Weighing a Witch.
At Wingrave, in Buckinghamshire, in 1759, a case occurred of the old popular witchcraft trial by weighing against the church Bible. One Susannah Hameokes, an elderly woman, was accused by a neighbor of being a witch. The overt act offered in proof was, that she had bewitched the said neighbor's spinning-wheel, so that she could not make it go round either one way or the other. The complaining party offered to make oath of the fact before a magistrate, on which the husband of the poor woman, in order to justify his wife, insisted that she should be tried by the church Bible, and that the accuser should be present. The woman was accordingly conducted by her husband to the ordeal, attended by a great concourse of people, who flocked to the parish church to see the ceremony. Being stripped of nearly all her clothes, she was put into one scale and the Bible into another, when, to the no small astonishment and mortification of her accuser, she actually outweighed it, and was honorably acquitted of the charge.