Among the indications and symptoms of a witch, are reckoned various bodily marks and spots, said to be insensible to pain (page 20), inability to shed tears, &c.  The pricking of witches was at one time a lucrative profession both in England and Scotland, one of the most noted prickers being a wretched imposter named Matthew Hopkins who was sent for to all parts of the country to exercise his vile art.  Ralph Gardner, in his England’s Grievance Discovered (1655), speaks also of two prickers, Thomas Shovel and Cuthbert Nicholson, who, in 1649 and 1650, were sent by the magistrates of Newcastle-on-Tyne, into Scotland, there to confer with another very able man in that line and bring him back to Newcastle.  They were to have twenty shillings, but the Scotchman three pounds, per head of all they could convict, and a free passage there and back.  When these wretches got to any town—­for they tried all the chief market-towns in the district—­the crier used to go round with his bell, desiring “all people that would bring in any complaint against any woman for a witch, they should be sent for and tried by the person appointed.”  As many as thirty women were brought at once into the Newcastle town-hall, stripped and pricked, and twenty-seven set aside as guilty.  Gardner continues:—­

The said witch-finder acquainted Lieutenant-Colonel Hobson that he knew women whether they were witches or no by their looks; and when the said person was searching of a personable and good-like woman, the said colonel replied and said, ‘Surely this woman is none, and need not be tried;’ but the Scotchman said she was, for the town said she was, and therefore he would try her; and presently, in sight of all the people, laid her body naked to the waist, with her clothes over her head, by which fright and shame all her blood contracted into one part of her body, and then he ran a pin into her thigh, and then suddenly let her coats fall, and then demanded whether she had nothing of his in her body, but did not bleed?  But she, being amazed, replied little.  Then he put his hands up her coats and pulled out the pin, and set her aside as a guilty person and child of the devil, and fell to try others, whom he made guilty.  Lieutenant-Colonel Hobson, perceiving the alteration of the aforesaid woman by her blood settling in her right parts, caused that woman to be brought again, and her clothes pulled up to her thigh, and required the Scot to run the pin into the same place, and then it gushed out of blood, and the said Scot cleared her, and said she was not a child of the devil.

If this precious wretch had not been stopped he would have declared half the women in the north country to be witches.  But the magistrates and the people got tired of him at last, and his imposture being discovered, he was hanged in Scotland.  At the gallows he confessed that he had been the death of 220 men and women in England and Scotland, simply for the sake of the twenty shillings which he generally received as blood-money.