In the year 1658, a woman named Jane Brookes was tried, condemned, and executed at Chard in Somersetshire. The indictment against her was that she had bewitched Richard the son of Henry Jones, of Shepton Mallet in that county. Numberless persons of all ranks and classes, including both clergymen and physicians, witnessed his sufferings and paroxysms; while the direct influence of the woman indicted was fully apparent and abundantly proved. “The boy,” as the Rev. Joseph Glanville,[90] one of the chaplains of King Charles II. writes, “fell into his fitts at the sight of Jane Brookes and lay in a man’s arms like a dead person; the woman was then willed to lay on her hand, which she did, and he thereupon started and sprung out in a very unusual manner. One of the justices, to prevent all possibilities of _legerdemain_, caused Gibson and the rest to stand off from the boy, and then that justice himself held him. The youth being blindfolded, the justice called as if Brookes should touch him, but winked to others to do it, which two or three successively did, but the boy appeared not concerned. The justice then called on the father to take him, but had privately before desired one Mr. Geoffrey Strode to bring Jane Brookes to touch him at such a time as he should call for his father, which was done, and the boy immediately sprang out after a very odd and violent fashion. He was afterwards touched by several persons and moved not, but Jane Brookes being again caused to put her hand upon him he started and sprung up twice as before. All this while he remained in his fit and some time after, and being then laid on a bed in the same room, the people present could not for a long time bow either of his arms or legs.” It appears tolerably evident that the boy, when under the influence of his fits, owned a faculty not unlike that of clairvoyance. As regards Jane Brookes and her sister, he seems to have had the capacity to describe them accurately wherever they might have been. As the Report declares, “He would tell the clothes and habits they were in at the time, exactly as the constable and others have found them on repairing to them, although Brookes’ house was a good distance from Jones’: this they often tried, and always found the boy right in his description.”[91] From the same volume, the main facts of which seem to be admitted by competent authority, a woman named Elizabeth Style of Bayford was indicted for bewitching a girl named Elizabeth Hill, thirteen years of age. In this case the formal deposition of three credible witnesses attests that “during her fits, her strength was encreased beyond the proportion of nature, and the force of divers men. Furthermore, in one fit she foretold when she would have the next, which happened accordingly.”