d held him; quhairvpon the sicknes immediatelie
left him, and his sone ran made; and Thomas Paiterson, seeing him tak his
madnes, and the father to turn weill, ane dog being in the bark, took the
dog and bladdit him vpon the twa schoulderis, and thaireftir flang the
said dogg in the sea, quhairby those in the bark were saiffed." So Marion
Richart, _alias_ Langland, learnt the hangman's way to the grave in the
year of grace 1629; and her corpse was burned, when the hangman's rope had
done its work.

LADY LEE'S PENNY AND THE WITCHES OF 1629.[28]

Isobel Young, spous to George Smith, was burnt, in 1629, for curing
cattle, as well as for the other crimes belonging to a witch. She had
sought to borrow Lady Lee's Penny--a precious stone or amulet, like to a
piece of amber, set in a silver penny, which one of the old Lee family had
gotten from a Saracen in the Crusades--and which Lee Penny was to help
her in her incantations, for curing "the bestiall of the routting evill,"
whatever that might have been. But Lady Lee let her have only a flagon of
water in which the amulet had been steeped, which did quite as well, and
helped to set the stake as quickly as anything else would have done.
Various other mischancy things did Isobel Young. She stopped a certain
mill, and made it incapable of grinding for eleven days: she forespoke a
certain boat, and though all the rest returned to Dunbar full and richly
laden, this came back empty, whereby the owner was ruined: she bewitched
milk that it would give no cream, and churns, so that no butter would
come: she twice crossed the mill water on a wild and stormy night, when
the milne horses could not ride it out, and where there was no bridge of
stone or wood; but Isobel the witch crossed and recrossed those raging
waters under the stormy sky, and came out at the end as dry as if from a
kiln. And was not this as unholy as taking off her "curch" at William
Meslet's barn-door, and running "thrice about the barn widdershins,"
whereby the cattle were caused to fall dead in "great suddainty?" Then, as
further iniquity, she had dealings with Christian Grinton, another witch,
who one night came out of a hole in the roof in the likeness of a cat; and
she cast a sickness from off her husband, and laid it on his brother's
son, who, knowing full well that he was bewitched, came to the house, and
there saw the "firlott"--a certain measure of wheat--running about, and
the stuff poppling on the floor, w