Anderson472 and Threlfall473 give Elizabeth Warren’s baptismal date as 21 July 1629, but Smith474 gives 28 June 1629. Anderson notes472 that “Elizabeth French in 1910 published English wills and parish register entries which identified the English origin of John Warren and three generations of his paternal ancestry [NEHGR 64:348-55]. Examination of the originals of the Nayland registers reveals only one discrepancy, in the baptismal date for the first daughter Elizabeth.” It seems likely that Smith was quoting the date given by French, rather than the original apparently being cited by Anderson and Threlfall.

CORRECTION to the following: the report below pertains to Elizabeth (Warren) Knapp’s daughter, Elizabeth Knapp, not to this Elizabeth. This error appears in Savage, Threlfall, and perhaps other sources.

According to Threlfall473, this is the “Elizabeth Knap” who, in the sixth’s book of Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana, was said to have been bewitched in 1671. Butler’s History of Groton475 quotes Mather’s account as follows:

“‘In the town of Groton, one Elizabeth Knap, (October, 1671,) was taken after a very strange manner; sometimes weeping, sometimes laughing, sometimes roaring, with violent agitations, crying out money! money! Her tongue would be for many hours together drawn like a semicircle up to the roof of her mouth, so that no fingers applied to it could remove it. Six men were scarce able to hold her in some of her fits, but she would skip about the house, yelling and howling and looking hideously.

“‘On December seventeenth, her tongue being drawn out of her mouth to an extraordinary length, a daemon began manifestly to speak in her, for many words were [p. 255] distinctly uttered, wherein are the labial letters, without any motion of the lips at all; words, also, were uttered from her throat, sometimes when her mouth was wholly shut, and somtimes words were uttered when her mouth was wide open, but no organs of speech used therein. The chief things the daemon spoke, were horrid railings against the godly minister of the town; but likewise he sometimes belched out most nefarious blasphemies against the God of heaven. And one thing about this young woman was yet more particularly remarkable; she cried out in her fits, that a certain woman in the neighborhood appeared unto her, and was the only cause of her affliction.

“‘The woman thus cried out upon was doubtless a holy, a devout, a virtuous person; and she, by the advice of her friends, visited the afflicted. The possessed creature, though she was in one of her fits and had her eyes wholly shut, yet when this innocent woman was coming, she discovered herself wonderfully sensible of it, and was in grievous agonies at her approaches.

“‘But this innocent woman, thus accused and abused by a malicious devil, prayed earnestly with, as well as for this possessed creature; whereupon coming to herself, she confessed that she had been deluded by Satan, and compelled by him unreasonably to think and speak evil of a good neighbor without a cause. After this, there was no further complaint of such an one’s apparition, but she said some devil, in the shape of divers, did very diversely and cruelly torment her, and then told her it was not he but they, that were her tormentors.’”