ay give her a slight claim to a place
in these pages; but the question is doubtful, so we must let her go--as
also her son-in-law, William Outlawe, whose strict imprisonment of nine
weeks led to no bad result, and, let us hope, cooled his blood, which was
a trifle too near to boiling point.

Then we stumble over the threshold of the chamber where Friars Bacon and
Bungay are sleeping, while stupid Miles is watching the Brazen Head whose
brief solemn words were spoken in vain; going forward just a few paces
until we come to the death-beds of Bungay and Vandermast, and Friar
Bacon's clever cheating of the Devil at last. But we are still on the
outskirts of legendary land, and must go on to the middle of the
fourteenth century before we get a firm hold. About this time the subject
of witchcraft occupied much of the attention and thought of the Church,
but the priests had not yet quite closed their fingers round it; for in
1371 a man was arrested for sorcery, and "brought before the justices of
the King's Bench, by whom he was acquitted for want of evidence, which
shows that it was still looked upon merely as an offence against common
law."[95] It was only when it became the superstition which some men are
pleased to call "religion" that it got stained with its deepest dyes.
Early in 1406 Henry IV. gave instructions to the Bishop of Norwich to
search for the sorcerers, witches, and necromancers reported to be rather
rife in that respectable diocese, and if he could not convert them from
the evil of their ways, he was to bring them to speedy punishment; and in
1432 the Privy Council ordered to be seized and examined a Franciscan
friar of Worcester, by name Thomas Northfield; another friar, John
Ashwell; John Virley "a clerk;" and Margery Jourdemaine--the same Margery
generally called the Witch of Eye, who, nine years later, was burnt at
Smithfield for her complicity in the treasonable practices of Dame Eleanor
of Gloucester. In 1441 Dame Eleanor herself was arrested, and "put in
holt, for she was suspecte of treason;" and with her the Witch of Eye, who
was burnt; and Roger, a clerk "longing to her," who was placed on a high
scaffold against St. Paul's Cross on the Sunday, and there "arraied like
as he should never thrive in his garnementys;" while heaped up round about
were all his instruments taken with him, to be showed among the people,
and create a proper fear and horror in their mind. The end of poor Roger
the clerk was,