counted a witch was
buried." The intervening links need hardly be supplied, but the Reverend
Mr. Boys has given them: "whether by the cold she got in the water, or
by some other means, she fell very ill and dyed."

It must have been very diverting, this experimentation by water, and it
had become so popular by the beginning of the eighteenth century that
Chief Justice Holt[49] is said to have ruled that in the future, where
swimming had fatal results, those responsible would be prosecuted for
murder. Such a declaration perhaps caused some disuse of the method for
a time, but it was revived in the second third of the eighteenth
century.

Popular feeling still arrayed itself against the witch. If the
increasing use of the swimming ordeal was the answer to the
non-enforcement of the Jacobean statute, it was the answer of the
ignorant classes. Their influence was bound to diminish. But another
possible consequence of the breaking down of the law may be suggested.
Mr. Inderwick, who has looked much into English witchcraft, says that
"from 1686 to 1712 ... the charges and convictions of malicious injury
to property in burning haystacks, barns, and houses, and malicious
injuries to persons and to cattle increased enormously."[50] This is
very interesting, if true, and it seems quite in accord with the history
of witchcraft that it should be true. Again and again we have seen that
the charge of witchcraft was a weapon of prosecutors who could not prove
other suspected crimes. As the charges of witchcraft fell off,
accusations for other crimes would naturally be multiplied; and, now
that it was no longer easy to lay everything to the witch of a
community, the number of the accused would also grow.

We are now at the end of the witch trials. In another chapter we shall
trace the history of opinion through this last period. With the
dismissal of the Norton women at Leicester, the courts were through with
witch trials.

[1] See below, pp. 342-343.

[2] We are assuming that the cases at Northampton in 1705 and at
Huntingdon in 1716 have no basis of fact. At Northampton two women,
according to the pamphlet account, had been hanged and burnt; at
Huntingdon, according to another account, a woman and her daughter. It
is possible that these pamphlets deal with historical events; but the
probabilities are all against that supposition. For a discussion of the
matter in detail see below, appendix A, Sec. 10.

[3] For his early his