, pale
and horrible to see. Slowly she uprose, blue, dead, stark, as she was; and
then the Devil took her by the hand, and led her to the door where stood a
gigantic black horse, whose back was all studded with iron spikes, and
whose nostrils, breathing fire, told of his infernal manger below. The
Devil vaulted into the saddle, flung the witch on before him, and off and
away they rode--the yells of the clamouring demons, and the shrieks of the
tortured soul, sounding for hours, far and wide, in the ears of the monks
and the nuns. So here too, in this legend, as in all the rest, the Devil
is greater than God, and prayer and penitence inefficacious to redeem
iniquity.

EARLY HISTORIC TRIALS.

Coming out from these purely legendary times, we find ourselves on the
more solid ground of an actual legal record--the 'Abbreviatio
Placitorum;'[93] which informs us that in the tenth year of King John's
reign, "Agnes, the wife of Odo the merchant, accused Gideon of sorcery (de
sorceria), and she was acquitted by the judgment of the (hot) iron." This
is the earliest historic trial to be found in any legal document in
England. Nothing more appears until 1324, when two Coventry men,[94]
specially appointed out of twenty-seven implicated, undertook the slaying
of the King, Edward II., the two Dispensers his favourites, the Prior of
Coventry, his caterer and his steward, because they had oppressed the
town, and dealt unrighteously with its inhabitants. These two men went to
a famous necromancer then living in Coventry, called Master John of
Nottingham, whom, with his servant Robert Marshall of Leicester, they
engaged to perform the work required. But Robert Marshall proved
faithless, and betrayed his master to the authorities; telling them how
they had received a sum of money for the work in hand, with which sum of
money they had bought seven pounds of wax and two yards of canvas, to make
seven images--six for the six already enumerated, the seventh for one
Richard de Lowe, who had done no one any harm, but on whom they wished to
try the effect of the spell, as a modern anatomist would try his
experiments on cats, or dogs, or rabbits. He told them how he and Master
John of Nottingham had been to a ruined house under Shorteley Park, about
half a league from Coventry, where they remained at work from the Monday
after the Feast of Saint Nicholas to the Saturday after the Feast of
Ascension, making these images of wax and canvas by which