sed to
communicate with him until such time as (being thereunto enjoined
by the ordinary) he had brought from London a certificate under
the hands of two physicians that his hoarseness proceeded from a
disease of the lungs; which certificate he published in the
church, in the presence of the whole congregation: and by this
means he was cured, or rather excused of the shame of the
disease. And this,' certifies the narrator, 'I know to be true,
by the relation of divers honest men of that parish. And truly if
one of the jury had not been wiser than the others, she had been
condemned thereupon, and upon other as ridiculous matters as
this. For the name of witch is so odious, and her power so feared
among the common people, that if the honestest body living
chanced to be arraigned thereupon, she shall hardly escape
condemnation.'

CHAPTER III.

The 'Discoverie of Witchcraft,' published 1584--Wier's 'De
Praestigiis Daemonum, &c.'--Naude--Jean Bodin--His 'De la
Demonomanie des Sorciers,' published at Paris, 1580--His
authority--Nider--Witch-case at Warboys--Evidence adduced at
the Trial--Remarkable as being the origin of the institution
of an Annual Sermon at Huntingdon.

Three years after this affair, Dr. Reginald Scot published his
'Discoverie of Witchcraft, proving that common opinions of
witches contracting with devils, spirits, or their familiars, and
their power to kill, torment, and consume the bodies of men,
women, and children, or other creatures, by disease, or
otherwise, their flying in the air, &c., to be but imaginary,
erroneous conceptions and novelties: wherein also the lewd,
unchristian, practices of witchmongers upon aged, melancholy,
ignorant, and superstitious people, in extorting confessions by
inhuman terrors and tortures, is notably detected.'[99]

[99] The edition referred to is that of 1654. The author is
commemorated by Hallam in terms of high praise--'A solid and
learned person, beyond almost all the English of that
age.'--_Introduction to the Literature of Europe in the
Fifteenth, Sixteenth, and Seventeenth Centuries._

This work is divided into sixteen books, with a treatise affixed
upon devils and spirits, in thirty-four chapters. It contains an
infinity of quotations from or references to the writings of
those whom the author terms _witch-mongers_; and several chapters
are devoted to a descriptive catalogue of the charms in repute
and diab