Page:Abstract of the bloody massacre in Ireland.pdf/7

 Having thus seized upon their goods and cattle, ransacked their houses, got their persons, stript man, woman, and child naked, and so turned them out of doors, strictly prohibiting the Irish, under great penalties, to give them any relief, by means hereof many perished miserably through cold, nakedness and hunger.

In the town of Colraine, of these poor people that fled thither for succour, many thousands died in two days, so that the living could not bury the dead, but laid their carcases in ranks, in waste and wide holes, piling them up as if they had been herrings.

One Magdalen Kedman deposeth, that she and divers other Protestants, among whom were two and twenty widows, were first robbed, and then stripped naked, and when they had covered themselves with straw, the bloody Papists threw in burning straw among them, on purpose to burn them; then they drove them out into the woods in frost and snow, where many of them died with extreme cold, and those that survived, lived miserably by reason of their many wants.

Yet though these bloody villains exercised such inhuman cruelties among the poor Protestants, they would commonly boast, That these were but the beginning of their sorrows, and indeed they made it good; for having disarmed the English, robbed them of their goods, stript them of their clothes, and having their persons in their power, they furiously broke out into all manner of abomin-