a free passage there and back. When these wretches got to any
town--for they tried all the chief market-towns in the district--the
crier used to go round with his bell, desiring "all people that would
bring in any complaint against any woman for a witch, they should be
sent for and tried by the person appointed." As many as thirty women
were brought at once into the Newcastle town-hall, stripped and
pricked, and twenty-seven set aside as guilty. Gardner continues:--

The said witch-finder acquainted Lieutenant-Colonel Hobson
that he knew women whether they were witches or no by their
looks; and when the said person was searching of a
personable and good-like woman, the said colonel replied and
said, 'Surely this woman is none, and need not be tried;'
but the Scotchman said she was, for the town said she was,
and therefore he would try her; and presently, in sight of
all the people, laid her body naked to the waist, with her
clothes over her head, by which fright and shame all her
blood contracted into one part of her body, and then he ran
a pin into her thigh, and then suddenly let her coats fall,
and then demanded whether she had nothing of his in her
body, but did not bleed? But she, being amazed, replied
little. Then he put his hands up her coats and pulled out
the pin, and set her aside as a guilty person and child of
the devil, and fell to try others, whom he made guilty.
Lieutenant-Colonel Hobson, perceiving the alteration of the
aforesaid woman by her blood settling in her right parts,
caused that woman to be brought again, and her clothes
pulled up to her thigh, and required the Scot to run the pin
into the same place, and then it gushed out of blood, and
the said Scot cleared her, and said she was not a child of