K b 4. “A light so farrandly.”] Farrandly, or farrantly, a word still in use in Lancashire, and which is equivalent to fair, likely, or handsome. (See Lancashire Dialect and Glossary.) “Harne panne,” i.e., cranium.—­Promptorium Parvulorum, p. 237.

K 2 a 1. “Vpon the ground of holy weepe.”] I know not how to explain this, unless it mean the ground of holy weeping, i.e., the Garden of Gethsemane.

K 2 a 2. “Shall neuer deere thee.”] The word to dere, or hurt, says Mr. Way, Promptorium Parvulorum, p. 119, is commonly used by Chaucer and most other writers until the sixteenth century: 

“Fyr he schal hym nevyr dere.”
Coeur de Lion, 1638.

Fabyan observes, under the year 1194, “So fast besyed this good Kyng Richarde to vex and dere the infydelys of Sury.”  Palsgrave gives, “To dere or hurte a noye nuire, I wyll never dere you by my good wyll.”  Ang.  Sax., [Anglo-Saxon:  derian] nocere, [Anglo-Saxon:  derung] laesio.

K 3 a. “The Witches of Salmesbvry.”] Or, more properly, Samlesbury.  This wicked attempt on the part of this priest, or Jesuit, Thompson, alias Southworth, to murder the three persons whose trial is next reported, by suborning a child of the family to accuse them of what, in the excited state of the public mind at the time, was almost certain to consign them to a public execution, has few parallels in the annals of atrocity.  The plot was defeated, and the lives of the persons accused, Jennet Bierley, Ellen Bierley, and Jane Southworth, saved, by no sagacity of the judge or wisdom of the jury, but by the effect of one simple question, wrung from the intended victims on the verge of anticipated condemnation, and which, natural as it might appear, was one the felicity of which Garrow or Erskine might have envied.  It demolished, like Ithuriel’s spear, the whole fabric of imposture, and laid it open even to the comprehension of Sir Edward Bromley and Master Thomas Potts.  This was a case which well deserved Archbishop Harsnet for its historian.  His vein of irony, which Swift or Echard never surpassed, and the scorching invective of which he was so consummate a master, would have been well employed in handing down to posterity a scene of villainy to which the frauds of Somers and the stratagems of Weston were mere child’s play.  We might then have had, from the most enlightened man of his age, a commentary on the statute 1st James First, which would have neutralized its mischief, and spared a hecatomb of victims.  His resistless ridicule would, perhaps, have accomplished at once what was slowly and with difficulty brought about by the arguments of Scot and Webster, the establishment of the Royal Society, and a century’s growth of intelligence and knowledge.