An account of this singular instance of ignorance and credulity was written by Darrell and secretly printed in 1600. The various symptoms described are not incompatible with many diseases now known to the medical profession, and need not be described; to cure the patients, however, a conjurer of the name of Hartley was called in, who for his services was to receive 40s. a year and bed and board; but this did not satisfy him long, and on being refused additional pay, in the shape of a house and the land it stood on, he so affected the possessed ones that (as Darrell puts it) they "sent forth such a strange supernatural and fearful noyse and loud whupping as the like was neuer hard at Cleworth nor in England." Mr. Starkie was naturally not satisfied with the treatment, and having applied to a Manchester physician in vain, he went to the famous Dr. Dee, then Warden of Manchester, who advised him to consult "some godly preachers" and get them to call a public or private fast day. The eldest son's vagaries were certainly peculiar: he would at times act like a madman or a mad dog, and he and his sisters, we are told (by Darrell), would howl and bark and join in a chorus "like a ring of five bells." The whole affair was doubtless a fraud, but, nevertheless, it shows in a marked degree the dense ignorance even of some of the well-to-do classes at that time: for we find that Mr. Starkie, after his futile appeal to the Manchester physician, Dr. Dee, and others, could only resort to the justices of the peace, who in their wisdom sent Hartley to the Lancaster assizes, where he was in solemn manner tried, condemned and hanged, not for the evident imposition and fraud, but for witchcraft, the strongest evidence against him being that he had on several occasions "drawn magic circles." But perhaps the most curious circumstance about the case is that at his execution the rope broke, whereupon, probably thinking to save his neck, he confessed that he was guilty; the plea, however, failed, and he was quietly hung up a second time. After Hartley's execution, John Darrell and the pastor of Calke, in Derbyshire, were called to Cleworth (in 1596), and they with thirty others spent a day in fasting and prayer, the result being (so we are told) that the whole seven were dispossessed, the devil coming out of their mouths in various forms, as a crow's head, a hedgehog, a toad, etc. This and other impostures practised by Darrell and his associates led to a prolonged controversy, in which several pamphlets were printed in London, the author of one of them being Samuel Harsnett, who was afterwards Archbishop of York. Not very long after this, King James issued his "Dæmonologie," in which he advocated the putting to death of all witches.