Witchcraft -- England; Witchcraft -- Great Britain; Witchcraft -- Scotland
Witchcraft, is, when it is true at all and not mere legerdemain, as little
understood and as falsely catalogued as was ever the art of magic and
sorcery.
THE HUNTINGDON IMPS.
In another very scarce tract by "J. D." (John Davenport) "present at the
trial," we come to a strange and mournful group of judicial murders that
took place in Huntingdon, 1646. First, there was Elizabeth Weed, of Great
Catworth, who confessed that twenty-one years ago, as she was saying her
prayers, three spirits came suddenly to her, one of which was like a man
or youth, and the other two like puppies, of which one was white and the
other black. The young man asked her if she would renounce God and Christ:
to which she assented, her faith being weak; and then the devil promised
that she should do all the mischief she would, if she would covenant to
give him her soul at the end of twenty-one years. She assented to this
too; and sealed the bargain with her blood. He drew the blood from under
her left arm, and "a great lump of flesh did rise there, and has increased
ever since;" and the devil scribbled with her blood, and the covenant was
signed and sealed. The name of her white imp, like a puppy, was "Lilly,"
of the black "Priscille;" and the office of the white was to hurt man,
woman, and child, but of the black to hurt cattle. The man spirit's
function was that of her husband, in which relation she lived with him to
her great satisfaction. Lilly killed Mr. Henry Bedell's child, and
Priscille sundry cattle; but she had not had much good of the bargain, for
the twenty-one years were to be out next Low Sunday, when her soul would
be required of her and the devil would take her away; and she desired to
be rid of the burden of her life before then. The judges acquiesced in her
desire: which a little good food and careful watching would have proved to
them was but the phantasy of disease; and the hangman had her body, though
no devil took her soul, and her sufferings and her sins vexed the universe
no more.
John Winnick's confession is one of the most graphic and extraordinary of
any in the tract. I give it word for word as I found it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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