What, then, are the facts, as far as they have been investigated?  The Father Edmund Arrowsmith who suffered death at Lancaster was born at Haydock in Lancashire[2] in 1585, and he suffered death in August 1628 (4th Charles I.), sixty years before William iii. ascended the English throne.  The mode of execution was not that of capital punishment for the offence committed, but rather that imposed by the laws for treason and for exercising the functions of a Roman Catholic priest.  He was hanged, drawn, and quartered, and his head and quarters were fixed upon poles on Lancaster Castle.  It was in this dismemberment that the hand became separated, and it was secretly carried away by some sorrowing member of his communion, and its supposed curative power was afterwards discovered and made known.[3] Mr Roby cites no authority for this contradiction of the original tradition.  The judge who presided at the trial was Sir Henry Yelverton of the Common Pleas, who died on the 24th January 1629.

In the Tradition of “The Dule upo’ Dun,” Mr Roby states that a public-house having that sign stood at the entrance of a small village on the right of the highway to Gisburn, and barely three miles from Clitheroe.  When Mr Roby wrote the public-house had been long pulled down; it had ceased to be an inn at a period beyond living memory; though the ancient house, converted into two mean, thatched cottages, stood until about forty years ago.  But the site of the house is in Clitheroe itself, little more than half a mile from the centre of the town, and on the road, not to Gisburn, but to Waddington.[4]

It only remains to add that the illustrations to the present edition comprise not only all the beautiful plates (engraved by Edward Finden, from drawings by George Pickering) of the original edition, which have been much admired as picturesque works of art, but also all the wood-engravings (by Williams, after designs by Frank Howard) which have appeared in any former edition, and which constituted the sole embellishments of the three-volume editions.  To these is now first added the fine portrait of Mr Roby from the posthumous volume.

FOOTNOTES: 

[1] The First Series includes all the Traditions beginning with “Sir Tarquin” and ending with “The Haunted Manor-House;” the Second Series comprises all the Tales from “Clitheroe Castle” to “Rivington Pike,” both included; and the three Tales now first incorporated are—­“Mother Red-Cap, or the Rosicrucians;” “The Death Painter, or the Skeleton’s Bride;” and “The Crystal Goblet.”

[2] His mother was a daughter of the old Lancashire family of Gerard of Bryn.

[3] These dates and facts will be found in the Missionary Priests of Bishop Challoner, who wrote about 1740 (2 vols. 8vo., Manchester, 1741-2), naming as his authority a manuscript history of the trial, and a printed account of it published in 1629.  His statements are confirmed by independent testimony.  See Henry More’s Historia-Provinciae Anglicaae Societatis Jesu, book x. (sm. fol.  St Omer’s, 1660).  Also Tanner’s Societas Jesu, &c., p. 99 (sm. fol.  Prague, 1675).  Neither Challoner nor the Ms. account, nor either of the authors just quoted, says one word of Father Arrowsmith’s alleged speech about the hand.