of accusations and confessions, the justices of the peace were
busy during March, April, and May of 1645. It was not until the
twenty-ninth of July that the trial took place. It was held at
Chelmsford before the justices of the peace and Robert Rich, Earl of
Warwick. Warwick was not an itinerant justice, nor was he, so far as we
know, in any way connected with the judicial system. One of the most
prominent Presbyterians in England, he had in April of this year, as a
result of the "self-denying ordinance," laid down his commission as head
of the navy. He disappears from view until August, when he was again
given work to do. In the mean time occurred the Chelmsford trial. We can
only guess that the earl, who was appointed head of the Eastern
Association less than a month later[17] (August 27), acted in this
instance in a military capacity. The assizes had been suspended. No
doubt some of the justices of the peace pressed upon him the urgency of
the cases to be tried. We may guess that he sat with them in the quarter
sessions, but he seems to have played the role of an itinerant justice.

No narrative account of the trial proper is extant. Some one who signs
himself "H. F." copied out and printed the evidence taken by the
justices of the peace and inserted in the margins the verdicts. In this
way we know that at least sixteen were condemned, probably two more, and
possibly eleven or twelve more.[18] Of the original sixteen, one was
reprieved, one died before execution, four were hanged at Manningtree
and ten at Chelmsford.

The cases excited some comment, and it is comment that must not be
passed over, for it will prove of some use later in analyzing the causes
of the outbreak. Arthur Wilson, whom we have mentioned as an historian
of the time, has left his verdict on the trial. "There is nothing," he
wrote, "so crosse to my temper as putting so many witches to death." He
saw nothing, in the women condemned at Chelmsford, "other than poore
mellenchollie ... ill-dieted atrabilious constitutions, whose fancies
working by grosse fumes and vapors might make the imagination readie to
take any impression." Wilson wrestled long with his God over the matter
of witches and came at length to the conclusion that "it did not consist
with the infinite goodnes of the Almightie God to let Satan loose in so
ravenous a way."

The opinion of a parliamentary journal in London on the twenty-fourth of
July, three days before the Essex execut