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The Mompesson affair undoubtedly possessed elements of humor; the wild tales about Amy Duny and Rose Cullender would have been uncommonly diverting, had they not produced such tragic results. With the stories spun about Julian Cox the witch accusers could go no farther. They had reached the culmination of nonsense.
Both children grievously complained that Amy Duny and another woman, whose habit and looks they described, did appear to them, and torment them, and would cry out, 'There stands Amy Duny! There stands Rose Cullender! the other person who afflicted them. Their fits were not alike.
Another time the youngest child said, after a fit, that Amy Duny had been with her, and tempted her to drown herself, or cut her throat, or otherwise destroy herself. Another time they both cried out upon Amy Duny and Rose Cullender, saying, 'Why don't you come yourselves? Why do you send your imps to torment us?"
One of the most remarkable trials that occur in the history of criminal jurisprudence, was that of Amy Duny and Rose Cullender at Bury St. Edmund's in the year 1664. Not for the circumstances that occasioned it; for they were of the coarsest and most vulgar materials.
On the next day Amy Duny was found to have her face and body all scorched. She said to the witness that "she might thank her for it."
One day while the girl was resting outside the house, "Amy Duny came to the deponnent's house to buy some herrings; but, being denied, she went away discontented.... But at the very same instant of time, the said child was taken with most violent fits, feeling extreme pain in her stomach, like the pricking of pins, and shrieking out in a dreadful manner like unto a whelp."
Baron Hale was induced, at length, to appoint a committee of several gentlemen, including Serjeant Kelyng, to make trial of the girl with her eyes covered. An outside party was brought up to her and touched her hand. The girl was expecting that Amy Duny would be brought up and flew into the usual paroxysms.
But, notwithstanding, they raised, at times, at least thirty pins, in her presence, and had terrible fits; in which fits they would cry out upon Amy Duny and Rose Cullender, saying, that they saw them and heard them threatening, as before; that they saw things, like mice, running about the house; and one of them catched one, and threw it into the fire, which made a noise, like a rat.
And on the mother enquiring of Amy Duny how this had happened, Amy replied, "she might thank her for it, for that she was the cause thereof, but that she should live to see some of her children dead, or else upon crutches."
The trial concerned two women of Lowestoft, Amy Duny and Rose Cullender. The first had been reputed a witch and a "person of very evil behaviour." She was in all probability related to some of those women who had suffered at the hands of Hopkins, and to that connection owed her ill name.
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