d before the justices of the peace, the accused
woman denied that she was guilty of anything more than unwitching the
afflicted. That she had learned, she said, ten or more years ago from a
woman now deceased. She was committed to the assizes, and Justice Brian
Darcy, whose servant Grace Thurlow had started the trouble, took the
case in hand. He examined her eight-year-old "base son," who gave
damning evidence against his mother. She fed four imps, Tyffin, Tittey,
Piggen, and Jacket. The boy's testimony and the judge's promise that if
she would confess the truth she "would have favour," seemed to break
down the woman's resolution. "Bursting out with weeping she fell upon
her knees and confessed that she had four spirits." Two of them she had
used for laming, two for killing. Not only the details of her son's
evidence, but all the earlier charges, she confirmed step by step, first
in private confessions to the judge and then publicly at the court
sessions. The woman's stories tallied with those of all her accusers[13]
and displayed no little play of imagination in the orientation of
details.[14] Not content with thus entangling herself in a fearful web
of crime, she went on to point out other women guilty of similar
witchcrafts. Four of those whom she named were haled before the justice.
Elizabeth Bennett, who spun wool for a cloth-maker, was one of those
most vehemently accused, but she denied knowledge of any kind of
witchcraft. It had been charged against her that she kept some wool
hidden in a pot under some stones in her house. She denied at first the
possession of this potent and malignant charm; but, influenced by the
gentle urgings of Justice Darcy,[15] she gave way, as Ursley Kemp had
done, and, breaking all restraint, poured forth wild stories of devilish
crimes committed through the assistance of her imps.

But why should we trace out the confessions, charges, and
counter-charges that followed? The stories that were poured forth
continued to involve a widening group until sixteen persons were under
accusation of the most awful crimes, committed by demoniacal agency. As
at Chelmsford, they were the dregs of the lower classes, women with
illegitimate children, some of them dependent upon public support. It
will be seen that in some respects the panic bore a likeness to those
that had preceded. The spirits, which took extraordinary and bizarre
forms, were the offspring of the same perverted imaginations, but they