The Tewkesbury Witch That Sucked the Sow
About the same time a Tewkesbury man had a sow and a litter of pigs: the sow with abundance of milk, but the pigs lean and miserable. He concluded that something which had no right to it came and robbed his piglings of their milk; so he watched; and sure enough a “black four-footed Creature like a Pole-Cat” came and beat away the pigs and sucked the sow; but the farmer got a pitchfork and ran it into the thigh of the pole-cat, which struggled so mightily that, though it was nailed to the ground, it got away and made off. When he asked some neighbours, standing near, what they had seen, they said they had only seen a wench go by, with blood falling from her as she went. They caught the wench and searched her, and, sure enough, found her wounded as the man said he had wounded the thing sucking his sow. She was apprehended, tried, and hanged, because she made herself into a creature like a black pole-cat, and went and sucked the farmers’ sows. “These two Relations, I received from a Person of Quality, of good Ability and of unquestionable Credit, who was present at both the Tryals, and wrote them in his Presence, and afterwards read them to him; and he assured me they were very true in all the Particulars, as they were given in Evidence,” says the author of the “Collection of Modern Relations” complacently.