ps public sentiment at home
made the sheriff unwilling to do it, perhaps the wretched creatures
spent two or more years in prison--for we do not know when they got
out--as a result of judicial negligence, a negligence of which there are
too many examples in the records of the time. More likely the king and
the privy council, while doubting the charges against the women, had
been reluctant to antagonize public sentiment by declaring them
innocent.

It is disagreeable to have to state that Lancaster was not yet through
with its witches. Early in the next year the Bishop of Chester was again
called upon by the privy council to look into the cases of four women.
There was some delay, during which a dispute took place between the
bishop and the sheriff as to where the bishop should examine the
witches, whether at Wigan, as he proposed, or at Lancaster.[27] One
suspects that the civil authorities of the Duchy of Lancaster may have
resented the bishop's part in the affair. When Bridgeman arrived in
Lancaster he found two of the women already dead. Of the other two, the
one, he wrote, was accused by a man formerly "distracted and lunatic"
and by a woman who was a common beggar; the other had been long reputed
a witch, but he saw no reason to believe it. He had, he admitted, found
a small lump of flesh on her right ear.[28] Alas that the Bishop of
Chester, like the king and the privy council, however much he discounted
the accusations of witchcraft, had not yet wholly rid himself of one of
the darkest and most disagreeable forms of the belief that the Evil One
had bodily communication with his subjects.

In one respect the affair of 1633-1634 in northern England was singular.
The social and moral character of those accused was distinctly high. Not
that they belonged to any but the peasant class, but that they
represented a good type of farming people. Frances Dickonson's husband
evidently had some property. Mary Spencer insisted that she was
accustomed to go to church and to repeat the sermon to her parents, and
that she was not afraid of death, for she hoped it would make an
entrance for her into heaven. Margaret Johnson was persuaded that a man
and his wife who were in the gaol on Robinson's charges were not
witches, because the man "daily prays and reads and seems a godly man."
With this evidence of religious life, which must have meant something as
to the status of the people in the community, should be coupled the
entire