Chapter II: Part 2

I turn to some historic instances. Under Henry III., by the Assize of Bread and Ale, it was decreed that knavish bakers, brewers, and butchers be “set on the pyllory.” It was also provided that “The pyllory shal be of a metely strengthe, so that they that be fautye may be thereon without any jeopardye of their lyvys.” (The platform must not seldom have broken down, leaving the “worm of the hour” suspended by the neck--that had been securely fastened--in peril of strangulation, in a case of this sort, under Elizabeth, he sued the town, and recovered damages.) The articles of usage for the City of London, published under Edward I., set forth some evil humours of the time. Rustical simplicity fell, then as now, an easy prey to urban cunning. What rascals these mediæval cits were, to be sure! Thus, your corn dealer would take in grain from harmless necessary bumpkins, to whom he would give an earnest, telling them to come to his house for payment. Here he met them with a long face:--his wife had gone out with the key of the cash-box; would his country friends call again? And when they do, he is “not in.” (Ah! That “call again” and that “not in!” Were they stale so many centuries ago?) If the rogue were discovered, he impudently denied his debt:--he had never seen the gentlemen before; or, raising some dispute about the price, he told him to take back his goods--when the corn was found too wet for removal. “By these means the poor men lose half their pay in expenses before they are settled with;” and the wrong-doer is to be amerced heavily. Being unable to pay, “then he shall be put on the Pillory, and remain there an hour in the day at least; a Serjeant of the City standing by the side of the Pillory with good hue-and-cry as to the reason why he is punished.” The wicked butcher suffered after the same fashion; while the baker, who put off bad bread, was drawn--for the first offence upon a hurdle from the Guildhall to his own house, by “the great streets that are most dirty, with the faulty loaf hanging about his neck,” a spectacle to gods and a cockshy for men. For the second offence he processioned as before; and, to boot, he must stand in the Pillory for an hour. Offending for the third time, he was judged incorrigible: his oven was dismantled, and he might bake within the city bounds no more. Sure, the ancient London loaf, be it _manchet_, or _chete_, or mere _mystelon_, must ever have been of good quality? When, indeed, did the falling off begin? Was it when the city fathers unwisely took to regulating men’s morals? In the seventh of Richard II. this punishment was ordained for the man of evil life:--“Let his head and beard be shaved except a fringe on the head two inches in breadth, and let him be taken to the Pillory, with minstrels, and set thereon for a certain time, at the discretion of the Mayor and Aldermen.” As for the erring sister, she was taken from the prison into Aldgate with a hood of ray and a white wand in her hand. From Aldgate minstrels played her to the Thew (a species of Pillory for women). Thence, her offence being proclaimed, she was led “through Chepe and Newgate to Cokkes Lane, there to take up her abode.” Again, the brawler or the scold must hold a distaff with tow in hand--and so on; for your old-time law-giver lusted after variation.

Once the Pillory was an indispensable ornament of the market-place. Nay, were it not kept fit for use, the very right to hold a market might be lost. As an emblem of power, it was claimed by the great lords: often, indeed, it went with the lordship of the manor. Thus at Beverley, in the twenty-first of Edward I., John, Archbishop of York, claims the right of Pillory with the right of gallows and gibbet; and with the right of Pillory the right of tumbrell, which was the dung-cart wherein minor malefactors were shamefully trundled through the town. Legislative ingenuity was ever striving to devise fresh marks of ignominy. Stow relates that, in the seventh of Edward IV., certain common jurors must (for their partial conduct) ride in paper mitres from Newgate to the Pillory in Cornhill, and there do penance for their fault. Again, in the first of Henry VIII. (1509), Smith and Simpson, ringleaders of false inquests, rode the City (also in paper mitres) with their faces to the horse’s tail; and they were set on the Pillory in Cornhill; and they were brought again to Newgate, where they died from very shame. The like fate, it seems, befell a much later offender, one James Morris, who was pilloried (April 2, 1803) for fraud in the market place at Lancaster. Next morning he was found dead in his bed, and the coroner’s jury brought it in as “visitation of God.” Oft-times the sufferer came less mysteriously to his end. The mobility was, in effect, invited, as it were, to italicise his sentence in terms of anything you please, from rotten eggs to brickbats. Not seldom it did so to the sternest purpose. On June 22, 1732, contemporary prints report:--“Last night the corpse of John Walker, who was killed in the Pillory on Tuesday last, was buried at St. Andrew’s, Holborn;” and among the casualties of the December of that same year, the case of another poor wretch is dismissed with “murder’d in the pillory.” In 1756 Egon and two others were pilloried for procuring the commission of a robbery, in order to get a reward for its detection. Egon was stoned to death. On one or two occasions--notably when Elizabeth Collier was pilloried by order of Jeffreys in 1680--the authorities were ordered to see that the peace was kept and that the culprit suffered the exposure alone.

A long list might be given of misdemeanours punished by the Pillory:--as, practising the art magick; cutting a purse; placing a piece of iron in a loaf of bread; selling bad oats, stinking eels, strawberry pottles half fall of fern; vending ale by measures not sealed and thickening the bottom of such measures with pewter. As (also) lies, defamations, and libels of all sorts. If the lie were notorious, or were told of the mayor or any other dignitary, the liar was pilloried with a whetstone round his neck: whence it came that a whetstone was the popular reward for audacious mendacity, and “lying for the whetstone” was a current phrase.

Late Tudor and Stuart times edged and weighted the punishment of the Pillory. It might be preceded by a flogging at the Cart’s-tail. Stripped to the waist, the culprit, man or woman, was tied to the hinder end (our fathers used a shorter phrase) of a cart, and was thus lashed through the streets. (This vulgarly was called, “Shoving the tumbler,” or “Crying carrots and turnips.”) Or, as Butler’s couplet reminds us, the patient’s ears were nailed to the wood:--

Each window like a Pillory appears,
With heads thrust through, nail’d by the ears.

Or his ears were cropped, and not seldom his nose was slit likewise. In 1570, Timothy Penredd was pilloried in Chepe on two successive market-days for counterfeiting the seal of the Queen’s Bench. Each time an ear was nailed; and this poor member he must free “by his own proper motion.” If the wrench were too great for human fortitude, the thoughtful authorities lent some aid. In one case (1552) the culprit would not “rent his eare”; so that in the long run “one of the bedles slitted yt upwards with a penkniffe to loose it.” Indeed, the law had a strong grudge against the ears of malefactors. The fourteenth of Elizabeth, cap. 5, ordered that vagrants be grievously whipped and burned through the gristle of the right ear, unless some credible person took them to service (if they relapsed they were hanged). The punishments of the time show a curious alternation between Pillory and Cart. Thus, whilst keepers of immoral houses were carted about the town to the music of ringing basins, in the eleventh of James I., William Barnwell, “gentleman” (an inaccurate description had vitiated the indictment), and his wife Thomasina, criminals of the same class, were whipped at the Cart’s-tail from the prison to their house, and back again. Thus, too, were handled those who lived by cards and dice; but, for witchcraft, Dorothy Magicke was set four times a year upon the Pillory, and must thereon make public confession. This man capers dolefully at the Cart’s-tail for stealing lead; that must take his turn in the Pillory for snatching three-pence worth of hairs from a mare’s tail. Later, it was thought excellent for fraudulent attorneys. In November 1786 one “Mr. A----” (the name is thus disguised), a legal gentleman, was brought from Newgate in a hackney cab and pilloried for an hour hard by the gate of Westminster Hall. What he did, and how he fared, we are not told; so it may be that his hap was even as Thomas Scott’s, pilloried for a false accusation in January 1804. Scott was pelted with rotten eggs, filth, and dirt of the street. Also, the neighbouring ragamuffins had thoughtfully collected good store of dead cats and rats “in the vicinity of the metropolis” that morning.

Was it so very edifying after all? Opinions began to differ. Yet Lord Thurlow solemnly cracked it up “as a restraint against licentiousness provided by the wisdom of our ancestors”; and in 1814 Lord Ellenborough ordered Lord Cochrane to be pilloried for conspiring to spread false news. The justice of this last abominable sentence was questioned. Sir Francis Burdett, Cochrane’s fellow-member for Middlesex, vowed that he would stand with him on the day of punishment; but the Government did not venture to carry out the sentence. Two years later, in 1816, the punishment of Pillory was restricted to persons guilty of perjury; and in 1837, by the 1 Vict. cap. 23, it was abolished altogether. The last person who suffered it is said to have been Peter James Bossy, pilloried in front of the Old Bailey, June 24, 1830. The public whipping of women went in 1817; the private followed in 1820 by 1 Geo. IV. cap. 57. The whipping of men for a common law misdemeanour has never been formally abolished; but the punishment is now inflicted only under the Garrotters Act (1863) for robbery with violence; which, of course, has nothing to do with existing statutory provisions for the flogging of juvenile male offenders. I should add that in America Pillory and Whipping-Post were “an unconscionable time a-dying”; lingered especially in the State of Delaware; and that their restoration has been urged.

The Finger Pillory deserves a word. It was fixed up inside churches (that of Ashby-de-la-Zouch, for instance) and halls. Boys who misbehaved during service, and offenders at festive times against the mock reign of the lord of misrule, alike expiated their offences therein.

I note some remarkable cases. First, and most important, is the group of literary martyrs. The Stuart Government could not crush the press; but author, printer, and publisher all worked in peril of the Pillory. The author of _Robinson Crusoe_ was, perhaps, its most famous inmate.

Earless on high stood unabash’d De Foe,
And Tutchin flagrant from the scourge below,

sings Pope in the _Dunciad_ with reckless inaccuracy. In 1703, De Foe, for his _Shortest Way with the Dissenters_, was condemned to stand thrice in the Pillory before the Royal Exchange, near the Conduit in Cheapside, and at Temple Bar. The mob, he tells us, treated him very well, and cheered long and loud when he was taken out of what he calls a “Hieraglyphick state machine; Contrived to punish fancy in” (_Hymn to the Pillory_). He comforts himself by reflecting that the learned Selden narrowly escaped it, and turns the whole thing to ridicule; but then mutilation was no port of the sentence. Pope’s reference to John Tutchin is still wider of the mark. Tutchin, having narrowly escaped death for his share in Monmouth’s rebellion, was sentenced by Jeffreys, on his famous Western Circuit (1685), to seven years’ imprisonment, during which he must, once a year, be whipped through every market-town in Dorsetshire. The very clerk of the court was moved to protest that this meant a whipping once a fortnight; but the sentence remained. Out of bravado, or in desperation, the prisoner petitioned the King to be hanged instead of whipped; but, in the result, he was neither whipped nor hanged. He fell ill of the small-pox; passion cooled; and, intelligently bribing, he escaped, to visit Jeffreys in the Tower. Apparently he went to gloat, but remained to accept the ruined Chancellor’s explanation, that he had only obeyed instructions. “So after he had treated Mr. _Tutchin_ with a glass of wine, Mr. _Tutchin_ went away.”

Another of Pope’s examples is “old Prynne,” cropped (in 1632) in the Pillory for his _Histriomastic_, or Players’ Scourge, which was held to reflect on Charles I.’s Queen. Again he stood there in 1637, when the executioner cruelly mangled the ancient stumps. A quite incorrigible person was this same William Prynne, described by Marchmont Needham as “one of the greatest paper worms that ever crept about a library.” He wrote some forty works remarkable for virulence even in that age of bitter polemics. He strenuously supported the Restoration, and the new Government was at its wit’s end what to do with him till Charles himself solved the difficulty with happy humour. “Let him amuse himself with writing against the Catholics and poring over the records in the Tower,” said the king; and silenced him with the Keepership of the Records and £500 a year. Prynne’s second appearance was for a bitter attack on Laud; and he had as fellow-sufferers John Bastwick, who had written a sort of mock _Litanie_, and Henry Burton. Bastwick was “very merrie.” His wife “got on a stool and kissed him;” and, “his ears being cut off, she called for them, put them in a clean handkerchief, and carried them away with her.” There was a great crowd, which “cried and howled terribly, especially when Burton was cropped.” Being angered by the jeers and execrations of the mob, the executioner did his work very brutally. Pope’s Billingsgate is classic, but it remains Billingsgate. The Pillory shows often in his verse. Edmund Curl was a pet aversion of his, and for publishing the _Memoirs of Ker of Kersland_ Curl suffered the punishment at Charing Cross on Feb. 23, 1728. Pope hints (_Dunciad_, II. 3 and 4) that he was badly handled by the mob. In truth he came off very well, owing, it seems, to an explanatory circular he got distributed among the spectators.

As time wore on the punishment reverted to its earlier and milder form. Thus, in 1630, Dr. Leighton, for his _Zion’s Plea against Prelacy_, was pilloried, branded, cropped, and whipped; but the authors of the eighteenth century were punished by exposure alone, and were often solaced by popular sympathy. In 1765 Williams, the bookseller, stood in the Pillory for re-publishing _The North Briton_: he held a sprig of laurel in his hand, and a large collection was made for him then and there. In derision of authority the mob displayed (_inter alia_) the famous Bootjack--the popular reference to Lord Bute, the late Prime Minister. Still more farcical was the exposure (1759) of Dr. Shebbeare for publishing political libels. He was attended on the platform by a servant in livery holding an umbrella over his head, and his neck and arms were not confined. The court thought the under-sheriff of Middlesex something more than remiss: wherefore he was fined and imprisoned, it being judicially decided that the culprit must stand not merely _on_ but _in_ the Pillory. In this connexion I will only further mention the case of Eton the publisher, “a very old man,” who in 1812 was pilloried for printing Paine’s _Age of Reason_. Here, again, the crowd, by the respect it heaped upon the prisoner, altogether eliminated the sting from the punishment. The minor scribe of to-day is supposed to court an action, nay, a criminal prosecution, as a stimulus to circulation; a former age saw in the Pillory the best possible advertisement for the Grub Street hack. In Foote’s _Patron_, Puff, the publisher, urges Dactyl to produce a satire; and, when the proposed risk is hinted at, retorts: “Why, I would not give twopence for an author who was afraid of his ears.... Why, zooks, sir! I never got salt for my porridge till I mounted at the Royal Exchange, that was the making of me.... The true Castalian stream is a shower of eggs and a Pillory the poet’s Parnassus.”

Among cases other than literary, a notable one is that of Titus Oates (1685), who, being convicted of perjury, was sentenced to stand in the Pillory and be whipped at the Cart’s-tail. The lashing was so cruelly done that you feel some pity even for that arch rascal. The curious computed that he received 2256 strokes with a whip of six thongs--13,536 strokes in all. Yet the wretch lived to enjoy a pension after the Revolution! There was another remarkable instance that same year. Thomas Dangerfield, convicted of libelling the King when Duke of York, was sentenced to a fine, to the Pillory, and to be whipped from Aldgate to Newgate, and from Newgate to Tyburn. The dreadful work was over, and he was returning prisonwards in a coach, when there steps forward Robert Francis, a barrister of Gray’s Inn, with the cruel jibe, “How now, friend? Have you had your heat this morning?” Dangerfield turned on him with bitter curses (“Son of a wh----” is the elegant sample preserved by the records). Francis, much enraged, thrust at the aching, smarting, bleeding wretch with a small cane, and by mischance put out an eye, so that in two hours Dangerfield was dead; and no great while thereafter he himself was tried, condemned, and hanged. According to the testimony of the Rev. Mr. Samuel Smith, Ordinary at Newgate, he made a very edifying end.

Quite interesting is the case of Japhet Crook, _alias_ Sir Peter Stringer, whose unhappy memory is preserved in some of Pope’s most biting lines. In 1731, poor Japhet stood in the Pillory at Charing Cross for forging a deed; when the hangman, dressed like a butcher, “with a knife like a gardener’s pruning knife cut off his ears, and with a pair of scissors slit both his nostrils.” The wretch endured all this with great patience; but at the searing “the pain was so great that he got up from his chair.” No wonder! Two years after Eleanor Beare, keeper of “The White Horse,” Nuns Green, Derby, was pilloried (August 1732) after just escaping the gallows for murder. She mounted the platform “with an easy air”; thus exasperating a mob already ill-disposed, which bombarded her with apples, eggs, turnips, and so forth; so that “the stagnate kennels were robbed of their contents, and became the cleanest part of the street.” Managing to escape, she dashed off, “a moving heap of filth,” but was presently seized and lugged back; and at the end of the hour she was carried to prison, “an object which none cared to touch.” A week after she was again forced to take her stand. The officer noted that her head was wondrous swelled, and he presently stripped it of “ten or twelve coverings,” whereof one was a pewter plate. Her aspect was most forlorn, but the crowd, no whit moved, pelted its hardest, and she was borne away more dead than alive. Yet she too not only lived, but “recovered her health, her spirits, and her beauty.” Two lighter instances, and I have done. In the early stages of Monmouth’s rebellion, an astrologer, consulting the stars, saw that the duke would be presently King of England. After Sedgemoor he was cast into Dorchester Gaol for this unlucky prediction. Again falling to his observations, he clearly read “that he would be whipped at the Cart’s ----”; and this time the planets spoke true. In 1783, the poet Cowper reports one humorous case from his own experience. At Olney a man was publicly whipped for theft; he whealed with every stroke; but that was only because the beadle drew the scourge against a piece of red ochre hidden in his hand. Noting the fraud, the parish constable laid his cane smartly about the shoulders of the all too-lenient official, whereat a country wench, in high dudgeon, set to pomelling the constable. And of the three the thief alone escaped punishment.

State Trials for Witchcraft

Early Laws against Witchcraft--The Essex Witches--The Devon
Witches--The Bury St. Edmunds Case--Bewitched Children--The
Scepticism of Serjeant Keeling--Evidence of Sir Thomas Browne--The
Judge’s Charge--The End of it All--The Trial of Richard
Hathaway--The Comic Side of Superstition--A Rogue’s Punishment--A
Word in Conclusion.

I propose to examine the Witchcraft cases in Howell’s twenty-one bulky volumes of State Trials. The general subject, even in England, is too vast for detailed treatment here; also it is choked with all manner of absurdities. In a trial some of these are pared away: you know what the people saw, or believed they saw, and you have the declarations of the witches themselves. Only five cases, all between 1616 (13 Jac. I.) and 1702 (1 Anne) are reported. The selection is capricious, for some famous prosecutions as that of the Lancashire witches are omitted, but it is fairly representative.

In the early times Witchcraft and sorcery were left to the Church. In 1541, 33 Hen. VIII. c. 8, made both felony without “benefit of clergy;” and by the 1 Jac. I. c. 12, all persons invoking any evil spirit, or taking up dead bodies from their graves to be used in any Witchcraft, sorcery, charm, or enchantment, or killing or otherwise hurting any person by such infernal arts, shall be guilty of felony without “benefit of clergy,” and suffer death. King James’s views on Witchcraft and his skill (whereon he greatly plumed himself) as witch-finder are famed. Royal influence went hand-in-hand with popular superstition. In less than a century and a half, legislative if not vulgar ideas were altered, and in 1736, by 9 Geo. II. c. 5, the laws against Witchcraft were swept away, though charlatans professing the occult sciences were still punished as cheats.

I pass as of little interest Howell’s first case, that of Mary Smith, in 1616. More worthy of note are the proceedings against the Essex witches, some twenty in number, condemned at the Chelmsford Sessions on July 29, 1645, before the Earl of Warwick and other Justices. One noted witch was Elizabeth Clarke to whom the devil had appeared “in the shape of a proper gentleman with a laced band, having the whole proportion of a man.” She had certain imps, whom she called Jamara (“a white dogge with red spots”), Vinegar Tom, Hoult, and Sack and Sugar. So far the information of Matthew Hopkins, of Manningtree, gent., who further said that the same evening whereon the accused confessed those marvels to him, “he espied a white thing about the bignesse of a kitlyn,” which bit a piece out of his greyhound, and in his own yard that very night “he espied a black thing proportioned like a cat, only it was thrice as big, sitting on a strawberry-bed, and fixing the eyes on this informant.”

John Sterne, gent., had equal wonders of imps the size of small dogs, and how Sack and Sugar were like to do him hurt. ’Twere well, said the malevolent Elizabeth, “that this informant were so quick, otherwise the said impe had soone skipped upon his face, and perchance had got into his throate, and then there would have been a feast of toades in this informant’s belly.” The witch Clarke ascribed her undoing to Anne Weste, widow, here usually called Old Beldam Weste, who, coming upon her as she was picking up a few sticks, and seeming to pity her for “her lamenesse (having but one leg) and her poverty,” promised to send her a little kitten to assist her. Sure enough, a few nights after two imps appeared, who vowed to “help her to an husband who should maintain her ever after.” A country justice’s notions of evidence are not supposed to be exact even to-day; what they were then let the information of Robert Tayler, also of Manningtree, show. It seems Clarke had accused one Elizabeth Gooding as a confederate. Gooding was refused credit at Tayler’s for half a pound of cheese, whereupon “she went away muttering and mumbling to herself, and within a few hours came again with money and bought a pound of cheese of this informant.” That very night Tayler’s horse fell grievously ill and four farriers were gravelled to tell what ailed it, but this portentous fact was noted: “the belly of the said horse would rumble and make a noyse as a foule chimney set on fire.” In four days it was dead. Tayler had also heard that certain confessed witches had “impeached the said Elizabeth Gooding for killing of this said horse,” moreover Elizabeth kept company with notorious witches--after which scepticism was scarce permissible. Rebecca Weste, a prisoner awaiting trial in Colchester, confessed how at a witches’ meeting the devil appeared to her in the shape of a dog and kissed her. In less than six months he came again and promised to marry her. “Shee said he kissed her, but was as cold as clay, and married her that night in this manner: he tooke her by the hand and led her about the chamber and promised to be a loving husband to death, and to avenge her of her enemies.”

One Rawbood had taken a house over the head of Margaret Moon, another of the accused, with highly unpleasant consequences. Thus, Mrs. Rawbood, though a “very tydy and cleanly woman, sitting upon a block, after dinner with another neighbour, a little before it was time to go to church upon an Easter Day, the said Rawbood’s wife was on a sudden so filled with lice that they might have been swept off her clothes with a stick; and this informant saith he did see them, and that they were long and lean, and not like other lice.” More gruesome were the confessions of Rebecca Jones, of Osyth. One fine day some twenty-five years past she, a servant lass at Much-Clacton, was summoned by a knock at the door, where she saw “a very handsome young man, as shee then thought, but now shee thinks it was the devil.” Politely inquiring how she did, he desired to see her left wrist, which being shown him, he pulled out a pin “from this examinant’s owne sleeve, and pricked her wrist twice, and there came out a drop of bloud, which he took off with the top of his finger, and so departed”--leaving poor Rebecca’s heart all in a flutter. About four months afterwards as she was going to market to sell butter, a “man met with her, being in a ragged state, and having such great eyes that this examinant was very much afraid of him.” He presented her with three things like to “moules,” which she afterwards used to destroy her neighbours’ cattle, and now and again her neighbours themselves. In evidence against other suspects there was mention of a familiar called Elimanzer, who was fed with milk pottage, and of imps called Wynowe, Jeso, Panu, with many other remarkable particulars.

The foregoing was collected before trial as information upon oath; but this testimony of Sir Thomas Bowes, knight, was given from the bench during the trial of Anne Weste, whom it concerned. He reported that an honest man of Manningtree passing Anne Weste’s door at the very witching hour of night, in bright moonlight saw four things like black rabbits emerge. He caught one of them, and beat the head of it against his stick, “intending to beat out the braines of it,” failing in which benevolent design, he next tried to tear off its head, “and as he wrung and stretched the neck of it, it came out between his hands like a lock of wooll;” then he went to a spring to drown it, but at every step he fell down, yet he managed to creep to the water, under which he held the thing “a good space.” Thinking it was drowned he let go, whereupon “it sprang out of the water into the aire, and so vanished away.” There was but one end possible for people who froze the rustic soul with such pranks. Each and all were soon dangling from the gallows.

The case of the Devon witches tried at Exeter in August 1682 is much like the Essex business. The informations are stuffed with grotesque horrors, yet it is hard to believe that the accused--three poor women from Bideford, two of them widows--had been convicted but for their own confessions, which are full of copious and minute details of their dealings with Satan. Going to their death, they were worried by Mr. H----, a nonconformist preacher and (as is evident) a very pestilent fellow. “Did you pass through the keyhole of the door, or was the door open?” was one query. The witch asserted that like other people she entered by the door, though “the devil did lead me upstairs.” Mr. H---- went on, “How do you know it was the devil?” “I knew it by his eyes,” she returned. Again, “Did you never ride over an arm of the sea on a cow?”--an exploit which the poor woman sturdily disclaimed. Mr. H----, a little dissatisfied, one fancies, prayed at them a while, after which two of the women were turned off the ladder. Mr. Sheriff tried his hand at the survivor: he was curious as to the shape or colour of the devil, and was answered that he appeared “in black like a bullock.” He again pressed her as to whether she went in “through the keyhole or the door,” but she alleged the more commonplace and (for a witch) unorthodox mode of entry, “and so was executed.”

Between these two cases one occurred wherein the best legal intellect of the day was engaged--and with no better result. In March 1665, Rose Cullender and Amy Duny, widows, were indicted at the Assizes at Bury St. Edmunds for bewitching certain people. Sir Matthew Hale, Lord Chief Baron of the Exchequer, presided. “Still his name is of account.” To an earlier time he seemed a judge “whom for his integrity, learning, and law, hardly any age, either before or since, could parallel.” William Durant, an infant, was one victim; his mother had promised Amy Duny a penny to watch him, but she was strictly charged not to give him suck. To what end? queried the court reflecting on Amy’s age. The mother replied: firstly, Amy had the reputation of a witch, and secondly, it was a custom of old women thus to please the child, “and it did please the child, but it sucked nothing but wind, which did the child hurt.” The two women had a quarrel on the subject: Amy was enraged, and departed after some dark sayings, and the boy forthwith fell into “strange fits of swounding.” Dr. Jacob, of Yarmouth, an eminent witch-doctor, advised “to hang up the child’s blanket in the chimney-corner all day, and at night when she put the child to bed to put it into the said blanket, and if she found anything in it she should not be afraid, but throw it into the fire.” The blanket was duly hung up, and taken down, when a great toad fell out, which being thrown into the fire made (not unnaturally) “a great and horrible noise;” followed a crack and a flash, and--exit the toad! The court with solemn foolishness inquired if the substance of the toad was not seen to consume? and was stoutly answered “No.” Next day Amy was discovered sitting alone in her house in her smock without any fire. She was in “a most lamentable condition,” having her face all scorched with fire. This deponent had no doubt as to the witch’s guilt, “for that the said Amy hath been long reputed to be a witch and a person of very evil behaviour, whose kindred and relations have been many of them accused for witchcraft, and some of them have been condemned.”

Elizabeth Pacy was another bewitched child. By direction of the judge, Amy Duny was made to touch her, whereupon the child clawed the Old Beldam till the blood came--a portentous fact, for everybody knew that the bewitched would naturally scratch the tormentor’s face and thus obtain relief. The father of the child, Samuel Pacy (whose soberness and moderation are specially commended by the reporter), now told how Amy Duny thrice came to buy herrings, and, being as often refused, “went away grumbling, but what she said was not perfectly understood.” Immediately his child Deborah fell sick, whereupon Amy was set in the stocks. Here she confessed that, when any of her offspring were so afflicted, “she had been fain to open her child’s mouth with a tap to give it vitals,” which simple device the sapient Pacy practised upon his brats with some effect, but still continuing ill they vomited “crooked pins and one time a twopenny nail with a very broad head, which pins, amounting to forty or more, together with the twopenny nail, were produced in court,” so what room was there for doubt? The children, continually accusing Amy Duny and Rose Cullender as cause of their sickness, were packed off by their distracted father to his sister at Yarmouth, who now took up the wondrous tale. When the younger child was taking the air out of doors, “presently a little thing like a bee flew upon her face, and would have gone into her mouth.” She rushed indoors, and incontinent vomited up a twopenny nail with a broad head, whose presence she accounted for thus: “the bee brought this nail and forced it into her mouth”; from all which the guilt of the witches was ever more evident.

Even that age had its sceptics. Some people in court, chief among them Mr. Serjeant Keeling, whose position and learning made it impossible to disregard their opinion, “seemed much unsatisfied.” The learned serjeant pointed out that even if the children were bewitched, there was no real evidence to connect the prisoners with the fact. Then Dr. Browne, of Norwich, “a person of great knowledge” (no other, alas! than the Sir Thomas Browne of the _Religio Medici_), made a very learned if confusing dissertation on Witchcraft in general, with some curious details as to a late “great discovery of witches” in Denmark; which no whit advanced the matter. Then there was another experiment. Amy Duny was brought to one of the children whose eyes were blinded. The child was presently touched by another person, “which produced the same effect as the touch of the witch did in the court.” The sceptical Keeling and his set now roundly declared the whole business a sham, which “put the court and all persons into a stand. But at length Mr. Pacy did declare that possibly the maid might be deceived by a suspicion that the witch touched her when she did not.” This was the very point the sceptics were making, and was anything but an argument in reply, though it seems to have been accepted as such. And how to suppose, it was urged, that innocent children would tell such terrible lies? It was the golden age of the rod; never was there fitter occasion for its use. Once fancies a few strokes had produced remarkable confessions from the innocents! However, the court went on hearing evidence. The judge summed up with much seeming impartiality, much wooden wisdom, and the usual judicial platitudes, all which after more than two centuries you read with considerable irritation. The jury upon half an hour’s deliberation returned a verdict of guilty. Next morning the children were brought to the judge, “and Mr. Pacy did affirm that within less than half an hour after the witches were convicted they were all of them restored.” After this, what place was left for doubt? “In conclusion the judge and all the court were fully satisfied with the verdict, and thereupon gave judgment against the witches that they should be hanged.” Three days afterwards the poor unfortunates went to their death. “They were much urged to confess, but would not.”

Finally, you have this much less tragic business. In the first year of Queen Anne’s reign (1702), Richard Hathaway was tried at the Surrey Assizes before Lord Chief Justice Holt for falsely accusing Sarah Morduck of bewitching him. The offence being a misdemeanour, the prisoner had counsel, an advantage not then fully given to those charged with felony. The trial reads like one in our own day. The case for the Crown had been carefully put together. Possibly the authorities were striking at accusations of and prosecutions for Witchcraft. Sarah Morduck had been tried and acquitted at Guildford Assizes for bewitching Hathaway, whereupon this prosecution had been ordered. Dr. Martin, parish minister in Southwark, an able and enlightened divine, had saved Sarah from the mob, and so was led on to probe the matter. He found Hathaway apparently blind and dumb, but giving his assent by a sign to the suggestion that he should scratch Morduck, and so (according to the superstition already noted) obtain relief. Dr. Martin brought Sarah and a woman of the same height called Johnson to the room where the impostor lay, seemingly, at death’s door. Morduck announced her willingness to be scratched, and then Johnson’s hand was put into his. Hathaway was suspicious, and felt the arm very carefully, whereat the parson “spoke to him somewhat eagerly: If you will not scratch I will begone.” Whereupon he clawed so lustily that Johnson near fainted. She was forthwith hustled out of the room and Morduck pushed forward; but the rogue, fearing a trap, lay quiet till Dr. Martin encouraged him by simulated admiration. Then he opened wide his eyes, “caught hold of the apron of Sarah Morduck, and looked her in the face,” thus implying that his supposed scratching of her had restored his eyesight. Being informed of his blunder he “seemed much cast down,” but his native impudence soon asserting itself, he gave himself out for worse than ever, whilst Sarah Morduck, anxious to be clear at any cost, declared that not she but Johnson was the witch. The popular voice roundly abused Dr. Martin for a stubborn sceptic. Charges of bribery against him, as well as against the judge and jury who had acquitted Morduck, were freely bandied about. Dr. Martin had got Bateman a friend of his to see Hathaway, one of whose symptoms was the vomiting of pins. His evidence was that the rogue scattered the pins about the room by sleight of hand; Bateman had taken several parcels of them, almost by force, out of his pocket. Kensy, a surgeon, further told how Hathaway, being committed to his care, at first would neither eat nor drink. Kensy being afraid that he would starve himself to death sooner than have his cheat discovered, arranged a pretended quarrel with his maid Baker, who supplied the patient with food as if against his orders. Indeed, she plied him so well with meat and drink that, so she told the court, “he was very merry and danced about, and took the tongs and played upon them, but after that he was mightily sick and vomited sadly”--but there were no pins and needles! She further told how four gentlemen, privily stored away in the buttery and coal-hole, witnessed Hathaway’s gastronomic feats. Serjeant Jenner for the defence called several witnesses, who testified to the prisoner’s abstinence from food for quite miraculous periods. The force of this evidence was much shaken by the pertinent cross-examination of the judge, who asked the jury in his summing up, “Whether you have any evidence to induce you to believe it to be in the power of all the witches in the world, or all the Devils in Hell, to fast beyond the usual time that nature will allow: they cannot invert the order of nature.” The jury, “without going from the bar, brought him in Guilty.” He was sentenced to a fine, a sound flogging, the pillory, and imprisonment with hard labour. The last conviction for Witchcraft in England was that of Jane Wenham, at Hertford, in 1712. She was respited by the judge and afterwards pardoned. The case is not here reported.

These trials throw a curious light on the ideas of the time; unfortunately they exhibit human nature in some of its worst aspects. The victims were women, old, poor, helpless, and the persecution to which they were subjected was due partly to superstition, partly to that delight in cruelty so strong in the natural man. The “confessions” of the accused are easily accounted for. The popular beliefs so impressed their imaginations that they believed in their own malevolent power, also the terror they inspired lacked not charm, it procured them consideration, some money, even some protection. Not seldom their “confessions” were merely terrified assents to statements made about them by witch-finders, clergymen, and justices. And the judges? Sometimes, alas! they callously administered a law in which they had no belief. Is there not still something inexplicable? Well, such things as mesmerism, thought-reading, and so forth exhibit remarkable phenomena. A former age ascribed all to Satan: we believe them natural though we cannot as yet solve all their riddles. I must add that the ancient popular horror of witches is partly explained by the hideous and grotesque details given at the trials, but those obscenities I dare not reproduce.

A Pair of Parricides

The State Trials--The Dry Bones of Romance--Pictures of
the Past--Their Value for the Present--The Case of Philip
Standsfield--The Place of the Tragedy--The Night of the
Murder--The Scene in Morham Kirk--The Trial--“The Bluidy
Advocate--Mackenzie”--The Fate of Standsfield--The Case
of Mary Blandy, Spinster--The Villain of the Piece--The
Maid’s Gossip--Death of Mr. Blandy--The “Angel” Inn at
Henley-on-Thames--The Defence--Miss Blandy’s Exit.

There is a new series of _State Trials_ continuing the old, and edited with a skill and completeness altogether lacking in its predecessor; yet its formal correctness gives an impression of dulness. You think with regret of Howell’s thirty-three huge volumes, that vast magazine of curiosities and horrors, of all that is best and worst in English history. How exciting life was long ago, to be sure, and how persistently it grows duller! What a price we pay for the smug comfort of our time! People shuddered of yore; did they yawn quite so often? Howell and the folk he edits knew how to tell a story. Judges, too, were not wont to exclude interesting detail for that it wasn’t evidence, and the compilers did not end with a man’s condemnation. They had too keen a sense of what was relished of the general: the last confession and dying speech, the exit on the scaffold or from the cart, are told with infinite gusto. What a terrible test earth’s great unfortunates underwent! Sir Thomas More’s delicate fencing with his judges, the exquisite courtesy wherewith he bade them farewell, make but half the record; you must hear the strange gaiety which flashed in the condemned cell and by the block ere you learn the man’s true nature. And to know Raleigh you must see him at Winchester under the brutal insults of Coke; “Thou art a monster, thou hast an English face but a Spanish heart;” again, “I thou thee, thou traitor!” and at Palace Yard, Westminster, on that dreary October morning urging the sheriff to hurry, since he would not be thought fear-shaken when it was but the ague; for these are all-important episodes in the life of that richly dressed, stately, and gallant figure your fancy is wont to picture in his Elizabethan warship sweeping the Spanish Main. Time would fail to tell of Strafford and Charles and Laud and a hundred others, for the collection begins with Thomas à Becket in 1163 and comes down to Thistlewood in 1820. Once familiar with those close packed, badly printed pages, you find therein a deeper, a more subtle charm than cunningest romance can furnish forth. The account of Mary Stuart’s ending has a finer hold than Froude’s magnificent and highly decorated picture--Study at first hand “Bloody Jeffreys,” his slogging of Titus Oates, with that unabashed rascal’s replies during his trial for perjury; or again, my Lord’s brilliant though brutal cross-examination of Dunn in the “Lady” Alice Lisle case, during the famous or infamous Western Circuit, and you will find Macaulay’s wealth of vituperative rhetoric, in comparison, tiresome and pointless verbiage. Also you will prefer to construct your own Braxfield from trials like those of Thomas Muir in 1793, and of Alexander Scott and Maurice Margarot in 1794, rather than accept the counterfeit presentment which Stevenson’s master-hand has limned in _Weir of Hermiston_.

But the interests are varied. How full of grotesque and curious horrors are the prosecutions for witchcraft! There is that one, for instance, in March 1665 at Bury St. Edmunds before Sir Matthew Hale, with stories of bewitched children, and plague-stricken women, and satanic necromancy. Again, there is the diverting exposure of Richard Hathaway in 1702, and how the rogue pretended to vomit pins and abstain from meat or drink for quite miraculous periods. But most of those things I deal with elsewhere in this volume. The trials of obscurer criminals have their own charm. Where else do you find such Dutch pictures of long-vanished interiors or exteriors? You touch the _vie intime_ of a past age; you see how kitchen and hall lived and talked; what master and man, mistress and maid thought and felt; how they were dressed, what they ate, of what they gossiped. Again, how oft your page recalls the strange, mad, picturesque ways of old English law! _Benefit of clergy_ meets you at every turn, the _Peine Fort et Dure_ is explained with horrible minuteness, the lore of _Ship Money_ as well as of _Impressment of Seamen_ is all there. Also is an occasional touch of farce. But what phase of man’s life goes unrecorded in those musty old tomes?

Howell’s collection only comes down to 1820. Reform has since then purged our law, and the whole set is packed off to the Lumber Room. In a year’s current reports you may find the volumes quoted once or twice, but that is “but a bravery,” as Lord Bacon would say, for their law is “a creed outworn.” Yet the human interest of a story remains, however antiquated the setting, incapable of hurt from Act of Parliament. So, partly for themselves, partly as samples of the bulk, I here present in altered form two of these tragedies, a Pair of Parricides: one Scots of the seventeenth, the other English of the eighteenth century.

The first is the case of Philip Standsfield, tried at Edinburgh, in 1688, for the murder of his father, Sir James Standsfield, of New Mills, in East Lothian. To-day New Mills is called Amisfield; it lies on the south bank of the Tyne, a mile east of Haddington. There is a fine mansion-house about a century old in the midst of a well wooded park, and all round are the superbly tilled Lothian fields, as _dulcia arva_ as ever the Mantuan sang. Amisfield got its present name thus: Colonel Charteris, infamed (in the phrase of Arbuthnot’s famous epitaph) for the “undeviating pravity of his manners” (hence lashed by Pope in many a stinging line), purchased it early in the last century and re-named it from the seat of his family in Nithsdale. Through him it passed by descent to the house of Wemyss, still its owners. Amongst its trees and its waters the place lies away from the beaten track and is now as charmingly peaceful a spot as you shall anywhere discover. Name gone and aspect changed, local tradition has but a vague memory of the two-centuries-old tragedy whereof it was the centre.

Sir James Standsfield, an Englishman by birth, had married a Scots lady and spent most of his life in Scotland. After the Restoration he had established a successful cloth factory at the place called New Mills, and there lived, a prosperous gentleman. But he had much domestic trouble chiefly from the conduct of his eldest son Philip, who, though well brought up, led a wild life. Whilst “this profligate youth” (so Wodrow, who tells the story, dubs him) was a student at the University of St. Andrews, curiosity or mischief led him to attend a conventicle where godly Mr. John Welch was holding forth. Using a chance loaf as a missile, he smote the astonished divine, who, failing to discover the culprit, was moved to prophecy. “There would be,” he thundered, “more present at the death of him who did it, than were hearing him that day; and the multitude was not small.” Graver matters than this freak stained the lad’s later career. Serving abroad in the Scots regiment, he had been condemned to death at Treves, but had escaped by flight. Certain notorious villainies had also made him familiar with the interior of the Marshalsea and the prisons of Brussels, Antwerp, and Orleans. Sir James at last was moved to disinherit him in favour of his second son John. Partly cause and partly effect of this, Philip was given to cursing his father in most extravagant terms (of itself a capital offence according to old Scots law); he affirmed his parent “girned upon him like a sheep’s head in a tongs;” on several occasions he had even attempted that parent’s life: all which is set forth at great length in the “ditty” or indictment upon which he was tried. No doubt Sir James went in considerable fear of his unnatural son. A certain Mr. Roderick Mackenzie, advocate, testifies that eight days before the end he met the old gentleman in the Parliament Close, Edinburgh, whereupon “the defunct invited him to take his morning draught.” As they partook Sir James bemoaned his domestic troubles. “Yes,” said Mackenzie, but why had he disherished his son? And the defunct answered: “Ye do not know my son, for he is the greatest debauch in the earth. And that which troubles me most is that he twice attempted my own person.”

Upon the last Saturday of November 1687, the elder Standsfield travelled from Edinburgh to New Mills in company with Mr. John Bell, minister of the Gospel, who was to officiate the next day in Morham Church (Morham is a secluded parish on the lower slope of the Lammermoors, some three miles south-west of New Mills; the church plays an important part in what follows). Arrived at New Mills the pair supped together, thereafter the host accompanied his guest to his chamber, where he sat talking “pertinently and to good purpose” till about ten o’clock. Left alone, our divine gat him to bed, but had scarce fallen asleep when he awoke in terror, for a terrible cry rang through the silence of the winter night. A confused murmur of voices and a noise of folk moving about succeeded. Mr. Bell incontinently set all down to “evil wicked spirits,” so having seen to the bolts of his chamber door, and having fortified his timid soul with prayers, he huddled in bed again; but the voices and noises continuing outside the house he crept to the window, where peering out he perceived nought in the darkness. The noises died away across the garden towards the river, and Bell lay quaking till the morning. An hour after day Philip came to his chamber to ask if his father had been there, for he had been seeking him upon the banks of the water. “Why on the banks of that water?” queried Bell in natural amazement. Without answer Philip hurriedly left the room. Later that same Sunday morning a certain John Topping coming from Monkrig to New Mills, along the bank of the Tyne, saw a man’s body floating on the water. Philip, drawn to the spot by some terrible fascination, was looking on (you picture his face). “Whose body was it?” asked the horror-struck Topping, but Philip replied not. Well _he_ knew it was his father’s corpse. It was noted that, though a hard frosty morning, the bank was “all beaten to mash with feet and the ground very open and mellow.” The dead man being presently dragged forth and carried home was refused entry by Philip into the house so late his own, “for he had not died like a man but like a beast,”--the suggestion being that his father had drowned himself,--and so the poor remains must rest in the woollen mill, and then in a cellar “where there was very little light.” The gossips retailed unseemly fragments of scandal, as “within an hour after his father’s body was brought from the water, he got the buckles from his father’s shoes and put them in his;” and again, there is note of a hideous and sordid quarrel between Lady Standsfield and Janet Johnstoun, “who was his own concubine,” so the prosecution averred, “about some remains of the Holland of the woonding-sheet,” with some incriminating words of Philip that accompanied.