There is a very interesting account of the second of these trials (that of Elizabeth Horner or Turner) in a letter to the Bishop of Exeter from Archdeacon (?) Blackburne, who attended at the bishop’s request. This letter, dated Sept. 14, 1696, has been printed by Mr. T. Quiller-Couch in Notes and Queries, 1st Series, XI, 498-499, and again in Brand’s Popular Antiquities, ed. Hazlitt, III, 103-104. The spectral evidence comes out clearly. Of Holt, Blackburne remarks: “My Lord Chief Justice by his questions and manner of summing up the Evidence seem’d to me to believe nothing of witchery at all.”

Chap. 160, sec. 5, p. 384. “The court justified themselves from books of law, and the authorities of Keble, Dalton and other lawyers, then of the first character, who lay down rules of conviction as absurd and dangerous, as any which were practiced in New England.” Hutchinson, History of Massachusetts, ed. 1795, II, 27.

James Burvile testified “That hearing the Scratchings and Noises of Cats, he went out, and saw several of them; that one of them had a Face like Jane Wenham; that he was present several Times when Anne Thorn said she saw Cats about her Bed; and more he would have attested, but this was thought sufficient by the Court” ([F. Bragge,] A Full and Impartial Account of the Discovery of Sorcery and Witchcraft, practis’d by Jane Wenham, London, 1712, p. 29). After the conviction of the witch, Ann was still afflicted: “Ann Thorn continues to be frequently troubl’d with the Apparition either of Jane Wenham in her own Shape, or that of a Cat, which speaks to her, and tempts her to destroy her self with a Knife that it brings along with it” ([Bragge,] Witchcraft Farther Display’d, 1712, Introduction). In 1711 spectral evidence was admitted at the trial of eight witches at Carrickfergus, in Ireland (A Narrative of some Strange Events that took place in Island Magee, and Neighbourhood, in 1711, by an Eye Witness, Belfast, 1822, Appendix, pp. 49-50).

A Tryal of Witches, as above, p. 40.

“The Judge and all the Court were fully satisfied with the Verdict” (A Tryal, etc., p. 58).

For a learned discussion of spectral evidence see J. B. Thayer, Atlantic Monthly, April, 1890, LXV, 471 ff.

Dr. Hutchinson, who acknowledges his indebtedness to Holt, mentions six witches as tried by the Chief Justice from 1691 to 1696, and adds, “Several others in other Places, about Eleven in all, have been tried for Witches before my Lord Chief Justice Holt, and have all been acquitted. The last of them was Sarah Morduck, accused by Richard Hathaway, and tried at Guilford Assize, Anno 1701” (Historical Essay, 2d ed., pp. 58-63). It is not clear whether the “eleven in all” includes the seven previously mentioned. On the Morduck-Hathaway case, cf. Howell, State Trials, XIV, 639 ff.

Drake, Annals of Witchcraft in New England, pp. 136, 138.

Compare Mr. Goodell’s remarks on the reversal of attainder, in his Reasons for Concluding that the Act of 1711 became a Law, 1884. I have not considered here the bearing of this reversal, or of the attempt to pay damages to the survivors or their heirs, because these things came somewhat later. It must be noted, however, that all such measures of reparation, whatever may be thought of their sufficiency, were unexampled in the history of witch trials the world over, and that they came before the last condemnation for witchcraft in England (1712). See the references appended by Mr. Goodell to the Act of 1703 in The Acts and Resolves of the Province of the Massachusetts Bay, VI, 49-50.

See p. 17, above.

Legge, as above, p. 264.

2d ed., 1720.

P. 83; 2d ed., p. 108.

See W. F. Poole, in Winsor’s Memorial History of Boston, II, 133. Dr. Poole finds twelve executions in New England before 1692. This makes the total for all New England, from 1620 to the present day, 34 (including two who died in jail). Cf. C. W. Upham, Salem Witchcraft, Boston, 1867, II, 351; S. G. Drake, Annals of Witchcraft, pp. 191 ff. In this part of my paper I have made a few quotations from a book of my own, The Old Farmer and his Almanack (Boston, 1904).

“They were the first of all people,” writes Mr. Goodell, “to escape the thraldom” (Reasons for Concluding that the Act of 1711 became a Law, 1884, p. 21).

See Francis Hutchinson, Historical Essay, 2d edition, 1720, pp. 45 ff.

John Stearne, Hopkins’s associate, speaks of what he has himself “learned and observed since the 25. of March 1645 as being in part an agent in finding out or discovering some of those since that time, being about two hundred in number, in Essex, Suffolke, Northamptonshire, Huntingtonshire, Bedfordshire, Norfolke, Cambridgeshire, and the Isle of Ely in the County of Cambridge, besides other places, justly and deservedly executed upon their legall tryalls” (A Confirmation and Discovery of Witch-craft, London, 1648, To the Reader). Stearne wrote his book after the death of Hopkins, which took place in 1647. In the life of Hopkins in the Dictionary of National Biography, the Witch-Finder is said to have begun operations in 1644. This is a manifest error. Hopkins himself (Discovery of Witches, 1647, p. 2, see below) says that his experiences began at Manningtree “in March 1644,” but Stearne’s statement makes it clear that this is Old Style, for Stearne was also concerned in the Manningtree business, and the year is completely established by the report of the proceedings,--A True and Exact Relation of the several Informations [etc.] of the late Witches, London, 1645 (cf. T. B. Howell’s State Trials, IV, 817 ff.). The traditional statement that Hopkins was hanged as a wizard (cf. Hudibras, Part ii,