Ten Thousand Wonderful Things: Comprising whatever is marvellous and rare, curious, eccentric and extraordinary in all ages and nations
History
Ten Thousand Wonderful Things: Comprising whatever is marvellous and rare, curious, eccentric and extraordinary in all ages and nations
Curiosities and wonders; Encyclopedias and dictionaries; Folklore
About sixty years since, two characters, equally singular in their way,
resided at Cambridge: Paris, a well-known bookseller, and Jackson, a
bookbinder, and principal bass-singer at Trinity College Chapel in that
University; these two gentlemen, who were both remarkably corpulent,
were such small consumers in the article of bread, that their
abstemiousness in that particular was generally noticed; but, to make
amends, they gave way to the greatest excess and indulgence of their
appetites in meat, poultry, and fish, of almost every description. So
one day, having taken an excursion, in walking a few miles from home,
they were overtaken by hunger, and, on entering a public-house, the
only provision they could procure was a clod of beef, weighing near
fourteen pounds, which had been a day or two in salt; and this these
two moderate bread consumers contrived to manage between them broiled,
assisted by a due proportion of buttered potatoes and pickles. The
landlord of the house, having some knowledge of his guests, the story
got into circulation, and the two worthies were ever after denominated
the Cambridge Clods!
WITCH-TESTING AT NEWCASTLE IN 1649.
March 26.--Mention occurs of a petition in the common council books
of Newcastle, of this date, and signed, no doubt, by the inhabitants,
concerning witches, the purport of which appears, from what followed,
to have been to cause all such persons as were suspected of that crime
to be apprehended and brought to trial. In consequence of this, the
magistrates sent two of their sergeants, viz.--Thomas Shevill and
Cuthbert Nicholson, into Scotland, to agree with a Scotchman, who
pretended knowledge to find out witches, by pricking them with pins, to
come to Newcastle, where he should try such who should be brought to
him, and to have twenty shillings a piece, for all he should condemn as
witches, and free passage thither and back again. When the sergeants
had brought the said witch-finder on horseback to town, the magistrates
sent their bellman through the town, ringing his bell and crying,
all people that would bring in any complaint against any woman for a
witch, they should be sent for, and tried by the person appointed.
Thirty women were brought into the town-hall, and stripped, and then
openly had pins thrust into their bodies, and most of them were found
guilty. The said reputed witch-finder acquainted Lieutenant-Colonel
Paul Hobson, deputy-governor of Newcastle, that he knew women whether
they were witches or no by their looks; and when the said person
was searching of a personable and good-like woman, the said colonel
replied, and said, surely this woman is none, and need not be tried,
but the Scotchman said she was, and, therefore, he would try her; and
presently, in the sight of all the people, laid her body naked to the
waist, with her cloathes over her head, by which fright and shame all
her blood contracted into one part of her body, and then he ran a pin
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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