uch a trial, and such personal insults,
the blood is apt to return to the heart, and a slight wound, as with a
pin, may be inflicted without being followed by blood. In the latter end
of the seventeenth century this childish, indecent, and brutal practice
began to be called by its right name. Fountainhall has recorded that in
1678 the Privy Council received the complaint of a poor woman who had
been abused by a country magistrate and one of those impostors called
prickers. They expressed high displeasure against the presumption of the
parties complained against, and treated the pricker as a common
cheat.[72]

[Footnote 72: Fountainhall's "Decisions," vol. i. p. 15.]

From this and other instances it appears that the predominance of the
superstition of witchcraft, and the proneness to persecute those accused
of such practices in Scotland, were increased by the too great readiness
of subordinate judges to interfere in matters which were, in fact,
beyond their jurisdiction. The Supreme Court of Justiciary was that in
which the cause properly and exclusively ought to have been tried. But,
in practice, each inferior judge in the country, the pettiest bailie in
the most trifling burgh, the smallest and most ignorant baron of a rude
territory, took it on him to arrest, imprison, and examine, in which
examinations, as we have already seen, the accused suffered the grossest
injustice. The copies of these examinations, made up of extorted
confessions, or the evidence of inhabile witnesses, were all that were
transmitted to the Privy Council, who were to direct the future mode of
procedure. Thus no creature was secure against the malice or folly of
some defamatory accusation, if there was a timid or superstitious judge,
though of the meanest denomination, to be found within the district.

But, secondly, it was the course of the Privy Council to appoint
commissions of the gentlemen of the country, and particularly of the
clergymen, though not likely, from their education, to be freed from
general prejudice, and peculiarly liable to be affected by the clamour
of the neighbourhood againt the delinquent. Now, as it is well known
that such a commission could not be granted in a case of murder in the
county where the crime was charged, there seems no good reason why the
trial of witches, so liable to excite the passions, should not have been
uniformly tried by a court whose rank and condition secured them from
the suspicion of partial