The Project Gutenberg eBook, Discovery of Witches, by Thomas Potts, Edited by James Crossley This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org Title: Discovery of Witches The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster Author: Thomas Potts Editor: James Crossley Release Date: April 25, 2006 [eBook #18253] Language: English Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 ***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DISCOVERY OF WITCHES*** E-text prepared by Clare Boothby, Linda Cantoni, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net/) REMAINS HISTORICAL & LITERARY CONNECTED WITH THE PALATINE COUNTIES OF LANCASTER AND CHESTER PUBLISHED BY THE CHETHAM SOCIETY. VOL. VI. PRINTED FOR THE CHETHAM SOCIETY. M.DCCC.XLV. The Chetham Society Council. EDWARD HOLME, Esq., M.D., President. REV. RICHARD PARKINSON, B.D., Canon of Manchester, Vice-President. THE HON. & VERY REV. WILLIAM HERBERT, Dean of Manchester. GEORGE ORMEROD, Esq., D.C.L., F.R.S., F.S.A., F.G.S., Sedbury Park. SAMUEL HIBBERT WARE, Esq., M.D., F.R.S.E., Edinburgh. REV. THOMAS CORSER, M.A. REV. GEORGE DUGARD, M.A. REV. C.G. HULTON, M.A. REV. J. PICCOPE, M.A. REV. F.R. RAINES, M.A., F.S.A., Milnrow Parsonage, near Rochdale. JAMES CROSSLEY, Esq. JAMES HEYWOOD, Esq., F.R.S. WILLIAM LANGTON, Esq., Treasurer. WILLIAM FLEMING, Esq., M.D., Hon. Secretary. coat of arms POTTS'S DISCOVERY OF WITCHES In the County of Lancaster, REPRINTED FROM THE ORIGINAL EDITION OF 1613. WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND NOTES, BY JAMES CROSSLEY, Esq. PRINTED FOR THE CHETHAM SOCIETY. M.DCC.XLV. Manchester: Printed by Charles Simms and Co. [Transcriber's Note: This Table of Contents was not present in the original.] CONTENTS. INTRODUCTION. THE WONDERFVLL DISCOVERIE OF WITCHES IN THE COVNTIE OF LANCASTER. NOTES. Chetham Society. Footnotes. INTRODUCTION. Were not every chapter of the history of the human mind too precious an inheritance to be willingly relinquished,—for appalling as its contents may be, the value of the materials it may furnish may be inestimable,—we might otherwise be tempted to wish that the miserable record in which the excesses occasioned by the witch mania are narrated, could be struck out of its pages, and for ever cancelled. Most assuredly, he, who is content to take the fine exaggeration of the author of Hydriotaphia as a serious and literal truth, and who believes with him that "man is a glorious animal," must not go to the chapter which contains that record for his evidences and proofs. If he should be in search of materials for humiliation and abasement, he will find in the history of witchcraft in this country, from the beginning to the end of the seventeenth century, large and abundant materials, whether it affects the species or the individual. In truth, human nature is never seen in worse colours than in that dark and dismal review. Childhood, without any of its engaging properties, appears prematurely artful, wicked and cruel[1]; woman, the victim of a wretched and debasing bigotry, has yet so little of the feminine adjuncts, that the fountains of our sympathies are almost closed; and man, tyrannizing over the sex he was bound to protect, in its helpless destitution and enfeebled decline, seems lost in prejudice and superstition and only strong in oppression. If we turn from the common herd to the luminaries of the age, to those whose works are the landmarks of literature and science, the reference is equally disappointing;— "The sun itself is dark And silent as the moon Hid in her vacant interlunar cave." We find the illustrious author of the Novum Organon sacrificing to courtly suppleness his philosophic truth, and gravely prescribing the ingredients for a witches' ointment;[2]—Raleigh, adopting miserable fallacies at second hand, without subjecting them to the crucible of his acute and vigorous understanding;[3]—Selden, maintaining that crimes of the imagination may be punished with death;[4]—The detector of Vulgar Errors, and the most humane of physicians,[5] giving the casting weight to the vacillating bigotry of Sir Matthew Hale;[6]—Hobbes, ever sceptical, penetrating and sagacious, yet here paralyzed, and shrinking from the subject as if afraid to touch it;[7]—The adventurous explorer, who sounded the depths and channels of the "Intellectual System" along all the "wide watered" shores of antiquity, running after witches to hear them recite the Common Prayer and the Creed, as a rational test of guilt or innocence;[8]—The gentle spirit of Dr. Henry More, girding on the armour of persecution, and rousing itself from a Platonic reverie on the Divine Life, to assume the hood and cloak of a familiar of the Inquisition;[9]—and the patient and enquiring Boyle, putting aside for a while his searches for the grand Magisterium, and listening, as if spell-bound, with gratified attention to stories of witches at Oxford, and devils at Mascon.[10] Nor is it from a retrospect of our own intellectual progress only that we find how capricious, how intermitting, and how little privileged to great names or high intellects, or even to those minds which seemed to possess the very qualifications which would operate as conductors, are those illuminating gleams of common sense which shoot athwart the gloom, and aid a nation on its tardy progress to wisdom, humanity, and justice. If on the Continent there were, in the sixteenth century, two men from whom an exposure of the absurdities of the system of witchcraft might have been naturally and rationally expected, and who seem to stand out prominently [iii] [iv] [v] [vi] [vii] [viii] from the crowd as predestined to that honourable and salutary office, those two men were John Bodin[11] and Thomas Erastus.[12] The former a lawyer—much exercised in the affairs of men—whose learning was not merely umbratic— whose knowledge of history was most philosophic and exact—of piercing penetration and sagacity—tolerant—liberal minded—disposed to take no proposition upon trust, but to canvass and examine every thing for himself, and who had large views of human nature and society—in fact, the Montesquieu of the seventeenth century. The other, a physician and professor, sage, judicious, incredulous, "The scourge of impostors, the terror of quacks," who had routed irrecoverably empiricism in almost every shape—Paracelsians—Astrologers—Alchemists— Rosicrucians—and who weighed and scrutinized and analyzed every conclusion, from excommunication and the power of the keys to the revolutions of comets and their supposed effects on empires, and all with perfect fearlessness and intuitive insight into the weak points of an argument. Yet, alas! for human infirmity. Bodin threw all the weight of his reasoning and learning and vivacity into the scale of the witch supporters, and made the "hell-broth boil and bubble" anew, and increased the witch furor to downright fanaticism, by the publication of his Demo-manie,[13] a work in which "Learning, blinded first and then beguiled, Looks dark as ignorance, as frenzy wild;" but which it is impossible to read without being carried along by the force of mind and power of combination which the author manifests, and without feeling how much ingenious sophistry can perform to mitigate and soften the most startling absurdity. His contemporary, Erastus, after all his victories on the field of imposition, was foiled by the subject of witchcraft at last. This was his pet delusion—almost the only one he cared not to discard—like the dying miser's last reserve:— —— "My manor, sir? he cried; Not that, I cannot part with that,—and died." In his treatise De Lamiis, published in 1577, 8vo., he defends nearly all the absurdities of the system with a blind zealotry which in such a man is very remarkable. His book has accordingly taken its place on the same shelf with Sprenger, Remigius, Delrio, and De Lancre, and deserves insertion only in a list which has yet to be made out, and which if accurately compiled would be a literary curiosity, of the singularly illogical books of singularly able reasoners. What was left unaccomplished by the centurions of literature came ultimately from the strangest of all possible quarters; from the study of an humble pupil of the transmuter of metals and prince of mountebanks and quacks—the expounder of Reuchlin de verbo mirifico, and lecturer in the unknown tongues—the follower of Trismegistus—cursed with bell, book and candle, by every decorous Church in Christendom—the redoubted Cornelius Agrippa; who, if he left not to his pupil Wierus the secret of the philosopher's stone or grand elixir, seems to have communicated a treasure perhaps equally rare and not less precious, the faculty of seeing a truth which should open the eyes of bigotry and dispel the mists of superstition, which should stop the persecution of the helpless and stay the call for blood. If, in working out this virgin ore from the mine, he has produced it mixed up with the scoria of his master's Occult Philosophy; if he gives us catalogues of devils and spirits, with whose acquaintance we could have dispensed; if he pleads the great truth faintly, inconsistently, imperfectly, and is evidently unaware of the strength of the weapons he wields; these deductions do not the less entitle Wierus to take his place in the first rank of Humanity's honoured professors, the true philanthropists and noble benefactors of mankind. In our own country, it may be curious and edifying to observe to whom we mainly owe those enlightened views on this subject, which might have been expected to proceed in their natural channel, but for which we look in vain, from the "triumphant heirs of universal praise," the recognized guides of public opinion, whose fame sheds such a lustre on our annals,—the Bacons, the Raleighs, the Seldens, the Cudworths, and the Boyles. The strangely assorted and rather grotesque band to whom we are principally indebted for a vindication of outraged common sense and insulted humanity in this instance, and whose vigorous exposition of the absurdities of the prevailing system, in combination with other lights and sources of intelligence, led at last to its being universally abandoned, consists of four individuals—on any of whom a literary Pharisee would look down with supercilious scorn:—a country gentleman, devoted to husbandry, and deep in platforms of hop gardens,[14]—a baronet, whose name for upwards of a century has been used as a synonyme for incurable political bigotry,[15]—a little, crooked, and now forgotten man, who died, as his biographer tells us, "distracted, occasioned by a deep conceit of his own parts, and by a continual bibbing of strong and high tasted liquors,"[16]—and last, but not least assuredly, of one who was by turns a fanatical preacher and an obscure practitioner of physic, and who passed his old age at Clitheroe in Lancashire in attempting to transmute metals and discover the philosopher's stone.[17] So strange a band of Apostles of reason may occasion a smile; it deserves, at all events, a little more particular consideration before we address ourselves to the short narration which may be deemed necessary as an introduction to the republication which follows. Of the first of the number, Reginald or Reynold Scot, it is to be regretted that more particulars are not known. Nearly the whole are contained in the following information afforded by Anthony à Wood, Athenæ., vol. i. p. 297; from which it appears that he took to "solid reading" at a crisis of life when it is generally thrown aside. "Reynolde Scot, a younger son of Sir John Scot, of Scot's Hall, near to Smeeth, in Kent, by his wife, daughter of Reynolde Pimp, of Pimp's Court, [ix] [x] [xi] [xii] Knight, was born in that county, and at about 17 years of age was sent to Oxon, particularly as it seems to Hart Hall, where several of his countrymen and name studied in the latter end of K. Henry VIII. and the reign of Edward VI., &c. Afterwards he retired to his native country, without the honour of a Degree, and settled at Smeeth, where he found great encouragement in his studies from his kinsman, Sir Thomas Scot. About which time, taking to him a wife, he gave himself up solely to solid reading, to the perusing of obscure authors that had, by the generality of scholars, been neglected, and at times of leisure to husbandry and gardening. He died in September or October in 1599, and was buried among his ancestors, in the church at Smeeth before mentioned." Retired as his life and obscure as his death might be, he is one whose name will be remembered as long as vigorous sense, flowing from the "wells of English undefiled," hearty and radiant humour, and sterling patriotism, are considered as deserving of commemoration. His Discoverie of Witchcraft, first published in 1584, is indeed a treat to him who wishes to study the idioms, manners, opinions, and superstitions of the reign of Elizabeth. Its entire title deserves to be given:— "The discouerie of witchcraft, wherein the lewde dealing of witches and witchmongers is notablie detected, the knauerie of coniurors, the impietie of inchantors, the follie of soothsaiers, the impudent falshood of cousenors, the infidelitie of atheists, the pestilent practises of Pythonists, the curiositie of figurecasters, the vanitie of dreamers, the beggerlie art of Alcumystrie, the abhomination of idolatrie, the horrible art of poisoning, the vertue and power of naturall magike, and all the conueiances of Legierdemaine and iuggling are deciphered: and many other things opened, which haue long lien hidden, howbeit verie necessarie to be knowne. Heerevnto is added a treatise vpon the nature and substance of spirits and diuels, &c: all latelie written by Reginald Scot Esquire. 1 John, 4, 1. Beleeue not euerie spirit but trie the spirits, whether they are of God; for many false prophets are gone out into the world, &c. 1584." This title is sufficient to show that he gives no quarter to the delusion he undertakes to expose, and though he does not deny that there may be witches in the abstract, (to have done so would have left him a preacher without an audience,) yet he guards so cautiously against any practical application of that principle, and battles so vigorously against the error which assimilated the witches of modern times to the witches of Scripture, and, denying the validity of the confessions of those convicted, throws such discredit and ridicule upon the whole system, that the popular belief cannot but have received a severe shock from the publication of his work.[18] By an extraordinary elevation of good sense, he managed, not only to see through the absurdities of witchcraft, but likewise of other errors which long maintained their hold upon the learned as well as the vulgar. Indeed, if not generally more enlightened, he was, in some respects, more emancipated from delusion than even his great successor, the learned and sagacious Webster, who, a century after, clung still to alchemy which Reginald Scot had ridiculed and exposed. Yet with all its strong points and broad humour, it is undeniable that The Discoverie of Witchcraft only scotched the snake instead of killing it; and that its effect was any thing but final and complete. Inveterate error is seldom prostrated by a blow from one hand, and truth seems to be a tree which cannot be forced by planting it before its time. There was something, too, in the book itself which militated against its entire acceptance by the public. It is intended to form a little Encyclopædia of the different arts of imposition practised in Scot's time; and in order to illustrate the various tricks and modes of cozenage, he gives us so many charms and diagrams and conjurations, to say nothing of an inventory of seventy-nine devils and spirits, and their several seignories and degrees, that the Occult Philosophy of Cornelius Agrippa himself looks scarcely less appalling, at first sight, than the Discoverie. This gave some colour to the declamation of the author's opponents, who held him up as Wierus had been represented before him, as if he were as deeply dipped in diabolical practises as any of those whom he defended. Atheist and Sadducee, if not very wizard himself, were the terms in which his name was generally mentioned, and as such, the royal author of the Demonology anathematizes him with great unction and very edifying horror. Against the papists, the satire of Scot had been almost as much directed as against what he calls the "witch- mongers," so that that very powerful party were to a man opposed to him. Vigorous, therefore, as was his onslaught, its effect soon passed by; and when on the accession of James, the statute which so long disgraced our penal code was enacted, as the adulatory tribute of all parties, against which no honest voice was raised, to the known opinions of the monarch, Scot became too unfashionable to be seen on the tables of the great or in the libraries of the learned. If he were noticed, it was only to be traduced as a sciolist, (imperitus dialecticæ et aliarum bonarum artium, says Dr. Reynolds,) and to be exposed for imagined lapses in scholarship in an age when for a writer not to be a scholar, was like a traveller journeying without a passport. Meric Casaubon, who carried all the prejudices of the time of James the first into the reign of Charles the second, but who, though overshadowed by the fame of his father, was no unworthy scion of that incomparable stock, at the same time that he denounces Scot as illiterate, will only acknowledge to having met with him "at friends houses" and "booksellers shops," as if his work were one which would bring contamination to a scholar's library. Scot was certainly not a scholar in the sense in which the term is applied to the Scaligers, Casaubons, and Vossius's, though he would have been considered a prodigy of reading in these days of superficial acquisition. But he had original gifts far transcending scholarship. He had a manly, straightforward, vigorous understanding, which, united with an honest integrity of purpose, kept him right when greater men went wrong. How invaluable a phalanx would the battalion of folios which the reign of James the first produced now afford us, if the admirable mother-wit and single-minded sincerity of Reginald Scot could only have vivified and informed them.[19] After the lapse of another half century, and at the very period when the persecution against witches waxed hotter, and the public prejudice had become only more inveterate, from the ingredient of fanaticism having been largely thrown in as a stimulant, another ally to the cause of compassion and common sense started up, in the person of one whose name has rounded many a period and given point to many an invective. To find the proscribed author of the Patriarcha purging with "euphrasy and rue" the eyes of the dispensers of justice, and shouldering the crowd to obtain for reason a [xiii] [xiv] [xv-xvi] [xvii] [xviii] [xix] [xx] [xxi] [xxii] [xxiii] fair and impartial hearing, is indeed like meeting with Saul among the prophets. If there be one name which has been doomed to run the gauntlet, and against which every pert and insolent political declaimer has had his fling, it is that of this unfortunate writer; yet in his short but masterly and unanswerable "Advertisement to the Jurymen of England, touching Witches, together with a difference between an English and Hebrew Witch," first published in 1653, 4to., he has addressed himself so cogently and decisively to the main fallacy of the arguments in favour of witchcraft which rested their force on Scripture misunderstood, and has so pertinently and popularly urged the points to be considered, that his tract must have had the greatest weight on the class to whom his reasoning was principally addressed, and on whose fiat the fates of his unhappy clients may be said to have hung. For this good service, reason and common sense owe Sir Robert Filmer a debt which does not yet appear to have been paid. The verdict of proscription against him was pronounced by the most incompetent and superficial æra of our literature, and no friendly appellant has yet moved the court of posterity for its reversal. Yet without entering upon the theory of the patriarchal scheme, which after all, perhaps, was not so irrational as may be supposed, or discussing on an occasion like the present the conflicting theories of government, it may be allowable to express a doubt whether even the famous author of the "Essay on the Human Understanding," to whose culminating star the decadence of the rival intelligence is attributable, can be shewn to have been as much in advance of his generation in the time of king William, as from the tract on witchcraft, and another written on a different subject, but with equally enlightened views,[20] Sir Robert Filmer manifestly appears to have outrun his at the period of the usurpation.[21] The next champion in this unpopular cause, John Wagstaffe, who published "The Question of Witchcraft Debated," 1669, 12mo,[22] was, as A. à Wood informs us, "the son of John Wagstaffe, citizen of London, descended from those of his name of Hasland Hall, in Derbyshire, was born in Cheapside, within the city of London, became a commoner of Oriel College in the latter end of 1649, took the degrees in Arts, and applied himself to the study of politics and other learning. At length, being raised from an academical life to the inheritance of Hasland, by the death of an uncle, who died without male issue, he spent his life afterwards in single estate." His death took place in 1677. The Oxford historian, who had little reverence for new lights, and never loses an opportunity of girding at those whose weights and measures were not according to the current and only authentic standard, has left no very flattering account of his person. "He was a little crooked man, and of a despicable presence. He was laughed at by the boys of this University, because, as they said, he himself looked like a little wizard." Small as might be his stature, and questionable the shape in which he appeared, he might still have taken up the boast of the author of the Religio Medici: "Men that look upon my outside do err in my altitude, for I am above Atlas's shoulders." None but a large-souled and kindly-affectioned man, whose intellect was as comprehensive as his feelings were benevolent, could have produced the excellent little treatise which claims him as its author. The following is the lofty and memorable peroration in which he sums up the strength of his cause:— "I cannot think without trembling and horror on the vast numbers of people that in several ages and several countries have been sacrificed unto this idol, Opinion. Thousands, ten thousands, are upon record to have been slain, and many of them not with simple deaths, but horrid, exquisite tortures. And yet, how many are there more who have undergone the same fate, of whom we have no memorial extant. Since, therefore, the opinion of witchcraft is a mere stranger unto Scripture, and wholly alien from true religion; since it is ridiculous by asserting fables and impossibilities; since it appears, when duly considered, to be all bloody and full of dangerous consequence unto the lives and safety of men; I hope that with this my Discourse, opposing an absurd and pernicious error, I can not at all disoblige any sober, unbiassed person; especially if he be of such ingenuity as to have freed himself from a slavish subjection unto those prejudicial opinions which custom and education do with too much tyranny impose.—If the doctrine of witchcraft should be carried up to a height, and the inquisition after it should be intrusted in the hands of ambitious, covetous and malicious men, it would prove of far more fatal consequence unto the lives and safety of mankind, than that ancient, heathenish custom of sacrificing men unto idol gods; insomuch that we stand in need of another Hercules Liberator, who, as the former freed the world from human sacrifice, should, in like manner, travel from country to country, and by his all-commanding authority, free it from this euil and base custom of torturing people to confess themselves witches, and burning them after extorted confessions. Surely the blood of men ought not to be so cheap, nor so easily to be shed by those who, under the name of God, do gratifie exorbitant passions and selfish ends; for without question, under this side heaven, there is nothing so sacred as the life of man; for the preservation whereof all policies and forms of government, all laws and magistrates are most especially ordained. Wherefore I presume that this Discourse of mine, attempting to prove the vanity and impossibility of witchcraft, is so far from any deserved censure and blame, that it rather deserves commendation and praise, if I can in the least measure contribute to the saving of the lives of men." Wagstaffe was answered by Meric Casaubon in his treatise "Of Credulity and Incredulity in Things Divine and Spiritual," 1670, 12mo; and if his reply be altogether inconclusive, it cannot be denied to be, as indeed every thing of Meric Casaubon's writing was, learned, discursive and entertaining. He observes of Wagstaffe:— "He doth make some show of a scholar and a man of some learning, but whether he doth acquit himself as a gentleman (which I hear he is) in it, I shall leave to others to judge." This is surely the first time that a belief in witchcraft was ever made a test of gentlemanly propriety. Two years before the trial, which is the subject of the following republication, took place, the hamlet of Thornton, in the parish of Coxwold, in the adjoining county of York, gave birth to one who was destined so utterly to demolish the unstable and already shaken and tottering structure which Bodin, Delrio, and their followers had set up, as not to leave [xxiv] [xxv] [xxvi] [xxvii] [xxviii] one stone of that unhallowed edifice remaining upon another. Of the various course of life of John Webster, the author of "The Displaying of supposed Witchcraft," his travels, troubles, and persecutions; of the experience he had had in restless youth and in unsettled manhood of religion under various forms, amongst religionists of almost every denomination; and of those profound and wide-ranging researches in every art and science in which his vigorous intellect delighted, and by which it was in declining age enlightened, sobered and composed; it is much to be regretted that we have not his own narrative, written in the calm evening of his days, when he walked the slopes of Pendle, from where, "Through shadow dimly seen Rose Clid'row's castle grey;"[23] when, to use his own expressions, he lived a "solitary and sedentary life, mihi et musis, having more converse with the dead than the living, that is, more with books than with men." The facts for his biography are scanty and meagre, and are rather collected by inference from his works, than from any other source. He was born at Thornton on the 3rd of February, 1610. From a passing notice of A. à Wood, and an incidental allusion in his own works, he may be presumed to have passed some time at Cambridge, though with what views, or at what period of his life, is uncertain. He was ordained Presbyter by Dr. Morton, when Bishop of Durham, who was, it will be recollected, the sagacious prelate by whom the frauds of the boy of Bilson were detected. In the year 1634, Webster was curate of Kildwick in Craven, and while in that cure the scene occurred which he has so vividly sketched in the passage after quoted, and which supplied the hint, and laid the foundation, for the work which has perpetuated his fame. How long he continued in this cure we know not: but, if one authority may be relied on, he was Master of the Free Grammar School at Clitheroe in 1643. To this foundation he may be considered as a great benefactor, for, from information supplied from a manuscript source, I find that he recovered for its use, with considerable trouble and no small personal charge, an income of about £60. per annum, which had been given to the school, but was illegally diverted and withheld. From this period there is a blank in his biography for about ten years. Most probably his life was rambling and desultory. He speaks of himself as having been about that time a chaplain in the army. His first two works, published in 1653 and 1654, "The Saints' Guide," and "The Judgment Set and the Books Opened,"[24] show that in the interval he had deserted the Established Church, and, probably, after some of those restless fluctuations of belief to which men of his ardent temperament are subject, settled at last in a wilder sort of Independency, which he eulogizes as "unmanacling the simple and pure light of the Gospel from the chains and fetters of cold and dead formality, and of restrictive and compulsory power." His language in these two works is more assimilated to that of the Seekers or Quakers, which it resembles in the cloudy mysteriousness of its phraseology, than that of the more rational and sober writers of the Independent school. Amongst the dregs of fanaticism of which they consist, the reader will look in vain for any germ or promise of future excellence or distinction as an author. It would seem that he preached the sermons contained in "The Judgment Set and Books Opened" at the church of All-Hallows, Lombard-street, at which he must have been for some time the officiating minister, and where the amusing incident, in which Webster was concerned, narrated by Wood, which had many a parallel in those times, no doubt occurred. "On the 12th of Oct., 1653," says the author of the Athenæ.,[25] "he (i.e. William Erbury) with John Webster, sometimes a Cambridge scholar, endeavoured to knock down learning and the ministry both together, in a disputation that they then had against two ministers in a church in Lombard-street, in London. Erbury then declared that the wisest ministers and purest churches were at that time befool'd, confounded, and defil'd, by reason of learning. Another while he said, that the ministry were monsters, beasts, asses, greedy dogs, false prophets; and that they are the Beast with seven heads and ten horns. The same person also spoke out and said that Babylon is the Church in her ministers, and that the Great Whore is the Church in her worship, &c.; so that with him there was an end of ministers and churches and ordinations altogether. While these things were babbled to and fro, the multitude being of various opinions, began to mutter, and many to cry out, and immediately it came to a meeting or tumult, (call it which you please,) wherein the women bore away the Bell, but lost some of them their kerchiefs: and the dispute being hot, there was more danger of pulling down the church than the ministry."[26] Of Erbury who, being originally in holy orders and a beneficed clergyman, deserted the Established Church and ran into all the excesses of Antinomianism, Webster was a great admirer, and has in a preface, hitherto unnoticed, prefixed to a scarce tract of Erbury's, entitled "The great Earthquake, or Fall of all the Churches," published in 1654, 4to, left a sketch of his opinions and character, in which his defence is undertaken with great zeal and no small ingenuity. One of his apologist's conclusions most of Erbury's readers will find no difficulty in assenting to, "the world is not ripe for such discoveries as our author held forth." The verses which are appended to this sketch, characterizing Erbury— "As him Who did the saintship sever From the opinion; this fails, that shall never, Chymist of Truth and Gospel;"— are, also, evidently Webster's, and their quality is not such as to make us unreasonably impatient for any further manifestations of his poetical skill. In the year 1654 he published another tract of singular interest and curiosity, in which he attacks the Universities and the received system of education there, always with vigour and various learning, and frequently with success. It is entitled "Academiarum Examen, or the Examination of Academies; wherein is discussed and examined the matter, method, and customes of academick and scholastic learning, and the insufficiency thereof [xxix] [xxx] [xxxi] [xxxii] [xxxiii] discovered and laid open; as also some expedients proposed for the reforming of schools, and the perfecting and promoting of all kind of science; offered to the judgment of all those that love the proficiencie of arts and sciences and the advancement of learning. By Jo. Webster. In moribus et institutis academiarum, collegiorum et similium conventium quo ad doctorum hominum sedes et operas mutuas destinata sunt, omnia progressui scientiarum in ulterius adversa inveniri. Franc. Bacon de Verulamio lib. de cogitat. et vis. pag. mihi. 14. London: Printed for Giles Calvert, and are to be sold at the sign of the Black Spread-Eagle, at the west end of Paul's. 1654." 4to. In this tract, which, like some other attacks upon the seats of learning, displays more power in objection than in substitution, in pulling down than in building up again, he shews the same fondness for the philosophers of the Hermetic school, for Paracelsus, Dee, Fludd and Van Helmont, and the same adhesion to planetary sigils, astrology, and the doctrine of sympathies and primæval signatures, which is perceptible in the deliberate performance of his old age. Of himself he observes: "I owe little to the advantages of those things called the goods of fortune, but most (next under the goodness of God) to industry: however, I am a free born Englishman, a citizen of the world and a seeker of knowledge, and am willing to teach what I know, and learn what I know not." No one can read the Academiarum Examen without feeling that it is the production of a vigorous and powerful mind, which had "tasted," and that not scantily, of the "sweet fruit of far fetched and dear bought science." Yet it still remains a literary problem rather difficult of solution, how a performance so clear, well digested, and rational, could proceed, and that contemporaneously, from the same author as the cloudy and fanatical "Judgment Set and Books Opened." On behalf of the Universities, answerers started up in the persons of Ward and Wilkins, both afterwards bishops, and the part taken by the first of them in the controversy was considered of sufficient importance to form matter of commemoration in his monumental inscription. Two opponents so famous, might almost seem to threaten extinction to one, of whom it could only be said, that he had been an obscure country schoolmaster, and whose acquirements, whatever they were, were mainly the result of his own unassisted study. In the joint answer, the title of which is "Vindiciæ Academiarum, containing some briefe animadversions upon Mr. Webster's book entitled the 'Examination of Academies,' together with an appendix concerning what Mr. Hobbes and Mr. Dell have published in this argument, Oxford, 1654," 4to., there is no want of bitterness nor of controversial skill, but though, particularly in the limited arena of the prescribed course of academical study, the knowledge displayed in it is more exact, there is neither visible in it the same power of mind, nor the same breadth of views, nor even the same variety of learning, as is conspicuous in the original tract. This, with the two fanatical pieces which Webster published contemporaneously with it, were entirely unknown to his biographer, Dr. Whitaker, who has ceded him a place amongst the distinguished natives and residents of the parish of Whalley, in the full confidence "that there is no puritanical taint in his writings, and that his taste had evidently been formed upon better models.[27]" Had these early theological and literary delinquencies of the physician of Clitheroe been communicated to his historian, it may be questioned whether the portals of his provincial temple of fame would have opened to receive so heinous a transgressor. But Dr. Whitaker's deduction would have been perhaps perfectly warrantable, had Webster left no remains but his History of Metals, and Displaying of Witchcraft—so little do an author's latest works afford a clue to the character of his earliest. From 1654 to 1671, when he published his History of Metals, little is known of Webster's course of life. He appears to have retired into the country and devoted himself to medical practice and study, and to have taken up his residence in or near Clitheroe. He complains, that in the year 1658 all his books and papers were taken from him, an abstraction which, so far as his manuscripts are concerned, posterity is not called upon to lament, if they all resembled his Judgment Set and Books Opened. But his capacious and acute understanding was gradually unfolding new resources, supplying the defects, and overcoming the disadvantages of his imperfect education and desultory and irregular studies, while his matured and enlightened judgment had abandoned and discarded the fanatical pravities and erroneous tenets, which his ardent enthusiasm had too hastily imbibed. When he again became a candidate for the honours of authorship, it was evident that he knew well how to apply those quarries of learning into which, during his long recess, he had been digging so indefatigably, to furnish materials for solid and durable structures, rising in honourable and gratifying contrast to the fabrics which had preceded them. In 1671 came forth his "Metallographia, or History of Metals,"[28] in which all that recondite learning and extensive observation could bring together, on a subject which experiment had scarcely yet placed upon a rational basis, is collected. He styles himself on the Title page, "Practitioner in Physic and Chirurgery." In 1677, he published his great work. Its Title is "The Displaying of supposed Witchcraft. Wherein is affirmed that there are many sorts of Deceivers and Impostors. And Divers persons under a passive Delusion of Melancholy and Fancy. But that there is a Corporeal League made betwixt the Devil and the Witch, Or that he sucks on the Witches Body, has Carnal Copulation, or that Witches are turned into Cats, Dogs, raise Tempests, or the like, is utterly denied and disproved. Wherein also is handled, the Existence of Angels and Spirits, the truth of Apparitions, the Nature of Astral and Sydereal Spirits, the force of Charms and Philters; with other abstruse matters. By John Webster, Practitioner in Physic. Falsæ etenim opiniones Hominum præoccupantes, non solum surdos, sed et cæcos faciunt, ita ut videre nequeant, quæ aliis perspicua apparent. Galen, lib. 8. de Comp. Med. London, Printed by J.M. and are to be sold by the Booksellers in London. 1677," (fol.) In this memorable book he exhausts the subject, as far as it is possible to do so, by powerful ridicule, cogent arguments, and the most various and well applied learning, leaving to Hutchinson, and others who have since followed in his track, little further necessary than to reproduce his facts and reasonings in a more popular, it can scarcely be said, in a more effective, form.[29] Those who love literary parallels may compare Webster, as he appears in this his last and most characteristic performance, with two famous medical contemporaries, Sir Thomas Browne, and Thomas Bartholinus the Dane, whom he strongly resembled in the character of his mind, in the complexion and variety of his studies, in grave simplicity, in exactness of observation, in general philosophical incredulity with some startling reserves, in elaborate and massive ratiocination, and in the enthusiasm, subdued but not extinguished, which gives zest to his speculations and poignancy and colouring to his style. He who seeks to measure great men in their strength and in their weakness, and what operation of literary analysis is more instructive or delightful, will find ample [xxxiv] [xxxv] [xxxvi] [xxxvii] [xxxviii] [xxxix] [xl] [xli] employment for collation and comparison in this extraordinary book, in which, keen as is the penetration displayed on almost every subject of imposition and delusion, he appears still to cling, with the obstinacy of a veteran, to some of the darling Dalilahs of his youth, "to the admirable and soul-ravishing knowledge of the three great Hypostatical principles of nature, salt, sulphur, and mercury," and, proh pudor! to alchemy and astrology—and those seraphic doctors and professors, Crollius, Libavius, and Van Helmont. He closed his literary performances with this noble fabric of logic and learning, not the less striking, and scarcely less useful, because it is chequered by some of the mosaic work of human imperfection,—a performance which may be said to have grown up under the umbrage of Pendle, and which he might have bequeathed to its future Demdikes and Chattox's as an amulet of irresistible power.[30] But it is necessary to proceed from the authors on witchcraft to that extraordinary case which forms the subject of the present republication, and which first gave to Pendle its title to be considered as the Hartz Forest of England. The Forest of Pendle is a portion of the greater one of Blackburnshire, and is so called from the celebrated mountain of that name, over the declivity of which it extends and stretches in a long but interrupted descent of five miles, to the water of Pendle, a barren and dreary tract. Dr. Whitaker observes of this and the neighbouring forests, and the remark even yet holds good, "that they still bear the marks of original barrenness, and recent cultivation; that they are still distinguished from the ancient freehold tracts around them, by want of old houses, old woods, high fences; (for these were forbidden by the forest laws;) by peculiarities of dialect and manners in their inhabitants; and lastly, by a general air of poverty which all the opulence of manufactures cannot remove." He considers that "at an uncertain period during the occupancy of the Lacies, the first principle of population" (in these forests) commenced; it was found that these wilds, bleak and barren as they were, might be occupied to some advantage in breeding young and depasturing lean "cattle, which were afterwards fattened in the lower domains. Vaccaries, or great upland pastures, were laid out for this purpose; booths or mansions erected upon them for the residence of herdsmen; and at the same time that herds of deer were permitted to range at large as heretofore, lawnds, by which are meant parks within a forest, were inclosed, in order to chase them with greater facility, or, by confinement, to produce fatter venison. Of these lawnds Pendle had new and old lawnd, with the contiguous park of Ightenhill." In the early part of the seventeenth century, the inhabitants of this district must have been, with few exceptions, a wretchedly poor and uncultivated race, having little communication with the occupants of the more fertile regions around them, and in whose minds superstition, even yet unextinguished, must have had absolute and uncontrollable domination. Under the disenchanting influence of steam, manufactures, and projected rail-roads, still much of the old character of its population remains. Hodie manent vestigia ruris. The "parting genius" of superstition still clings to the hoary hill tops and rugged slopes and mossy water sides, along which the old forest stretched its length, and the voices of ancestral tradition are still heard to speak from the depth of its quiet hollows, and along the course of its gurgling streams. He who visits Pendle[31] will yet find that charms are generally resorted to amongst the lower classes; that there are hares which, in their persuasion, never can be caught, and which survive only to baffle and confound the huntsman; that each small hamlet has its peculiar and gifted personage, whom it is dangerous to offend; that the wise man and wise woman (the white witches of our ancestors) still continue their investigations of truth, undisturbed by the rural police or the progress of the schoolmaster; that each locality has its haunted house; that apparitions still walk their ghostly rounds—and little would his reputation for piety avail that clergyman in the eyes of his parishioners who should refuse to lay those "extravagant and erring spirits," when requested, by those due liturgic ceremonies which the orthodoxy of tradition requires. In the early part of the reign of James the first, and at the period when his execrable statute against witchcraft might have been sharpening its appetite by a temporary fast for the full meal of blood by which it was eventually glutted,—for as yet it could count no recorded victims,—two wretched old women with their families resided in the Forest of Pendle. Their names were Elizabeth Southernes and Ann Whittle, better known, perhaps, in the chronicles of witchcraft, by the appellations of Old Demdike and Old Chattox.[32] Both had attained, or had reached the verge of the advanced age of eighty, were evidently in a state of extreme poverty, subsisting with their families by occasional employment, by mendicancy, but principally, perhaps, by the assumption of that unlawful power, which commerce with spirits of evil was supposed to procure, and of which their sex, life, appearance, and peculiarities, might seem to the prejudiced neighbourhood in the Forest to render them not unsuitable depositaries. In both, perhaps, some vindictive wish, which appeared to have been gratified nearly as soon as uttered, or some one of those curious coincidences which no individual's life is without, led to an impression which time, habit, and general recognition would gradually deepen into full conviction, that each really possessed the powers which witchcraft was believed to confer. Whether it be with witches as it is said to be with a much maligned branch of a certain profession, that it needs two of its members in a district to make its exercise profitable, it is not for me to say; but it is seldom found that competition is accompanied by any very amicable feeling in the competitors, or by a disposition to underrate the value of the merchandize which each has to offer for sale. Accordingly, great was the rivalry, constant the feuds, and unintermitting the respective criminations of the Erictho and Canidia of Pendle,[33] who had opened shops for the vending of similar contraband commodities, and were called upon to decry each other's stock, as well as to magnify their own. Each "gave her little senate laws," and had her own party (or tail, according to modern phraseology) in the Forest. Some looked up to and patronized one, and some the other. If old Demdike could boast that she had Tibb as a familiar, old Chattox was not without her Fancy. If the former had skill in waxen images, the latter could dig up the scalps of the dead, and make their teeth serviceable to her unhallowed purposes. In the anxiety which each felt to outvie the other, and to secure the greater share of the general custom of a not very extended or very lucrative market, each would wish to be represented as more death-dealing, destructive, and powerful than her neighbour; and she who could number up the most goodly [xli] [xlii] [xliii] [xliv] [xlv] [xlvi] [xlvii] assortment of damage done to man and beast, whether real or not was quite immaterial, as long as the draught was spiced and flavoured to suit the general taste, stood the best chance of obtaining a monopoly. It is a curious fact, that the son-in-law of one of these two individuals, and whose wife was herself executed as a witch, paid to the other a yearly rent,[34] on an express covenant that she should exempt him from her charms and witchcrafts. Where the possession of a commission from the powers of darkness was thus eagerly and ostentatiously paraded, every death, the cause of which was not perfectly obvious, whether it ended in a sudden termination or a slow and gradual decline, would be placed to the general account of one of the two (to use Master Potts's description,) "agents for the devil in those parts," as the party responsible for these unclaimed dividends of mortality. Did a cow go mad, or was a horse unaccountably afflicted with the staggers, the same solution was always at hand to clear negligence and save the trouble of inquiry; and so far from modestly disclaiming these atrocities, the only struggle on the parts of Mothers Demdike and Chattox would be which should first appropriate them. And in all this it must not be forgotten that their own credulity was at least as great as the credulity of their neighbours, and that each had the power in question was so much an admitted point, that she had long ceased, in all probability, to entertain any doubts on the subject. With this general conviction on one hand, and a sincere persuasion on the other, it would be surprising if, in the course of a few years, the scandalous chronicle of Pendle had not accumulated a corpus delicti against them, which only required that "one of his Majesties Justices in these parts, a very religious honest gentleman, painful in the service of his country," should work the materials into shape, and make "the gruel thick and slab." Such a man was soon found in the representative of the old family of the Nowels of Read, who, desirous of signalizing himself as an active and stirring justice, took up the case of these self-accusing culprits, for both made confessions when examined before him, with a vigour worthy of...