Читать книгу The Discovery of Witchcraft. Facts, Fiction & Conspiracy Theories Behind the Medieval Witch Hunt онлайн

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I have said on ssss1 that the discovery of Scot’s name in the Subsidy Rolls for 1586 and 1587 with the affix of “Armiger” was for me an important find. And now I would explain that it was so, inasmuch as it set my mind at rest as to the oneness of the Raynold of the Hoppe-garden with the Reginald Scot Esquire, of the Witchcraft. Aware that Reynold and Reginald were variants of one name, used of and by the same person, the following facts hindered me for a long time from accepting the common belief that the Raynold and Reginald of these two works were one and the same. First, the author of the Hoppe-garden in each of his signatures to the editions of 1574–6–8, three in each, appears as Raynold. In the marriage entry, in the pay-account of the Kent forces, in the Muster-roll, and in the Will, it is also Raynold. But in 1584, throughout the Witchcraft, that is, four times in all, the name appears as Reginald. Secondly, in the Will of 1599, in accordance with the want of any title on the title-page of the Hoppe-garden, he describes himself as “gent”, and in the Inquisitio p. m., though he is called Reginald, the document being in Latin, he is, as in his Will, “generosus”. But in the title-page of the Witchcraft, he is Reginald Scot Esquire. The finding no evidence of the separate existence of a Raynold and a Reginald, the frequent references to the Scriptures in the Witchcraft, and the very frequent references to the Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, in the “Address to the Reader” of the Hoppe-garden, the use in both works, as already quoted, of certain legal phrases, and the occurrence in the prefatory part of the Hoppe-garden of “with the licour (or rather the lucre)”, and “condemne the man, or rather the mynde”, a trick of language not unfrequently repeated in the Discoverie, a trick resulting from his love of irony, shook my doubts. But there were still, the want of any title after the name in the Hoppe-garden, the “gent” of the Will, and the “generosus” of the Inquisitio, as against the “Esquire” of the Discoverie. First, however, Hunter’s suggestion, that his esquireship was due to his having been appointed a Justice of the Peace, and then the discovery of armiger after his name, have removed all reasonable doubts; and to turn our belief to a positive certainty, it only remains to discover that he was a Justice of the Peace.