Front matter (continued 4)

That Matthew Hopkins initiated new methods of witch-finding by no means implies that there was any lack of such before his time. Where the simple rule-of-thumb torture failed to extract the requisite confession, a further range, subtler and more exquisite, came into play. No witch could say the Lord's Prayer—a possible enough contingency under great nervous strain even for a good Christian. Thus Fairfax relates how Thorp's wife, accused of bewitching his children, being put to this test, could not say "Forgive us our trespasses," and thus convinced the justices of her guilt. Another method much practised by Hopkins was the searching for the Devil-marks. These marks, as we have said, were the corporeal proofs of her contract with Satan, borne by every witch upon some part of her body, and were further the places whereat her imps came to suck her blood. Few witches—which is to say, suspects—were ever found to pass this test satisfactorily—a fact the less surprising in that any blemish, birth-mark, or even insect-bite was accepted by special legal injunction as sufficient evidence. The witch-mark was believed to be insensible to pain, whence arose the popular and lucrative profession of "witch-pricking." The witch-pricker, having blindfolded the witch, proceeded to prick her in suspected places with a three-inch pin, afterwards telling her to point out to him the places where she felt pain. If the suspect, half-crazed with shame and terror, was unable to do so with sufficient exactitude, the spot was declared insensible, and her conviction followed. Before the actual pricking, when the witch had been stripped of her clothes, she was shaven, lest she should have concealed in her hair some charm against confession under torture. Great care was taken at the same time lest the Devil, by sucking blood from her little finger or left foot, should make it impossible for her to confess. Further, as a witch was notoriously unable to shed tears, another test of her guilt was to call upon her to weep to order—very much as Miss Haversham in "Great Expectations" commanded Little Pip, "Now, play!"

Most popular test of all, as taking place in the open and thus providing a general holiday, was witch-ducking or "swimming." So near was it to the great heart of the British public that its celebration continued informally well into the nineteenth century. In Monmouth, so late as 1829, several persons were tried for the ducking of a supposed witch; while in 1857 the Vicar of East Thorpe, in Essex—perhaps the most noted witch-stronghold in England—was compelled to mount guard in person over the door of a suspected witch to prevent her from undergoing a similar fate. The procedure was of the simplest. The thumbs and great toes of the suspect were tied across, and she was thus dragged in a sheet to a pond or stream. If she floated, she was pronounced a witch; if she sank, she was in all probability drowned. Even if by a lucky chance she escaped both these perils, the nervous shock—to say nothing of what was probably the first cold bath she had ever experienced—acting upon her advanced age, gave her little chance of final triumph over her accusers. Another well-known and popular test was that of weighing the suspected witch against the Church Bible. Had the authorities provided one of more than common weight which outweighed her skin and bone, woe betide her! for her guilt was proved beyond further question.

Such forms of extraneous evidence were, however, held in less store than was the obtaining of a definite confession, which had the double advantage of justifying the judges to the full as well as of convicting the accused. Of how it might be obtained Reginald Scot gives us a vivid example. "The seven words of the Cross," he says, "be hanged about the witch's neck and the length of Christ in wax be knit about her bare bodie with relikes of saints." If torture and other means of persuasion cannot obtain a confession, the jailer must pretend to leave her, and some of her friends must visit her, promising that if she will but confess they will help her to escape from prison. Friday, according to the same writer, was the most auspicious day for the purpose. As to the actual torture, the prisoner must first be stripped lest the means of witchcraft be sewn into her clothing, the instruments of torture being so placed that she has an uninterrupted view of them. The judge then exhorts her that if she remains obstinate, he bids the attendants make her fast to the strapado or other chosen instrument. Having been tortured, she is taken aside and again urged to confess by the promise of thus escaping the death-penalty. As the Church conveniently absolved the faithful from the necessity of keeping faith with heretics or sorcerers, this promise was never kept. To put it briefly, every possible avenue of escape was denied the accused. Even an alibi, however complete, was unavailing, seeing that in her absence her place was always filled by a demon.

However much we may sympathise with the victims of such judicial proceedings, it would be less than fair to blame the general public for its attitude towards them when such men as Blackstone or Sir Matthew Hale were convinced of their reasonableness. Blackstone, indeed, one of the greatest of English lawyers, went so far as to declare that "to deny the possibility, nay, the actual existence of witchcraft is at once flatly to contradict the revealed Word of God." The attitude of Sir Matthew Hale, Lord Chief Justice, an enlightened and God-fearing man, may best be gathered from an account of one of the trials in which he was concerned. In 1664, at St. Edmundsbury, two women, Amy Duny and Rose Cullender, were tried before him upon the usual charges. The first witness was Dorothy Durent, whose child was under the care of Rose Cullender. Dorothy had for some time suspected Rose of bewitching her child—a fact which throws some doubt upon the witness's maternal care in confiding her offspring to such a nurse. Eventually the witness consulted a witch-doctor, a proceeding which, had she known it, rendered her liable to conviction as well as Rose, under the statute of James I.[1] The doctor advised her to hang up her child's blanket in the chimney, which she did. On taking it down some time later, she was horror-stricken to find a toad in it. This toad she had "put it into the fire and held it there, though it made a great and horrible noise, and flashed like gunpowder and went off like a pistol, and then became invisible, and that by this the prisoner was scorched and burnt lamentably." Other witnesses, Mr. Pacy and Edmund Durent, deposed that Rose Cullender and Amy Duny came to them to buy herrings, and, on being refused, went away grumbling. Further, it appeared that Amy Duny had told Cornelius Sandwell's wife that if she did not fetch her geese home, they would be destroyed. She also told Cornelius that if he did not attend to a rickety chimney in his house it would fall. John Soan deposed that he had three carts wherein to carry corn. One of them "wrenched Amy Duny's house, whereat she scolded him. That very day his cart overturned two or three times, and his children had fits." Probably such damning evidence would have sufficed by itself. It was driven home by that of Sir Thomas Browne, who declared with dangerous moderation that "the fits were natural, but heightened by the Devil co-operating with the malice of the Witches, at whose Instance he did the villainies." This was too much for the Lord Chief Justice. He "was in such fears and proceeded with such caution that he would not so much as sum up the evidence, but left it to the Jury, with prayers that the great God of Heaven would direct their hearts in this weighty manner." Needless to say, the jury returned a sentence of "Guilty." Amy Duny and Rose Cullender were hanged at Cambridge accordingly, obstinately refusing to confess, and no sooner were they dead than the afflicted children were cured of their fits and returned to the best of health. Which can have left no further doubt in the mind of Sir Matthew Hale, Lord Chief Baron of the Court of Exchequer, as to the justice of his sentence, even had he any before.

It would be both tedious and unprofitable to trace out the whole long history of witch-persecution in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Their details are invariably nauseous, and differ only in the slightest degree; having heard one, the recapitulation of the rest can be of interest only to the moralist. Some of the more famous examples may be briefly considered, however, as typical of the rest. I have already referred to the case of the Knaresborough witches, accused of bewitching the children of Edward Fairfax, the scholar—a case the more remarkable that the six women accused, although tried before two successive assizes, were finally acquitted. The lonely moorlands and grim wastes of the Northern counties were, naturally enough, regarded with suspicion as offering very eligible lurking-places for Satan's agents, and accordingly we find that the majority of the earlier persecutions concerned that part of the county. Ten years before the Knaresborough trial—in 1612—twenty witches were tried "at the Assizes and Generall Gaole-Delivery, holden at Lancaster, before Sir Edward Bromley and Sir James Eltham." They came from Pendle Forest, a wild district on the eastern extremity of the county, and the most prominent among them was Elizabeth Southernes, more generally known as Mother Demdyke, who, by her own confession, had been a practising witch for nearly half a century, having been led astray thereto by one Tibb, a spirit or devil in the form of a boy wearing a parti-coloured coat of brown-and-black, whom she met upon the highway. She and her fellow-prisoners were charged with murders, conspiracies, and other damnable practices, upon evidence fully borne out by their own confessions. Nevertheless, of the twenty only twelve were hanged, one, Mother Demdyke herself, cheating the gallows by dying in prison, while the remaining seven were acquitted—for the time. That so large a proportion should have escaped speaks ill for the abilities of the prosecution, for an example was badly needed. "This remote country," says Scot, "was full of Popish recusants, travelling priests, and so forth, and some of their spells are given in which holy names and things alluded to form a strange contrast with the purpose to which they were applied to secure a good brewing of ale, or the like." One such charm, quoted at the trial, was used by Anne Whittle, _alias_ Chattox, one of the twenty, in order to remove a curse previously laid upon John Moore's wife's brewing, and ran as follows:—

Three Biters hast thou bitten, The Host, ill Eye, ill Tongue; Three Bitter shall be thy boote, Father, Sonne, and Holy Ghost, A God's name. Five Paternosters, five Avies, And a creede, For worship of five woundes Of our Lord.

Which would seem to show that whether or no Anne Whittle was a witch, she was certainly a Papist, so we need feel little surprise that she was among the twelve executed.

The second great persecution in Lancashire, in 1633, rested almost entirely on the evidence of a boy of eleven. His name was Edmund Robinson, and he lived with his father, a very poor man, in Pendle Forest, where no doubt he heard many legends of the redoubtable Mother Demdyke and her colleagues. Upon All Saints' Day, when gathering "bulloes" in a field, he there saw two greyhounds, one black, the other brown, each wearing a collar shining like gold. They fawned upon him, whereafter, "seeing no one, he took them, thinking to course with them. And presently a Hare did rise very near before him. Whereat he cried, 'Loo, Loo, Loo'; but the Doggs would not run. Whereupon he, being very angry, took them, and with the strings that were about their collars, tied them to a little bush at the next hedge, and with a switch that he had in his hand he beat them. And instead of the black greyhound, one Dickenson's wife stood up, a Neighbour, whom this Informer knoweth. And instead of the brown one a little Boy, whom this Informer knoweth not." Dickenson's wife offered him a shilling as the price of his silence, but he answered, "Nay, thou art a witch." Whereupon she put her hand into her pocket and pulled out something like a Bridle, "that gingled," and put it over the little Boy's head, upon which he turned into a white horse. Mrs. Dickenson then seized upon the Informer, set him before her on the white horse, and carried him to a new house called Hoarstones, about a quarter of a mile away. Here he saw about sixty persons, some by the door, others riding towards the house on horses of different colours. In the house was a fire with meat roasting before it. A young woman offered him "Flesh and Bread upon a Trencher and Drink in a Glass," but after the first taste he would have no more of it. On going into the adjoining Barn, he there saw six persons kneeling and pulling at Ropes fastened to the top of the Barn. Whereupon "there came into the Informer's sight flesh smoking, butter in lumps, and milk as it were syling (streaming) from the said Ropes. All of which fell into basins placed under the said Ropes. And when these six had done, there came other six which did likewise, and during all the time of their said pulling they made such ugly faces as scared the Informer, so that he was glad to run out and steal homewards." They pursued him, but he met two horsemen, whereupon they left him. The foremost of his pursuers was one Loind's wife.

The troubles of the Informer were not yet at an end. "After he had come from the company aforesaid, his Father bade him go and fetch home two kine and he happed upon a Boy, who fought him." The Informer had his ears and face made very bloody in the fight, and looking down he saw the Boy had a cloven foot. With commendable prudence he ran away, only to see a light like to a lantern, which he pursued, thinking it might be carried by a neighbour. But he only found a woman—Loind's wife—standing on a bridge, and running from her he met the cloven-footed Boy again, who hit him and made him cry.

Such was the dread story told in court, and partly corroborated by the boy's father. The wives of Dickenson and Loind, along with some eighteen other persons, were arrested at once, while the informer and his father made a comfortable little sum of money by going the round of the neighbouring churches and there detecting others. The trial took place at Lancaster Assizes, when seventeen of the accused were found guilty, but the judge, not being satisfied with the evidence, obtained a reprieve. Four of the accused were sent up to London, and committed to the Fleet Prison, where "great sums of money were gotten by shewing them." The Bishop of Chester held a special examination of the case, and the informer, being separated from his father, soon confessed that his estimable parent had invented the whole story as a means towards an end. So the trial ended in a lamentable fiasco, from the point of view of that public who were looking forward to the public executions as a holiday.

Although the activities of Matthew Hopkins reached their culminating point in the trial of the Manningtree Witches, held before Sir Matthew Hale at Ipswich in 1645, they were only a part of his bag in that year, as we may gather from a statement in Beaumont's "Treatise on Spirits," that "thirty-six were arraigned at the same time before Judge Coniers, an. 1645, and fourteen of them hanged and a hundred more detained in several prisons in Suffolk and Essex." Nearly twenty years later, in 1664, we find the Witchfinder-General at work in Great Yarmouth, where he accused sixteen old women, all of whom were convicted and executed; and in the same year took place the St. Edmunsbury trials already referred to. Nevertheless it must be said for Matthew Hopkins, gent., that by the very enthusiasm he imparted into his business he did something towards checking the tide of persecution even at the full. Although the general public gave little sign of satiety, those in authority and the more educated class in general were growing tired of so much useless bloodshed. Witch-trials continued unabated, but towards the close of the century the judge's directions to his jury were frequently such as to ensure an acquittal; while, even when found guilty, the accused were often reprieved through the judge's exertions. Among these just judges the name of Lord Chief Justice Holt merits a high place, as of one more than usually in advance of his age.

In 1694, before the same Lord Chief Justice, at Bury Saint Edmunds, was tried Mother Munnings, of Hartis, in Suffolk. Many things were deposed concerning her spoiling of wort and harming of cattle, and, further, that several persons upon their death-beds had attributed their destruction to her arts. Thus it was sworn that Thomas Pannel, the landlord, not knowing how to turn her out of his house, took away the door and left her without one. Some time after, he happening to pass by, she said to him, "Go thy way; thy nose shall lie upward in the churchyard before Saturday next." On the Monday following Pannel sickened, died on the Tuesday, and was buried within the week, according to her word. To confirm this, another witness added that a doctor, being consulted about another afflicted person, and Mother Munnings being mentioned, said that she was a dangerous woman, for she could touch the line of life. In the indictment she was charged with having an imp like a polecat, and one witness swore that coming from the alehouse about nine o'clock at night, he looked through her window, and saw her take two imps out of a basket, a black and a white. It was further deposed that one Sarah Wager, after a quarrel with the accused, was struck dumb and lame, and was in that condition at home at the time of the trial. Many other equally dreadful accusations were brought, and things might have gone hard for Mother Munnings had not the Lord Chief Justice been on the bench. He, however, directed the jury to bring in a verdict of "Not Guilty," which they obediently did. "Upon particular Enquiry," says Hutchinson, "of several in or near the Town, I find most are satisfied it was a very right Judgment. She lived about Two years after without doing any known Harm to any, and died declaring her Innocence. Her landlord was a consumptive spent Man, and the Words not exactly as they swore them, and the whole thing seventeen Years before ... the White Imp is believed to have been a Lock of Wool taken out of her Basket to spin, and its Shadow, it is supposed, was the Black one."

In the same year Margaret Elmore was tried at the Ipswich Assizes before the same judge. "She was committed," says Hutchinson, "upon the account of one Mrs. Rudge, who was Three Years in a languishing condition, as was thought by the Witchcraft of the Prisoner then at the Bar, because Mr. Rudge, Husband of the afflicted Person, had refused letting her a House. Some Witnesses said that Mrs. Rudge was better upon the confinement of the woman, and worse again when her chains were off. Other witnesses gave account that her grandmother and her aunt had formerly been hanged for Witches, and that her Grandmother had said she had 8 or 9 Imps, and that she had given two or three apiece to her children." It was further shown on the evidence of a midwife who had searched her grandmother, that the prisoner had plainer witch-marks than she; while several women who had been on bad terms with her took oath that their bodies were infested with lice and other vermin supposed to be of her sending. But not even the vermin could influence the Lord Chief Justice, and Margaret Elmore was found "Not Guilty."

Yet another case, tried before Holt, was that of Elizabeth Horner at Exeter, in 1696. Three children of one William Borch were said to have been bewitched by her. One had died, the leg of another was twisted, all had vomited pins, been bitten, pricked, and pinched. Their mother deposed "that one of them walked up a smooth plaistered Wall till her Feet were nine foot high, her Head standing off from it. This," she said, "she did five or six times, and laughed and said Bess Horner held her up." Poor Elizabeth had a wart on her shoulder, which the children said was a witch-mark, and was sucked by her toad. But the Lord Chief Justice seems to have been of another opinion, for he directed the jury to acquit her. Indeed, of all the many cases of witchcraft brought before him, not one prisoner was convicted—a state of things which would certainly have resulted in a question being asked in Parliament had it happened in our time. The last woman found guilty of witchcraft in this country was Jane Wenham, the Witch of Walkerne, in Hertfordshire, who was tried in 1712. The witch-finder was called into requisition, and she was submitted to the usual inane and degrading tests. "They either did themselves or suffered others that were about them to scratch and tear her face and run Pins into her Flesh. They ... turned the Lord's Prayer into a Charm"—(the Vicar of Ardely was responsible for this part of the performance, by the way). "They turned to Spectre Evidence, they drave her to such Distraction that by leading Questions they drew from her what they called a Confession. They had her to Jail. The witnesses swore to vomiting Pins. The Jury found her Guilty, the Judge condemned her, and those clergymen wrote a Narrative of the Tryal, which was received and read with such Pleasure that in a Month's Time it had a Fourth Edition." But Jane Wenham was fortunate in her judge. Being a man of learning and experience, "he Valued not those Tricks and Tryals, and though he was forced to condemn her because a Silly Jury would find her guilty, he saved her Life. And that she might not afterwards be torn to pieces in an ignorant Town, a sensible Gentleman, who will for ever be in Honour for what he did, Colonel Plummer of Gilston, in the same County, took her into his protection and placed her in a little house near his own, where she now lives soberly and inoffensively, and keeps her church, and the whole county is now fully convinced that she was innocent, and that the Maid that was thought to be bewitched was an Idle Hussy ... and was well as soon as her sweetheart came and married her."

Thenceforward the law of England had no more terrors for the witch, though she was not yet quite out of danger. The Statute of James I. was not repealed until 1736, and long after that the mob was accustomed to take the law into its own hands. Thus, in 1751, a man and his wife named Osborn were ducked at Thring, having been dragged by the mob from the workhouse where they had been placed by the parish officers for safety. The woman lost her life in the process. She was, however, not unavenged, for a verdict of "Wilful Murder" was returned against the ringleader of the mob, a chimney-sweeper named Colley, and he was hanged, very much to his own and other people's indignation. There was indeed something to be said for the injured Colley when a man like Wesley, pinning his faith to the Bible, could find no means of evading the direct command, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live." The last case in which the blood of a witch was actually shed in this country, so far as I have been able to trace, was in 1875, when a certain Ann Turner, a reputed witch, was murdered by a man, who was, however, declared insane.

FOOTNOTES:

CHAPTER XII

PERSECUTIONS IN SCOTLAND

The influence of longitude upon national tendencies in superstition is far too wide a subject to be here discussed in any detail, but speaking generally, it may be said that the superstitions of a people—as their religion—are largely a matter of climate—milder and more genial in temperate districts, carried to fiercer and more terrible lengths amid extremes of heat and cold. The man whose gods are based upon his conceptions of the thunderstorm, the grim northern winter or the tropical sun, evokes sterner and more dreadful images than he whose lot is cast amid mild skies and gentle breezes. How wide is the difference between the grim gods who ruled the inhospitable heavens of Scandinavian and Teuton from the tolerant Bohemians who tenanted the classical Olympus. The gentle dryads and light-hearted fauns of Italy would have perished in the first snows of a Baltic winter, just as the hungry ravens of Woden would have been metamorphosed into Venus' doves in one Italian generation.

Nowhere is the influence of climate upon national temperament more clearly typified than in the island of Great Britain. The Viking, settling amid the lush meadows and pleasant woodlands of England, laid aside his heathen sacrifices for the more climatically appropriate religion of Christ with scarcely a regret. Thor and Woden long held their own in the bare northern fastnesses, not to be finally driven out until they had tinged the Christianity which took their place with something of their own hopelessness and gloom. Just as the gods of Valhalla ever looked forward to the day of their destruction, so Hell rather than Heaven has always held the leading place in the Scottish imagination. So it came about that the superstitions of the Scot were gloomier than were those of his neighbour over the Border. The conviction of his own sinfulness was always with him; how much deeper and more certain that of his neighbours. And because he had a more imminent sense of sin, his belief in witches and their malignancy was more intimate and more resentful. The Englishman, again, feared the witch chiefly on his own personal account; the Scotsman took up the cudgels on behalf of his Creator as well. The Devil seemed so much more powerful to the dwellers of a bleak Highland glen than to the stout yeoman walking amid his opulent English pastures. In Scotland he was on terms almost of equality with God; it is scarcely too much to say that to the majority he was even more powerful, and his earthly agents all the more to be feared and hated.

As in Rome and Greece, the witch was firmly settled in Scotland centuries before the coming of Christianity. But she was of another breed, as befitted her sterner ancestry. She and her demoniacal coadjutors held all the land under a grip of blood and iron. There was nothing amiable, nothing whimsical, nothing human about the spirits, of one kind or another, that lorded it among the mists and heather. Even the fairies had more in common with Logi than with Oberon, Elfame, their dwelling-place, resembled rather Hell than Fairyland. In place of a Lob-lie-by-the-Fire, who found his highest pleasure in the helping of good housewives without fee, of a Queen Mab, who tormented no one but the idle or the wicked, you had a Kelpie, lurking in lonely places intent upon your murder, or a Banshee, prophesying your coming death or ruin. When at last Christianity came, it had a long, stern struggle against such antagonists—nor, indeed, could it ever altogether overcome them, even though it forced them to adopt new names and new disguises. The missionary saints found their task of conversion increased tenfold by the strenuous opposition of the witches and other evil spirits. St. Patrick, in particular, so enraged them and their master the Devil, by his pertinacity, that he was forced, for a time, to flee before their assaults back to Ireland. One of their most famous exploits was the bombardment with a mountain-top of the vessel in which he was embarked. It is true that their aim, like that of Polyphemus, a member of their own family, was bad, and the mountain-top fell into the sea instead of drowning the saint. But by this very mischance they provided permanent proof of their exploit; for the mountain-top remains to this day to testify unto it, being that upon which Dumbarton Castle was subsequently built.

Among the many legends dealing with these same early Scots witches, I am tempted to quote from one, taken down verbatim from the lips of an old Highland woman, by the late Dr. Norman Macleod and related by him in his "Reminiscences of a Highland Parish." In its modern form it was woven around the imaginary misadventures of a Spanish Princess—and the real shipwreck of the _Florida_, one of the vessels forming the Spanish Armada, sunk near Tobermory, in Mull, in 1588. Actually, however, the magical passages have some much more ancient history, probably, as we may judge from incidental reference to Druidism, from pre-Christian days. The first part of the legend relates how the Spanish Princess came to Mull, there had a love affair with Maclean of Duart, and was murdered by his jealous wife. The King of Spain, hearing of his daughter's fate, fitted out a war-vessel and despatched it to Tobermory to take summary vengeance. Maclean and his people, feeling unequal to resisting it by ordinary means, sought aid from magic (Druidism, in fact) and by powerful spells and charms gathered all the witches of Mull, the _Doideagan Muileach_, together. He explained the position and begged them to raise a tempest and sink the Spanish vessel, pointing out at the same time that her commander, one Captain Forrest, was himself a magician. The chief witch asked if the Spaniard, when declaring his unfriendly intentions, had said, "With God's help!" On learning that he had omitted that precaution she professed herself ready to undertake the task. This passage is so unsuggestive of the pagan witch's usual attitude that I take it to be a pious interpretation of later date.

In due time the witches began their work of _ṻbag_, _obag_ and _gisreag_ (charm, incantation and chanting), but with little initial effect. Stronger measures becoming necessary the chief witch tied a straw rope to a quern-stone, passed it over a rafter, and raised the stone as high as she was able. As it rose the wind rose with it, but she could not get it very high owing to the counter-spells of the Spanish captain with the English name. Accordingly she called her sister-witches to help her—witches with very much finer names, by the way, than their English colleagues could boast of. They were nine in all, and the names of five were Luideag (which is to say "Raggie"), Agus Doideag (or "Frizzle Hair"), Agus Corrag Nighin Jain Bhàin ("The Finger of White John's Daughter"), Cas a'mhogain Riabhaich á Gleancomham ("Hogganfoot from Glencoe") and Agus Gormshuil mhòr bhàrr na Maighe ("Great Blue-Eye from Moy"). All pulled together at the rope, but could not raise the quern-stone. Some of them then flew through the air and climbed about the ship's rigging in the shape of cats, spitting and swearing. But Captain Forrest only laughed at them. So he did when their number increased to fifteen. At last the _Doideag_ got a very strong man, _Domhnull Dubh Làidir_, to hold the rope and prevent the stone from slipping down again, while she flew off to Lochaber to beg the assistance of Great Garmal of Moy, the _doyenne_ of Scotch witchcraft, whose powers were more developed than those of all the others put together. Garmal accepted the flattering invitation, and set out for the scene of action. No sooner was she in the air than a tempest began, and by the time she reached Tobermory Captain Forrest realised that he had better retire. But before his cable could be cut Great Garmal had reached the ship, had climbed to the top of the mast in the shape of the largest black cat that ever was seen, and uttered one spell, whereupon the Spanish man-o'-war with all her crew sank to the bottom of the sea.

Against witches of such prowess he must be a powerful man—saint or king—who would gainsay them. Many—if not most—of the earlier Scottish kings had passages with witchcraft, mostly to their own detriment. Leaving aside Macbeth, quite as credible an historic character as the rest, we have King Duff, who, towards the end of the tenth century, narrowly escaped a lingering death at the hands of the witches—they employing the old-fashioned, even in those days, but eminently dependable "waxen image." By good luck only he was enabled to discover the witches and, having burned them and broken up the magic before it was quite melted before their fire, to recover his usual health and spirits.

Not only for its long line of eminent witches does Scotland claim an important place in the annals of the arts magical. In Michael Scot she had one of the most famous wizards known to history, far superior in prowess to the great bulk of his successors, if tradition may be credited, and every whit as eminent, while a great deal more probable, than the British Merlin of Arthurian legend. Thomas the Rhymer, he of Escildonne, chosen lover of the Fairy Queen, was another wizard of repute.

It is an indirect testimony to the high, if evil, place held by magic in Scotland that so many of its followers and practitioners were men and women of the first ranks of life. We have the dread figure of William, Lord Soulis, boiled to death as the only fit punishment for the crimes committed in his feudal stronghold, such as put him on an evil parity with the Marshal de Retz, the French Bluebeard. Or again, in 1479, by which time we are on firm ground, the Earl of Mar, with a whole band of male and female abettors of humbler rank, was burned in Edinburgh for attempts on the King's life by aid of waxen images and spells. Indeed, the whole family of this peccant nobleman proved, on investigation, to be tarred with the same magical brush. Lady Glammis again, burned in 1536 as a witch, was one of the proud Douglasses, grand-daughter of Archibald Bell-the-Cat, widow of "Clean the Causeway" Lord Glammis, whom, _inter alia_, she was accused of murdering—young, beautiful, and wealthy. It is true that her death was very necessary to one of the contemporary political parties, though that may have been only a coincidence. Another aristocratic witch was Lady Katherine Fouliss, who, with her step-son, was tried in 1590 for "witchcraft, incantation, sorcery, and poisoning." She, although she seems to have gone about her questionable business with an open-hearted publicity that arouses our admiration, was acquitted through family influence, and her step-son with her, though several of their humbler accomplices paid the penalty in the usual way.

In the following year occurred a witch-trial of interest in itself, and the cause of the great outburst of persecution which for the next century makes the annals of Scottish justice run red with innocent blood—that of Dr. Feane—or Fian, as it is variously spelt. The story of the "Secretar and Register to the Devil" has been often told, but it will bear recapitulation. Fian was a schoolmaster at Saltpans, Lothian; he was further, according to his accusers, a wizard. More exactly, perhaps, he should be described as a male-witch, seeing that he had no control over Satan, but, on the other hand, had sworn allegiance to him, received witch-marks—under his tongue—and otherwise conformed to the etiquette of the lower grade in the profession. This seems, indeed, to have been customary in Scotland, where the distinction which I have endeavoured to lay down between the sorcerer and the witch is often hard to trace. His magic, however, gains its chief interest from its object—no less a person than James I. and VI. This learned and Protestant monarch, being on his way to visit his Danish bride in her native land, the Devil and his Secretary laid a plot to drown him. They put to sea, after the vessel, along with a whole regiment of witches, and there cast an enchanted cat into the sea, raising a fierce storm, which could not, however, prevent the Divinely-protected James from reaching Denmark in safety. On his return journey the plotters tried another plan—to raise a fog whereby the Royal ship might be driven ashore on the English coast. Towards this end Satan cast a football, or its misty semblance, into the sea, and succeeded in raising what may be accurately described as the Devil's own fog. But angels guided the ship upon its proper course, and again the King escaped the assaults of his enemies. For these and other crimes Dr. Fian, with a number of women-witches, was tried, tortured, forced to confess, and burned on Castle Hill—though he withdrew his confession before the end and died like a gentleman and a scholar. It is an interesting point about the trial that in it occurs the first Scottish mention of the Devil's mark.

The effects of this outrage upon the Lord's Anointed were not to end with the death of its presumed concocters. If the tribe of witches had grown so bold, it was high time they were extirpated, and gallantly did the King and his advisers set about it. It was in 1563 that the persecution of the witch was regularised as a distinct branch of crime by an enactment of the Estates, "that nae person take upon hand to use any manner of witchcrafts, sorcery, or necromancy, nor give themselves furth to have ony sic craft or knowledge thereof therethrough abusing the people," and that "nae person seek ony help, response, or consultation, at any sic users or abusers of witchcrafts ... under pain of death."

Thenceforward, until the last witch-burning in 1727, the fires were seldom allowed to go out, and to be an old and ugly woman was perhaps the most "dangerous trade" in Scottish industry. There was, indeed, one incidental to a witch-burning which may—it is at least to be hoped—have sometimes moved the economical Scotsman in the direction of toleration—the expense. Here, for instance, are the items expended in the execution of one batch of witches in Fife in 1633:—

£ s. d.

For ten loads of coal to burn them 3 6 8

For a tar-barrel 14 0

For towes 6 0

For harden to be jumps to them 3 10

For making of them 8

————

Or a grand total of £4 11s. 2d., no small sum, seen with thrifty eyes, especially if we consider the greater value of money in those days.

It is, perhaps, only characteristic of the national attitude towards the whole subject that the "White," or amiable, witch was held in as great detestation as her "Black," or malignant, sister. Torture and penalty were the same for either. Thus we find that, in 1597, four women were convicted at Edinburgh for curing, or endeavouring to cure, certain of their neighbours' ills by witchcraft, and were in due course strangled and burned. It is true that they did not suffer the greater penalty of being burned alive, which was reserved for witches of unusual malevolence. The dislike and dread of a "White" witch was not, be it noted, due to ingratitude alone, but rather because it entailed the mutilation of the patient at the Resurrection. While the rest of his body would owe its preservation in this world to God Himself, any limb or organ healed by the Devil—acting through the "White" witch—would belong to him, and thus be unable to rise at the Day of Judgment with the rest. In endeavouring to understand the mental attitude which gave rise to the great persecutions of the seventeenth century, one cannot afford to overlook such points of belief as this. Fear and the instinct of self-preservation, not cruelty, were the driving-power in the witch-murderer. We, who think no shame of shooting partridges for pastime, have little cause to contemn the seventeenth-century Christian who killed witches lest they should destroy him body and soul.

Such is the similarity of the various Scottish witch-trials that too-detailed recapitulation would be tedious and unprofitable. Some, however, stand out from the rest by reason of their grotesque horror and exaggeration. Such is the trial of Isobel Grierson, "spous to Johnne Bull, wark-man in the Pannis" (Preston Pans), tried at Edinburgh in March, 1607. Grierson, by the way, was a name very prominent in witch-circles at the time. One Robert Grierson had taken a leading part as an accomplice of Dr. Fian, above referred to, his being the hand which cast the enchanted cat into the sea in the endeavour to drown King James. He was also, as shown in the confession of another defendant in the same trial, the cause of much disturbance at a Sabbath held in North Berwick Churchyard. Satan, by an unfortunate slip, addressed him by his real name. As etiquette strictly demanded that Christian names should be ignored, and nicknames—in this instance "Rab the Rower"—used instead, the mistake appeared an intentional insult on Satan's part, and was so taken by the assembled witches, who expressed their displeasure with uncompromising vigour, even to the extent of running "hirdy girdy" about the churchyard. But to return to John Bull's wife. She was accused, _inter alia_, of having conceived a cruel hatred and malice against one Adam Clark, and with having for the space of a year used all devilish and unholy means to be revenged upon him. On a November night in 1606, between eleven and midnight, Adam and his wife being in bed, Isobel entered the house in the form of a black cat, accompanied by a number of other cats, and made a great and fearful noise, whereat Adam, his wife, and maid-servant were so frightened as almost to go mad. Immediately afterwards the Devil appeared, in the likeness of a black man, seized the servant's nightcap and cast it on the fire, and then dragged her up and down the house. Who thereby contracted a great sickness, so that she lay bed-fast, in danger of her life, for the space of six weeks. Isobel was further accused of having compassed the death of William Burnet and of laying on him a fearful and uncouth sickness, by casting in at his door a gobbet of raw, enchanted flesh. Whereafter the Devil nightly appeared in poor William's house in the guise of a naked infant child for the space of half a year. Occasionally he varied the performance by appearing in the shape of Isobel herself, but being called by her name would immediately vanish away. As a result of all which, Adam languished in sickness for the space of three years, unable to obtain a cure, and at last, in great "douleur and payne," departed this life. Another of her victims was Robert Peddan, who remained sick for the space of one year and six months, and then suddenly remembering that he owed Isobel nine shilling and fourpence, and that before the time of his sickness, as he had refused to pay it, she had delivered to him certain writings that she kept in MS., and thereafter, with divers blasphemous speeches, told him he should repent it. Remembering this, he sought out Isobel and satisfied her the said sum, at the same time asking his health of her for God's sake, saying, "If ye have done me any wrong or hurt, refrain the same and restore to me my health." And within twenty-four hours he was as well as ever before. Yet again, Margaret, the wife of Robert Peddan, lying in bed, Isobel, or a spirit in her shape, entered his house, seized Margaret by the shoulder and flung her upon the floor, so that she swooned with fright, and was immediately seized with a fearful and uncouth sickness. Isobel, hearing that rumours of her ill-doing were abroad, caused Mrs. Peddan to drink with her, whereupon her sickness left her for eight or ten days. But as Mrs. Peddan, learning nothing from experience, declared _hic et ubique_ that Isobel was a foul witch, she straightway laid another charm upon her, so that the sickness returned. Isobel, being found guilty of all these and other crimes, was ordered by her judges to be "taken to the Castle Hill of Edinburgh, and there to be strangled at the stake until she be dead and her body to be burnt in ashes, as convict of the said crimes; and all her movable goods to be escheat and inbrought to our sovereign lord's use, as convict of the said crimes." Which was done accordingly.

In 1622 Margaret Wallace was executed on the charge of inflicting and causing diseases. The chief count against her was of having consulted with Christiane Graham—burned as a witch some time before Margaret's trial—how to cure Margaret Muir, "a bairne," of a disorder, "to which end they went about twelve at night to a yard, and there used their devilish charms, whereby the disease was removed from the bairne."

The next twenty years are filled with a monotonous record of witch-trials, similar in essentials to those already quoted. Perhaps the most outstanding is that of Catharine Oswald, who kept many rendezvous with Satan, and cursed the yard of John Clerk so effectually that for four years neither "kaill, hemp, nor other graine would grow therein." Alice Nisbet, also famous in her day, was likewise convicted of having "took paines off a woman in travell, by some charms and horrible words; among which thir ware some, 'the bones to the fire and the soull to the divill.'"

In 1633 twenty witches were executed, Sir George Home, of Manderston, being the most zealous persecutor, chiefly, it was said, to spite his wife, with whom he was not on good terms, and who had a taste for Black Magic. Ten years later arose another fierce persecution, so that in Fifeshire alone thirty women were executed—the local ministry taking the lead in the prosecution. Two of the accused were domestic servants in service at Edinburgh, and with that love of finery which even now attends their kind. By their own confession they had been introduced to the Devil by Janet Cranston, a notorious witch, and had by him been promised that, if they gave themselves bodies and souls to his allegiance, "they should be as trimlie clad as the best servants in Edinburgh." Janet Barker, one of the twain, admitted having the Devil's mark between her shoulders, and when a pin was thrust therein it remained there for an hour before she noticed it. Needless to say, both were "wirriet" (strangled) at the stake and burned. Agnes Fynnie was convicted on no fewer than twenty counts of different offences, chiefly of harming the health of personal enemies. Her defence was more vigorous than was customary, but although she pleaded that of all the witches already burned not one had mentioned her name, she was found guilty and executed.

It must not be supposed that Satan did not make occasional efforts to befriend his own. Thus we may learn from Sinclair's "Invisible World Discovered" that he directly interfered, endeavouring to save the wife of one Goodail, "a most beautiful and comely person," for whom he had a particular regard, much to the jealousy of less well-favoured witches. He even visited her prison and endeavoured to carry her off through the air, so that "she made several loups upwards, increasing gradually till her feet were as high as his breast." But James Fleming, the gaoler, was a man of might. He caught hold of her feet, so that it was a case of "Pull Devil, pull Gaoler," and the better man—which is to say Mr. Fleming—won, and the prisoner was saved for subsequent execution. On another occasion Satan actually released a witch from the church-steeple of Culross, where she was confined. Unfortunately for her, before they had gone far upon their aerial flight, she happened, in the course of conversation, to mention the name of the Deity—whereupon he dropped her.

Political ups and downs, whomever else they might affect, made no difference in the hard lot of the witch—save, indeed, that she was regarded as belonging to the opposite party by that in power. That did not, however, gain for her the sympathy of the defeated. Thus the death of Charles I., according to many, could only have been compassed by the Powers of Darkness themselves. Even the brute creation seemed to have realised this, if we may judge from the reputed fact that some of the lions in the Tower of London died from the smell of a handkerchief dipped in the martyred monarch's blood. "Old Noll" was declared, by Royalists anxious to explain away their defeats, to be Satan's direct agent, if not the Devil incarnate, the Commonwealth representing his Kingdom upon Earth. Thus although the Republicans had done their utmost in the way of witch-harrying, their efforts were but feeble compared to those of the Royalists upon the glorious Restoration. Obviously a witch must be a friend to crop-eared Roundheads—and fearfully did she pay the penalty. Somewhere about 120 were executed in the year 1661, immediately following the King's entering upon his own again—the majority owing their arrest to the exertions of John Kincaid and John Dick, witch-finders as eminent, though less famous, than Matthew Hopkins himself. And now it was the turn of the victorious Cavaliers to be regarded, by Presbyterian and Parliamentarian, as owing their success to the help of Satan and his agents. Their Bishops were reported to be cloven-footed and shadowless, their military commanders to be bullet-proof by enchantment, and to possess horses that could clamber among inaccessible rocks like foxes; the justices who put fugitives on trial for treason were seen in familiar converse with the Fiend, and one of them was known to have offered up his first-born son to Satan.

A representative example of the trials held in the latter part of the seventeenth century is that consequent upon the death of Sir George Maxwell, of Pollock, slain, as was supposed, by the malice of "some haggs and one wizard." A full account of it is given in the "Memorialls" of Robert Law, writer, edited from his MS. by Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe. To put it briefly, Sir George, having been ill for some time, having great pain in his side and shoulder, a dumb girl called at the house and explained by signs that his waxen "picture" was being melted before the fire in a certain woman's house, who had a grudge against him. Search being made, his image was found up the chimney. Two pins being found stuck in the figure's shoulder were removed, whereupon Sir George recovered, and the woman was laid by the heels and found to have several witch-marks. But very soon the baronet was again taken ill. The witch's house, now inhabited by her son, was again searched, and a second "portraitour," this time of clay, found under the man's bolster. Arrested, he confessed that the Devil had visited him, in company with four witches, had made the image himself, and stuck pins in the appropriate limbs. The four witches were apprehended, and, with the young man, burnt at Paisley; but this did not prevent their victim's death. A few months later he died, "being worn to a shadow," owing, according to the dumb girl, to the existence of yet another "picture" which his friends had "slighted."

The last Scottish execution of a witch took place in 1722. The prisoner was accused of having turned her daughter into a pony, shod by the Devil and so ridden upon her—whence the girl was ever afterwards lame. Found guilty, this last of a long line of martyrs was burned at Dornoch, and scandalised the spectators—the weather being chilly—by composedly warming her hands at the fire that was to consume her.

In 1735, English and Scottish statutes against witchcraft were alike repealed, much to the horror of the seceders from the Established Kirk, who, in their annual confession of National and Personal Sins, gave a prominent place to "The Penal Statutes against Witches having been repealed by Parliament contrary to the express Law of God."

CHAPTER XIII

OTHER PERSECUTIONS

The universality of the belief in witchcraft carried in its train international belief in the efficacy of persecution as its cure. When one nation led the others were bound to follow, and accordingly we find that every European country—to say nothing of non-Christian peoples—lent itself vigorously to this form of legalised murder. But so similar are the details of these proceedings that witchcraft might claim to have preceded Volapuk or Esperanto as an international bond. Everywhere the persecution followed the same, or parallel lines, differing only in minor national idiosyncrasies. So far as Catholic countries were in question this was natural enough—seeing that all alike drew their inspiration from the same source—Innocent VIII.'s Bull; while the Protestants, however much they might object to Papal persecution of their peculiar tenets, heartily agreed with both the purpose and the method of those directed at the common enemy of all.

In France, as elsewhere, the seventeenth century saw the witch-fever rise to its most extravagant height. Though it is difficult to compare them in degree—where all alike rose to the highest level of bloodthirstiness—the French may be said to have excelled their ancient rivals in thoroughness. Thus the direction of the campaign was in the direct control of either Church or State, rather than being submitted to the ordinary process of the law; they were official rather than local, and witchcraft a religious and political rather than a merely criminal offence. Thus, in 1634, Urbain Grandier, who had satirised Richelieu, was accused, at the Cardinal's direct instigation, of practising the Black Art upon some nuns at Loudun, and was in due course burned at the stake; and many similar cases are recorded. A point in which the French practice differed from the English in the matter of witch-finding was that, while in England the affair was usually entrusted to the care of such comparatively humble persons as Matthew Hopkins, the French Commissioner was an official of importance, and usually, as in the case of Pierre de Lancre, of education. This gentleman, sent as we have seen at the instance of the King, according to his own account, by the Parliament of Bordeaux to investigate the charges of wholesale witchcraft against the inhabitants of the Labourt district in 1608, has himself provided us with illuminating insight into such an official's frame of mind. This is shown even more clearly in his introductory argument than in his book—already frequently referred to—written to prove the inconstancy of devils and bad angels. Towards this end he sets out to prove the inconstancy of the natives of Labourt and their peculiar liability to Satan's snares. Then he argues that Labourt must, on the face of it, breed an unsettled and inconstant race, being both mountainous and situated on the borders of three kingdoms, France, Spain, and Navarre. Its language, being likewise varied—a mixture of French, Spanish, and Basque—is in itself another powerful argument. Its inhabitants, again, are for the most part sailors, when they might with better reason be farmers, because they prefer the inconstant sea to the firm, unchanging land. Their long absences, he finds, tends to make their wives unfaithful—another powerful impetus towards witchcraft. Although the Commissioner—a man of open mind—confesses that their dress is not indecent; he has grave doubts about their dances, being not quiet and respectable, but rowdy in the extreme, and accompanied upon the tambourine, an instrument of baleful significance. They live very largely upon apples—which may also account for their proneness to forbidden things, the Devil's power over the apple having been recognised ever since the days of Eve. De Lancre even puts forward the assertions of heretical Scottish and English merchants, who have visited Bordeaux to buy wines, and have there assured him that they have often seen large troops of dæmons heading across the sea straight for Labourt. From all of which the Commissioner concludes that there is scarcely a family in the district but is more or less deeply involved in or connected with witchcraft and its practices.

The same causes which rendered the French persecutions more severe while they lasted, also brought it about that any relaxation of the Governmental attitude diminished them to a greater extent than was the case in England, where witchcraft had a more personal aspect. The armed peasant, who, musket in hand, proved his possession of supernatural powers by defeating the King's best troops led by a Marshall of France, among the bare peaks of the Cevennes, in defence of his detestable heresies, might look for nothing but ruthless extermination as a wizard; but even Governments have human memories, and the humble old woman muttering spells in obscure corners of the kingdom, was apt to be overlooked. Sometimes, too, as the years passed, the Royal Person actually interfered to shield the accused from less official persecution. Thus, when in 1672, a number of shepherds were arrested in Normandy and the Parliament of Rouen prepared for an investigation similar to that previously held at Labourt, the King ordered all the accused to be set at liberty, with salutary effect in dissipating the increasing witch-fever. Some ten years later, however, a Royal edict revived all previous ordinances against sorcery and divination. Many such cases were tried before the "Chambre Ardente," the last being that of a woman named Voisin, condemned for sorcery and poisoning in 1680. The anti-sorcery laws were in force until the mid-eighteenth century, while as proof of the persistence of the superstition we may again quote the case of the Soubervies, in 1850, already referred to.

Germany—the land of sentiment, no less than of common sense—was not different from her neighbours in her method of regarding the witch. The German, though he protested against the methods of the Inquisition, as applied to himself, could have no objection to its treatment of the witch-question. Cases were sometimes heard in the civil court, but were far more frequently left to the tender mercies of the Church. At the end of the fifteenth century the Inquisitors Sprenger and Kramer taught the whole duty of an Inquisitor in the "Malleus Maleficarum," and found many apt pupils throughout the Empire. Persecutions of unprecedented fierceness broke out in many districts, one of the most striking examples being that at Trier in the second half of the sixteenth century. For many years there had been failure of crops and increasing sterility throughout the land, attributed by many to the increase of witchcraft and the malice of the Devil. In time, so ferocious became the popular antipathy that scarcely any who fell under suspicion had the remotest chance of escape. It was perhaps the most democratic persecution recorded in history; neither rank nor wealth was of the least avail in face of accusation. Canon Linden, an eye-witness, relates that two Burgomasters, several councillors and associate judges, canons of sundry collegiate churches, parish priests and rural deans were among the victims. Dr. Dietrich Flade, judge of the secular court and deputy governor of the city, strove to check the persecution and fell a victim to it for his pains. He was accused, tortured into confessing various crimes of sorcery, and burned at the stake in 1589. A Dutch scholar, Cornelius Loos by name, a reputed disciple of Wierus and tenant of a professorial chair at the Trier University, also ventured to enter a protest against the prevalent madness. Failing in his appeal to the authorities he wrote a book, in which his views were set forth at length. It was seized while in the printers' hands and its author cast into prison. He was, however, released in the spring of 1593 upon uttering a solemn recantation—published in book form six years later by Del Rio. Far from curing the barrenness of the land, the persecution only increased it—and thus provided its own cure—dying down at last when the general poverty prevented the necessary funds being provided for its maintenance.

A pathetic incident is recorded of another formidable outburst of the witch-mania—at Bamberg in 1628. The Burgomaster, Johannes Junius, was among those put on trial. In the beginning he denied all the charges against him, but being put to the torture, confessed that he had been present at a witch gathering and a witch-dance and had desecrated the Host. Such a confession, though it spared him further torture, did not, of course, stay his execution. Some little time after, having partially recovered from his first agonies, he was in great distress of mind as to the opinion his dearly-loved daughter should hold of him after his death. With sorely maimed hands he yet managed to scrawl a letter and ensure its reaching her. In it he appeals in agony of heart that she shall not believe the matter of his enforced confession: "Innocent have I come into prison, innocent have I been tortured, and innocent must I die.... I confessed only in order to escape the great anguish and bitter torture, such as it was impossible for me longer to bear." Unfortunately the torturers were never satisfied with a confession unless it implicated other people as well, and the case of Junius and some of his friends and neighbours who also suffered formed no exception to the rule.

The Bamberg persecution was succeeded by one at Wurzburg in the following year. Fortunately the noble Jesuit priest and poet, Friedrich von Spee, was appointed confessor of those sentenced to death, and was inspired to write, in 1631, his "Cautio Criminalis," which, published anonymously, did much to stem the tide of persecution. "Incredible among us Germans," he begins, "and especially (I blush to say it) among Catholics, are the popular superstitions, envy, calumnies, backbitings, insinuations and the like, which being neither punished by the magistrates nor refuted by the pulpit, first stir up suspicion of witchcraft. All the Divine judgments which God has threatened in Holy Writ are now ascribed to witches. No longer do God or Nature aught, but witches everything."

It was a long time, however, before such enlightened views could obtain universal credence, and it was in Germany that the last European execution for witchcraft took place, so lately as 1793.

The international epidemic did not spread to Sweden till the end of the century, when it broke out, in more than usually eccentric form, in the village of Mohra. It was chiefly remarkable for the number of children concerned. "Four score and five persons, fifteen of them children, were condemned, and most, if not all of them, were burnt and executed. There were besides six-and-thirty children that ran the gauntlet and twenty were whipt on the hands at the Church-door every Sunday for three weeks together." The whole proceedings were, indeed, almost a children's drama and no emanation of childish imagination but was eagerly swallowed by a normally sober and sensible community. Most probably, indeed, the whole affair had its foundation in some myth or folk-story more or less popular in all the local nurseries. Indeed, were we of the present generation to return to the earlier belief in lycanthropy and the ceaseless malignancy of ubiquitous were-wolves, it is easily within the bounds of possibility that "Red Riding Hood," a story which quite conceivably owes its origin to the same superstition, might bring about some similar panic. An imaginative child might easily mix up the grandmother in the story with the wolf who devours her: might thus come to the conclusion that his own grandmother occasionally masqueraded in the form of a wolf: might in time convince himself that he had actually seen her thus transmogrified, and might thus in time bring not only his own venerable relative but those of half the other children in the school that he attended under unpleasant suspicion and not improbably to a more unpleasant death.

The mainstay of the Mohra panic was the sudden belief—propagated by the children themselves—that some hundreds of them had been brought under the power of the Devil by local witches. The whole community took the alarm, the Government was appealed to, and a Royal Commission embodied to investigate the charges—with sanguinary results. It was declared that the witches instructed the children to go to the cross-ways, and there to invoke the Devil, begging him to carry them to the Blockula, the favourite local mountain meeting-place for Sabbaths. Satan, in answering their prayers, appeared in many forms, the most original being that of a man with a red beard, wearing a grey coat, red and blue stockings, a high-crowned hat adorned with ribbons of many colours, and preposterous garters. So attired he must have wanted only a magic pipe to serve as double to the Pied Piper of Hamelin, the Teutonic legend most nearly recalled by the whole circumstance. He provided the children with mounts and anointed them with unguent composed of the scrapings of altars and the filings of church-clocks. Another account says that the witches accompanied the children, riding with them to the Blockula on men's backs—the said men, upon arriving there, being propped against the wall, fast asleep. Now and again they preferred to ride upon posts, or goats transfixed upon spits, and they flew through walls, chimneys, and windows without either injuring themselves or breaking the glass and bricks.

The actual transportation of the children gave rise to many weighty arguments. All the time they asserted they were at the Blockula, their parents declared that they had held them asleep in their arms. It was finally concluded that their nocturnal travels might be either in the flesh or the spirit, according to circumstances. So firmly did many parents credit their children's assertions that a local clergyman determined to watch his little son throughout the night, holding him tightly in his arms; but even this ocular demonstration did not serve to convince the mother.

Upon the Blockula was declared to be a fine house, having a gate painted in very gay colours. Within it were a large banqueting-hall and other rooms. The food served at the banquets consisted of such nourishing fare as coleworts, bacon, and bread, butter, milk and cheese—all of them, be it noted, familiar to childish palates, as was the feast of the Lancashire witches—quoted elsewhere—to the "Informer." Those who attended the Blockula gave birth to sons and daughters, who were married in their turn to each other, their children being toads and serpents. They built houses, but so badly that the walls fell upon them, making them black and blue; they were beaten, abused, and laughed at—yet when on one occasion they thought the Devil was dead, the place was filled with wailings and lamentations. As usually happened in such persecutions, the bloodshed at last brought people to their senses—perhaps the execution of fifteen children gave their parents pause. At all events, the Commission was in due course dissolved, and the persecution came to a sudden end, though prayers continued to be offered weekly in the church against any other such horrible visitation—as indeed they well might!

It is not my intention to give more than a general idea of the most outstanding historic persecutions—for, as I have said, they differ only in minor degrees in different times and places. There are, however, yet one other group too striking to be ignored—those which raged in the New England Colonies. It might have been supposed, by one unconversant with human nature, that the memory of their own sufferings would have softened the hearts of the colonists when they themselves were in power. The reverse was the case; their enmity against their former oppressors was diverted towards this new channel, gaining force in the process. There is indeed some excuse to be found for their mental attitude. Springing in the most cases from the humbler class, they had many privations and sufferings to endure before they could gain any respite in their newly-settled country to think of progressive education. Their warfare against the Indians might well have given both sides reason to think that the Devil was indeed arrayed upon the side of their enemies—and in time the gloomy superstitions of the natives served to buttress the imported beliefs of Europe.

From the beginning of the seventeenth century to the end the settlers had been forced to devote most of their thoughts to means of subsistence alone, and there had been no opportunity for speculative thought to modify ideas which, standing still, became more and more stereotyped. The precarious existence of the infant State also gave its leaders every ground for taking the severest measures towards anything considered to be dangerous to its welfare. As early as 1648, Margaret Jones of Charlestone was accused of practising witchcraft. The charge was "that she was found to have such a malignant touch as many persons, men, women and children whom she stroked or touched in any affliction or displeasure, were taken with deafness or vomiting, or other violent pains or sickness." Governor Winthrop, in whose Journals the account is found, also adds that "in prison there was seen in her arms a little child which ran from her into another room, the officer following it, it vanished."

Margaret Jones was found guilty of the crime of witchcraft, and was hanged according to the law. Soon after her execution her husband wished to go to Barbadoes in a vessel lying in Boston Harbour. He was refused a passage as being the husband of a witch, and thereupon the vessel began to roll as though it would turn over. Instead of the phenomenon being attributed to the refusal to take an innocent man on board, it was reported to the magistrate, and an officer was sent to arrest Jones. On his exhibiting the warrant for the arrest, the vessel instantly ceased to roll. Jones was thrown into prison, but there is no evidence of his ever having been tried.

In 1655, Ann Hibbins was hanged at Boston for witchcraft; there were witch-executions in different places at ever-decreasing intervals. One of the most interesting cases of witchcraft was that of the Goodwin family in 1688. A full account of this case is given by Cotton Mather, "Minister of the Gospel," in a book which purported to contain "a faithful account of many Wonderful and Surprising Things that have befallen several Bewitched and Possessed Persons in New England." In his own words, in 1689, "There dwells at this time in the South part of Boston a sober and pious man, whose name is John Goodwin, whose Trade is that of a Mason, and whose Wife (to whom a good Report gives a share with him in all the characters of Virtue) has made him the Father of six (now living) children. Of these children all but the eldest, who works with his Father at his calling, and the youngest, who lives yet upon the Breast of its mother, have laboured under the direful effects of a (no less palpable than) stupendous WITCHCRAFT." After explaining the godly and virtuous tendencies of the children and the excellence of their upbringing and religious education, Mather says:—"Such was the whole Temper and Courage of the children that there cannot easily be anything more unreasonable than to imagine that a Design to Dissemble could cause them to fall into any of their odd Fits."

In 1688 the eldest daughter, on examining the linen, found that some of it was missing, and questioned the daughter of the washerwoman with regard to it. The washerwoman—as might have happened in much later times—used very bad language in her daughter's defence, whereupon poor Miss Goodwin "became variously indisposed in her health, and was visited with strange Fits, beyond those that attend an Epilepsy or a Catalepsy, or those that they call the Diseases of Astonishment." Shortly afterwards one of her sisters and two of her brothers were seized in a like manner and "were all four tortured everywhere in a manner so very grievous that it would have broken an heart of stone to have seen their agonies." "Physicians were of no avail. Sometimes they would be Deaf, sometimes Dumb, and sometimes Blind, and often all this at once. One while their Tongues would be drawn down their throats, another while they would be pulled out upon their chins to a prodigious length. They would have their mouths opened into such wideness that their Jaws went out of joint; and anon they would clap together with a force like that of a Strong Spring-Lock. The same would happen to their Shoulder-Blades, and their Elbows and Hand-wrists and several of their Joints. They would at times ly in a benummed condition, and be drawn together as those that are tyed Neck and Heels, and presently be stretched out, yea, drawn Backwards to such a degree it was feared the very skin of their Bellies would have crack'd." There were many other symptoms which Mather relates with zealous satisfaction.—At last the distracted father told the Magistrates of his suspicions of the washerwoman Glover. On being examined, she gave such a poor account of herself that she was committed to prison. It was found that she could not say the Lord's Prayer, even when it was repeated to her clause by clause, and when she was committed it was found that all the children "had some present ease." The supposed witch was brought to trial, but, being an Irishwoman, there were difficulties in her understanding the questions, which told very badly against her. Orders were given to search her house, and several small images—dolls, perhaps—made of rags and stuffed with goat's-hair, were found. The old woman then confessed "that her way to torment the objects of her malice was by rubbing of her Finger with her spittle, and stroaking of those little Images." When one of the images was brought to her, she took it in her hand, and immediately one of the children fell into fits before the whole assembly. Witnesses were easily found against her, one of whom said that Glover had sometimes come down her chimney. After her condemnation the worthy Mather visited her in prison, "but she entertained me with nothing but Irish, which language I have not Learning enough to understand without an Interpreter." On her way to execution she declared that her death would not end the sufferings of the children, as there were more in it besides herself; and so it proved. The children would bark like dogs and purr like cats, and they would fly like geese. "Such is Satanic perversity that if one ordered them to Rub a clean table, they were able to do it without any disturbance; if to rub a dirty Table, presumably they would, with many Torments, be made uncapable." Mather relates that owing to their Bewitchments, holy Books caused them horrible agonies. One girl told him that if she went to read the Bible, her eyes would be strangely twisted and blinded, and her neck presumably broken, but also that if anyone else did read the Bible in the Room, though it were wholly out of her sight, and without the least voice or noise of it, she would be cast into very horrible agonies. "_A Popish Book_," says Mather, "she would endure very well and also books such as the 'Oxford Tests'"—Mather must be forgiven for being a partisan—but "my grand-father Cotton's catechism called 'Milk for Babes' and the Assemblie's Catechism would bring hideous convulsions on the child if she look'd into them." With a certain unconscious jocularity, Mather hopes that he has "not spoilt the credit of the books by telling how much the Devil hated them."

At last Cotton Mather and some devout neighbours kept a day of prayer on behalf of the afflicted children, and gradually "the liberty of the children increased daily more and more, and their vexation abated by degrees," though demons and spirits continued to trouble Boston for some time after.

In 1692 Salem village was the scene of a fierce outbreak against witchcraft, which lasted some 16 months. Cotton Mather attributes it to the Indian "Paw-Maws," but Hutchinson, with his usual common sense, probably hits upon at least one of the real causes. Mather had published a book on witchcraft in 1689. It was strongly recommended in England by Richard Baxter, who a short time later published his own "Certainty of the World of Spirits." This contained a testimony to Mather, and he, in his turn, caused it to be widely circulated in New England. The witch epidemic at Salem occurred but a short time after this and Hutchinson attributes it to "Mr. Baxter's book," and "his and his father's" (_i.e._, Mather's book and that of his father) and the false principles and frightful stories that "filled the people's mind with great fears and dangerous notions."

The witchcraft scare in Salem began in the house of Mr. Parris, minister of the place, and several other people soon began to act in an unusual manner. "They crept into holes and under chairs and stools. They used antick gestures and spake ridiculous speeches and fell into fits. After some time and a day of prayer kept, the afflicted persons named several that they said they saw in their fits afflicting them, and in particular an Indian woman." The Indian woman, Tihuba was her name, was deposed to have used charms, at the beginning of the outbreak, for the discovery of the witches, but the fact of her being an Indian would probably have been sufficient to cast suspicion upon her. On being beaten and threatened by her master she confessed that she was a witch, and said the Devil urged her to sign a book. Two other women, Osborn and Good, were accused by the Parris children of having bewitched them, and warrants were issued for their arrest. All three were sent to the jail in Boston. Good's little daughter, Dorcas, aged five, was called upon to testify against her mother, and her evidence amounted only to this: "That her mother had 2 birds, one black and one green, and these birds hurt the children and afflicted persons." Sarah Good was sentenced to be hanged. The Rev. Mr. Voyes told her as she stood on the scaffold, "You are a witch and you know you are a witch." She replied, "You are a liar. I am no more a witch than you are a wizard, and if you take my life God will give you blood to drink." Sarah Osborn died in prison, and the bill of the Boston jailer for the expenses of both women runs thus:—

£ s. d.

To chains for Sarah Good and Sarah Osborn 14 0

To keeping Sarah Osborn from the 7th March to 10th May, when she died, being nine weeks and two days 1 3 5

Tihuba was kept in prison for 13 months and was then sold to pay her prison fees.

The arrest of these three women was followed almost immediately by many more accusations. The arrival of Governor Phips in May, armed with a charter which empowered the general court to erect and constitute judicatories and courts of record, or other courts of which the Governor was to appoint the judges, gave a great impetus to the persecution. Finding the prison full of witches he gave orders for their immediate trial. All through June and July the cases crowded one upon another, and such was the pitch of superstitious terror to which the people of Salem had arrived, that two dogs were put to death for witchcraft. The cases of Martha and Giles Carey, and of Rebecca Nurse, are so well-known that we will rather turn to the trial of Susanna Martin, held in the court of Oyer and terminated at Salem on June 29th, 1692.

Cotton Mather relates of her that:—"Susanna Martin, pleading 'Not Guilty' to the indictment of witchcraft brought in against her, there were produced the evidences of many persons very sensibly and grievously bewitched, who all complained of the prisoner at the bar as the person they believed the cause of their miseries."

At the examination the cast of Susanna's eye was supposed to strike the afflicted people to the ground whether they saw it or not.

_Magistrate._ Pray what ails these people?

_Martin._ I don't know.

_Mag._ But what do you think ails them?

_Martin._ I don't desire to spend my judgment upon it.

_Mag._ Don't you think they are bewitched?

_Martin._ No, I do not think they are.

_Mag._ Tell us your thoughts about them then.

_Martin._ No, my thoughts are my own when they are in; but when they are out they are another's. Their master——

_Mag._ Their Master? Who do you think _is their Master_?

_Martin._ If they be dealing in the Black Art, you may know as well as I.

_Mag._ Well. What have you done towards this?

_Martin._ Nothing at all.

_Mag._ Why, it is you or your appearance.

_Martin._ I cannot help it.

_Mag._ Is it not _your Master_? How comes your appearance to hurt these?

_Martin._ How do I know? He that appeared in the shape of Samuel, a glorified Saint, may appear in any-one's shape.

John Allen, of Salisbury, testified that he having refused because of the weakness of his oxen to cart some staves at Susanna Martin's request, she was angry and said, "It had been as good that he had, for his oxen should never do him much more service." The witness answered her, "Dost thou threaten me, thou old witch? I'll throw thee into the brook!" to escape which she flew over the bridge and escaped. From that time various misfortunes happened to his oxen and they ended by swimming out into the sea. Of fourteen good oxen only one was saved, the rest were cast up drowned in different places.

John Atkinson also testified to the bewitching of cattle by Martin, and Bernard Peache said, "that Being in Bed, on a Lord's Day night, he heard a Scrubbing at the Window, whereat he then saw Susanna Martin come in and jumped down upon the floor." She took hold of witness's feet and drew his body up into a heap. For two hours he could neither speak nor stir, but at length he caught her hand and bit three of her fingers to the bone. Whereupon she went down the stairs and out of the door. Snow was lying on the ground and drops of blood were found upon it, as also in a bucket on the left-hand side of the door. The marks of her two feet were found just without the threshold, but there was no sign of them any further off. Another accusation against Susanna was that after a long walk her feet were dry when other people's would have been wet. John Kembal had wished to buy a puppy of Martin, but as she would not let him choose the one he wanted he bought one elsewhere. "Whereupon Susanna Martin replied, 'If I live I'll give him puppies enough.' Within a few days after this, Kembal coming out of the woods, there arose a little cloud in the N.W. and Kembal immediately felt a force upon him that made him not able to avoid running upon the stumps of trees that were before him, albeit that he had a broad plain cartway before him; but though he had his ax also upon his shoulder to endanger him in his Falls, he could not forbear going out of his way to tumble over them. When he came below the Meeting House there appeared unto him a little thing like a Puppy of a Darkish colour, and it shot Backwards and forwards between his Leggs. He had the courage to use all possible Endeavours of cutting it with his ax; but he could not Hit it; the Puppy gave a jump from him and went, as to him it seem'd, into the ground. Going a little further, there appeared unto him a Black Puppy, somewhat bigger than the first, but as Black as a Cole. Its motions were quicker than those of his ax; it flew at his Belly and away; then at his Throat and over his Shoulder one way and then over his Shoulder another. His heart now began to fail him and he thought the Dog would have tore his Throat out. But he recovered himself and called upon God in his Distress; and naming the Name of Jesus Christ, it vanished away at once. The Deponent spoke not one word of these accidents for fear of affrighting his wife. But the next morning Edmund Eliot going into Martin's house, this woman asked him where Kembal was? He Replyed, 'At home abed for aught he knew.' She returned, 'They say he was frighted last night.' Eliot asked, 'With what?' She answered, 'With Puppies.' Eliot asked when she heard of it, for he had heard nothing of it; she rejoined, 'about the Town'; altho' Kembal had mentioned the Matter to no creature Living."

Susanna could do nothing against such evidence as this. She was found "Guilty" and executed on July 19th.

In sixteen months nineteen persons were hanged, one (Giles Corry) was pressed to death and eight more were condemned. More than fifty confessed themselves to be witches, a hundred and fifty were in prison and two hundred others were accused. But people were growing weary; and it was thought time to cease the persecutions. By about April, 1693, all those imprisoned were set at liberty, and others who had fled the country were allowed to return home. It is a striking comment that Mr. Parris, in whose house the supposed witchcrafts had begun, was accused by his congregation "that he hath been the beginner and procurer of the sorest afflictions, not to this village only, but to this whole country that did ever befall them," and he was dismissed.

CHAPTER XIV

PHILTRES, CHARMS AND POTIONS

Were it not that dogs and horses have frequently been observed to express their fear of ghosts, an apt definition for man would be "the superstitious animal." Certainly no human feeling is more universal or more enduring. If, as I have endeavoured to prove, the first mother was the first witch, she must have brought superstition with her as a legacy from the unknown world. Not only is it universal in mankind, it is also essential to mankind, if only that it is the one barrier between them and the tyranny of fact. As many-headed as a Hydra, it is to be found in one form or other, in the composition of every human being, from the sage to the savage. Dr. Johnson's idiosyncrasy for touching every post he passed upon his walks abroad, Napoleon's belief in his star, the burglar's faith in his lump of coal as his surest safeguard against discovery, and the bunch of bells which every Italian waggoner hangs about his team to scare away errant demons, are all alike variations upon the one theme—humanity's revolt against the tyranny of knowledge. Our boasted education avails nothing against the rock upon which superstition is securely based. The Girton girl who wears a bracelet hung with lucky-pigs, or rejoices when she finds white heather growing upon a brae-side, may not perhaps consciously accept them as capable of influencing her fortunes, any more than does the card-player believe with his head that if he wins when not playing for money that his next gamble will result in loss, or the race-course punter that a horse whose name includes some particular word such as gold, or love, or black will, for that reason, win races. But all alike have in their hearts this unexpressed belief, and though they may not admit it, does any unexpected good fortune befall them, their mascot has some share of their thanks. Few of us but hold that a certain colour, as, for instance, green, or a certain stone, as the opal, is unlucky. Many of us would not pass under a ladder if we could help it, even though we know that we are thus upholding a superstition based upon a former connection between a ladder and a gallows. In Paris, fashionable people carry little images of their special friends and in case of their illness mutter prayers or charms over the part affected. Indeed, those who protest most strongly their freedom from such degrading weakness thereby show themselves the more believing—he who resolutely walks under every ladder he passes as a mute protest is but acknowledging the faith he seeks to outrage.

All these modern forms of civilised superstition are, of course, survivals from a former age. Some of them, as, for instance, that of spilling salt or sitting thirteen at table, can be traced back to religious or other sources. Others, again, have endured from the earliest days of the human race. Many directly emanate from the art of witchcraft. A full-fledged witch must have her regular recipes and prescriptions—the first witch as much as the last. With the genius that made her a witch, she must seize and formulate the shadowy conceptions that form so large a share of her _clientèle's_ beliefs; with her power of organisation, she must elaborate and adapt them to individual needs; in answer to the primitive appeal, she must return the full-fledged spell or charm. As we have seen, her magical powers were exercised in various directions; her methods were consequently as variant. In her capacity as healer, and conversely as disease-inflicter, her various spells must cover all the ills that flesh is heir to. She must be able to cure the disease she inflicts; more, those who combat her must have their own ammunition of the like kind. To the Greek Abracadabra the Church must oppose the sign of the Cross or the mention of the Trinity. Thus in time arose an enormous store of such early methods of faith cure—a store which has since accumulated to such vast proportions as make it hopeless to do more than enumerate a few gleaned from various ages and countries as examples of the rest.

A great number of these charms are given by Wierus, who is severely reprobated by Bodin for propagating such iniquities. Toothache being a common and distracting complaint, there were various recipes for its cure. To repeat the following was found to be very efficacious:—

Galbes, Galbat, Galdes, Galdat.

Or it was equally good to write the following on a piece of paper, and then to hang it round your neck:—

Strigiles, falcesque, dentatae. Dentium, dolorem persanate.

Another and more religious means was to quote John, ch. ix., concerning the curse of the blind man, and Exodus, ch. xii., where it is written that no bone of the Passover shall be broken; and then to touch your teeth during Mass, by which time it was more than probable that your pains should cease. Ague, another common complaint, had several remedies. You might either write Abracadabra triangularly and hang it round your neck, or visit at dead of night the nearest cross-road five different times, and there bury a new-laid egg (this has never been known to fail), or emulate Ashmole, the astrologer, who wrote in 1661:—

I took early in the morning a good dose of elixir and hung three spiders about my neck; they drove my ague away.

Against mad-dog bite there were more complicated methods than mere Pasteurisation, and what is more, you had a large choice. A cure was effected by writing on a piece of bread the words:—

Irioni Khiriori effera Kuder fere.

then swallowing it; or writing on a piece of paper or bread the words:—

Oh, King of Glory, Jesus Christ, come in peace in the name of the Father + max in the name of the Son + max in the name of the Holy Ghost, prax, Gaspar, Melchior, Balthasar + prax + max + God imax +.

Some people were known to have been cured by a man who wrote

Hax, pax, max, Deus adimax

on an apple, which he gave the patient to eat; but this, says Wierus, was very impious.

According to Cato, bones out of joint could be put back into place by the charm:—

Danata, daries, dardaries, astataries.

Divers were but little distinguished from one another, and we find a number of cures for fevers included under one generic form. Several cures are given by Wierus:—

Wash your hands with the patient and say Psalm 144. "Exaltabo te, Deus meus Rex."

Or:—

Take the invalid's hand and say "Acque facilis tibi febris haec fit, atque Mariae Virgini Christi partus."

Or:—

Take three holy wafers, and write on the first, "So is the Father, so is Life"; on the second, "So is the Son, so is the Saint"; on the third, "So is the Holy Ghost, so is the remedy." Take these three wafers to the fever patient and tell him to eat them on three consecutive days, neither eating nor drinking anything else; also say fifteen times daily the Pater and the Ave.

A similar prescription is found in the following:—

Cut an apple in three places and write on the first, "Increatus Pater"; on the second, "Immensus Pater"; and on the third, "Aeternus Pater"; then let the patient eat them fasting on three different days.

The following savours little less of religion:—

For fever wryt thys words on a lorell lef + Ysmael + Ysmael + adjuro vos per angelum ut soporetur iste Homo. And ley thys lef under hys head that he mete not thereof and let hym ete Letuse oft and drynk Ip'e seed smal grounden in a mortar and temper yt with ale.

A cure for epilepsy was contained in the following words:—

Gaspare fert myrrham, thus Melchior, Balthasar aurum Haec tria cui secum portabit nomina regum Soluitur a morbo Christi pietate caduco.

Another remedy was to take the hand of the patient and say in his ear:—

I conjure you by the Sun, the Moon, the Gospel of the Day, given of God to Saint Hubert, Gilles, Corneille and Jein, that you get up without falling again, in the name of the Father, the Sonn and the Holy Ghost. Amen.

For the cure of headache Pliny recommends a plant growing on the head of a statue (_i.e._, that has never touched the ground), gathered in the lappet of any one of the garments, and attached to the neck with a red string.

Against the King's Evil, vervaine, plucked with the root, wrapped in a leaf, and warmed under cinders, was considered efficacious. This might at first sight seem to differ little in character from a medical prescription, whether useless or no, but to be efficacious certain conditions must be complied with. It must be applied, that is to say, by a young and fasting virgin, and the patient must receive it fasting. While touching his hand the virgin must say, "Apollo, let not the plague increase which a virgin has allayed." And thereafter she must spit three times.