Alice Stansby had in her secrete parts two bigs the one about the bigness of a straw and about half
an inch long; and after that the said Hellen Mayor had taken that big and laid it upon her finger it
bled. And the other big was about a quarter of an inch long and a great deal bigger than the other,
and blood did appear at that short big.
The recorded testimony of the searchers of Alice Stansby, suspected witch
She said, when the Witchfinders came into that neighbourhood, they had one woman under Trial
who, she veril believed was innocent. But being kept long fasting and without sleep, she confessed
and called her Imp nan. This good gentlewoman told me, that her husband, a very learned ingenious
gentleman, having indignation at the thing, he and she went to the house, and put the people out of
doors, and gave the poor woman some meat, and let her go to bed.
The recorded outrage that greeted the Witchfinder General at the Parish of Horham and
Athelington
Old grudges and fears come to the fore in Essex, as word spreads that witch-finders roam.
– Gaskill, Malcolm, Witchfinders: A Seventeenth Century English Tragedy, (2005)
– Levack, Brian, ‘State-Building and Witch-Hunting’, in Oldridge, Darren (ed.), The Witchcraft Reader, 2002
– Purkiss, DIane, The English Civil War: A People’s History, (2007)
– Jackson, Louise, ‘Witches, Wives and Mothers: Witchcraft Persecution and Women’s Confessions in Seventeenth-Century England’, in Oldridge, Darren (ed.), The Witchcraft Reader, 2002