[49] North Riding Record Soc., _Quarter Sessions Records_, I, 58.

[50] "... neither had they authoritie to compell her to goe without a
Constable."

[51] Brit. Mus., Add. MSS., 36,674, fol. 148. This is a brief
description of "how to discover a witch." It recommends the water ordeal
and cites the case of Mr. Enger and Mary Sutton.

[52] In the case of three of these four we know only that they were
sentenced.

[53] Before the Flower case at Lincoln came the Willimot-Baker cases at
Leicester. The Bedford trial resembled much the Northampton trial of the
previous year.

CHAPTER VI.

NOTABLE JACOBEAN CASES.

It is possible to sift, to analyze, and to reconstruct the material
derived from witch trials until some few conclusions about a given
period can be ventured. A large proportion of cases can be proved to
belong in this or that category, a certain percentage of the women can
be shown to possess these or those traits in common. Yet it is quite
thinkable that one might be armed with a quiver full of generalizations,
and fail, withal, to comprehend Jacobean witchcraft. If one could have
asked information on the subject from a Londoner of 1620, he would
probably have heard little about witchcraft in general, but a very great
deal about the Lancashire, Northampton, Leicester, Lincoln, and Fairfax
trials. The Londoner might have been able to tell the stories complete
of all those famous cases. He would have been but poorly informed could
he not have related some of them, and the listener would have caught the
surface drift of those stories. But a witch panic is a subtle thing, not
to be understood by those who do not follow all its deeper sequences.
The springs of the movement, the interaction of cause and effect, the
operation of personal traits, these are factors that must be evaluated,
and they are not factors that can be fitted into a general scheme,
labelled and classified.

This does not mean that the cases should be examined in chronological
sequence. That is not necessary; for the half-dozen cases that we shall
run over had little or no cause-and-effect connection with one another.
It is convenient, indeed, to make some classification, and the simplest
is that by probable origin, especially as it will enable us to emphasize
that important feature of the trials. Now, by this method the six or
more trials of note may be grouped under three headings: cases that seem
to have originated in the actual pr