[37] We yet want a full, elaborate, and satisfactory history of witchcraft. Hutchinson's is the only account we have which enters at all at length into the detail of the various cases; but his materials were generally collected from common sources, and he confines himself principally to English cases. The European history of witchcraft embraces so wide a field, and requires for its just completion a research so various, that there is little probability, I fear, of this desideratum being speedily supplied.
[38] The explorer of Pendle will find the mansion of Alice Nutter, Rough Lee, still standing. It is impossible to look at it, recollecting the circumstances of her case, without being strongly interested. It is a very substantial, and rather a fine specimen of the houses of the inferior gentry in the time of James the first, and is now divided into cottages. On one of the side walls is an inscription, almost entirely obliterated, which contained the date of the building and the initials of the name of its first owner. At a little distance from Rough Lee, pursuing the course of the stream, he will find the foundations of an ancient mill, and the millstones still unremoved, though the building itself has been pulled down long ago. This was, doubtless, the mill of Richard Baldwin, the miller, who, as stated in Old Demdike's confession, ejected her and Alizon Device her daughter, from his land so contumeliously; immediately after which her "Spirit or divell called Tibb appeared, and sayd Revenge thee of him." Greenhead, the residence of Robert Nutter, one of the reputed victims of the prisoners tried on this occasion, is at some distance from Rough Lee, and is yet in good preservation, and occupied as a farmhouse.
[39] The instances are very few in England in which the statute of James the first was brought to bear against any but the lowest classes of the people. Indeed, there are not many attempts reported to attack the rich and powerful with weapons derived from its provisions. One of such attempts, which did not, like that against Alice Nutter, prove successful, is narrated in a curious and scarce pamphlet, which I have now before me, with this title—"Wonderful News from the North, or a true Relation of the sad and grievous Torments inflicted upon the Bodies of three children of Mr. George Muschamp, late of the County of Northumberland, by Witchcraft, and how miraculously it pleased God to strengthen them and to deliver them; as also the prosecution of the say'd Witches, as by Oaths and their own Confessions will appear, and by the Indictment found by the Jury against one of them at the Sessions of the Peace held at Alnwick, the 24th day of April, 1650. London, printed by T.H., and are to be sold by Richard Harper at his Shop in Smithfield. 1650," 4to. This was evidently a diabolical plot, in which these children were made the puppets, and which was got up to accomplish the destruction of a person of condition, Mrs. Dorothy Swinnow, the wife of Colonel Swinnow, of Chatton, in Northumberland, and from which she had great difficulty in escaping.
[40] The copy in Baines is from the Harl. MSS., cod. 6854, fo. 26 b, and though inserted in his history as more correct than that in Whitaker's Whalley, is so disfigured by errors, particularly in the names of persons and places, as to be utterly unintelligible. From what source Whitaker derived his transcript does not appear; for the confession of Margaret Johnson he cites Dodsworth MSS. in Bodleian Lib., vol. 61, p. 47.
[41] "The informer was one Edmund Robinson (yet living at the writing hereof, and commonly known by the name of Ned of Roughs) whose Father was by trade a Waller, and but a poor Man, and they finding that they were believed and had incouragement by the adjoyning Magistrates, and the persons being committed to prison or bound over to the next Assizes, the boy, his Father and some others besides did make a practice to go from Church to Church that the Boy might reveal and discover Witches, pretending that there was a great number at the pretended meeting whose faces he could know, and by that means they got a good living, that in a short space the Father bought a Cow or two, when he had none before. And it came to pass that this said Boy was brought into the Church of Kildwick a large parish Church, where I (being then Curate there) was preaching in the afternoon, and was set upon a stall (he being but about ten or eleven years old) to look about him, which moved some little disturbance in the Congregation for a while. And after prayers I inquiring what the matter was, the people told me that it was the Boy that discovered Witches, upon which I went to the house where he was to stay all night, where I found him, and two very unlikely persons that did conduct him, and manage the business; I desired to have some discourse with the Boy in private, but that they utterly refused; then in the presence of a great many people, I took the Boy near me, and said: Good Boy tell me truly, and in earnest, did thou see and hear such strange things of the meeting of Witches, as is reported by many that thou dost relate, or did not some person teach thee to say such things of thy self? But the two men not giving the Boy leave to answer, did pluck him from me, and said he had been examined by two able Justices of the Peace, and they did never ask him such a question, to whom I replied, the persons accused had therefore the more wrong."—Webster's Displaying of Witchcraft, p. 276.
[42] This was Richard Shuttleworth of Gawthorp, Esq., who married the daughter and heiress of R. Fleetwood, Esq., of Barton, and died June 1669, aged 82.
[43] John Starkie, Esq., of the family of Starkie of Huntroyd, the same probably who was sheriff of Lancashire 9 Charles I, and one of the seven demoniacs at Cleworth in the year 1595, on whose evidence Hartley was hanged for witchcraft. Having commenced so early, he must by this time have qualified himself, if he only improved the advantages of his Cleworth education, to take the chair and proceed as professor, in all matters appertaining to witchcraft.
[44] Wheatley-lane is still a place of note in Pendle.
[45] Wild plums.
[46] It would seem as if a case of witchcraft in Pendle, without a Nutter in some way connected with it, could not occur.