A formal deed, attesting the truth of this ridiculous story, was drawn up and subscribed by bishop Peregrine, the successor of Hubert, A.D. 1013. {283} William of Malmsbury also, the most sensible of our old historians, appears to have given it full credit. In short, it seems very certain that it was long, in common with abundance of other similar tales, universally believed; which shews how well established the authority of the priesthood, and the popular reverence for that order, must then have been in this country, and here at Lynn, as well as in other places. Next to the priests and monks, the magicians and fortunetellers appear to have then possessed the largest share of the public confidence and veneration; and very probably with equal worthiness. Strange tales have been related by historians of the ascendancy which these sorts of people long had over the infatuated inhabitants, and even over those of the highest orders among them. These things give but an unfavourable idea of our national character in those times. It would but ill become us, however, to think very contemptuously of those foibles in our poor ancestors, while we ourselves with all our boasted advantages and wisdom, have not yet entirely left off consulting fortunetellers and conjurers: to say nothing of the multitude of other impostors, of different sorts, that are daily countenanced and caressed among us. SECTION VII. _Of the Heptarchy and its history—remarks on Egbert_, _Alfred_, _and their most renowned successors—character of Canute_, _and of Edward the Confessor_: _the latter the first of our monarchs that touched for the Evil—remarks on that circumstance_, _and on the prevalence of that complaint in the parts about Lynn_. During a good part of the period from the Saxon invasion to the conquest, England was divided into seven petty states, or kingdoms, usually denominated, the Heptarchy, {285} the history of which is exceedingly uninteresting; being, as Granger observes, a series of violence, wars, and massacres, among petty tyrants, most of whom were a disgrace to the human species.—Under the famous Egbert those states were consolidated, and formed into one kingdom, under the name of England, which it has borne ever since. The kings who have ruled it, from Egbert to the Norman conqueror, were, for the most part, like their predecessors in the days of the Heptarchy, very disreputable and worthless characters. There were however, some exceptions, among which Alfred was far the most conspicuous, and outshone the rest, as the sun does all the other luminaries.