saw nothing in the child's hands.' Another witness was the mother
of a servant girl, Susanna Chandler, whose depositions are of
much the same kind, but with the addition that her daughter was
sometimes stricken with blindness and dumbness by demoniacal
contrivance at the moment when her testimony was required in
court. 'Being brought into court at the trial, she suddenly fell
into her fits, and being carried out of the court again, within
the space of half an hour she came to herself and recovered her
speech; and thereupon was immediately brought into the court, and
asked by the Court whether she was in condition to take an oath
and to give evidence. She said she could. But when she was sworn
and asked what she could say against either of the prisoners,
before she could make any answer she fell into her fits,
shrieking out in a miserable manner, crying "Burn her! burn her!"
which was all the words she could speak.' Doubts having been
hazarded by one or two of the less credulous of the origin of the
fits and contortions, 'to avoid this scruple, it was privately
desired by the judge that the Lord Cornwallis, Sir Edmund Bacon,
and Mr. Serjeant Keeling and some other gentlemen there in court,
would attend one of the distempered persons in the farthest part
of the hall whilst she was in her fits, and then to send for one
of the witches to try what would then happen, which they did
accordingly.' Some of the possessed, having been put to the proof
by having their eyes covered, and being touched upon the hand by
one of those present, fell into contortions as if they had been
touched by the witches.
The suspicion of imposture thus raised was quickly silenced by
fresh proof. Robert Sherringham, farmer, deposed that 'about two
years since, passing along the street with his cart and horses,
the axle-tree of his cart touched her house and broke down some
part of it; at which she was very much displeased, threatening
him that his horses should suffer for it. And so it happened; for
all those horses, being four in number, died within a short time
after. Since that time he hath had great losses by sudden dying
of his other cattle. So soon as his sows pigged, the pigs would
leap and caper, and immediately fall down and die. Also, not long
after, he was taken with a lameness in his limbs that he could
neither go nor stand for some days.'[152]
[152] This witness finished his evidence by informing the
Court that 'after all this, he was very much vexed with a
great number of lice, of extraordinary bigness; and although
he many times shifted himself, yet he was not anything the
better, but would swarm again with them. So that in the
conclusion he was forced to burn all his clothes, being two
suits of apparel, and then was clear from
them.'--_Narratives of Sorcery_, &c., from the most
authentic sources, by Thomas Wright.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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