s
at once stricken with convulsions. His torments in court were very
convincing. It is pleasant to know that when he came out of his seizure
he would talk very "discreetly, christianly, and charitably." Master
Avery was versatile, however. His evidence against the women rested by
no means alone on his seizures. He had countless apparitions in which he
saw the accused;[15] he had been mysteriously thrown from a horse;
strangest of all, he had foretold at a certain time that if any one
should go down to the gaol and listen to the voices of the witches, he
could not understand a word. Whereupon a Master of Arts of Trinity
College, Oxford, went off to the prison at the uncanny hour of two in
the morning and "heard a confused noise of much chattering and chiding,
but could not discover a ready word."

Master Avery had a great deal more to tell, but the jury seem not to
have fully credited him.[16] They convicted Joan Brown and her mother,
however, on the charges of Elizabeth and her brother. Three others were
found guilty upon other counts. None of them, so far as the records go,
and the records were careful on this point, admitted any guilt.[17] The
one young man among those who were hanged bitterly resisted his
conviction from the beginning and died declaring that authority had
turned to tyranny. He might well feel so. His father and mother had both
been tortured by the water ordeal, and his mother had been worried till
she committed suicide in prison.

This brings us to the third sort of cases, those that were the outcome
of quarrels or grudges. It has already been observed that the Lancashire
affair could very well be reckoned under this heading. It is no
exaggeration to say that a goodly percentage of all other witch trials
in the reign of James could be classified in the same way. Most notable
among them was the famous trial of the Belvoir witches at Lincoln in
1618-1619. The trial has received wide notice because it concerned a
leading family--perhaps the wealthiest in England--the great Catholic
family of Manners, of which the Earl of Rutland was head. The effort to
account for the mysterious illness of his young heir and for that which
had a few years earlier carried off the boy's elder brother led to a
charge of witchcraft against three humble women of the neighborhood. The
Rutland affair shows how easily a suspicion of witchcraft might involve
the fortunes of the lowly with those of the great. Joan Flower and her