Thomas Darling, the "Boy of Burton" possession

Burton upon Trent, Staffordshire. 1596. Thomas Darling was 13, according to the pamphlet later written about him. His year would end in a witch trial, and later in a Church inquiry into fraud.

February 1596. A Saturday. The surviving record gives the 17th or the 27th. Thomas went hare-hunting with his uncle Robert Toone in Winsell Wood, east of the Trent, and lost him among the trees. There he met a small old woman in a grey gown, with three warts on her face. He broke wind as he passed her. She answered: "Gyp with a mischiefe, and fart with a bell: I wil goe to heauen, and thou shalt goe to hell."

He came home ill. Vomiting followed. Then the fits.

He "arose vp sodainly, striuing and strugling". His belly stood "vp much aboue hys head or feete". He "ran round on his hands and his feete". His neck was "so wrythen, that his face seemed to stand backward". Once he "leaped vp to the top of the bed".

The visions were his alone. "Looke where greene Angels stand in the window," he said. A green cat troubled him. In trance he argued with Satan, who offered him kingdoms and threatened torments. A thing spoke to him "with a voice small and shrill", and bystanders recorded that "a voyce was heard from him". Readings from the Bible made it worse, above all the first chapter of John.

A physician suspected worms. Others thought of the falling sickness. Arthur Hildersham of Ashby-de-la-Zouch said ministers had no gift for casting out devils, so the household fasted and prayed. John Darrell sent word that "his assistance in prayer and fasting they should have, but not his presence." Near the end Thomas cried: "Looke, looke, see you not the Mouse that is gone out of my mouth". After a last fit in the school porch around 8 June, and prayers the next morning, he "remained well".

Suspicion fell on Alice Gooderidge of Stapenhill, a woman of about 60. On 8 April the boy's grandmother, Mistress Walkeden, questioned her. The boy scratched her, and she admitted being in the wood that Saturday. On 14 April, before Sir Humphrey Ferrers and Thomas Gresley, women searched Alice and her mother, Elizabeth Wright, and reported marks on both. Alice went to Derby gaol that day. A cunning man put new shoes on her and held her near the fire. She confessed to a familiar, a red-and-white dog called Minny. She was convicted at the Derby assizes. The pamphlet says she died before she could be executed. One later account says she got a year in jail instead.

Darrell's later cases, among them William Somers at Nottingham, led Archbishop Whitgift to order an inquiry. In 1599 the High Commission condemned Darrell "for a counterfeyte". Samuel Harsnett published A Discouery of the Fraudulent Practises of Iohn Darrel that year and counted the Boy of Burton among the "cosenages". He named the pamphlet's compiler, who claimed to have been present at almost every fit, as Jesse Bee, a saddler of Burton. Darling is said to have confessed to faking, recanted, then confessed again. One account claims he had overheard Bee and his aunt discussing witchcraft. Others say Darrell coached him.

In February 1603 the Star Chamber sentenced Darling, by then an Oxford student, to lose his ears for libelling Vice-Chancellor John Howson. Today the Boy of Burton is a standard case for students of the witch craze in Britain.