th the reign of Charles
II their zeal increased mightily. Yet, if they had never before fetched
in so many "suspected parties" to the court of the justice of the
peace, they had never before been so often baffled by the outcome. Among
the many such cases known to us during this time there is no mention of
a conviction.[1] In Kent there was a flickering revival of the old
hatred of witches. In the year that Charles gained the throne the city
of Canterbury sent some women to the gibbet. Not so in Essex. In that
county not a single case during this period has been left on record. In
Middlesex, a county which from the days of Elizabeth through to the
Restoration had maintained a very even pace--a stray conviction now and
then among many acquittals--the reign of Charles II saw nothing more
serious than some commitments and releases upon bail. In the Midland
counties, where superstition had flourished in the days of James I,
there were now occasional tales of possession and vague charges which
rarely reached the ears of the assize judges. Northampton, where an
incendiary witch was sentenced, constituted the single exception. In
East Anglia there was just enough stir to prove that the days of Matthew
Hopkins had not been forgotten.

It needs no pointing out that a large proportion of the cases were but a
repetition of earlier trials. If a difference is discernible, it is in
the increased number of accusations that took their start in strange
diseases called possessions. Since the close of the sixteenth century
and the end of John Darrel's activities, the accounts of possession had
fallen off sensibly, but the last third of the seventeenth century saw a
distinct revival of this tendency to assign certain forms of disease to
the operation of the Devil. We have references to many cases, but only
in exceptional instances are the details given. Oliver Heywood, one of
the eminent Dissenters of northern England, fasted and prayed with his
co-workers over the convulsive and hysterical boys and girls in the West
Riding. Nathan Dodgson was left after long fastings in "a very sensible
melting frame,"[2] but the troubles returned and led, as we shall see in
another connection, to very tragic results. The Puritan clergymen do not
seem, however, to have had any highly developed method of exorcism or to
have looked upon cases of possession in a light very different from that
in which they would have looked upon ordinary illnesses.

Among th