each other with breathless rapidity, and the pamphlet literature of the time is so very considerable that even the briefest bibliography must fill many pages. It is possible only to mention a very few of the more important trials. In 1566 Mother Waterhouse and Alice Chandler were hanged at Chelmsford; thirteen years later three more women were executed in the same town; in 1579 four were hanged at Abingdon; and in 1582 occurred the notorious case of the witches of S. Osyth, a hamlet to the north-east of Chelmsford. In the following year Mother Gabley was hanged at King’s Lynn. In 1589 there was a fresh alarm at Chelmsford, when three notorious witches went to the gallows. In 1593 took place the famous prosecutions at Warboys in Huntingdonshire, when the whole Samuel family, father, mother, and daughter, were hanged for having killed Lady Cromwell by a charm and cast malefic spells upon the house of Throckmorton. Sir Samuel Cromwell bequeathed a sum of £40 annually to Queen’s College, Cambridge, in order that on each Lady Day a divine of the college should deliver a sermon from the pulpit at Huntingdon, and this solemn discourse was to have Witchcraft as the theme. The sermon was still preached during the early years of the nineteenth century, but I am unable to say whether the practice is still in force; and even if, as it would appear, it was for some time discontinued, in these days it might be renewed with notable profit both to men’s intellects and to the health of their souls. In 1595 two witches were executed at Barnet and one at Brainford; in 1596 Mother Cooke was hanged at Leicester; in 1598 Elizabeth Housegoe was executed at King’s Lynn; in 1599 Oliffe
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