[Footnote 39: The instances are very few in England in which the
statute of James the first was brought to bear against any but the
lowest classes of the people. Indeed, there are not many attempts
reported to attack the rich and powerful with weapons derived from its
provisions. One of such attempts, which did not, like that against
Alice Nutter, prove successful, is narrated in a curious and scarce
pamphlet, which I have now before me, with this title--"Wonderful News
from the North, or a true Relation of the sad and grievous Torments
inflicted upon the Bodies of three children of Mr. George Muschamp,
late of the County of Northumberland, by Witchcraft, and how
miraculously it pleased God to strengthen them and to deliver them; as
also the prosecution of the say'd Witches, as by Oaths and their own
Confessions will appear, and by the Indictment found by the Jury
against one of them at the Sessions of the Peace held at Alnwick, the
24th day of April, 1650. London, printed by T.H., and are to be sold
by Richard Harper at his Shop in Smithfield. 1650," 4to. This was
evidently a diabolical plot, in which these children were made the
puppets, and which was got up to accomplish the destruction of a
person of condition, Mrs. Dorothy Swinnow, the wife of Colonel
Swinnow, of Chatton, in Northumberland, and from which she had great
difficulty in escaping.]

The trial of the Samlesbury witches, Jennet Bierley, Ellen Bierley,
and Jane Southworth, forms a curious episode in Potts's _Discoverie_.
A Priest or Jesuit, of the name of Thomson, _alias_ Southworth, had
tutored the principal evidence, Grace Sowerbuts, a girl of the age of
fourteen, but who had not the same instinctive genius for perjury as
Jennet Device, to accuse the three persons above mentioned of having
bewitched her; "so that," as the indictment runs, "by means thereof
her body wasted and consumed." "The chief object," says Sir Walter