It was not only for working ill that people were accused of witchcraft and executed; ill or well made little difference. In Edinburgh in 1623 it was charged against Thomas Grieve that he had relieved many sicknesses and grievous diseases by sorcery and witchcraft. "He took sickness off a woman in Fife, and put it upon a cow, which thereafter ran mad and died." He also cured a child of a disease "by straiking back the hair of his head, and wrapping him in an anointed cloth, and by that means putting him asleep," and thus through his devilry and witchcraft, cured the child. Other charges of a similar kind were brought against Grieve, who was found guilty and hanged on the Castle Hill.[196] At the same place, a year previous, Margaret Wallace was also sentenced to be hanged and burned, on the same kind of charge, and for "practising devilry, incantation, and witchcraft, especially forbidden by the laws of Almighty God, and the municipal laws of this realm." The following bill of costs for burning two women, Jane Wischert and Isabel Cocker, in Aberdeen, has a certain melancholy interest:-- £ _s._ _d._ Item for 20 loads of Peatts to burn them 2 0 0 " for ane boll of colles 1 4 0 " for four tar barrells 0 6 8 " for fir and win barrells 0 16 8 " for a staick and the dressing of it 0 16 0 " for four fathoms of towis 4 0 0 " to Jon Justice for their execution 0 13 4 In England, no less than in Scotland, America, and on the Continent, much learned testimony might be cited in defence of witchcraft. The great Sir Thomas Browne said in the most famous of his writings: "For my part I have ever believed, and do now know, that there are witches. They that doubt of these do not only deny them, but spirits; and are obliquely and upon consequence, a sort, not of infidels, but atheists."[197] Henry More, the great Platonist, asserted that they who deny the agency of witches are "puffed up with nothing but ignorance, vanity, and stupid infidelity." Ralph Cudworth, one of the greatest scholars of the latter part of the seventeenth century, said that they who denied the possibility of satanic intercourse "can hardly escape the suspicion of some hankering towards atheism."[198] Writing nearly a century later, when the English law merely prosecuted as rogues and vagabonds those who pretended to witchcraft, Blackstone thought it necessary to point out that this alteration did not deny the possibility of the offence, and added:-- "To deny this would be to contradict the revealed word of God in various passages both of the Old and New Testaments; and the thing itself is a truth in which every nation in the world hath in its turn borne testimony; either by examples seemingly well attested, or by prohibitory laws which at least suppose the possibility of a commerce with evil spirits."[199]