One common misapprehension to which the historians of witchcraft are liable comes from their failure to perceive that the immediate responsibility for actual prosecution rests frequently, if not in the majority of instances, on the rank and file of the community or neighborhood. This remark is not made in exculpation of prosecutors and judges,--for my purpose in this discussion is not to extenuate anybody’s offences or to shift the blame from one man’s shoulders to another. What is intended is simply to remind the reader of a patent and well-attested fact which is too often overlooked in the natural tendency of historians to find some notable personage to whom their propositions, commendatory or damaging, may be attached. A prosecution for witchcraft presupposes a general belief among the common people in the reality of the crime. But this is not all. It presupposes likewise the existence of a body of testimony, consisting of the talk of the neighborhood, usually extending back over a considerable stretch of years, with regard to certain persons who have the reputation of being witches, cunning men, and so on. It also presupposes the belief of the neighborhood that various strange occurrences,--such as storms, bad crops, plagues of grass-hoppers and caterpillars, loss of pigs or cattle, cases of lunacy or hysteria or chorea or wasting sickness,--are due to the malice of those particular suspects and their unknown confederates. These strange occurrences, be it remembered, are not the fictions of a superstitious or distempered imagination, they are--most of them--things that have really taken place; they are the _res gestae_ of the prosecution, without which it could never have come about, or, having begun, could never have continued. And further, in very many instances of prosecution for witchcraft, there have been among the accused, persons who believed themselves to be witches,--or who had, at any rate, pretended to extraordinary powers and--in many instances--had either used their uncanny reputation to scare their enemies or to get money by treating diseases of men and cattle. And finally, the habit of railing and brawling, of uttering idle but malignant threats, and, on the other hand, the habit of applying vile epithets--including that of “witch,”--to one’s neighbors in the heat of anger--customs far more prevalent in former times than now--also resulted in the accumulation of a mass of latent or potential testimony which lay stored up in people’s memories ready to become kinetic whenever the machinery of the law should once begin to move.[121]