be a running stream or a still pond. If a witch swam her guilt was evident, for as she had rejected the sacramental laver of Baptism so now the water refused to receive her into its bosom. King James strongly advocates this test in his Daemonologie, saying: “It appeares that God hath appoynted (for a supernaturall signe of the monstrous impietie of the Witches) that the water shall refuse to receive them in her bosom, that haue shaken off them the sacred Water of Baptisme, and wilfullie refused the benefite thereof.” It is remarkable that the belief in swimming a witch persisted late into the nineteenth century. Writing in 1861 Mrs. Lynn Linton speaks of an “old gentleman who died at Polstead not so long ago, and who, when a boy, had seen a witch swum in Polstead Ponds, ‘and she went over the water like a cork!’ ” In 1865 at Castle Headingham two persons, a man and a woman, were charged with having assaulted an old Frenchman, whom they suspected of sorcery, by throwing him into a brook, whilst a rabble urged them on, yelling, “Swim him, swim him on the Millhead.” The old man died within twenty-four hours of exposure and shock, and the prisoners were committed to the Chelmsford assizes. The bench commented on the “deep belief in witchcraft which possesses to a lamentable extent the tradespeople and lower orders of the district.”
As early as the laws of Hammurabi, King of Babylon, in the third millennium B.C., water was appointed as a test in cases of sorcery. “If a man charges another with black magic and has not made his case good, the one who is thus taxed shall go to the river and plunge into the water. If the river overcometh him then shall his accuser possess
