[121] A long and curious list of cases of defamation may be seen in a volume of Depositions and other Ecclesiastical Proceedings from the County of Durham, extending from 1311 to the Reign of Elisabeth, edited by James Raine for the Surtees Society in 1845 (Publications, XXI). Thus, in 1566-67, Margaret Lambert accuses John Lawson of saying “that she was a chermer” (p. 84); about 1569 Margaret Reed is charged with calling Margaret Howhett “a horse goodmother water wych” (p. 91); in 1572, Thomas Fewler deposed that he “hard Elisabeth Anderson caull ... Anne Burden ‘crowket handyd wytch.’ He saith the words was spoken audiently there; ther might many have herd them, beinge spoken so neigh the cross and in the towne gait as they were” (p. 247). So in 1691 Alice Bovill complained of a man who had said to her, “Thou bewitched my stot” (North Riding Record Society, Publications, IX, 6). See also Historical Manuscripts Commission, Report on Manuscripts in Various Collections, I, 283; Lefroy, Bermudas or Somers Islands, II, 629 (no. 15).
[122] See, for example, Mr. Noble’s edition of the Records of the Court of Assistants, II, 43, 72, 85, 94, 95, 104, 131, 136,—all between 1633 and 1644.
[123] See Drake’s Annals of Witchcraft in New England; Noble’s Records, as above, 1, 11, 31, 33, 159, 188, 228, 229, 233.
[124] “Quia vulgo creditum, multorum annorum continuatam sterilitatem à strigibus et maleficis diabolicâ invidiâ causari; tota patria in extictionem maleficarum insurrexit” (as quoted from the autograph MS. in the Trier Stadt-Bibliothek by G. L. Burr, The Fate of Dietrich Flade, p. 51, Papers of the American Historical Association, V).
[125] “Incredibile vulgi apud Germanos, & maxime (quod pudet dicere) Catholicos superstitio, invidia, calumniæ, detractationes, susurrationes & similia, quæ nec Magistratus punit, nee concionatores arguunt, suspicionem magiæ primum excitant. Omnes divinaæ punitiones, quas in sacris literis Deus minatus est, à Sagis sunt. Nihil jam amplius Deus facit aut natura, sed Sagæ omnia. 2. Unde impetu omnes clamant ut igitur inquirat Magistratus in Sagas, quas non nisi ipsi suis linguis tot fecerunt” (Cautio Criminalis, seu de Processibus contra Sagas Liber, 2d ed., 1695, pp. 387-388; cf. Dubium xv, pp. 67-68, Dubium xxxiv, pp. 231-232). Spee’s book came out anonymously in 1631, and, unlike most works on this side of the question, had immediate results. Spee had no doubt of the existence of witchcraft (Dubium i, pp. 1 ff., Dubium iii, pp. 7-8); his experience, however, had taught him that most of those condemned were innocent.
[126] The case is reported in A True and Impartial Relation of the Informations against Three Witches [etc.], 1682, which is reprinted in Howell’s State Trials, VIII, 1017 ff.
[127] Autobiography, chap. x, ed. Jessopp, 1887, pp. 131-132. North gives a similar account of the same trial, with some general observations of great interest, in his Life of the Lord Keeper Guilford, I, 267-269 (ed. 1826). It is not clear whether North was present at the trial or not. It is important to notice that North wrote his biographies late in life and that his death did not take place until 1736, the year in which the statute against witchcraft was repealed.
[128] North remarks that Guilford (then Francis North, Chief Justice of the Common Pleas) “had really a concern upon him at what happened; which was, that his brother Raymond’s passive behavior should let those poor women die” (Life of the Lord Keeper Guilford, I, 267). Raymond was, to be sure, the judge who presided at the trial, but Francis North cannot be allowed to have all the credit which his brother Roger would give him, for he refused to reprieve the convicted witches (see his letter, quoted at p. 34, above).
[129] The following pamphlets (all in the Harvard College Library) appeared in London in 1712: (1) A Full and Impartial Account of the Discovery of Sorcery and Witchcraft, practis’d by Jane Wenham of Walkerne in Hertfordshire; (2) The Case of the Hertfordshire Witchcraft consider’d. Being an Examination of a Book, entitl’d, A Full and Impartial Account [etc.]; (3) The Impossibility of Witchcraft ... In which the Depositions against Jane Wenham ... are Confuted and Expos’d; (4) The Belief of Witchcraft Vindicated ... in Answer to a late Pamphlet, Intituled, The Impossibility of Witchcraft. By G. R. A. M.; (5) A Defense of the Proceedings against Jane Wenham. By Francis Bragge; (6) Witchcraft Farther Display’d; (7) A Full Confutation of Witchcraft: more particularly of the Depositions against Jane Wenham ... In a Letter from a Physician in Hertfordshire, to his Friend in London. The first and fifth of these pamphlets are by Bragge, a Cambridge graduate who gave evidence for the prosecution. See also Memoirs of Literature, London, 1722, IV, 357; Wright, Narratives of Sorcery and Witchcraft, II, 319 ff. Jane Wenham lived nearly twenty years after her trial; she died in 1730 (Clutterbuck, History and Antiquities of the County of Hertford, II, 461; W. B. Gerish, A Hertfordshire Witch, p. 10).
[130] I refer to such remarks as the following:—“As the devil lost his empire among us in the last age, he exercised it with greater violence among the Indian Pawwaws, and our New England colonists” (Richard Gough, British Topography, 1780, II, 254, note ᵖ); “The colonists of [Massachusetts] appear to have carried with them, in an exaggerated form, the superstitious feelings with regard to witchcraft which then [at the time of the settlement] prevailed in the mother country” (Introduction to the reprint of Cotton Mather’s Wonders of the Invisible World, in the Library of Old Authors, 1862); “In the dark and dangerous forests of America the animistic instinct, the original source of the superstition, operated so powerfully in Puritan minds that Cotton Mather’s Wonders of the Invisible World and the Salem persecution surpassed in credulity and malignity anything the mother country could show” (Ferris Greenslet, Joseph Glanvill, New York, 1900, pp. 150-151); “The new world, from the time of its settlement, has been a kind of health resort for the worn-out delusions of the old.... For years prior to the Salem excitement, European witchcraft had been prostrate on its dying bed, under the watchful and apprehensive eyes of religion and of law; carried over the ocean it arose to its feet, and threatened to depopulate New England” (George M. Beard, The Psychology of the Salem Witchcraft Excitement, New York, 1882, p. 1).