Witch Stories Part 7

THE SPELL OF THE SLAP.[75]

In 1708, William Stensgar, of Southside, in Orkney, had rheumatism. He sent to an old beggar-woman, called Catherine Taylor--a cripple herself, but none the less qualified to heal others by her magic arts. She came to him about an hour before sunrise and took the case in hand, bidding him follow her till they came to a certain kind of gate or stile, called a slap or grind; William's wife accompanying them with a stoup of water. At this slap Catherine touched his knee, saying, "As I was going by the way I met the Lord Jesus Christ in the likeness of another man; he asked me what tidings I had to tell? I said I had no tidings to tell, but I am full of pain, and can neither gang nor stand. Thou shalt go to the holy kirk, and thou shalt gang round about, and then sit down upon thy knees, and say thy prayers to the Lord, and then thou shalt be as heal as the hour when Christ was born." After this precious charm, which the old cripple said had been taught her when a child, she repeated the 23rd Psalm; and then the evil spirit which had caused the rheumatism was a.s.sumed to be "telled out" into the stoup of water; at all events William Stensgar would have no more of it. Then the water was emptied out over the slap or gate so that the next person pa.s.sing by the stile might get it instead of William. One man who had watched this devilry from the beginning, evaded the foul fiend by pus.h.i.+ng his way through the hedge higher up; but another unfortunate wretch, not so lucky or not so early a riser, coming blundering over the stile as usual, got laid hold of by the fiend which William Stensgar had shaken off, and was holden by it hardly.

THE PLAGUE OF CATS.[76]

Year by year witches became scarcer, none of any special note presenting themselves till we come to the case of Margaret Nin-Gilbert, of Caithness, which happened in the year 1718; the same year as that in which the minister of Redcastle lost his life by witchcraft, and Mr. M'Gill's house at Kinross (he was minister there) was so egregiously troubled by a spirit which nipped the sheets and stuck pins into eggs and meat, and clipt away the laps of a gentlewoman's hood and a servant maid's gown tail, and flung stones down the chimney, which "wambled a s.p.a.ce" on the floor, and then took a flight out of the window, and threw the minister's bible into the fire, and spoilt the baking, and played all sorts of mad pranks to disquiet the family and defy G.o.d. If such things as these could be done in the light of the sun, why, should not Margaret Nin-Gilbert have supernatural power? Nin-Gilbert had a friend, one Margaret Olson, a woman of it is said wicked behaviour, whom Mr. Frazer put out of her house, taking as his tenant instead one William Montgomerie. Upon this Margaret Olson went to her friend Nin-Gilbert, the notorious witch, and besought her to harm Mr. Frazer; but Mr. Frazer being a gentleman of rank and fortune was defended from the witches, and Nin-Gilbert confessed she had no power or inclination to hurt him. However, one night as he was crossing a bridge, they attempted him, but succeeded not; and he, on being questioned, said he perfectly remembered "his horse making a great adoe at that place, but that by the Lord's goodness he escaped." Also he had a great sickness at the time these women were taken, but he had common sense enough to refuse to ascribe it to them. Finding that they could not prevail against Mr. Frazer, they turned their attention to Montgomerie, "mason, in Burnside of Scrabster," who was also under the ban for having accepted the tenancy of which Margaret Olson had been dispossessed.

Suddenly his house became so infested with cats that it was no longer safe for his family to remain there. He himself was away, but his wife sent to him five times, threatening that if he did not return home to protect them, she would flit to Thurso; and his servant left them suddenly, and in mid term, because five of these cats came one night to the fireside where she was alone, and began speaking among themselves with human and intelligible voices. So William Montgomerie, mason at Scrabster, returned home to do battle with the enemy. The cats came in their old way and in their old numbers; and William prepared his best. On Friday night, the 28th of November, one of the cats got into a chest with a hole in it, and when she put her head out of the hole, William made a lunge at her with his sword, which "cutt hir," but for all that he could not hold her. He then opened the chest, and his servant, William Geddes, stuck his dirk into her hind quarters and pinned her to the chest. After which, Montgomerie beat her with his sword and cast her out for dead; but the next morning she was gone; so there was no doubt as to her true character.

Four or five nights after this, his servant, being in bed, "cryed out that Some of these catts had come in on him." Montgomerie ran to his aid, wrapt his plaid about the cat and thrust his dirk through her body, then smashed her head with the back of an axe, and cast her out like the first. The next morning she too was gone, and there was proof positive for another case. So as none of these cats belonged to the neighbourhood, and there were eight of them a.s.sembled together in one night, "this looking like witchcraft, it being threatened that none should thrive in my said house,"

William Montgomerie made pet.i.tion to the Sherrif-Deput of Caithness, to visit "some person of bad fame," who was reported to have fallen sick immediately on this encounter, and search out if she had any wounds on her body or not. "This representation seeming all the time to be very incredulous and fabulous, the sheriff had no manner of regard yrto." But when, on the 12th of February, Margaret Nin-Gilbert was seen by one of her neighbours "to drop at her own door one of her leggs from the midle, and she, being under bad fame for witchcraft, the legg, black and putrified, was brought before the Sheriff-depute" (not the sheriff himself, the Earl of Caithness, who might have had a little more common sense)--then the said Sheriff-depute ordered Nin-Gilbert to be seized and examined.

Margaret made short work of it. Being interrogated the 8th of February, 1719, she confessed that she was under compact with the devil, whom she had met in the likeness of a black man as she was travelling some long time byegone in ane evening; confessed also that he sometimes appeared to her as a great black horse, and other times as if riding on a black horse, and sometimes as a black cloud, and sometimes as a black hen. Confessed also that she was at William Montgomerie's house that evening, when he attacked her as a cat, and that he broke her leg with the dirk or axe, which since had fallen off from the rest of her body: also, that Margaret Olson was there with her, who, being stronger than she did cast her on the dirk when her leg was broken. She then delated four other women, one of whom, Helen Andrew, had been so crushed and maimed by Montgomerie, "that she dyed that same night of her wounds or few days yrafter:" and another, M'Huistan, "cast herself a few days afterwards from the rocks of Borrowstoun into the sea, since which time she was never seen; while a third, Jannet Pyper, she identified as having a red petticoat on her.

Asked how they managed not to be discovered said, the devil raised a fog or mist to conceal them." When her confession was ended, her accomplices were apprehended; but she herself died in prison in a fortnight's time.

Margaret Olson was then examined. She was "tryed in the shoulders" (for witches' marks), "where there were several small spots, some read, some blewish; after a needle was driven in with great force almost to the eye she felt it not. Mr. Innes, Mr. Oswald, minister, and several honest women, and Bailzie Forbes, were witnesses to this. And further, that while the needle was in her shoulder, as aforesaid, she said, 'Am not I ane honest woman now?'" So this instance of human wickedness and folly ended by the usual method of the cord and the stake.

THE YOUNG HONOURABLE'S DECEITS.

January, 1720, saw distress and confusion at Calder in Mid Lothian. Lord Torphichen's third son, the Honourable Patrick Sandilands, was bewitched, and the whole country was in excitement. If the devil could touch a Lord's son, who was safe? There was no doubt of the fact, let who would deny it.

Lord Torphichen's son though he was, the Honourable Patrick Sandilands was worse holden than the meanest hind on the estate. He was buffeted about the room; flung down in trances, from which no horsewhippings--and it is to be hoped he had plenty of them, and well laid on--could revive him; he p.r.o.nounced prophecies; was lifted up in the air; taken off long journeys between the s.p.a.ce of two flashes of light; had the gift of clairvoyance; and put out all the candles by his very presence--his powers depending, as such powers generally do, on darkness and confusion for their perfect development. Lord Torphichen soon left off the use of the horsewhip, and he and all the family came to the conclusion that the Honourable Patrick was bewitched. So they got hold of the witch, a brutish, ignorant, half-witted woman living in the village of Calder, and put her in prison, waiting her confession. As for that, it was not difficult to get at. Yes, she was a witch; had been a witch for many years; had once given the devil her own dead child to make a roast of; had made an image of the young laird; and had three a.s.sociates, two women and a man. Mad William Mitch.e.l.l, the Tinklarian Doctor,[77] as he was called, went on foot in ill weather without food from the West Bow to Lord Torphichen's house at Calder, to see what he could do towards discovering the devil in the witches. This was on the 14th of January--the day of the solemn fast, which was all the help that the awakening reason of the times would allow the Honourable Patrick Sandilands. True, the witch and her confederates were in prison, but there was no gallows planted, and no fire set: only the ministers, and elders, and saints, and people, convened in solemn and sacred prayer, to beseech G.o.d to drive out the devil from a lying, mischievous, hysterical lad. But crazy William Mitch.e.l.l took very little by this move, Lord Torphichen not favouring his pretensions to special and private illumination. The sermon was preached in the Calder Kirk by the Rev. Mr. John Wilkie, minister of Uphall, the sorcerers being present, and was found so powerful that the devil was fairly exorcised, and the boy soon after wholly recovered. In time he went to sea, rose to the command of an East Indiaman, but perished in a storm, leaving a meritorious name singularly stained with boyish sins. "It brings us strangely near to this wild-looking affair," says Chambers, "that the present Lord Torphichen (1860) is only _nephew_ to the witch-boy of Calder."

THE LAST OF THE WITCHES.

And now we draw near to the close of this fatal superst.i.tion. In 1726, Woodrow notes "some pretty odd accounts of witches," had from a couple of Ross-s.h.i.+re men, but fails to give us very accurate details, save only that one of them at her death "confessed that they had, by sorcery, taken away the sight of one of the eyes of an Episcopal minister, who lost the sight of his eye upon a sudden, and could give no reason for it." And early in the year of 1727[78] the last witch-fire was kindled with which the air of bonnie Scotland was polluted. Two poor Highland women, a mother and daughter, were brought before Captain David Ross of Littledean, deputy-sheriff of Sutherland, charged with witchcraft and consorting with the devil. The mother was accused of having used her daughter as her "horse and hattock," causing her to be shod by the devil, so that she was ever after lame in both hands and feet; and the fact being satisfactorily proved, and Captain David Ross being well a.s.sured of the same, the poor old woman was put into a tar-barrel and burned at Dornoch in the bright month of June. "And it is said that after being brought out to execution, the weather proving very severe, she sat composedly warming herself by the fire prepared to consume her, while the other instruments of death were getting ready." The daughter escaped: afterwards she married and had a son who was as lame as herself; and lame in the same manner too; though it does not seem that he was ever shod by the devil and witch-ridden. "And this son," says Sir Walter Scott, in 1830, "was living so lately as to receive the charity of the present Marchioness of Stafford, Countess of Sutherland in her own right."

This, then, is the last execution for witchcraft in Scotland; and in June, 1736, the Acts Anentis Witchcraft were formally repealed. Henceforth, to the dread of the timid, and the anger of the pious, the English Parliament distinctly opposed the express letter of the Law of G.o.d, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live;" and declared the text upon which so much critical absurdity had been talked, and in support of which so much innocent blood had been shed, vain, superst.i.tious, impossible, and contrary to that human reason which is the highest law of G.o.d hitherto revealed unto men. But if Parliament could stay executions it could not remove beliefs, nor give rationality in place of folly. Not more than sixty years ago an old woman named Elizabeth M'Whirter[79] was "scratched"

by one Eaglesham, in the parish of Colmonel, Ayrs.h.i.+re, because his son had fallen sick, and the neighbours said he was bewitched. Poor old Bessie M'Whirter was forced over the hills to the young man's house, a distance of three miles, and there made to kneel by his bedside and repeat the Lord's Prayer. When she had finished, the youth's father took a rusty nail and scratched the poor old creature's brow in the form of a cross; scratched it so effectually that it was many weeks in healing, and the scar remained to the last day of her life. If Elizabeth M'Whirter had lived a generation earlier, she might have run a race with death and a tar barrel, and been defeated at the end, like the poor old wretch at Dornoch.

But still the old faith lingers in those beautiful vales, and hides in the fastnesses of the mountain glens; still brownies haunt the ruined places, and witches send forth blight and bale at their will; still the elfin people ride on the whirlwind and dance in the moonlight; and the hill and the flood and the brae and the streamlet have their attendant spirits which vie with the churchyard ghost in impotent malevolence to men. And the gift of second sight, though dying out because of these degenerate times of utilitarianism and power-loom weaving, is yet to be found where the old blood runs thickest, and the old ideas are least disturbed; and still the whole nation clings with spasmodic force to its gloomy creed of the Predestined and the Elect, and holds by the early faith from whose narrow bounds others have emerged into a brighter and a wider path. No more witch-fires are now lighted on the Castle Hill; no more grave and reverend divines give themselves up, like Mr. John Aird, to discovering the devil's mark stamped visibly on human flesh; yet the heart of the people has not abandoned its ancient G.o.d, and though the altars may be dressed with the flowers of another season, and the name upon the plinth be carved in other characters, yet is the indwelling idol the same. The G.o.d which Calvinistic Scotland yet wors.h.i.+ps is the same G.o.d as that to which the witches and wizards of old were sacrificed; he is the G.o.d of Superst.i.tion, the G.o.d of Condemnation, in whose temple Nature has no place, and Humanity no rights.

The Witches of England.

"Every old woman with a wrinkled face, a furr'd brow, a hairy lip, a gobber tooth, a squint eye, a squeaking voice, or a scolding tongue, having a ragged coate on her back, a skull-cap on her head, a spindle in her hand, and a Dog or Cat by her side, is not only suspected but p.r.o.nounced for a witch," says John Gaule;[80] while Reginald Scot[81] puts forth as his experience:--"One sort of such as are said to be witches, are women which be commonly old, lame, blear-eyed, pale, fowle, and full of wrinckles; poor, sullen, superst.i.tious, and Papists; or such as know no religion; in whose drousie minds the devill hath gotten a fine seat; so as, what mischief, mischance, calamity or slaughter is brought to pa.s.se, they are easily perswaded the same is done by themselves; imprinting in their minds an earnest and constant imagination thereof. They are leane and deformed, showing melancholy in their faces, to the horror of all that see them. They are doting, scolds, mad, devilish; and not much differing from them that are thought to be possessed with spirits, so firm and steadfast in their opinions, as whosoever shall only have respect to the constancy of their words uttered, would easily believe they were true indeed." Dr. Harsnet, in his "Declaration of Popish Impostures," gives the subject a masterly touch of common sense and satire:--"These things,"

saith he, "are raked together out of old doating Heathen Histriographers, Wizzardizing Augurs, Imposturizing Soothsayers, Dreaming Poets, Chimerical Conceiters, and Coiners of Fables, &c. Out of these is shap'd the true Idea of a _Witch_, an old weather-beaten Crone, having her Chin and Knees meeting for Age, walking like a Bow leaning on a Staff, Hollow-Ey'd, Untooth'd, Furrow'd on her Face, having her Lips trembling with the Palsy, going mumbling in the Streets: One that hath forgotten her Pater Noster, and yet hath a shrewd Tongue to call a Drab a Drab. If she hath learn'd of an old Wife in a Chimney End Pax, Max, Fax, for a Spell; or can say Sir John Grantham's Curse for the Miller's Eels, All ye that have stolen the Miller's Eels, laudate Dominum de Coelis: And all they that have consented thereto, Benedicamus Domino: Why then beware, look about you, my Neighbours. If any of you have a Sheep sick of the Giddies, or a Stag of the Mumps, or a Horse of the Staggers, or a Knavish Boy of the School, or an idle Girl of the Wheel, or a young Drab of the Sullens, and hath not Fat enough for her Porrage, or b.u.t.ter enough for her Bread, and she hath a little Help of the Epilepsy or Cramp, to teach her to roll her Eyes, wry her Mouth, gnash her Teeth, startle with her Body, hold her Arms and Hands stiff, &c. And then with an old Mother n.o.bs hath by Chance call'd her Idle young Housewife, or bid the Devil scratch her; then no doubt but Mother n.o.bs is the Witch, and the young Girl is Owl-blasted, &c." Then he goes on to say, with more force and right judgment than one could have expected from one of his generation:--"They that have their Brains baited, and their Fancies distemper'd with the Imaginations, and Apprehensions of Witches, Conjurers, and Fairies, and all that Lymphatical Chimaera, I find to be marshall'd in one of these five Ranks: Children, Fools, Women, Cowards, sick or black melancholick discompos'd Wits."

These then are the sentiments of three somewhat wise and sane men, who lived in a time of universal madness, and gave their minds to the task of stemming the raging torrent. For the whole world was overrun with witches.

From every town came crowds of these lost and d.a.m.ned souls; from every hovel peered out the cursing witch, or cried aloud for help the stricken victims. These poor and old and wretched beings, upon whose heads lighted the wrath of a world, and against whom every idle lad had a curse and a stone to fling at his will, were held capable of all but omnipotence. They could destroy the babe in the womb and make the "mother of many children childless among women;" they could kill with a look and disable with a curse; bring storms or suns.h.i.+ne as they listed; by their "witch-ropes,"

artfully woven, draw to themselves all the profit of their neighbours'

barns and breweries; yet ever remained poor and miserable, glad to beg a mouthful of meat, or a can of sour milk from the hands of those whom they could ruin by half a dozen muttered words; they could take on themselves what shapes they would, and transport themselves whither they would: no bolt or bar kept them out, no distance by land or sea was too great for them to accomplish; a straw--a broomstick--the serviceable imp ever at hand--was enough for them; and with a pot of magic ointment, and a charm of spoken gibberish, they might visit the king on his throne, or the lady in her bower, to do what ill was in their hearts against them, or to gather to themselves what gain and store they would. Yet with all this power the superst.i.tious world of the time saw nothing doubtful or illogical in the fact of their exceeding poverty, and never stayed to think that if they could transport themselves through the air to any distance they chose, they would be but slippery holding in prison, and not very likely to remain there for the pleasure of being tortured and burnt at the end. But neither reason nor logic had anything to do with the matter. The whole thing rested on fear, and that practical atheism of fear, which denies the power of G.o.d and the wholesome beauty of Nature, to exalt in their stead the supremacy of the Devil. This belief in the Devil's material presence and power over men was the dark chain that bound them all. Even the boldest opponent of the Witchcraft Delusion dared not fling it off; not the bravest man or freest thinker could shake his mind clear of this terrible trammel, this bugbear, this mere phantasm of human fear and ignorance, this ghastly lie and morbid delusion, or abandon the slavish wors.h.i.+p of Satan for the glad freedom of G.o.d and Nature. It was much when such men as Scot,[82] and Giffard,[83] and Gaule of Staughton,[84] Sir Robert Filmer,[85] Ady,[86] Wagstaffe,[87] Webster,[88]

Hutchinson,[89] and half a dozen more s.h.i.+ning lights could bring themselves to deny the supernatural power of a few half-crazed old beggar-women, and plead for humanity and mercy towards them, instead of cruelty and condemnation; but not one dare take the wider step beyond, and deny the existence of that phantom fiend, belief in whom wrought all this misery and despair. Even the very best of the time gave in to this delusion, and discussed gravely the properties and proportions of what we know now were mere lies.

"We find the ill.u.s.trious author of the 'Novum Organum' sacrificing to courtly suppleness his philosophic truth, and gravely prescribing the ingredients for a witch's ointment;--Selden maintaining that crimes of the imagination may be punished with death;--The detector of Vulgar Errors, and the most humane of physicians giving the casting vote to the vacillating bigotry of Sir Matthew Hale;--Hobbes, ever sceptical, penetrating, and sagacious, yet here paralyzed and shrinking from the subject, as if afraid to touch it;--The adventurous explorer, who sounded the depths and channels of the 'Intellectual System' along all the 'wide-watered' sh.o.r.es of antiquity, running after witches to hear them recite the Common Prayer and the Creed, as a rational test of guilt or innocence;--The gentle spirit of Dr. Henry More, girding on the armour of persecution, and rousing itself from a Platonic reverie on the Divine Life to a.s.sume the hood and cloak of a familiar of the Inquisition;--and the patient and inquiring Boyle, putting aside for a while his searches for the grand Magisterium, and listening, as if spell-bound, with gratified attention to stories of witches at Oxford and devils at Mascon."[90] In the Church and amongst the more notoriously "religious" men of the time it was worse. In Archbishop Cranmer's 'Articles of Visitation' (1549) is this clause:--"You shall enquire whether you know of any that use Charms, Sorcery, Enchantments, Soothsaying, or any like Craft invented by the Devil;" and Bishop Jewel, preaching before Queen Elizabeth (1558), informed her how that "witches and sorcerers within these last few years are marvellously increased in your Grace's realm. Your Grace's subjects pine away even unto their death, their colour fadeth, their flesh rotteth, their speech is benumbed, their senses are bereft; I pray G.o.d they never practise further than upon the subject.... These eyes have seen most evident and manifest marks of their wickedness." At the next Parliament the new Bill against the detestable sin of witchcraft was pa.s.sed, and Strype says, partly on account of the Lord Bishop's earnest objurgation.

Dalton's[91] 'Country Justice' (1655) shows to what a pa.s.s, a century later, witchcraft had come in credulous England. Truly Scot was right when he said that his greatest adversaries were "young ignorance and old customs." They have always been the greatest adversaries of all truth. Of late, thank G.o.d, the march of humanity has been steadily, if slowly, towards the daylight; but at present you and I, my reader, have to do with the most debasing superst.i.tion that ever afflicted history, in the matter of those poor wretched servants of the devil--those witches and wizards, who somehow managed to lose on all sides--to suffer in time and be ruined for eternity, and to get only ill-will and ill-usage from man and fiend alike.

THE WITCH OF BERKELEY.

One of our earliest English witches, so early indeed that she becomes mythical and misty and out of all possible proportion, was the celebrated Witch of Berkeley,[92] who got the reward of her sins in the middle of the ninth century, leaving behind her a tremendous lesson, by which, however, after generations did not much profit. The witch had been rich and the witch had been gay, but the moment of reckoning had to come in the morning; the feast had been n.o.ble and well enjoyed, but the terrible account had to be paid when all was over; and the poor witch found her ruddy-cheeked apple, now that the rind was off and eaten, filled with nothing but dust and ashes--which she must digest as best she may. As the moment of her death approached, she called for the monks and the nuns of the neighbouring monasteries, and sent for her children to hear her confession; and then she told them of the compact she had made, and how the Devil was to come for her body as well as her soul. "But," said she, "sew me in the hide of a stag, then place me in a stone coffin, and fasten in the covering lead and iron. Upon this place another stone, and chain the whole down with heavy chains of iron. Let fifty psalms be sung each night, and fifty ma.s.ses be said by day, to break the power of the demons.

If you can thus keep my body for three nights safe, on the fourth day you may bury it--the Devil will have sought and not found." The monks and the nuns did as they were desired; and, on the first night, though the demons kept up a loud howling and wailing outside the church, the priests conquered, and the old witch slept undisturbed. On the second night the demons were more fierce and clamorous, and the monks and the nuns told their beads faster and faster; but the fiends were getting more powerful as time went on, and at last broke open the gates of the monastery, in spite of prayer and bolt and bar; and two chains of the coffin burst asunder, but the middle one held firm. On the third night the fiends raged sore and wild. The monastery was shaken to its foundations, and the monks and the nuns almost forgot their paters and their aves in the uproar that drowned their voices and quailed their hearts; but they still went on, until, with an awful crash, and a yell from all the smaller demons about, a Devil, larger and more terrible than any that had come yet, stalked into the church and up to the foot of the altar, where the old woman and her coffin lay. Here he stopped, and bade the witch rise and follow him.

Piteously she answered that she could not--she was kept down by the chain in the middle: but the Devil soon settled that difficulty; for he put his foot to the coffin, and broke the iron chain like a bit of burnt thread.

Then off flew the covering of lead and iron, and there lay the witch, pale and horrible to see. Slowly she uprose, blue, dead, stark, as she was; and then the Devil took her by the hand, and led her to the door where stood a gigantic black horse, whose back was all studded with iron spikes, and whose nostrils, breathing fire, told of his infernal manger below. The Devil vaulted into the saddle, flung the witch on before him, and off and away they rode--the yells of the clamouring demons, and the shrieks of the tortured soul, sounding for hours, far and wide, in the ears of the monks and the nuns. So here too, in this legend, as in all the rest, the Devil is greater than G.o.d, and prayer and penitence inefficacious to redeem iniquity.

EARLY HISTORIC TRIALS.

Coming out from these purely legendary times, we find ourselves on the more solid ground of an actual legal record--the 'Abbreviatio Placitorum;'[93] which informs us that in the tenth year of King John's reign, "Agnes, the wife of Odo the merchant, accused Gideon of sorcery (de sorceria), and she was acquitted by the judgment of the (hot) iron." This is the earliest historic trial to be found in any legal doc.u.ment in England. Nothing more appears until 1324, when two Coventry men,[94]

specially appointed out of twenty-seven implicated, undertook the slaying of the King, Edward II., the two Dispensers his favourites, the Prior of Coventry, his caterer and his steward, because they had oppressed the town, and dealt unrighteously with its inhabitants. These two men went to a famous necromancer then living in Coventry, called Master John of Nottingham, whom, with his servant Robert Marshall of Leicester, they engaged to perform the work required. But Robert Marshall proved faithless, and betrayed his master to the authorities; telling them how they had received a sum of money for the work in hand, with which sum of money they had bought seven pounds of wax and two yards of canvas, to make seven images--six for the six already enumerated, the seventh for one Richard de Lowe, who had done no one any harm, but on whom they wished to try the effect of the spell, as a modern anatomist would try his experiments on cats, or dogs, or rabbits. He told them how he and Master John of Nottingham had been to a ruined house under Shorteley Park, about half a league from Coventry, where they remained at work from the Monday after the Feast of Saint Nicholas to the Sat.u.r.day after the Feast of Ascension, making these images of wax and canvas by which they were to bewitch their n.o.ble enemies to death. And first, to try the potency of the charm, Master John took a long leaden pin, and struck it two inches deep into the forehead of the image representing Richard de Lowe, upon which Richard was found writhing and in great pain, screaming "harrow!" and having no knowledge of any man; and so he languished for some days. Then Master John drew out the leaden pin from the brow, and struck it into the heart of the image, when immediately Richard de Lowe died, as any number of witnesses could testify. The necromancer and his man, and the twenty-seven Coventry men implicated in this bit of sorcery, were tried at common law, and acquitted for want of evidence.

That same year, too, occurred one of the most picturesque trials for witchcraft known: the trial of Dame Alice Kyteler, which Mr. Wright, with so much industry and learning, has exhumed from the dusty old records where it was buried, and set out into the light of present knowledge and apprehension. But Dame Alice was an Irishwoman, and so does not rightly come into a book on English witches; else it would be a pleasant, if sad, labour to tell how she was arrested on the charge of holding nightly conferences with her spirit or familiar, Artisson, who was sometimes a cat, and sometimes a black s.h.a.ggy dog, and sometimes a black man with two tall black companions, each carrying an iron rod in his hand--to which fiendish Proteus she had sacrificed, in the highway, nine red c.o.c.ks, and nine peac.o.c.ks' eyes; and also for having, between complines and twilight, raked all the filth of Kilkenny streets to the doors of her son-in-law William Outlawe, murmuring to herself--

"To the house of William, my sonne, Hie all the wealth of Kilkennie towne."

Of how, too, she blasphemously travestied the holy sacrament, having a wafer with the Devil's name stamped on it instead of Christ's; and how she had a pipe of ointment wherewith she greased a staff "upon which she ambolled and gallopped thorough thicke and thin, when and what manner she listed." But it does not belong to my present subject: nor to tell how one of her accomplices, poor weak Petronilla de Meath, was burnt at Kilkenny, not having strength or courage to resist the monstrous confession forced upon her; but how the other, Basil, escaped, according to the natural law by which the strongest always come off the best. Perhaps the fact that Dame Alice took refuge in England may give her a slight claim to a place in these pages; but the question is doubtful, so we must let her go--as also her son-in-law, William Outlawe, whose strict imprisonment of nine weeks led to no bad result, and, let us hope, cooled his blood, which was a trifle too near to boiling point.

Then we stumble over the threshold of the chamber where Friars Bacon and Bungay are sleeping, while stupid Miles is watching the Brazen Head whose brief solemn words were spoken in vain; going forward just a few paces until we come to the death-beds of Bungay and Vandermast, and Friar Bacon's clever cheating of the Devil at last. But we are still on the outskirts of legendary land, and must go on to the middle of the fourteenth century before we get a firm hold. About this time the subject of witchcraft occupied much of the attention and thought of the Church, but the priests had not yet quite closed their fingers round it; for in 1371 a man was arrested for sorcery, and "brought before the justices of the King's Bench, by whom he was acquitted for want of evidence, which shows that it was still looked upon merely as an offence against common law."[95] It was only when it became the superst.i.tion which some men are pleased to call "religion" that it got stained with its deepest dyes.

Early in 1406 Henry IV. gave instructions to the Bishop of Norwich to search for the sorcerers, witches, and necromancers reported to be rather rife in that respectable diocese, and if he could not convert them from the evil of their ways, he was to bring them to speedy punishment; and in 1432 the Privy Council ordered to be seized and examined a Franciscan friar of Worcester, by name Thomas Northfield; another friar, John Ashwell; John Virley "a clerk;" and Margery Jourdemaine--the same Margery generally called the Witch of Eye, who, nine years later, was burnt at Smithfield for her complicity in the treasonable practices of Dame Eleanor of Gloucester. In 1441 Dame Eleanor herself was arrested, and "put in holt, for she was suspecte of treason;" and with her the Witch of Eye, who was burnt; and Roger, a clerk "longing to her," who was placed on a high scaffold against St. Paul's Cross on the Sunday, and there "arraied like as he should never thrive in his garnementys;" while heaped up round about were all his instruments taken with him, to be showed among the people, and create a proper fear and horror in their mind. The end of poor Roger the clerk was, that he was dragged from the Tower to Tyburn, there hanged, beheaded, and quartered; his head set on London Bridge, and his four quarters sent--one to Hereford, and one to Oxenford, another to York, and the fourth to Cambrigge. As for Dame Eleanor, that proud, dark, unscrupulous heroine of romance, every one knows the story of her disgrace and shame; how she came from London to Westminster, and walked through the streets of the city barefooted and bareheaded, carrying the waxen taper of two pounds' weight, and doing penance before all the crowd of citizens a.s.sembled to see her "on her foot and hoodles;" and how she offered up her taper on the high altar of "Poules;" and when all was done, was sent to Chester prison, "there to byde while she lyveth."

After her, in 1478, comes "the high and n.o.ble princesse Jaquet," d.u.c.h.ess of Bedford, charged with having, by the aid of "an image of lede, made lyke a man of arms, conteyning the length of a mannes fynger, and broken in the myddes, and made fast with a wyre," turned the love of King Edward IV. from one Dame Elianor b.u.t.teler daughter of the old Earl of Shrewsbury, to whom he was affianced, unto her own child, Elizabeth Grey, sometime wife to Sir John Grey, knight; and in 1483 poor Jane Sh.o.r.e was bound to do penance, walking bareheaded and barefooted, clad only in her kirtle, carrying a wax taper, and acknowledging her sins, because Richard of Gloucester had a withered arm, and wanted to put a few enemies out of the way of that arm and its desires. He employed the same accusation against many of those enemies, but so patently for political motives and without even the semblance of reason, that these attainders can scarcely be set down in any manner to the charge of witchcraft. Then in 1484 came the bull of Innocent VIII., which gave authority to the inquisitors to "convict, imprison, and punish" the unfortunate servants of the Devil, who thus found themselves a mark for every one's shaft.

In Henry the Eighth's time treasure-seeking was the most fas.h.i.+onable phase of necromancy. There was Neville of Wolsey's household, who consulted Wood--gentleman, magician, and treasure-seeker extraordinary--but only for a charm or magic ring which should bring him into favour with his prince, saying that his master the Cardinal had such an one, and he would fain partic.i.p.ate; and he did at last get Wood to make him one that would bring him the love of women. Wood could find treasures wherever hidden, and was sure of the philosopher's stone; nay, he would "chebard" (jeopard) his life but that he could make gold as he listed, and offered to remain in prison till he had accomplished it, "twelve months on silver and twelve and a half on gold." In this same reign, too, was arrested William Stapleton for sorcery. William[96] was a monk of St. Benet in the Holm, Norfolk, and William loved not his monkish life; so he got out, seeking money to buy his dispensation. And not having the money at hand himself, nor knowing how to get it, he took to treasure-seeking as the easiest manner open to him of making a fortune. But his conjurations and his magic staff only led him to some Roman remains, and nothing more; so he borrowed of a friend instead, then settled in Norfolk, and turned to treasure-seeking again, uselessly; got into intrigues that did him no good; and had three spirits, Andrea Malchus, Inchubus, and Oberion--the last a dumb devil who would not speak, being in the service of my Lord Cardinal.

In 1521 the Duke of Buckingham died on the scaffold, led into some imprudent actions by the predictions of his familiar magician, one friar Hopkins; and Hopkins, to make amends, died broken-hearted shortly after.

And there was the Maid of Kent (1534), Elizabeth Barton, who had trances and gave revelations, and was on intimate terms with Mary Magdalen and the Virgin, and who was probably a "sensitive" made use of by the Catholics to try and frighten the King from his marriage with the "gospel eyes;" but poor Elizabeth Barton came to a sad pa.s.s with her revelations and trances; and Mary Magdalen, who had given her a letter written in heaven and all of gold, forgot to forewarn or s.h.i.+eld her from her cruel and shameful end at Tyburn that cloudy fitful day of April, with the gallows standing out against the flecked sky, and the poor raving nun, half-enthusiast half-impostor, praying bareheaded at its foot--she and her accomplices waiting for the moment to die.

In 1541 we find a n.o.bler name on the scaffold--Lord Hungerford--"beheaded for procuring certain persons to conspire that they might know how long Henry VIII. would live;" and that same year an Act was pa.s.sed against false prophecies, and another against conjurations, witchcraft, and sorcery, making it felony without benefit of clergy. But six years later Edward VI. abrogated that statute; not for any tenderness to witches, but because with it was bound up a prohibition against pulling down crosses.

In 1549 Ket's rebellion was troublesome; its vigour due partly to the old prophecy repeated through the plains of Norfolk--

"Hob, Dic, and Hic, with Clubs and clouted Shoon, Shall fill up Duffin-dale with slaughtered Bodies soon."

And then we come to nothing more until 1559, when Elizabeth "renewed the same article of inquiry for sorcerers," but punis.h.i.+ng the first conviction only with the pillory. The following year eight men were taken up for conjurations and sorcery, and tried at Westminster, where they had to purge themselves by confession, penitence, and a repudiating oath. In 1562 the Earl and Countess of Lennox, Anthony Pool, Anthony Fortescue, and some others, were condemned for treason and meddling with sorcerers; though, indeed, Elizabeth herself was not free from either the superst.i.tion or its practice; for did she not patronize Dr. Dee and his "skryer" John Kelly, with his ranting about Madimi in her gown of "changeable sey," and all the other spirits who came in and out of the "show-stone," and talked just the same kind of rubbish as spirits talk now in modern circles? But the poor "figure-flinger, with his tin pictures," was a sorcerer not to be protected, so got tried and condemned--poor figure-flinger!

In 1562, the year of Lady Lennox's business, a new Act against witchcraft was pa.s.sed; and in 1589 one Mrs. Deir practised conjuration against the Queen, for which she was tried, but acquitted for want of evidence; but the Queen had excessive anguish in her teeth that year, by night and by day. When Ferdinand Earl of Derby died, about this time, of perpetual and unceasing sickness, a waxen image was found in his chamber stuffed with hair the exact colour of his; which sufficiently accounted for his illness and the mysterious manner of his death, though a Sadducee and sceptic might have whispered of poison, or a physician have spoken of cholera; from which disease indeed, by the minute symptoms so carefully detailed, the poor earl's death seems to have been--if not from poison, which might have produced the same effects. Still, the accusation of sorcery was so convenient--such a cloak for viler sins! The latter half of Elizabeth's reign was disgraced by many witch persecutions, for the subject was beginning to attract painful notice now; and, though it was not till James I. had set the smouldering fragments all a-blaze that the worst of the evils were done, still enough was doing now for the philosopher to deplore and the humanitarian to lament. In 1575 many were hanged at Barking; in 1579 three were executed at Chelmsford, four at Abingdon, and two at Cambridge. In 1582 thirteen at St. Osith's, the evidence against one being that she had been heard to talk to something when alone in her house; while of the other, a woman swore that she looked through her window one day, when she was out, and there "espied a spirite to looke out of a potcharde from under a clothe, the nose thereof being browne like unto a ferret." In 1585 one was hanged at Tyburn and one at Stanmore; 1589 saw three sent into eternity at Chelmsford; in 1593 we have the witches of Warbois; and two years later (1595) three at Barnet and Brainford; in 1597 several at Derby and Stafford; so that by degrees the thing came to be a notorious matter of social life; and the poor and the aged and the disliked lived in fear and peril, daily increasing. At this time, too, possessions were many and ghosts walked abroad without let or hindrance.

Richard Lee saw one at Canterbury (1575), and Master Gaymore and others saw another at Rye two years after. "But," says Reginald Scot, "certainely some one knave in a white sheet hath cosened and abused many thousands that way, specially when Robin Goodfellow kept such a coile in the Country. For you shall understand that these bugs specially are spied and feared of sicke folke, children, women, and cowards, which, through weaknesse of minde and body, are shaken with vain dreames and continuall fear. The Scythians, being a stout and a warlike nation, as divers writers report, never see any vaine sights, or spirits. It is a common saying, a Lion feareth no bugs. But in our childhood our mothers' maids have so terrified us with an ugly devil having hornes on his head, fire in his mouth, and a taile at his back, eyes like a bason, fanges like a dog, clawes like a beare, a skinne like a Niger, and a voice roring like a Lion, whereby we start and are afraid when we hear one cry Bough; they have so fraied us with bullbeggars, spirits, urchens, elves, hags, fairies, satyrs, pans, fauns, sylens (syrens?), kit with the cansticke, tritons, centaures, dwarfes, giants, imps, calcats, conjurors, nymphes, changelings, incubus, Robin Goodfellow, the spoorn, the mare, the man in the oke, the h.e.l.l-waine, the firedrake, the puckle, Tom thombe, hob-gobbin, Tom tumbler, boneles, and such other bugs, that we are afraid of our own shadowes; insomuch as some never fear the devil, but in a dark night; and then a polled sheep is a perillous beast, and many times is taken for our father's soul, specially in a churchyard, where a right hardy man heretofore scant durst pa.s.se by night, but his haire would stand upright. For right grave writers report, that spirits most often and specially take the shape of women, appearing to monks, &c., and of beasts, dogs, swine, horses, goats, cats, haires, of fowles, as crowes, night owles and shreek owles; but they delight most in the likenesse of snakes and dragons." All of which "wretched and cowardly infidelity" was rampant in England when good Queen Bess ruled the land--rampant doubly, so that there was no holding in of this furious madness after James I. had got his foot in the stirrup, and was riding a race neck and neck with the Devil.

But I must turn back a few years, and tell of

THE AFFLICTIONS OF ALEXANDER NYNDGE,

a precious babe of grace s.n.a.t.c.hed from destruction. They are to be found in 'A Booke declaring the fearfull vexation of one Alexander Nyndge, Beynge moste Horriblye tormented wyth an euyll spirit, the xx. daie of Januarie. In the yere of our Lorde 1573, at Lyeringswell in Suffolke;' and this book sets forth the details of the various fits which Alexander Nyndge indulged in, for the purpose, as it seems, of enabling his brother Edward to prove his power of exorcism. His first fit began one evening at seven--his father, mother, brothers, and the residue of the household being present; his chest and body swelled, his eyes stared wildly as if starting from their sockets, his back bent inward: the household was disturbed and sore affrighted, but brother Edward had courage enough to say that it was an evil spirit, and undertook to exorcise it. So he charged the foul fiend to come out of him, and the countenance of his brother became more sad and fearful than it was before. Edward was not dismayed but returned to the conflict full of confidence, not giving in even when Alexander and the devil had a wrestle together; or rather when the devil within him seemed as if he would have torn him to pieces, so great was his rage and malice. After some time of this kind of work, Edward got the devil to confess to one or two little matters. In the first place his name was Aubon, and he came last from Ireland; he had come for Alexander's soul, which his brother was not disposed to give up; and by a strange slip of the tongue he called Christ _his_ Redeemer: but Edward rebuked him, as became a learned M.A., reminding him that He was Alexander's Redeemer in truth, but not his, the foul fiend's. Even this palpable blunder did not enlighten the Nyndge household as to whose was really the "hollow ghostly" voice proceeding out of Alexander's chest. At last, when Edward had tired him very much, and powerfully shaken him, he said, gruffly, "Bawe wawe, bawe wawe!" and Alexander was transformed, "much like a picture in a play," while a terrible roaring voice sounded "h.e.l.lsownd." Then they opened the windows to allow the foul spirit to escape; and in two minutes Alexander leaped up joyfully, crying, "He is gone! he is gone!" After this he had a second, and then a third, attack; but his brother, praying in his right ear, comforted him and finally cured him, for he was never after tormented. Luckily he had not fixed upon any unhappy old woman as the cause of his disorder, so it pa.s.sed for a case of simple "possession," which prayer and supplication had overcome.

ADE DAVIE'S MOURNING.[97]

Ade Davie, wife of Simon Davie husbandman, had a wiser man for her husband, simple and unlearned as he was, than had many a wretched creature for her judge. Ade suddenly became sad and pensive as she never had been in times past. Her husband did his best to cheer her, but Ade still continued sorrowful; when, at last her burden grew heavier than she could bear, falling down at Simon's feet she besought him to forgive her, for that she had grievously offended both G.o.d and him. "Her poor husband being abashed at this her behaviour, comforted her as he could; asking her the cause of her trouble and greefe; who told him that she had, contrary to G.o.d's law, and to the offence of all good Christians, to the injury of him, and specially to the losse of her own soul, bargained and given her soul to the devill, to be delivered unto him within short s.p.a.ce. Whereunto her husband answered, saying, 'Wife, be of good cheer, this thy bargain is void and of none effect; for thou hast sold that which is none of thine to sell: sith it belongeth to Christ, who hath bought it, and dearly paid for it, even with his blood, which he shed upon the crosse; so as the devil hath no interest in thee.' After this, with like submission, teares, and penitence, she said unto him, 'Oh, husband, I have yet committed another fault, and done you more injury; for I have bewitched you and four children.' 'Be content,' quoth he, 'by the grace of G.o.d, Jesus Christ can unwitch us; for none evill can happen to them that fear G.o.d.'"