Devonshire Characters and Strange EventsBaring-Gould, S. (Sabine)
History
Devonshire Characters and Strange Events
Baring-Gould, S. (Sabine)
Devon (England) -- Biography; Devon (England) -- History
Grace Thomas also complained of pricking pains caused by Temperance
Lloyd, “just as though pins and awls had been thrust into her body,
from the crown of her head to the soles of her feet.” Temperance was
brought to confess that she had met the devil, as a little blackamoor,
in a lane, and that she had gone with him invisibly to the bedroom of
Grace Thomas, who lodged in the house of Thomas Eastchurch, and that
she “did then and there pinch with the nails of her fingers the said
Grace, in her shoulders, thighs, and legs.” She further admitted that
the black man had sucked her teats, and that he was about the length
of her arm. She was subjected to examination by some matrons, who
professed that they found suspicious marks upon her body. Before the
rector of Bideford she confessed that, having assumed the form of a
cat, she fetched out of Thomas Eastchurch’s shop a puppet, commonly
called a child’s baby, and left it near Grace’s bed, but she would
in no way admit that she had run pins into this figure. It appears
that Grace Thomas had been pricked in nine places about the knee, as
though pricked by a thorn, and according to the evidence of Elizabeth
Eastchurch, Temperance had confessed that she had taken a piece of
leather and driven a pin into it nine times, purposing thereby to cause
injury to the skin of Grace. She allowed that she had been accused of
assuming the form of a red pig, but would not admit that the accusation
was true. According to the evidence, the devil had appeared to her at
various times, sometimes in the form of a magpie, sometimes in that of
a grey or braget cat.
Susanna Edwards confessed that she first encountered the devil, dressed
very respectably and gravely in a black suit, in the Parsonage Close,
and that afterward, shrinking in size to a small boy, he had sucked
blood from her breast. She had pricked and pinched Grace Barnes; and
she stated that whilst her body lay motionless in bed, she could go to
any place she liked invisibly.
Mary Trembles confessed that the devil came to her “in the shape of a
Lyon” and sucked her so hard, that she was obliged to scream for pain,
and that she also could travel invisibly.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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