Mary Schweidler, - the amber witch. - The most interesting trial for witchcraft ever known. | Page 3

them to stand.
4th. The specification of the whole income of the church at Coserow,
before and during the terrible times of the Thirty Years' War.
5th. The enumeration of the dwellings left standing, after the
devastations made by the enemy in every village throughout the parish.
6th. The names of the districts to which this or that member of the
congregation had emigrated.
7th. A ground plan and description of the old Manse.
I have likewise here and there ventured to make a few changes in the
language, as my author is not always consistent in the use of his words
or in his orthography. The latter I have, however, with very few
exceptions, retained.
And thus I lay before the gracious reader a work, glowing with the fire
of heaven, as well as with that of hell.
MEINHOLD.
[1] The original manuscript does indeed contain several accounts which
at first sight may have led to this mistake; besides, the handwriting is
extremely difficult to read, and in several places the paper is
discoloured and decayed.

[2] It is my intention to publish this trial also, as it possesses very great
psychological interest.
[3] Horst, Zauberbibliothek, vi. p. 231.
[4] Vom Alten Pommerlande (of old Pomerania), book v.

INTRODUCTION
The origin of our biographer cannot be traced with any degree of
certainty, owing to the loss of the first part of his manuscript. It is,
however, pretty clear that he was not a Pomeranian, as he says he was
in Silesia in his youth, and mentions relations scattered far and wide,
not only at Hamburg and Cologne, but even at Antwerp; above all, his
south German language betrays a foreign origin, and he makes use of
words which are, I believe, peculiar to Swabia. He must, however, have
been living for a long time in Pomerania at the time he wrote, as he
even more frequently uses Low-German expressions, such as occur in
contemporary native Pomeranian writers.
Since he sprang from an ancient noble family, as he says on several
occasions, it is possible that some particulars relating to the
Schweidlers might be discovered in the family records of the
seventeenth century which would give a clew to his native country; but
I have sought for that name in all the sources of information accessible
to me, in vain, and am led to suspect that our author, like many of his
contemporaries, laid aside his nobility and changed his name when he
took holy orders.
I will not, however, venture on any further conjectures; the manuscript,
of which six chapters are missing, begins with the words "Imperialists
plundered," and evidently the previous pages must have contained an
account of the breaking out of the Thirty Years' War in the island of
Usedom. It goes on as follows:--
"Coffers, chests, and closets were all plundered and broken to pieces,
and my surplice also was torn, so that I remained in great distress and

tribulation. But my poor little daughter they did not find, seeing that I
had hidden her in the stable, which was dark, without which I doubt not
they would have made my heart heavy indeed. The lewd dogs would
even have been rude to my old maid Ilse, a woman hard upon fifty, if
an old cornet had not forbidden them. Wherefore I gave thanks to my
Maker when the wild guests were gone, that I had first saved my child
from their clutches, although not one dust of flour, nor one grain of
corn, one morsel of meat even of a finger's length was left, and I knew
not how I should any longer support my own life, and my poor child's.
Item, I thanked God that I had likewise secured the vasa sacra, which I
had forthwith buried in the church in front of the altar, in presence of
the two churchwardens, Hinrich Seden and Claus Bulken, of Uekeritze,
commending them to the care of God. And now because, as I have
already said, I was suffering the pangs of hunger, I wrote to his lordship
the Sheriff Wittich V. Appelmann, at Pudgla, that for the love of God
and his holy Gospel he should send me that which his highness' grace
Philippus Julius had allowed me as praestanda from the convent at
Pudgla, to wit, thirty bushels of barley and twenty-five marks of silver,
which, howbeit his lordship had always withheld from me hitherto (for
he was a very hard inhuman man, as he despised the holy Gospel and
the preaching of the Word, and openly, without shame, reviled the
servants of God, saying that they were useless feeders, and that Luther
had but half cleansed the pigstye of the Church--God mend it!). But he
answered me nothing, and I should have perished for want