The ignorance which was thus displayed of the proper nature of testimony has constantly been considered as a mark of atrocious ferocity and cowardly time-service in the judges of the period. Such a view is entirely erroneous. The evidence accepted at political trials did not differ in character from that acted upon at trials the causes of which were remote from politics. Fortunately there are means by which this can be proved exactly. It is fortunate, for it is improbable that the same type of perjured evidence should appear in any other than a political trial. Of perjured evidence there was no doubt plenty at every assize, as is witnessed by the case of the Rev. Mr. Hawkins,[579] where a considerable dose was nearly swallowed without being detected. But in this style of lie there was not the same boldness, the same play of fancy, the same overriding of the limits of likelihood which has rendered the acceptance of Oates’ evidence unintelligible to historians except on the supposition of monstrous immorality in the judges and juries. “Witnesses,” writes Fox, “of such a character as not to deserve credit in the most trifling cause, upon the most immaterial facts, gave evidence so incredible, or, to speak more properly, so impossible to be true, that it ought not to have been believed if it had come from the mouth of Cato; and upon such evidence, from such witnesses, were innocent men condemned to death and executed.”[580] Such a state of things, thought Fox and many after him, is not to be explained on any supposition other than that of wilfully wicked blindness to the truth, and can hardly be paralleled in modern history. There is however, if not a parallel, at least a very great similarity between the evidence offered at the trials for the Popish Plot and that taken at another series of trials of almost the same date, to find which no one need go further than a different page in the same volume of reports. The same tangled farrago of wild nonsense with which Oates and his fellow-witnesses filled the courts is, on another plane, almost exactly reproduced in the witch trials of the seventeenth century.