[Footnote 47:  What Mr. Robinson is intended does not appear.  It was a common name in Pendle.  It is, however, a curious fact, that a family of this name, with the alias of Swyer, (see Potts, confession of Elizabeth Device,) is even now, or very recently was, to be met with in Pendle, of whom the John Robinson, alias Swyer, one of the supposed victims of Witchcraft, was probably an ancestor.  There are few instances of an alias being similarly transmitted in families for upwards of two centuries.]

[Footnote 48:  Mother Dickenson, as Sir Walter Scott remarks, brings to mind the magician Queen in the Arabian Tales.]

[Footnote 49:  This house is still standing, and though it has undergone some modernizations, has every appearance of having been built about this period.]

[Footnote 50:  The old barn, so famous as the scene of these exploits, is no longer extant.  A more modern and very substantial one has now been erected on its site.]

[Footnote 51:  Syleing, from the verb sile or syle, to strain, to pass through a strainer.  See Jamieson, under “sile.”]

[Footnote 52:  Frightened.]

[Footnote 53:  Boggard Hole lies in a hollow, near to Hoarstones, and is still known by that name.]

[Footnote 54:  “It is the sport to see the engineer hoist with his own petar.”  Her old occupation as witness having got into other hands, Janet or Jennet Davies, or Device, for the person spoken of appears to be the same with the grand-daughter of Old Demdike, on whose evidence three members of her family were executed, has now to take her place amongst the witnessed against.]

[Footnote 55:  Seale, from sele, s. a yoke for binding cattle in the stall.  Sal (A.S.) denotes “a collar or bond.”  Somner.  Sile (Isl.) seems to bear the very same sense with our sele, being exp. a ligament of leather by which cattle and other things are bound.  Vide Jamieson, under “sele.”]

[Footnote 56:  Heywood and Broome, in their play, “The late Lancashire Witches,” 1634, 4to, follow the terms of this deposition very closely.  It is very probable that they had seen and conversed with the boy, to whom, when taken up to London, there was a great resort of company.  The Lancashire dialect, as given in this play, and by no means unfaithfully, was perhaps derived from conversations with some of the actors in this drama of real life, a drama quite as extraordinary as any that Heywood’s imagination ever bodied forth from the world of fiction.

“Enter Boy with a switch.

Boy. Now I have gathered Bullies, and fild my bellie pretty well, i’le goe see some sport.  There are gentlemen coursing in the medow hard by; and ’tis a game that I love better than going to Schoole ten to one.

Enter an invisible spirit.  J. Adson[D] with a brace of greyhounds.