An history of the original parish of Whalley, and honor of Clitheroe : in the counties of Lancaster and York, to which is subjoined, an account of the parish of Cartmell . owing passage, in which he is speaking of a sound judgment as necessary to a com-petent witness, is grotesquely told :— They ought to be of a sound judgment, and not of a vitiated and distempered phantasie,nor of a melancholic constitution ; for these will take a bush to be a bugbear, and a black sheej)to be a demon ; the noise of the wild swans flying high in the nights to be spirits, or, as theycall them here in the North,
An history of the original parish of Whalley, and honor of Clitheroe : in the counties of Lancaster and York, to which is subjoined, an account of the parish of Cartmell . owing passage, in which he is speaking of a sound judgment as necessary to a com-petent witness, is grotesquely told :— They ought to be of a sound judgment, and not of a vitiated and distempered phantasie,nor of a melancholic constitution ; for these will take a bush to be a bugbear, and a black sheej)to be a demon ; the noise of the wild swans flying high in the nights to be spirits, or, as theycall them here in the North, Gabriel Ratchets; the calling of a daker hen in the meadow, to bethe Whistlers ; the howling of the female fox in a gill or a clough, for the male, to be the cry offairies. The Gabriel Ratchets, in our Authors time, seem to have been the same with the (JermanRachtvogel or Rachtraven. The word and the superstition are still known in Lancashire, thoughin a sense somewhat difTcrent; for the Gable-Raches are supposed to be something like litters ofpuppies yelping (gabbling) in the air. Ratch is certainly a dog in general*.—The Whistlers * See Junius^ in voce. are,. Book VI.—Chap. I.] HISTORY OF VVHALLEY, 493 are, I believe, the green or whistling plover, which fly very high in the night, uttering theircharacteristic note. We are at present little aware of the mischiefs from which such men as Webster sought todeliver their age and country. Let the Reader take his own account; By such wicked means and unchristian practices, divers innocent persons lost their lives;and these wicked rogues wanted not greater persons (even of the ministry too) that did authorizeand encourage them in their diabolical courses : and the like, in my time, happened here inLancashire, where divers, both men and women, were accused of supposed witchcraft, andwere so unchristianly and inhumanly handled, as to be stripped stark naked and laid upontables and beds to be searched, for their supposed witch-ma
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