Stacy has argued that it was less the target of the attempted murder than the method used in doing so that worried contemporaries, and so it was this that accounts for both the elevation of Roose's crime to treason and the brutality with which it was punished; Alison Sim describes how "poison made no differentiation between the life of a "gentlyman" and that of a "pore Woman"; it was also linked to the supernatural in contemporary imagination: the Latin "veneficum" translated both as poisoning and sorcery.