Transcriber's note:
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Remains Historical & Literary Connected with the Palatine Counties of Lancaster and Chester
Published by the Chetham Society.
Vol. VI.
Printed for the Chetham Society. M.DCCC.XLV.
Council.
EDWARD HOLME, ESQ., M.D., PRESIDENT. REV. RICHARD PARKINSON, B.D., CANON OF MANCHESTER, VICE-PRESIDENT. THE HON. & VERY REV. WILLIAM HERBERT, DEAN OF MANCHESTER. GEORGE ORMEROD, ESQ., D.C.L., F.R.S., F.S.A., F.G.S., SEDBURY PARK. SAMUEL HIBBERT WARE, ESQ., M.D., F.R.S.E., EDINBURGH. REV. THOMAS CORSER, M.A. REV. GEORGE DUGARD, M.A. REV. C.G. HULTON, M.A. REV. J. PICCOPE, M.A. REV. F.R. RAINES, M.A., F.S.A., MILNROW PARSONAGE, NEAR ROCHDALE. JAMES CROSSLEY, ESQ. JAMES HEYWOOD, ESQ., F.R.S. WILLIAM LANGTON, ESQ., TREASURER. WILLIAM FLEMING, ESQ., M.D., HON. SECRETARY.
POTTS'S DISCOVERY OF WITCHES
In the County of Lancaster,
Reprinted from the Original Edition of 1613.
With an Introduction and Notes, by JAMES CROSSLEY, ESQ.
Printed for the Chetham Society. M.DCC.XLV. Manchester: Printed by Charles Simms and Co.
INTRODUCTION.
Were not every chapter of the history of the human mind too precious an inheritance to be willingly relinquished,--for appalling as its contents may be, the value of the materials it may furnish may be inestimable,--we might otherwise be tempted to wish that the miserable record in which the excesses occasioned by the witch mania are narrated, could be struck out of its pages, and for ever cancelled. Most assuredly, he, who is content to take the fine exaggeration of the author of Hydriotaphia as a serious and literal truth, and who believes with him that "man is a glorious animal," must not go to the chapter which contains that record for his evidences and proofs. If he should be in search of materials for humiliation and abasement, he will find in the history of witchcraft in this country, from the beginning to the end of the seventeenth century, large and abundant materials, whether it affects the species or the individual. In truth, human nature is never seen in worse colours than in that dark and dismal review. Childhood, without any of its engaging properties, appears prematurely artful, wicked and cruel[1]; woman, the victim of a wretched and debasing bigotry, has yet so little of the feminine adjuncts, that the fountains of our sympathies are almost closed; and man, tyrannizing over the sex he was bound to protect, in its helpless destitution and enfeebled decline, seems lost in prejudice and superstition and only strong in oppression. If we turn from the common herd to the luminaries of the age, to those whose works are the landmarks of literature and science, the reference is equally disappointing;--
"The sun itself is dark And silent as the moon Hid in her vacant interlunar cave."
[Footnote 1: Take, as an instance, the children of Mr. Throgmorton, of Warbois, for bewitching whom, Mother Samuels, her husband, and daughter, suffered in 1593. No veteran professors "in the art of ingeniously tormenting" could have administered the question with more consummate skill than these little incarnate fiends, till the poor old woman was actually induced, from their confident asseverations and plausible counterfeiting, to believe at last that she had been a witch all her life without knowing it. She made a confession, following the story which they had prompted, on their assurances that it was the only means to restore them, and then was hanged upon that confession, to which she adhered on the scaffold. Few tracts present a more vivid picture of manners than that in which the account of this case of witchcraft is contained. It is perhaps the rarest of the English tracts relating to witchcraft, and is entitled "The most strange and admirable Discoverie of the three Witches of Warboys, arraigned, convicted, and executed at the last Assizes at Huntingdon, for the bewitching of the five daughters of Robert Throckmorton, Esquire, and divers other persons with sundrie Devilish and grievous torments. And also for the bewitching to Death of the Lady Crumwell, the like hath not been heard of in this age. London, Printed by the Widdowe Orwin for Thomas Man and John Winnington, and are to be sold in Paternoster Rowe at the Signe of the Talbot." 1593, 4to. My copy was Brand's, and formed Lot 8224 in his Sale Catalogue.]
We find the illustrious author of the Novum Organon sacrificing to courtly suppleness his philosophic truth, and gravely prescribing the ingredients for a witches' ointment;[2]--Raleigh, adopting miserable fallacies at second hand, without subjecting them to the crucible of his acute and vigorous understanding;[3]--Selden, maintaining that crimes of the imagination may be punished with death;[4]--The detector of Vulgar Errors, and the most humane of physicians,[5] giving the casting weight to the vacillating bigotry of Sir Matthew Hale;[6]--Hobbes, ever sceptical, penetrating and sagacious, yet here paralyzed, and shrinking from the subject as if afraid to touch it;[7]--The adventurous explorer, who sounded the depths and channels of the "Intellectual System" along all the "wide watered" shores of antiquity, running after witches to hear them recite the Common Prayer and the Creed, as a rational test of guilt or innocence;[8]--The gentle spirit of Dr. Henry More, girding on the armour of persecution, and rousing itself from a Platonic reverie on the Divine Life, to assume the hood and cloak of a familiar of the Inquisition;[9]--and the patient and enquiring Boyle, putting aside for a while his searches for the grand Magisterium, and listening, as if spell-bound, with gratified attention to stories of witches at Oxford, and devils at Mascon.[10] Nor is it from a retrospect of our own intellectual progress only that we find how capricious, how intermitting, and how little privileged to great names or high intellects, or even to those minds which seemed to possess the very qualifications which would operate as conductors, are those illuminating gleams of common sense which shoot athwart the gloom, and aid a nation on its tardy progress to wisdom, humanity, and justice. If on the Continent there were, in the sixteenth century, two men from whom an exposure of the absurdities of the system of witchcraft might have been naturally and rationally expected, and who seem to stand out prominently from the crowd as predestined to that honourable and salutary office, those two men were John Bodin[11] and Thomas Erastus.[12] The former a lawyer--much exercised in the affairs of men--whose learning was not merely umbratic--whose knowledge of history was most philosophic and exact--of piercing penetration and sagacity--tolerant--liberal minded--disposed to take no proposition upon trust, but to canvass and examine every thing for himself, and who had large views of human nature and society--in fact, the Montesquieu of the seventeenth century. The other, a physician and professor, sage, judicious, incredulous,
"The scourge of impostors, the terror of quacks,"
who had routed irrecoverably empiricism in almost every shape--Paracelsians--Astrologers--Alchemists--Rosicrucians--and who weighed and scrutinized and analyzed every conclusion, from excommunication and the power of the keys to the revolutions of comets and their supposed effects on empires, and all with perfect fearlessness and intuitive insight into the weak points of an argument. Yet, alas! for human infirmity. Bodin threw all the weight of his reasoning and learning and vivacity into the scale of the witch supporters, and made the "hell-broth boil and bubble" anew, and increased the witch furor to downright fanaticism, by the publication of his Demo-manie,[13] a work in which
"Learning, blinded first and then beguiled, Looks dark as ignorance, as frenzy wild;"
but which it is impossible to read without being carried along by the force of mind and power of combination which the author manifests, and without feeling how much ingenious sophistry can perform to mitigate and soften the most startling absurdity. His contemporary, Erastus, after all his victories on the field of imposition, was foiled by the subject of witchcraft at last. This was his pet delusion--almost the only one he cared not to discard--like the dying miser's last reserve:--
---- "My manor, sir? he cried; Not that, I cannot part with that,--and died."
[Footnote 2: Lord Bacon thinks (see his Sylva Sylvarum) that soporiferous medicines "are likeliest" for this purpose, such as henbane, hemlock, mandrake, moonshade, tobacco, opium, saffron, poplar leaves, &c.]
[Footnote 3: See his History of the World.]
[Footnote 4: See his Table Talk, section "Witches."]
[Footnote 5: Sir Thomas Browne's evidence at the trial of Amy Duny and Rose Cullender at Bury St. Edmunds in 1664, is too well known to need an extract from the frequently reprinted report of the case. To adopt the words of an able writer, (Retros. Review, vol. v. p. 118,) "this trial is the only place in which we ever meet with the name of Sir Thomas Browne without pleasurable associations."]