customary in Elizabethan times for thoroughly reputable and even eminent
medical men to explain baffling cases as the results of witchcraft[37]
that to draw the line of demarcation between them and the pretenders who
suggested by means of a charm or a glass a maleficent agent would be
impossible. Granted the phenomena of conjuration and witchcraft as
facts--and no one had yet disputed them--it was altogether easy to
believe that good witches who antagonized the works of black witches
were more dependable than the family physician, who could but suggest
the cause of sickness. The regular practitioner must often have created
business for his brother of the cunning arts.

One would like to know what these practicers thought of their own arts.
Certainly some of them accomplished cures. Mental troubles that baffled
the ordinary physician would offer the "good witch" a rare field for
successful endeavor. Such would be able not only to persuade a community
of their good offices, but to deceive themselves. Not all of them,
however, by any means, were self-deceived. Conscious fraud played a part
in a large percentage of cases. One witch was very naive in her
confession of fraud. When suspected of sorcery and cited to court, she
was said to have frankly recited her charm:

"My lofe in my lappe,
My penny in my purse,
You are never the better,
I am never the worse."

She was acquitted and doubtless continued to add penny to penny.[38]

We need not, indeed, be surprised that the state should have been remiss
in punishing a crime so vague in character and so closely related to an
honorable profession. Except where conjuration had affected high
interests of state, it had been practically overlooked by the
government. Now and then throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries there had been isolated plots against the sovereign, in which
conjury had played a conspicuous part. With these few exceptions the
crime had been one left to ecclesiastical jurisdiction. But now the
state was ready to reclaim its jurisdiction over these crimes and to
assume a very positive attitude of hostility towards them. This came
about in a way that has already been briefly indicated. The government
of the queen found itself threatened constantly by plots for making away
with the queen, plots which their instigators hoped would overturn the
Protestant regime and bring England back into the fold. Elizabeth had
hardly mounted her th