Part 4 (1/2)
[20] It is some relief in this trial to read the testimony of John Tendering about William Byett. He had a cow ”in a strange case.” He could not lift it. He put fire under the cow, she got up and ”there stood still and fell a byting of stickes larger than any man's finger and after lived and did well.”
[21] Second wife of Sir Henry Cromwell, who was the grandfather of Oliver.
[22] The children were strangely inconsistent. At the first they had fits when Mother Samuel appeared. Later they were troubled unless Mother Samuel were kept in the house, or unless they were taken to her house.
[23] This device seems to have been originally suggested by the children to try Mother Samuel's guilt.
[24] The clergyman, ”Doctor Dorrington,” had been one of the leaders in prosecuting them.
[25] Harsnett, _Discovery of the Fraudulent Practises of John Darrel_ (London, 1599), 92, 97.
[26] Among the ma.n.u.scripts on witchcraft in the Bodleian Library are three such pardons of witches for their witchcraft--one of Jane Mortimer in 1595, one of Rosa Bexwell in 1600, and one of ”Alice S.,” without date but under Elizabeth.
[27] In 1595 he was made warden of the Manchester Collegiate Church. Dee has in our days found a biographer. See _John Dee_ (1527-1608), by Charlotte Fell Smith (London, 1909).
[28] For the particular case, see Mary Bateson, ed., _Records of the Borough of Leicester_ (Cambridge, 1899), III. 335; for the general letters patent covering such cases see _id._, II, 365, 366.
[29] For this story see Ralph Holinshed, _Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland_ (London, 1577, reprinted 1586-1587 and 1807-1808), ed. of 1807-1808, IV, 891, 893. Faversham was then ”Feversham.”
[30] Justice Anderson, when sentencing a witch to a year's imprisonment, declared that this was the twenty-fifth or twenty-sixth witch he had condemned. This is good evidence that the records of many cases have been lost. See Brit. Mus., Sloane MS. 831, f. 38.
CHAPTER III.
REGINALD SCOT.
From the chronicling of witch trials we turn aside in this chapter to follow the career of the first great English opponent of the superst.i.tion. We have seen how the attack upon the supposed creatures of the Devil was growing stronger throughout the reign of Elizabeth. We shall see how that attack was checked, at least in some degree, by the resistance of one man. Few men of so quiet and studious life have wrought so effectively as Reginald Scot. He came of a family well known in Kent, but not politically aggressive. As a young man he studied at Hart Hall[1] in Oxford, but left without taking his degree and returned to Scots-Hall, where he settled down to the routine duties of managing his estate. He gave himself over, we are told, to husbandry and gardening and to a solid course of general reading in the obscure authors that had ”by the generality been neglected.” In 1574 his studies in horticulture resulted in the publication of _A Perfect Platforme of a Hoppe-Garden and necessary instructions for the making and maintaining thereof_. That the book ministered to a practical interest was evidenced by the call for three editions within five years. Whether he now applied himself to the study of that subject which was to be the theme of his _Discoverie_, we do not know. It was a matter which had doubtless arrested his attention even earlier and had enlisted a growing interest upon his part. Not until a decade after his _Hoppe-Garden_, however, did he put forth the epoch-making _Discoverie_. Nor does it seem likely that he had been engaged for a long period on the actual composition. Rather, the style and matter of the book seem to evince traces of hurry in preparation. If this theory be true--and Mr. Brinsley Nicholson, his modern commentator, has adduced excellent reasons for accepting it[2]--there can be but one explanation, the St. Oses affair. That tragedy, occurring within a short distance of his own home, had no doubt so outraged his sense of justice, that the work which he had perhaps long been contemplating he now set himself to complete as soon as possible.[3] Even he who runs may read in Scot's strong sentences that he was not writing for instruction only, to propound a new doctrine, but that he was battling with the single purpose to stop a detestable and wicked practice. Something of a dilettante in real life, he became in his writing a man with an absorbing mission. That mission sprang not indeed from indignation at the St. Oses affair alone. From the days of childhood his experience had been of a kind to encourage skepticism. He had been reared in a county where Elizabeth Barton, the Holy Maid of Kent, first came into prominence, and he had seen the downfall that followed her public exposure.[4] In the year after he brought out his _Hoppe-garden_, his county was again stirred by performances of a supposedly supernatural character. Mildred Norrington, a girl of seventeen,[5] used ventriloquism with such skill that she convinced two clergymen and all her neighbors that she was possessed. In answer to queries, the evil spirit that spoke through Mildred declared that ”old Alice of Westwell”[6] had sent him to possess the girl. Alice, the spirit admitted, stood guilty of terrible witchcrafts. The demon's word was taken, and Alice seems to have been ”arraigned upon this evidence.”[7] But, through the justices' adroit management of the trial, the fraud of the accuser was exposed. She confessed herself a pretender and suffered ”condign punishment.” This case happened within six miles of Scot's home and opened his eyes to the possibility of humbug. In the very same year two pretenders, Agnes Bridges and Rachel Pinder, were convicted in London. By vomiting pins and straws[8] they had convinced many that they were bewitched, but the trickery was soon found out and they were compelled to do public penance at St. Paul's.[9] We are not told what was the fate of a detestable Mother Baker, who, when consulted by the parents of a sick girl at New Romney in Kent, accused a neighbor woman.[10] She said that the woman had made a waxen heart and p.r.i.c.ked it and by this means accomplished her evil purpose. In order to prove her accusation, she had in the mean time concealed the wax figure of a heart in the house of the woman she accused, and then pretended to find it.[11] It is some satisfaction to know that the malicious creature--who, during the history of witchcraft, had many imitators--was caught and compelled to confess.
Scot learned, indeed, by observing marvels of this sort[12]--what it is strange that many others did not learn--to look upon displays of the supernatural with a good deal of doubt. How much he had ever believed in them we do not know. It is not unlikely that in common with his generation he had, as a young man, held a somewhat ill-defined opinion about the Devil's use of witches. The belief in that had come down, a comparatively innocuous tradition, from a primitive period. It was a subject that had not been raised in speculation or for that matter in court rooms. But since Scot's early manhood all this had been changed.
England had been swept by a tidal wave of suspicion. Hazy theological notions had been tightened into rigid convictions. Convictions had pa.s.sed into legislative statutes and instructions to judges. The bench, which had at first acted on the new laws with caution and a desire to detect imposture, became infected with the fear and grew more ready to discover witchcraft and to punish it. It is unnecessary to recapitulate the progress of a movement already traced in the previous chapter.
Suffice it to say that the Kentish gentleman, familiarized with accounts of imposture, was unwilling to follow the rising current of superst.i.tion. Of course this is merely another way of saying that Scot was unconventional in his mental operations and thought the subject out for himself with results variant from those of his own generation. Here was a new abuse in England, here was a wrong that he had seen spring up within his own lifetime and in his own part of England. He made it his mission as far as possible to right the wrong. ”For so much,” he says, ”as the mightie helpe themselves together, and the poore widowes crie, though it reach to heaven, is sca.r.s.e heard here upon earth: I thought good (according to my poore abilitie) to make intercession, that some part of common rigor, and some points of hastie judgement may be advised upon.”[13]
It was indeed a splendid mission and he was singularly well equipped for it. He had the qualifications--scholarly training and the power of scientific observation, a background of broad theological and scriptural information, a familiarity with legal learning and practice, as well as a command of vigorous and incisive language--which were certain to make his work effective towards its object.
That he was a scholar is true in more senses than one. In his use of deduction from cla.s.sical writers he was something of a scholastic, in his willingness to venture into new fields of thought he was a product of the Renaissance, in his thorough use of research he reminds us of a modern investigator. He gives in his book a bibliography of the works consulted by him and one counts over two hundred Latin and thirty English t.i.tles. His reading had covered the whole field of superst.i.tion.
To Cornelius Agrippa and to Wierus (Johann Weyer),[14] who had attacked the tyranny of superst.i.tion upon the Continent, he owed an especial debt. He had not, however, borrowed enough from them to impair in any serious way the value of his own original contribution.
In respect to law, Scot was less a student than a man of experience. The _Discoverie_, however, bristled with references which indicated a legal way of thinking. He was almost certainly a man who had used the law.
Brinsley Nicholson believes that he had been a justice of the peace. In any case he had a lawyer's sense of the value of evidence and a lawyer's way of putting his case.
No less practical was his knowledge of theology and scripture. Here he had to meet the baffling problems of the Witch of Endor. The story of the witch who had called up before the frightened King Saul the spirit of the dead Samuel and made him speak, stood as a lion in the path of all opponents of witch persecution. When Scot dared to explain this Old Testament tale as an instance of ventriloquism, and to compare it to the celebrated case of Mildred Norrington, he showed a boldness in interpretation of the Bible far in advance of his contemporaries.
His antic.i.p.ation of present-day points of view cropped out perhaps more in his scientific spirit than in any other way. For years before he put pen to paper he had been conducting investigations into alleged cases of conjuring and witchcraft, attending trials,[15] and questioning clergymen and magistrates. For such observation he was most favorably situated and he used his position in his community to further his knowledge. A man almost impertinently curious was this sixteenth-century student. When he learned of a conjurer whose sentence of death had been remitted by the queen and who professed penitence for his crimes, he opened a correspondence and obtained from the man the clear statement that his conjuries were all impostures. The prisoner referred him to ”a booke written in the old Saxon toong by one Sir John Malborne, a divine of Oxenford, three hundred yeares past,” in which all these trickeries are cleared up. Scot put forth his best efforts to procure the work from the parson to whom it had been entrusted, but without success.[16] In another case he attended the a.s.sizes at Rochester, where a woman was on trial. One of her accusers was the vicar of the parish, who made several charges, not the least of which was that he could not enunciate clearly in church owing to enchantment. This explanation Scot carried to her and she was able to give him an explanation much less creditable to the clergyman of the ailment, an explanation which Scot found confirmed by an enquiry among the neighbors. To quiet such rumors in the community about the nature of the illness the vicar had to procure from London a medical certificate that it was a lung trouble.[17]
Can we wonder that a student at such pains to discover the fact as to a wrong done should have used barbed words in the portrayal of injustice?
Strong convictions spurred on his pen, already taught to shape vigorous and incisive sentences. Not a stylist, as measured by the highest Elizabethan standards of charm and mellifluence, he possessed a clearness and directness which win the modern reader. By his methods of a.n.a.lysis he displayed a quality of mind akin to and probably influenced by that of Calvin, while his intellectual att.i.tude showed the stimulus of the Reformation.
He was indeed in his own restricted field a reformer. He was not only the protagonist of a new cause, but a pioneer who had to cut through the underbrush of opinion a pathway for speculation to follow. So far as England was concerned, Scot found no philosophy of the subject, no systematic defences or a.s.saults upon the loosely constructed theory of demonic agency. It was for him to state in definite terms the beliefs he was seeking to overthrow. The Roman church knew fairly well by this time what it meant by witchcraft, but English theologians and philosophers would hardly have found common ground on any one tenet about the matter.[18] Without exaggeration it may be a.s.serted that Scot by his a.s.sault all along the front forced the enemy's advance and in some sense dictated his line of battle.