u now, Catch, limping? I hope you
have met with your match." Catch answered that Smack and he
had been fighting, and that Smack had broken his leg. Said
she, "That Smack is a shrewd fellow; methinks I would I
could see him. Pluck came last night with his head broke,
and now you have broken your leg. I hope he will break both
your necks before he hath done with you." Catch answered
that he would be even with him before he had done. Then,
said she, "Put forth your other leg, and let me see if I can
break that," having a stick in her hand. The spirit told her
she could not hit him. "Can I not hit you?" said she; "let
me try." Then the spirit put forth his leg, and she lifted
up the stick easily, and suddenly struck the ground.... So
she seemed divers times to strike at the spirit; but he
leaped over the stick, as she said, like a Jackanapes. So
after many such tricks the spirit went away, and she came
out of her fit, continuing all that night and the next day
very sick and full of pain in her legs.'

The sessions at Huntingdon began April 4, 1593, when the three
Samuels were arraigned; and the above charges, with much more of
the same sort, were repeated: the indictments specifying the
particular offences against the children and servants of the
Throgmortons, and the 'bewitching unto death' of the lady
Cromwell. The grand jury found a true bill immediately, and they
were put upon their trial in court. After a mass of nonsense had
been gone through, 'the judge, justices, and jury said the case
was apparent, and their consciences were well satisfied that the
said witches were guilty, and deserved death.' When sentence of
death was pronounced, the old woman, sixty years of age, pleaded,
in arrest of judgment, that she was with child--a pleading which
produced only a derisive shout of laughter in court. Husband and
daughter asserted their innocence to the last. All three were
hanged. From the moment of execution, we are assured, Robert
Throgmorton's children were permanently freed from all their
sufferings. Such, briefly, are the circumstances of a witch case
that resulted in the sending to the gallows three harmless
wretches, and in the founding an annual sermon which perpetuated
the memory of an iniquitous act and of an impossible crime. The
sermon, it may be presumed, like other similar surviving
institutions, was preserved in the eighteenth century more for
the benefit of the select pr