E 3 a 2. “Gaping as though he would haue wearied this Examinate.”] Wearied for worried.

E 3 b. “Examination of Iames Device.”] This is a very curious examination.  The production of the four teeth and figure of clay dug up at the west-end of Malkin Tower would look like a “damning witness” to the two horror-struck justices and the assembled concourse at Read, who did not perhaps consider how easily such evidences may be furnished, and how readily they who hide may find.  The incident deposed to at the burial at the New Church in Pendle is a wild and striking one.

E 4 a. “About eleuen yeares agoe, this Examinate and her mother had their firehouse broken.”] The inference intended is, that Whittle’s family committed the robbery from Old Demdike’s house.  This was, in all probability, the origin of their feuds.  The abstraction of the coif and band, tempting articles to the young daughter of Old Chattox, not destitute, if we may judge from one occurrence deposed to, of personal attractions, may be said to have convulsed Lancashire from the Leven to the Mersey,—­to have caused a sensation, the shock of which, after more than two centuries, has scarcely yet subsided, and to have actually given a new name to the fair sex.

E 4 b 1. “One Aghen-dole of meale.”] This Aghen-dole, a word still, I believe, in use for a particular measure of any article, was, I presume, a kind of witches’ black mail.  My friend, the Rev. Canon Parkinson, informs me that Aghen-dole, sometimes pronounced Acken-dole, signifies an half-measure of anything, from half-hand-dole.  Mr. Halliwell has omitted it in his Glossary, now in progress.

E 4 b 2. “Iohn Moore of Higham, Gentleman.”] Sir Jonas Moore, of whom an account is contained in Whitaker’s Whalley, p. 479, and whom he characterizes as a sanguine projector, was born in Pendle Forest, and was probably of this family.

E 4 b 3. “She would meet with the said Iohn Moore, or his.”] i.e.  She would be equal with him.

F a 1. “Charne.”] i.e.  Charm.

F a 2. “With weeping teares she humbly acknowledged them to be true.”] She seems to have confessed in the hope of saving her daughter, Anne Redfern.  But from such a judge as Sir Edward Bromley, mercy was as little to be expected as common sense from his “faithful chronicler,” Thomas Potts.

F 2 b. “Sparing no man with fearefull execrable curses and banning.”] Nothing seems to shock the nerves of these witch historiographers so much as the utter want of decorum and propriety exhibited by these unhappy creatures in giving vent to these indignant outbreaks, which a sense of the wicked injustice of their fate, and seeing their own offspring brought up in evidence against them, through the most detestable acts, and by the basest subornation, would naturally extort from minds even of iron mould.  If ever Lear’s or Timon’s power of malediction could be justifiably called into exercise, it would be against such a tribunal and such witnesses as they had generally to encounter.