Suitably enough it is from the land of 'Cunning Murrell' that my earliest instance comes. The Sheriff of Essex in 1169 made a note of having expended 5_s._ 3_d._ on 'a woman accused of sorcery.' The record is brief and unsatisfactory, telling neither the details of the offence, the method of trial, nor the result. These two last items we get in another case which occurred in Norfolk in 1208, when Agnes, wife of Odo the merchant, appealed a certain Galiena for sorcery, and Galiena successfully cleared herself by the ordeal of the hot iron. For a century after this any magical offenders who may have been brought to trial have eluded my search. Then in 1308 began the proceedings against the Knights Templars, based very largely on accusations of practising Black Magic. In England, however, nothing of the kind was even held to have been proved against the knights, although not only 'what the sailor said' was considered to be evidence, but also what the clerk thought the priest said the soldier heard the sailor say. [Illustration: '_... thrust a leaden bodkin into the head of that image._'] It is rather remarkable that the year 1324, in which the great Irish trial of the Lady Alice Kyteler took place, was the date of the fullest and in many ways the most interesting of the early English trials for sorcery. In that year Robert Marshall of Leicester, under arrest for a variety of offences, endeavoured to save his own neck by turning King's evidence and accusing his former master, John Notingham, and a number of Coventry citizens of conspiring to kill the King, the two Despensers, and the Prior and two other officials of Coventry by magical arts. Marshall's tale was to the effect that the accused citizens came to John Notingham, as a man skilled in 'nigromancy,' and bargained with him for the death of the persons named, paying a certain sum down and giving him seven pounds of wax. With the wax Notingham and Marshall made six images of the proposed victims and a seventh of Richard de Sowe, the _corpus vile_ selected for experimental purposes. The work was done in secret in an old deserted house not far from Coventry, and when the images were ready the magician bade his assistant thrust a leaden bodkin into the head of that image which represented Richard de Sowe, and next day sent him to the house of the said Richard, whom he found raving mad. Master John then removed the bodkin from the head of the image and thrust it into the heart, and within three days Richard died. And at that point Robert Marshall's story comes to a lame and impotent conclusion. Not a word of explanation does he give as to why, when the preliminary experiment had proved so successful, they did not go on with their fell design. The unfortunate 'nigromancer' died in prison before the case had been thrashed out and reported upon by a jury, and the case against the citizens was allowed to fall through. Even if the trial had followed its normal course it is not probable that we