er of its own accord, she declared that she used as a
child to roll a pail down-hill and to call it after her as she ran, a
perfectly natural piece of child's play. Frances Dickonson, too, charged
malice upon her accusers, especially upon the father of Edmund Robinson.
Her husband, she said, had been unwilling to sell him a cow without
surety and had so gained his ill-will. She went on to assert that the
elder Robinson had volunteered to withdraw the charges against her if
her husband would pay him forty shillings. This counter charge was
supported by another witness and seemed to make a good deal of an
impression on the ecclesiastic.

The third woman to be examined by the bishop was a widow of sixty, who
had not been numbered among the original seventeen witches. She
acknowledged that she was a witch, but was, wrote the bishop, "more
often faulting in the particulars of her actions as one having a strong
imagination of the former, but of too weak a memory to retain or relate
the latter." The woman told a commonplace story of a man in black attire
who had come to her six years before and made the usual contract. But
very curiously she could name only one other witch, and professed to
know none of those already in gaol.

Such were the results of the examinations sent in by the bishop. In the
letter which he sent along, he expressed doubt about the whole matter.
"Conceit and malice," he wrote, "are so powerful with many in those
parts that they will easily afford an oath to work revenge upon their
neighbour." He would, he intimated, have gone further in examining the
counter charges brought by the accused, had it not been that he
hesitated to proceed against the king, that is, the prosecution.

This report doubtless confirmed the fears of the government. The writs
to the sheriff of Lancaster were redirected, and four of the women were
brought up to London and carried to the "Ship Tavern" at Greenwich,
close to one of the royal residences.[19] Two of His Majesty's surgeons,
Alexander Baker and Sir William Knowles, the latter of whom was
accustomed to examine candidates for the king's touch, together with
five other surgeons and ten certificated midwives, were now ordered to
make a bodily examination of the women, under the direction of the
eminent Harvey,[20] the king's physician, who was later to discover the
circulation of the blood. In the course of this chapter we shall see
that Harvey had long cherished misgivings a