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The history of witch literature has been in no small degree the record of clerical opinion. Glanvill, Casaubon, Muggleton, Camfield, and Hallywell were all clergymen. Fortunately we have the opinions of at least half a dozen other churchmen. It will be remembered that Oliver Heywood, the famous Non-Conformist preacher of Lancashire, believed, though not too implicitly, in witchcraft.
Many ghosts have a perfect craze for announcing that bodies or treasures, are buried where there is nothing of the sort. Glanvill has a tale of a ghost who accused himself of a murder, and led a man to a place in a wood where the corpse of the slain was to be found. There was no corpse, the ghost was mad.
And so, quite unobtrusively, without blare of trumpets, skepticism would slip into society. It would be useless for Glanvill and More to call aloud, or for the people to rage. The classes who mingled in the worldly life of the capital would scoff; and the country gentry who took their cue from them would follow suit. Of course this is theory.
Nephew of the wife of Glanvill, the great judge of Henry II's time, spending much of his youth in the household of his uncle and some little time also in the service of the king, he was by training and by personal experience fitted to carry on the administration of England along the lines laid down in the previous reign and even to carry forward law and institutions in harmony with their beginnings and with the spirit of that great period.
But Glanvill adopted the nomenclature, and later writers began to draw conclusions from it. The author of Fleta, a writer by no means always intelligent in following and adopting his predecessors' use of the Roman law, /1/ says that to raise a debt there must be not only a certain thing promised, but a certain thing promised in return. /2/
Glanvill says that wounds are within the sheriff's jurisdiction, unless the appellor adds a charge of breach of the king's peace. /2/ Yet the wounds are given vi et armis as much in the one case as in the other.
The subject must have come up in his conversations with another friend, Robert Boyle. Boyle's interest in such matters was of course a scientific one. Baxter, like Glanvill, looked at them from a religious point of view. In the classic Saint's Everlasting Rest he drew his fourth argument for the future happiness and misery of man from the Devil's compact with witches.
The see of Canterbury was vacant, and Richard from his prison bestowed it on Hubert Walter, the Bishop of Salisbury, a nephew of Ranulf de Glanvill, and who had acted as secretary to Bishop Longchamp.
Though the educated classes had buried superstition, it lived, of course, among the people, who probably thumbed Baxter and Glanvill. Thus things went on, crowds gathering to amuse themselves with the ghost. On February 1, Mr. Aldrich, a clergyman of Clerkenwell, assembled in his house a number of gentlemen and ladies, having persuaded Parsons to let his child be carried thither and tested. Dr.
This evidence is presented in far greater detail than is here possible, in a curious document written by the Reverend Joseph Glanvill, a clergyman of the Church of England and an eye witness of some of the phenomena.
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