incolnshire
in 1564, which measured six yards between the eyes and had a tail fifteen
feet broad; "twelve men stood upright in his mouth to get the Oyl." In
1612 a comet appeared, which in the opinion of Dr. Bainbridge, the great
mathematician of Oxford, was as far above the moon as the moon is above
the earth, and the sequel of it was that infinite slaughters and
devastations followed it both in Germany and other countries. In 1613, in
Standish, in Lancashire, a maiden child was born having four legs, four
arms, and one head with two faces--the one before, the other behind, like
the picture of Janus. (One thinks of the prodigies that presaged the
birth of Glendower.) Also, the same year, in Hampshire, a carpenter,
lying in bed with his wife and a young child, "was himself and the childe
both burned to death with a sudden lightning, no fire appearing outwardly
upon him, and yet lay burning for the space of almost three days till he
was quite consumed to ashes." This year the Globe playhouse, on the
Bankside, was burned, and the year following the new playhouse, the
Fortune, in Golding Lane, "was by negligence of a candle, clean burned
down to the ground." In this year also, 1614, the town of
Stratford-on-Avon was burned. One of the strangest events, however,
happened in the first year of Elizabeth (1558), when "dyed Sir Thomas
Cheney, Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, of whom it is reported for a
certain, that his pulse did beat more than three quarters of an hour
after he was dead, as strongly as if he had been still alive." In 1580 a
strange apparition happened in Somersetshire--three score personages all
clothed in black, a furlong in distance from those that beheld them; "and
after their appearing, and a little while tarrying, they vanished away,
but immediately another strange company, in like manner, color, and
number appeared in the same place, and they encountered one another and
so vanished away. And the third time appeared that number again, all in
bright armour, and encountered one another, and so vanished away. This
was examined before Sir George Norton, and sworn by four honest men that
saw it, to be true." Equally well substantiated, probably, was what
happened in Herefordshire in 1571: "A field of three acres, in Blackmore,
with the Trees and Fences, moved from its place and passed over another
field, traveling in the highway that goeth to Herne, and there stayed."
Herefordshire was a favorite place for this