Ir would probably be impossible at the present time to find, within the three kingdoms, any person of ordinary education who entertains a belief in witchcraft. We believe in spirit-rapping and in table-turning, in homoeopathy and mesmerism, in Miss C. Smith, who exhibits her extraordinary powers in animal magnetism at 540 New Oxford Street, and in Mr J. Smith, who exhibits his extraordinary powers in prophecy at Utah. The doctrine of " Credo quia impossibile" never had more numerous disciples than now; but we do not believe in witchcraft. This scepticism is, however, of very modern date. Even at the early part of the last century belief was general, and we have only to go back about two hundred years to find it universal. From the days when Eleanor Cobham, the wife of a duke and the aunt of a king (after walking in solemn penance for her witchcrafts, "hoodlesse save a kercheif," through all the most crowded streets of London and Westminster, to offer a "taper at the high altar of St Paul's"), went to her life-long imprisonment at Kenilworth, whilst her accomplice Bolingbroke paid the penalty of his crime on the gibbet at Tyburn, down to those when Archbishop Cranmer directed his clergy to make strict inquiry after all witchcraft, and suchlike craft invented of the devil,” and Lord ChiefJustice Coke declared that it would have been "a great defect in government if so great an abomination had passed with impunity," no one doubted the existence or questioned the power of the witch.

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When Ford lays his cudgel across the shoulders of Falstaff, supposing him to be the "wise woman of Brentford," he only does what all around approve. Ford is a gentleman and (excepting his groundless jealousy) a man of sense. In the presence of a justice of the peace, a clergyman and a physician, of his neighbour Page, and the several

members of their families, he inflicts brutal chastisement upon an old woman, and not a word of remonstrance is uttered. There can be no doubt that Shakespeare has here given us a true picture of the feelings of his day. He has embodied the grander and more terrible idea of witchcraft in the tragedy of Macbeth. There is scarcely an ingredient of the witches' cauldron for which an authority could not be found in some of the trials of that day. The details of the enchantment, the sailing in a sieve, the "pilot's thumb," the "finger of birthstrangled babe," the "rat without a tail," were all objects of terror in an age when it was believed that the life of the king had been endangered on his return from Denmark by a storm raised by these very means,when the king himself had presided in person at the trials of the witches, "taking great delight to be present at their examinations,"* and had employed his royal pen to prove alike their existence and their criminality. The tailless rats were peculiarly objects of terror. Imps, in shape somewhat like a rat, but without tail or ears"-"things about the bignesse of mouses"-“ things like moles, having four feet a-piece, but without tayls," meet us on every page of the witch trials. A little later we come to the times of Matthew Hopkins, the witch-finder. Then we see Sir Matthew Hale presiding at the trials of the Bury St Edmunds witches, and Sir Thomas Brown, author of the Religio Medici and of the Inquiry into Vulgar Errors, giving the evidence on which those unhappy wretches were sent to the gallows. We find Baxter and Wesley declaring that the belief in witchcraft was essentially connected with the truths of Christianity, and, almost in our own day, Johnson doubting if not believing in the existence and power of witches.

The statute which made witchcraft a felony punishable with death, was

not repealed until the year 1736, nor had it become obsolete. A trial of the most solemn description took place under its provisions on the spring circuit of 1712, before the judge of assize at Hertford. The several collections of State trials, so rich in the earlier cases, contain (as far as we have been able to discover) no report of this very remarkable trial, though it is frequently referred to in various law treatises. There exists, however, a full, minute, and trustworthy account of the whole proceedings, in a very scarce tract entitled A full and impartial Account of Sorcery and Witchcraft practised by Jane Wenham, of Walkerne in Hertfordshire, upon the Bodies of Anne Thorne and Anne Street, &c.; the Proceedings against her, from her being first apprehended till she was committed to gaol by Sir Henry Chauncy; also her Tryal at the Assizes at Hertford, before Mr Justice Powell, when she was found guilty of Felony and Witchcraft, and received sentence of death for the same, March 4, 171112. 4th Edit." This tract was written by Mr Francis Bragge, one of the principal actors in the transaction. He was a young man of family and education. He had recently taken his degree at the university of Cambridge, and appears to have been, at the time in question, residing sometimes with his maternal grandfather, Sir Henry Chauncy, and sometimes with his father, the Rev. Francis Bragge, vicar of the neighbouring town of Hitchin. We shall draw largely upon his narrative, with the view of rescuing from oblivion the only record of this very remarkable trial, and throwing some additional light upon one of the most interesting and at the same time most obscure pages in the history of human

nature.

The village of Walkerne, the scene of the events we are about to narrate, lies a little more than four miles eastward from the Stevenage station of the Great Northern Railway. Nestling in a narrow valley, and embowered among gigantic elms, the low tower of the church, and the thatched roofs of the farmhouses, are hardly seen until the traveller is close

upon the entrance to the village. Few places probably have changed so little in the last hundred and fifty years. Yew-trees, clipped into the most fantastic forms, attest the antiquity of the gardens they adorn; and the low-roofed warm mud cottages, swarming with chubby rosycheeked children, are evidently unconscious of the existence of Mr Edwin Chadwick and all other zymotic diseases. At the extreme north end of the village stands the Rectory, a fitting residence for some learned fellow of King's College, Cambridge, in the hands of which venerable Society the patronage of the living is vested. Successive incumbents have impressed upon the Rectory the marks of their individual tastes; one added a library of such dimensions, and so well stored, that his parishioners were wont to call it "the Doctor's ba-arn fu' o' books." Another smoothed the lawn which slopes down to the clear stream, over which a footbridge leads to the church, and made it brilliant with calceolaria and the scarlet verbena. Thus the Rectory has experienced more change than any other part of the village, and retains but little of what it was at the time to which our story relates. It occupies, however, the same site, and the alterations have been so gradual as scarcely to destroy the identity.

Our narrative does not, as might be supposed, relate to any obscure or remote locality, or to a dark or ignorant period of history. Walkerne is within an easy afternoon's ride of London, and the literary intellect of England has never shone more brightly than in the year 1712. Dryden had set, but Pope had risen. Addison was painting his genial portraitof Sir Roger de Coverley, and, sickening with envy at the rising luminary which threatened to overpower all other lights, was scheming how he might dim its brightness, and "cuff down the rising merit" of the "little nightingale of Twickenham." Arbuthnot, unnamed, had just sent forth from the press his History of John Bull. Careless, kind-hearted Steele was living at the old cottage, which still stands surrounded by parallelograms of modern brick, half-way between London and Hampstead. Looming large in

the distance, his gigantic proportions developing themselves more and more as he recedes from sight, a darker and grander mystery clouding his features and enveloping his form, Swift towers above his comrades, stern and lonely. Dictating to ministers, and domineering_over peers, the poor proud vicar of Laracor was at that moment more courted, followed, flattered, and feared, than any man in England. Night after night he returns to his lodgings at eight shillings a-week"-in Bury Street, sighing for the willows of Laracor, and pouring out his heart in childish prattle to the woman who loved him through all the trials of his strange career-the star at whose setting a darkness more terrible than death descended on his soul. Nothing is too minute, nothing too trivial, to be recorded in the touching pages of that "Journal to Stella.' But on one subject he is silent. Day after day he dines with "neighbour Vanhomrig," yet no word escapes him of her whom he has made worldfamous to eternity- with whom, years afterwards, he sat under the laurels at Celbridge-laurels planted by her hand to signalise his fame. A few short years pass, Laracor and Celbridge are both lonely. The willows and the laurels find no hand to trim their branches or weave them into chaplets. A gaunt figure sits by the fireside in the Deanery of St Patrick's. Months and years pass away, but it utters no word and makes no sign. Day and night, in silence and in darkness, it lives on, a strange and a terrible spectacle. It dies. Earth, only earth at last, to carth. Let us stand reverently in the dingy aisle of St Patrick's, by that grave where the shell which once held, and through dark dread years survived, that mighty intellect, has long since mouldered into dust; let us not seek to penetrate a mystery too deep for us to fathom, but meekly trust that the Great Searcher of Hearts has mercifully dealt with him whom he so loved and so chastened, on whom he showered down his rarest gifts, and inflicted his most terrible doom. Let us fancy that

the gentle spirit of Hester Johnson and the passionate soul of Vanessa still hover lovingly around, and in the divinity of glory which encircles its head, let us forget that the feet of the idol they worshipped were of clay!

But of Swift and Pope, of Arbuthnot and Addison, the world of Walkerne, though within thirty miles of London, knew nothing. They cared neither for the Spectator nor for the Rape of the Lock. Sir Roger de Coverley and Miss Bell Fermor were nothing to them. They were busily employed in hunting a witch, and a very absurd farce, which, but for the good sense of one man, would have turned out a very deep tragedy, was being acted in that village by high and low during the month of February 1712.

One of the parishioners of the Rev. Godfrey Gardiner, the rector of Walkerne, was an old woman of the name of Jane Wenham. She was married and had children, but her domestic life had not been happy. She was suspected of too close an intimacy with the devil, and as no Sir Cresswell Cresswell then sat to adjudicate upon matrimonial differences, her husband adopted the simpler plan of sending the town-crier round to proclaim that he would not be answerable for her proceedings. The husband soon afterwards died miserably, and his death was of course attributed to the witchcraft of his wife. Nor did her vengeance stop there. The wife of Richard Harvey, whom the husband had employed in some step of this extrajudicial separation, lay sick. Jane Wenham "went under the window where the sick woman lay, and said, 'Why do they let this creature lie here? why don't they take her and hang her out of the way?' and that night the sick woman aforesaid died!"* A child of Susan Aylot, who had nursed Harvey's wife, was the next victim, and soon after another child sickened and died through her enchantments. Her time, when not occupied in murder, was passed in sending bumpkins on fools' errands, in bewitching cattle, and making elderly rams and discreet

some, and accordingly took some away from this informant.

"And farther, this informant saith,

That on the 29th of January last, when this informant was thrashing in the barn of his master, John Chapman, an old knows not which, came to the barn door, woman in a riding-hood or cloak, he and asked him for a pennyworth of straw; he told her he could give her none, and she went away muttering.

ewes stand on their heads in the fashion of the performing elephants at Astley's. Living a solitary pariah in her cottage, how she kept body and soul together is a mystery. Somehow or other, however, she managed to live on, in miserable poverty, the object of the hatred, terror, and contempt of every one around her. Abundance of abuse must have been showered upon her; she appears, however, not to have become wholly callous, for one morning meeting a neighbour, one John Chapman, he applied to her the very words which the little foot-page addressed to Queen Guinever when the magic mantle revealed her infi delity to the astonished eyes of the knights and dames of King Arthur's court; whereupon Jane Wenham, feeling no less indignation than her royal prototype, sought vengeance for the wrong at the hands of a neighbouring knight, Sir Henry Chauncy, of Ardley-Bury. We shall now avail ourselves of Mr Bragge's narrative, which begins as follows:

"It often falls out that, by the overruling providence of Almighty God, the most hidden and private wickednesses are discovered by the very means used to conceal them; and so it happened to Jane Wenham. One John Chapman, a farmer at Walkerne, had long entertained a suspicion that the strange deaths of many of his and the neighbours' horses and cattle were occasioned by the witchcrafts of this woman, and thought that he himself had suffered by them to the value of £200 in a short time; but not being able to prove any thing upon her, he did not inform against her, but waited till time should present a favourable opportunity of convicting her. And soon after, an accident fell out, which in its consequences brought on this prosecution. I shall relate it in the very words of the information of Matthew Gilston, servant to the above-said John Chapman, taken on the 14th day of Feb. 1711-12, before Sir Henry Chauncy.

"Matthew Gilston, of the parish of Walkerne, says, upon oath, that on New Year's Day last past, he carrying straw upon a fork from Mr Gardiner's barn, met Jane Wenham, who asked him for some straw, which he refused to give ner; then she said she would take

"And this informant saith, That after the woman was gone, he was not able to work, but ran out of the barn as far as a place called Munder's Hill (which is above three miles from Walkerne), and asked at a house there for a pennyworth of straw, and they refused to give him and took some straw from thence, and any; he went farther to some dung-heaps, pulled off his shirt, and brought it home in his shirt; he knows not what moved him to this, but says he was forced to it, he knows not how.' Thus far this informant. It was also further observed by some persons, who met this Matthew Gilston running on his fool's errand, that he went at a very great pace, and when he came to a river, he did not go over a bridge in his way, but directly through the water. This odd story, and the strange account the boy gave of it, made his master, John Chapman, suspect that Jane Wenham had played this trick upon his servant; and soon after, he meeting her, told her of it, and in heat of anger called her a witch and bitch. After the scolding bout was over, this Jane Wenbam thought she had got an advantage over her neighbour Chapman, and that she would make him pay for his words; accordingly, on the 9th of February she applies herself to Sir Henry Chauncy for a warrant against this man for calling her a witch, expecting not only to get something out of him, but to deter other people from calling her so any more; besides, this show of innocence might make her the less suspected for the future."

Sir Henry Chauncy is known by his History of Hertfordshire, which the standard history of that county. was published in 1700, and is still ancient family, the lineal descendHe was a man of high position and ant of the Chauncy de Chauncy who rode by the side of William the Conqueror at Hastings, and whose name is inscribed on the Roll of Battle Abbey. He was educated at Caius

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College, Cambridge, called to the bar by the Middle Temple, of which learned society he was successively reader and treasurer; he was a serjeant-at-law, Recorder of Hertford, and one of the Justices of the Principality of Wales. He is said to have sat for a single day on the bench of one of the superior courts at Westminster, when the Revolution of 1688 deprived him of his seat. He was unquestionably a man of high rank in the profession of the law, of liberal education, and considerable learning. Perhaps the most remarkable circumstance connected with these transactions is the part which it will be seen was taken by such a man and the various members of his family. In the first instance, however, he seems to have acted like a man of sense; he refused to interfere, and recommended the parties to refer the matter to one of their neighbours. Jane Wenham named the Rev. Mr Gardiner, the rector: Chapman consented, and to him they went to decide the dispute. Mr Gardiner advised them to live more peaceably together, told Chapman to give the old woman a shilling, and sent them away. Jane Wenham was dissatisfied with the award, and in a passion dropped the unlucky words, that "if she could not have justice there, she would have it elsewhere." She left the rectory, passing through the kitchen, where there sat a servantgirl of Mr Gardiner, named Anne Thorne, who had just returned from the surgeon's, who had set her knee, which, by some accident, had been put out of joint.

Within a few minutes after Jane Wenham's departure, Mr Gardiner, his wife, and Mr Francis Bragge, the author of the narrative we are quoting, who happened to be in the house at the time, were alarmed by a "strange yelling noise in the kitchen." Mr Gardiner immediately went to see what was the matter, and found Anne Thorne stripped to her shirt-sleeves, and wringing her hands in a dismal manner, and speechless. He calling out, Mrs Gardiner and Mr Bragge came immediately to him. Mrs Gardiner, seeing her servant in that sad condition, asked her what was the matter with her? She not

being able to speak, pointed earnestly at a bundle which lay at her feet, which Mrs Gardiner took up and unpinned, and found to be the girl's gown and apron, and a parcel of oaken twigs with dead leaves wrapped up therein."

When Anne Thorne came to herself, she declared that, during the few minutes that Mr Gardiner and the others had left her, she had found herself compelled to run to a place half a mile distant, to reach which she had to climb over a five-barred gate with her dislocated knee; that she was met by a "little old woman muffled in a riding-hood," who set her to gather the sticks, made her strip herself and wrap up the bundle in her gown, and " gave her a large crooked pin" to fasten it up with. Mrs Gardiner immediately proceeded to "burn the witch;" that is, she threw the bundle which was supposed to be bewitched into the fire. The charm was successful: whilst it was burning, in came Jane Wenham. She of course was the "little old woman," and Anne Thorne was bewitched.

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"The next morning," says Mr Bragge,

being the 12th of February, after she had had a pretty good night's rest, her

mistress asked her whether she thought she could go to Mistress Adams's house (a near neighbour) to fetch a few pease. She said she thought she could, and went with Mistress Rose Adams (who had breakfasted that morning with Mistress Gardiner) to her house. Having got her pease, as she was coming home she met Jane Wenham, who asked her why she told such stories of her, as if she had bewitched her? Anne Thorne answered she had said nothing but what was true, and she was the cause of all her disorder. To this Jane Wenham reply'd, If you tell any more such stories of 1 of me, it shall be worse for you than it has been yet, and shoved her with her hand. As soon as Anne Thorne had limped home, she told her mistress with a great concern that she had met Jane Wenham, and what had past between

them. When this circumstance was pressed upon Jane Wenham afterwards before Sir Henry Chauncy, she denied that she had met Anne Thorne, saying that she was at that time at Weston, three miles off; to disprove which Thomas Ireland made oath that he saw her in the town within three minutes of