Asked what he said to her, she answered that he told her to bewitch the Abbot of Blossholme because he was such a holy man that God had need of him and he did too much good upon the earth.  Also he prevented Emlyn Stower and Cicely Foterell from working his, the devil’s, will, and enabled them to keep alive the baby who would be a great wizard.  He told her moreover that midwife Megges was an angel (here the crowd laughed) sent to kill the said infant, who really was his own child, as might be seen by its black eyebrows and cleft tongue, also its webbed feet, and that he would appear in the shape of the ghost of Sir John Foterell to save it and give it to her, which he did, saying the Lord’s Prayer backwards, and that she must bring it up “in the faith of the Pentagon.”

Thus the poor crazed thing raved on, while sentence by sentence a scribe wrote down her gibberish, causing her at last to make her mark to it, all of which took a very long time.  At the end she begged that she might be pardoned and not burnt, but this, she was informed, was impossible.  Thereon she became enraged and asked why then had she been led to tell so many lies if after all she must burn, a question at which the crowd roared with laughter.  On hearing this the priest, who was about to absolve her, changed his mind and ordered her to be fastened to her stake, which was done by the blacksmith with the help of his apprentice and his portable anvil.

Still, her “confession” was solemnly read over to Cicely and Emlyn, who were asked whether, after hearing it, they still persisted in a denial of their guilt.  By way of answer Cicely lifted the hood from her boy’s face and showed that his eyebrows were not black, but light-coloured.  Also she bared his feet, passing her little finger between his toes, and asking them if they were webbed.  Some of them answered, “No,” but a monk roared, “What of that?  Cannot Satan web and unweb?” Then he snatched the infant from Cicely’s arms and laid it down upon the stump of an oak that had been placed there to receive it, crying out—­

“Let this child live or die as God pleases.”

Some brute who stood by aimed a blow at it with a stick, yelling, “Death to the witch’s brat!” but a big man, whom Emlyn recognized as one of old Sir John’s tenants, caught the falling stick from his hand and dealt him such a clout with it that he fell like a stone, and went for the rest of his life with but one eye and the nose flattened on the side of his face.  Thenceforward no one tried to harm the babe, who, as all know, because of what befell him on this day, went in after life by the nickname of Christopher Oak-stump.

The Abbot’s men stepped forward to tie Cicely to her stake, but ere they laid hands on her she took off her wool-lined cloak and threw it to the yeoman who had struck down the fellow with his own stick, saying—­

“Friend, wrap my boy in this and guard him till I ask him from you again.”