In another case, a man who was suspected of a murder was found to have red stains on his shirt and collar, but as these would not dissolve in water they could not have been due to blood. Subsequently it was found that they had been caused by the man going out in the wet with a red handkerchief round his neck. An early example of the way in which the evidence of an unskilled witness has been accepted upon the subject of blood is seen in the evidence given in 1682 at the trial of Thompson, Pain and Farwell for libel. The libel arose out of the earlier trial in 1679 of Robert Green and others for the murder of Sir Edmund Godfrey, who had been waylaid and apparently strangled. This trial was one of those arising out of the so-called Popish Plot, and upon the evidence of Titus Oates, Miles Praunce and others the prisoners were convicted and executed. Subsequently a letter to Mr. Praunce appeared in _The Loyal Protestant Intelligence_, which sought to make out that false evidence had been given at the murder trial, and that Sir Edmund Godfrey had not been strangled at all, but had committed suicide. In the words of the prosecuting counsel for the prisoners--"they say that if a man or any other creature be strangled or hanged and the body cold and the blood settled in the veins (as he must be if your evidence be true, meaning the evidence of the said Miles Praunce). Run twenty swords through such a body not one drop of blood will come out; but, on the contrary, his body when found was full of blood. So that they do aver that that wound that he received by that sword must be the cause of death." William Batson, who was one of the principal witnesses for the prosecution, stated: "They showed me in a ditch where they said he lay some blood. I cannot say it was his blood; and going a little further I saw some more whitish blood, and this is all I can swear." The Lord Chief Justice (Scroggs) then asked if the weather had been frosty, to which the witness replied: "My lord, I cannot tell whether it was, but I will assure you the blood looked to me more like blood that was laid there than anything else." After a lengthy trial, in which the main evidence of the former trial, which was quite unconvincing, was repeated, the prisoners were found guilty of traducing the justice of the nation and two of them were sentenced to stand for an hour in the pillory and pay a fine of £100 each, while the third escaped with the fine only. Where stains have been found upon the clothes or on a weapon in possession of an accused person and have been proved to consist of blood, the defence has frequently been set up that they were caused by the blood from a sheep that had been killed or from handling game.