Johannes Hyphantes sive Webster, In villa Spinosa supermontana, in Parochia silvae cuculatae, in agro Eboracensi, natus 1610 Feb. 3, Ergastulum animae deposuit 1682, Junii 18, Annoq. aetatis suae 72 currente.

    Sicq. peroravit moriens mundo huic valedicens,
    Aurea pax vivis, requies aeterna sepultis.”]

But it is necessary to proceed from the authors on witchcraft to that extraordinary case which forms the subject of the present republication, and which first gave to Pendle its title to be considered as the Hartz Forest of England.

The Forest of Pendle is a portion of the greater one of Blackburnshire, and is so called from the celebrated mountain of that name, over the declivity of which it extends and stretches in a long but interrupted descent of five miles, to the water of Pendle, a barren and dreary tract.  Dr. Whitaker observes of this and the neighbouring forests, and the remark even yet holds good, “that they still bear the marks of original barrenness, and recent cultivation; that they are still distinguished from the ancient freehold tracts around them, by want of old houses, old woods, high fences; (for these were forbidden by the forest laws;) by peculiarities of dialect and manners in their inhabitants; and lastly, by a general air of poverty which all the opulence of manufactures cannot remove.”  He considers that “at an uncertain period during the occupancy of the Lacies, the first principle of population” (in these forests) commenced; it was found that these wilds, bleak and barren as they were, might be occupied to some advantage in breeding young and depasturing lean “cattle, which were afterwards fattened in the lower domains. Vaccaries, or great upland pastures, were laid out for this purpose; booths or mansions erected upon them for the residence of herdsmen; and at the same time that herds of deer were permitted to range at large as heretofore, lawnds, by which are meant parks within a forest, were inclosed, in order to chase them with greater facility, or, by confinement, to produce fatter venison.  Of these lawnds Pendle had new and old lawnd, with the contiguous park of Ightenhill.”

In the early part of the seventeenth century, the inhabitants of this district must have been, with few exceptions, a wretchedly poor and uncultivated race, having little communication with the occupants of the more fertile regions around them, and in whose minds superstition, even yet unextinguished, must have had absolute and uncontrollable domination.  Under the disenchanting influence of steam, manufactures, and projected rail-roads, still much of the old character of its population remains. Hodie manent vestigia ruris. The “parting genius” of superstition still clings to the hoary hill tops and rugged slopes and mossy water sides, along which the old forest stretched its length, and the voices of ancestral tradition are still heard to speak from the depth of its quiet