H 2 a 4. “Master Nowell humbly prayed, that the particular examinations taken before him and others might be openly published and read in court.”] This kind of evidence, the witnesses being in court, and capable of being examined, would not be received at the present day.  At that time a greater laxity prevailed.

H 3 a. “Sheare Thursday.”] The Thursday before Easter, and so called, for that, in the old Fathers’ days, the people would that day, “shave their hedes, and clypp their berdes, and pool their heedes, and so make them honest against Easter Day.”—­Brand’s Popular Antiquities, vol. i., p. 83, edition 1841.

K b 1. “A Charme.”] Sinclair, in his Satan’s Invisible World Discovered, informs us, that “At night, in the time of popery, when folks went to bed, they believed the repetition of this following prayer was effectual to preserve them from danger, and the house too.

    “Who sains the house the night,
    They that sains it ilka night. 
    Saint Bryde and her brate,
    Saint Colme and his hat,
    Saint Michael and his spear,
    Keep this house from the weir;
    From running thief,
    And burning thief;
    And from and ill Rea,
    That be the gate can gae;
    And from an ill weight,
    That be the gate can light
    Nine reeds about the house;
    Keep it all the night,
    What is that, what I see
    So red, so bright, beyond the sea? 
    ’Tis he was pierc’d through the hands,
    Through the feet, through the throat,
    Through the tongue;
    Through the liver and the lung. 
    Well is them that well may
    Fast on Good-friday.”

which lines are not unlike some of those in the present “charme,” which, evidently much corrupted by recitation, is a very singular and interesting string of fragments handed down from times long anterior to the Reformation, when they had been employed as armour of proof by the credulous vulgar against the Robin Goodfellows, urchins, elves, hags, and fairies of earlier superstition.  I regret that I cannot throw more light upon it.  The concluding lines are not deficient in poetical spirit.

K b 2. “Ligh in leath wand.”] Leath is no doubt lithe, flexible.  What “ligh in” is intended for, unless it be lykinge, which the Promptorium Parvulorum (vide part i. p. 304) explains by lusty, or craske, Delicativus, crassus, I am unable to conjecture.  It is clear, that the wand in one hand is to steck, i.e. stake, or fasten, the latch of hell door, while the key in his other hand is to open heaven’s lock.

K b 3. “Let Crizum child goe to it Mother mild.”] The chrisom, according to the usual explanation, was a white cloth placed upon the head of an infant at baptism, when the chrism, or sacred oil of the Romish Church, was used in that sacrament.  If the child died within a month of its birth, that cloth was used as a shroud; and children so dying were called chrisoms in the old bills of mortality.