Jacques le Mesurier deposed that about two or three years ago he met Collas Becquet and Perot Massi, who had some fish and who moreover owed him money; he wished to take some of their fish at a reduced price, but they would not agree to it, and they quarrelled; whereupon one of the two, either Becquet or Massi, threatened him that he would repent of it; and at the end of two or three days, he was seized with a sickness in which he first burnt like fire and then was benumbed with cold so that nothing would warm him, and this without any cessation; he suffered in this way for nearly a month. Collas Becquet heard that witness charged him with being the cause of his sickness, and he threatened that he would kill witness; but very soon afterwards the said witness was cured; and he affirms and believes that the said Becquet and Massy, or one of them, was the cause of his attack.

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NOTE ON THE GUERNSEY RECORDS.

The Records at the Guernsey Greffe, from which the foregoing confessions and depositions have been transcribed, and whence the following list of accusations is compiled, are of a very voluminous character.  In fact there is enough matter in them, connected with Witchcraft alone, to fill at least a couple of thick octavo volumes.  There is, however, so much sameness in the different cases, and such a common tradition running through the whole, that the present excerpts give a very fair idea of the features which characterise the mass.  While some of these Records are tolerably complete, the greater part of them unfortunately are fragmentary and imperfect.  The books in which they were originally written seem to have been formed of a few sheets of paper stitched together.  Then at some later period a number of these separate sections—­in a more or less tattered condition—­were gathered into volumes and bound together in vellum.  It is evident, however, that very little care was exercised in their arrangement in chronological order.  The consequence is that one portion of a trial sometimes occurs in one part of a volume, and the rest in another part; sometimes the depositions alone seem to have been preserved; sometimes the confessions; while in many cases the sentences pronounced are all that can now be discovered.  Nevertheless these old Records enshrine much that is interesting, and very well deserve a more exhaustive analysis than they have ever yet received.  There are also in the margins of these volumes, scores of pen-and-ink sketches of a most primitive description, depicting the carrying out of the various rigours of the law.  Rough and uncouth as these illustrations are, they nevertheless possess a good deal of graphic significance, and I hope to reproduce some of them in facsimile, in a future publication.  They represent, for instance, culprits hanging on the gallows—­sometimes two or three in a row—­with a fire kindled underneath; others attached to stakes in the midst of the flames; others, again, racing away under the lash of the executioner, &c., &c., and thus form a most realistic comment on the judicial severities recorded in the text.