Hicks, and her daughter, a
little girl of nine years old, are said to have been hanged
as witches at Huntingdon, but of this there seems to be some
doubt. The last really authentic trial in England for
witchcraft took place in 1712, when the jury convicted an
old woman named Jane Wenham, of Walkerne, a little village
in the north of Hertfordshire, and she was sentenced to be
hanged. The judge, however, quietly procured a reprieve for
her, and a kind-hearted gentleman in the neighbourhood gave
her a cottage to live in, where she ended her days in peace.
With regard to the mobbing of reputed sorcerers, it is
recorded that in the year 1628, Dr. Lamb, a so-called
wizard, who had been under the protection of the Duke of
Buckingham, was torn to pieces by a London mob. While even
as late as April 22nd, 1751, a wild and tossing rabble of
about 5,000 persons beset and broke into the work-house at
Tring, in Hertfordshire, where seizing Luke Osborne and his
wife, two inoffensive old people suspected of witchcraft,
they ducked them in a pond till the old woman died.
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