About the same time a Tewkesbury man had a sow and a litter of pigs: the
sow with abundance of milk, but the pigs lean and miserable. He concluded
that something which had no right to it came and robbed his piglings of
their milk; so he watched; and sure enough a "black four-footed Creature
like a Pole-Cat" came and beat away the pigs and sucked the sow; but the
farmer got a pitchfork and ran it into the thigh of the pole-cat, which
struggled so mightily that, though it was nailed to the ground, it got
away and made off. When he asked some neighbours, standing near, what they
had seen, they said they had only seen a wench go by, with blood falling
from her as she went. They caught the wench and searched her, and, sure
enough, found her wounded as the man said he had wounded the thing sucking
his sow. She was apprehended, tried, and hanged, because she made herself
into a creature like a black pole-cat, and went and sucked the farmers'
sows. "These two Relations, I received from a Person of Quality, of good
Ability and of unquestionable Credit, who was present at both the Tryals,
and wrote them in his Presence, and afterwards read them to him; and he
assured me they were very true in all the Particulars, as they were given
in Evidence," says the author of the "Collection of Modern Relations"
complacently.