1. The following account is based on Chester and Cheshire Archives and Local Studies Service, Chester [hereafter CCALSS], DDX 196/1 (extract from the Wilbraham Family Diary, dated 1670, and copied by George Fortescue Wilbraham in 1872). This forms the basis of the briefer account printed in J. Hall, A History of the Town and Parish of Nantwich, or Wich-Malbank in the County Palatine of Chester (Nantwich, 1883), 198 (though Hall misidentifies the gentry family involved as the Bromleys rather than the Brookes).
2. For the trial and sentencing of the insane, see J.H. Baker, ‘Criminal courts and procedure at common law, 1550–1800’, in J.S. Cockburn (ed.), Crime in England, 1550–1800 (1977), 105. For contemporary legal opinion, see Michael Dalton, The Country Justice (3Td edn, 1626), 243.
3. Cf. C. Herrup, The Common Peace: Participation and the Criminal Law in Seventeenth-Centwy England (Cambridge, 1987), 151, 163.
4. The penalties for perjury were increased under the terms of 5 Elizabeth c.9 (1563). Cf. M.D. Gordon, ‘The invention of a common law crime: Perjury and the Elizabethan courts’, American Journal of Legal History 24 (1980), 145–70
5. Gordon, ‘The Perjury Statute of 1563: A case history of confusion’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 124:6 (1980), 438–54.