and we have figures not so different
from those of Elizabeth's reign.

This is a sufficient comment on the effectiveness of the new law as
respects its particularly novel features. A study of the character of
the evidence and of the tests of guilt employed at the various trials
during the reign will show that the phrasing of the law, as well as the
royal directions for trying guilt, influenced the forms of accusation
and the verdicts of the juries. In other words the testimony rendered in
some of the well known trials of the reign offers the best commentary
upon the statute as well as upon the _Daemonologie_. This can be
illustrated from three of the processes employed to determine guilt. The
king had recommended the water ordeal. Up to this time it had not been
employed in English witch cases, so far as we know. The first record of
its use was in 1612, nine years after James ascended the English throne.
In that year there was a "discoverie" of witches at Northampton. Eight
or nine women were accused of torturing a man and his sister and of
laming others. One of them was, at the command of a justice of the
peace, cast into the water with "her hands and feete bound," but "could
not sink to the bottome by any meanes." The same experiment was applied
to Arthur Bill and his parents. He was accused of bewitching a Martha
Aspine. His father and mother had long been considered witches. But the
"matter remaining doubtful that it could not be cleerly tryed upon him,"
he (and his parents) were tied with "their thumbes and great toes ...
acrosse" and thrown into the water. The suspicion that was before not
well grounded was now confirmed.[17] To be sure, this was done by the
justices of the peace and we do not know how much it influenced the
assize court.[18]

These are the only instances given us by the records of James's reign
where this test was employed by the authorities. But in the very next
year after the Northampton affair it was used in the adjoining county of
Bedford by private parties. A land-owner who had suffered ills, as he
thought, from two tenants, Mother Sutton and her daughter, took matters
into his own hands. His men were ordered to strip the two women "in to
their smocks," to tie their arms together, and to throw them into the
water. The precaution of a "roape tyed about their middles" was useless,
for both floated. This was not enough. The mother, tied toe and thumb,
was thrown into the water again. She "sun