A few years after (1704) Sarah Griffiths lay suspected for a witch, and a
bad one, for all the children in her neighbourhood were afflicted with
strange distempers, and had visions of cats and the like, so that no one
coveted poor Sarah's company, and many removed because of her. Her guilt
was discovered at last by a jolly young grocer's lad, who was one day
weighing her out some soap, but the scales would not hang right, whereat
he laughed and cried out they were bewitched. Sarah Griffiths did not
understand joking. She got very angry, and ran out of the shop threatening
revenge; and the next night all the goods in the shop were turned
topsy-turvy, and the day after the jolly young fellow was troubled with a
strange disease--but by prayer released. Meeting her by chance some time
after, as he and some friends were walking up to New River Head, they
resolved to swim her. They tossed her in, and she swam like a cork. They
kept her there for some time, but at last she got out, and struck the
young man on the arm, telling him he should pay dearly for what he had
done. He looked at his arm and found it black as a coal, with the exact
mark of her hand and fingers on it. He went home much tormented, vomiting
old nails, pins, and the like, afflicted with fits and strange
contortions, and for ever calling out against Mother Griffiths as he lay
sickening and disabled. And then his arm gangrened and rotted off: whereby
he died. Mother Griffith was taken by the constable, who, on her
attempting to escape, knocked her down. She was secured more firmly, taken
before the judge, and committed to Bridewell, whence--though I find no
sequel to this strange little page--there is very little doubt that she
was haled forth at the assizes only to be convicted and hanged.
We are coming now (1712) to the last authentic trial for witchcraft where
the accused was condemned to death for an impossible crime by a jury of
sane, decent, respectable Englishmen. Jane Wenham was this latest offshoot
of the old tree of judicial bigotry; not the latest fruit, but the last
instance of the law and judgment. There is a report current in most witch
books of a case at a later period--but I can find no _authentic_ account
of it--that, in 1716, of a Mrs. Hicks and her little daughter of nine,
hanged at Huntingdon for selling their souls to the devil, bewitching
their neighbours to death and their crops to ruin, and, as a climax to
all, taking off their stockings to raise a storm. It may well be so, but I
have not met with it in any reliable shape, so meanwhile we must accept
Jane Wenham as the last officially condemned.