The Bleeding of the Murdered

It was widely believed that a murdered body would bleed afresh when the murderer touched it, and King James I repeated the idea in his Daemonologie. Hone printed a deposition taken at the Hertford assizes in the reign of Charles I, in which a minister swore that a woman’s body, dug up thirty days after her death and touched by the four suspects, began to sweat, opened one eye three times and let a drop of blood fall from her ring finger. Reginald Scot had heard that a wound bled again in the presence of a dear friend or a deadly enemy.