Page:Abstract of the bloody massacre in Ireland.pdf/12

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THE BLOODY MASSACRE

in frost and snow, after which, sheltering themselves in a cave; they had nothing there to eat for three weeks, but two old calf skins, which they beat with stones, and so ate them hair and all.

In the cold weather, many thousands of Protestants of all ranks, ages, and sexes, being turned out naked, perished of cold and hunger; thousands of others were drowned, cast into ditches, bogs, and turf-pits; multitudes miserably burnt in houses; some that lay sick of fevers they hanged up; some men, women and children they drove into boggy pits, and knocked them on the head.

Some aged men, and women, these barbarous Papists enforced their own children to drown them; yea, some children were compelled unnaturally to execute their own parents, wives forced to hang their own husbands, and mothers to cast their own children into the waters; after which themselves were murdered. In Sligo they forced a young man to kill his father, and then hanged him up, in another place, they forced a woman to kill her husband, then caused her son to kill her, and then hanged the son: yea, such was their malice against the English, that they taught their children to kill English children.

The Irish women that followed the camp, cried out, Kill them all spare neither man, woman nor child. They took the child of Thomas Sorattan, being about twelve years old, and boiled him in a caldron. One good-wife Linn, and her daughter, they carried into a