To various conspicuous and easily intelligible causes the witch and the warlock, like the necromancer and the astrologer, owed their power with the multitude. First, there was the eager desire which humanity not unnaturally feels to tear aside the veil of Isis, and obtain some knowledge of that Other World which is hidden so completely from it. Next must be taken into account man’s greed for temporal advantages, his anxiety to direct the course of events to his personal benefit; and, lastly, his malice against his fellows. Thus we see that the influence enjoyed by the sorcerer and the magician had its origin in the unlawful passions of humanity, in whose history the pages that treat of witches and witchcraft are painful and humiliating reading. To define the limit between the special functions of the magician and the witch is somewhat difficult, more especially as the position of the witch gradually decreased in reputation and importance. There is a great gulf between the witch of Endor, or the witch of classical antiquity, or the witch of the Norse Sagas, While witchcraft was a power in the land, the witch, or warlock, was popularly supposed to be the direct instrument, and, indeed, the bond-slave, of the Evil One, fulfilling his behests in virtue of a compact, written in letters of blood, by which the witch made over her soul to the Infernal Power in return for the enjoyment of supernatural prerogatives for a fixed period. This treaty having been concluded, the witch received a mark on some part of the body, which was thenceforward insensible of pain—the stigma or devil’s mark, by which he might know his own again. A familiar imp or spirit was assigned to This wild and awful revel was called the Sabbat because it took place after midnight on Friday; that is, on the Jewish Sabbath—a curious illustration of the popular antipathy against the Jews. The spot where it was held never bloomed again with flower or herb; the burning feet of the demons blighted it for ever. Witch or warlock who failed to obey the summons The guests repaired thither, according to the belief entertained in France and England, upon broomsticks; but in Spain and Italy it was thought that the devil himself, in the shape of a goat, conveyed them on his back, which he contracted or elongated according to the number he carried. The witch, when starting on her aerial journey, would not quit her house by door or window; but astride on her broomstick made her exit by the chimney. During her absence, to prevent the suspicions of her neighbours from being aroused, an inferior demon assumed the semblance of her person, and lay in her bed, pretending to be ill or asleep. A curious story may here be introduced. In April, 1611, a ProvenÇal curÉ, named Gaurifidi, was accused of sorcery before the Parliament of Aix. In the course of trial much was said in proof of the power of the demons. Several witnesses asserted that Gaurifidi, after rubbing himself with a magic oil, repaired to the Sabbat, and afterwards returned to his chamber down the chimney. One day, when this sort of thing was exciting the imagination of the judges, an extraordinary noise was heard in the chimney of the hall, terminating suddenly in the apparition of a tall black man, who shook his head vigorously. The judges, thinking the devil had come in person to the rescue of his servant, took to their heels, with the exception of one Thorm, the The unclean ceremonies of the Witches’ Sabbat were ‘inaugurated’ by Satan, who, in his favourite assumption of a huge he-goat (a suggestion, no doubt, from Biblical imagery), with one face in front, and another between his haunches, took his place upon his throne. After all present had done homage by kissing him on the posterior face, he appointed a master of the ceremonies, and, attended by him, made a personal examination of any guest to ascertain if he or she bore the stigma, which indicated his right of ownership. Any who were found without it received the mark at once from the master of the ceremonies, while the devil bestowed on them a nickname. Thereafter all began to dance and sing with wild extravagance— ‘There is no rest to-night for anyone: When one dance ends another is begun’— until some neophyte arrived, and sought admission into the circle of the initiated. Silence prevailed ‘Alegremos, alegremos, Que gente va tenemos!’ When spent with the violent exercise, they sat down, and, like the witches in ‘Macbeth,’ related the evil things each had done since the last Sabbat, those who had not been sufficiently active being chastised by Satan himself until they were drenched in blood. A dance of toads was the next entertainment. They sprang up out of the earth by thousands, and danced on their hind-legs while Satan played on the bagpipes or the trumpet, after which they solicited the witches to reward them for their exertions by feeding them with the flesh of unbaptized babes. Was there ever a more curious mixture of the grotesque and the horrible? At a stamp from the devil’s foot they returned to the earth whence they came, and a banquet was served up, the nature of which the reader may be left to imagine! Dancing was afterwards resumed, while those who had no partiality for the pastime found amusement in burlesquing the sacrament of baptism, the toads being again summoned and sprinkled with holy water, while the devil made the sign of the cross, and the witches cried out in chorus: ‘In nomine PatricÂ, Aragueaco Patrica, agora, agora! Valentia, jurando gome guito goustia!’ that is, ‘In the name of Patrick, Patrick of Aragon now, now, all our ills are over!’ One cannot help wondering who first conceived the idea of these horrid saturnalia. Did it spring from the diseased imagination of some half-mad monk, brooding in the solitude of his silent cell, who gathered up all these unclean and grim images and worked them into so ghastly a picture? They are partly heathen, partly Christian; partly classical, partly Teutonic—a strange and unwholesome compound, as ‘thick and slab’ as the hell-broth mixed by the hags on ‘the blasted heath’! In these pages I am concerned only with our own ‘tight little island,’ into which the superstition was most certainly introduced by the northern invaders. It would derive strength and consistency from the teaching of the Old Testament, which distinctly recognises the existence of witchcraft. ‘Let not a witch live!’ is the command given in Exodus (chapter xxii.); and similar threats against witches, wizards and the like frequently occur in the books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy. Says Sir William Blackstone: ‘To deny the possibility, nay, the actual existence of witchcraft and sorcery, is at once flatly to contradict the revealed Word of God in various passages of the Old and New Testaments, and the thing itself is a truth to which every nation in the world hath, in its turn, borne testimony, either by It is in the twelfth century that we first obtain, in England, any distinct indications of the nature of this superstition, and it is then we first meet with the written compact between the devil and his victim. The story of the old woman of Berkeley, with which Southey’s ballad has made everybody familiar, is related by William of Malmesbury, on the authority of a friend who professed to have been an eye-witness of the facts. When the devil, we read, announced to the witch that the term of her compact had nearly expired, she summoned to her presence the monks of the neighbouring monastery and her children, confessed her sins, acknowledged her criminal compact, and displayed a curious anxiety lest Satan should secure her body as well as her soul. ‘Sew me in a stag’s hide,’ she said, ‘and, placing me in a stone coffin, shut me in with lead and iron. Load this with a heavy stone, and fasten down the whole with three iron chains. Let fifty psalms be sung by night, and fifty masses be said by day, to baffle the power of the demons, and if you can thus protect my body There are many allusions in the old monastic chronicles which illustrate the development of public opinion in reference to witches and their craft. Thus, John of Salisbury describes the nocturnal assemblies of the witches, the presence of Satan, the banquet, and the punishment or reward of the guests according to the failure or abundance of their zeal. William of Malmesbury tells us that on the highroad to Rome The first trial for witchcraft in England occurred in the tenth year of King John, when, as recorded in the ‘Abbreviatio Placitorum,’ Agnes, wife of Ado the merchant, accused one Gideon of the crime; but he proved his innocence by the ordeal of red-hot iron. The first trial which has been reported with any degree of particularity belongs to the year 1324. The two wizards retired to an old ruined house at Shorteley Park, about half a league from Coventry, where they remained at work for several days, and about midnight on the Friday following Holy Cross Day, the said Master John gave to the said Robert a sharp-pointed leaden branch, and commanded him to insert it about two inches deep in the forehead of the image representing Richard de Lowe, this being intended as an experiment. It was done, and next Wonderful stories are told by the later chroniclers of a certain Eudo de Stella, who had acquired great notoriety as a sorcerer. William of Newbury says that his ‘diabolical charms’ collected a large company of disciples, whom he carried with him from place to place, adding to their number wherever he stopped. At times he encamped in the heart of a wood, where sumptuous tables were suddenly spread with all kinds of dainty dishes and fragrant wines, and every wish breathed by the meanest guest was immediately fulfilled. Some of Eudo’s followers, however, confided to our authority that there was a strange want of solidity in these magically-supplied viands, and that though they ate of them continually, they were never satisfied. But it appears that whoever once tasted of the sorcerer’s meats, or received from him a gift, thereby became enrolled among his followers. And the chronicler supplies this irrefutable proof: A knight of his acquaintance paid a visit to the wizard, The trial of Dame Alicia Kyteler, or Le Poer, takes us across the seas, but it furnishes too many interesting particulars to be entirely ignored. Hutchinson informs us that, in 1324, Bishop de Ledrede, of Ossory, in the course of a visitation of his diocese, came to learn that, in the city of Kilkenny, there had long resided certain persons addicted to various kinds of witchcraft; and that the chief offender among them was a Dame Alicia Kyteler. As she was a woman of considerable wealth, which might prove of great benefit to the Church, the episcopal zeal blazed up strongly, and she and her accomplices were ordered to be put upon their trial. The accusation against them was divided into seven distinct heads: First: That, in order to give effect to their sorcery, they were wont altogether to deny the faith of Christ and of the Church for a year or month, according as the object to be attained was greater or less, so that during this longer or shorter period they believed in nothing that the Church believed, and abstained from ‘To the house of William my son, Hie all the wealth of Kilkenny town.’ The lady, rejoicing in powerful friends and advisers, defied the Bishop and all his works. She was excommunicated, and her son summoned to appear before the Bishop for the offence of harbouring and concealing her; but Dame Alice’s friends retaliated by throwing the Bishop into prison for several days. He revenged himself by placing the whole diocese under an interdict, and again summoning William Outlawe to appear on a certain day; but before the day arrived, he in his turn was cited before the Lord Justice, to answer for having imposed an interdict on his diocese, and to defend himself against accusations submitted by the seneschal. The Bishop pleaded that it was unsafe for him to travel; but the plea was not allowed, and, to save himself from further molestation, he recalled the interdict. The quarrel was not yet fought out. On the Monday following the octave of Easter, the seneschal, Arnold de la Poer, held his judicial court in the Assize Hall at Kilkenny. Thither repaired the Bishop, and, though refused admission, he forced his ‘Go to the church with your decretals,’ replied the seneschal, ‘and preach there, for none of us here will listen to you.’ In the Bishop’s character there must have been a fine strain of perseverance, for all these rebuffs failed to baffle him, and he actually succeeded, after a succession of disappointments and a constant renewal of difficulties, in obtaining permission to bring the alleged offenders to trial. Most of them suffered imprisonment; but Dame Alice escaped him, being secretly conveyed to England. Of all concerned in the affair, only one was punished: Petronella of By order of the Bishop she was six times flogged, after which the poor tortured victim made a confession, in which she declared not only her own guilt, but that of everybody against whom the Bishop had proceeded. She affirmed that in all Britain, nay, indeed, in the whole world, was no one more skilled in magical practices than Dame Alice Kyteler. She was brought to admit the truth—though in her heart she must have known its absolute falsehood It is worthy of observation that the mind of the public was roused to a much stronger feeling of hostility against witchcraft than against magic. Alchemists, astrologers, fortune-tellers, diviners, and the like, might incur suspicion, and sometimes punishment; but, on the whole, they were treated with tolerance, and even with distinction. For this inequality of treatment two or three reasons suggest themselves. In the crime of witchcraft the central feature was the compact with the demon, and it was natural that men should resent an act which entailed the eternal loss of the soul. Again, witchcraft, much more frequently than magic, was the instrument of personal ill-feeling, and was more generally directed against the lower classes. The magician seldom used his power except when liberally paid by an employer; the witch, it was thought, exercised her skill for the gratification of her own malice. However this may be, an imputation of witchcraft became, in the fifteenth century, a formidable affair, ensuring the death or ruin of the unfortunate individual against whom it was made. There was no little difficulty in defending one’s self; and in truth, once made, it clung to its victim like a Nessus’s shirt, and with a result as deadly. The Cardinal struck at the Duke through his beautiful wife, Eleanor Cobham. In July, 1441, two ecclesiastics, Roger Bolingbroke, and Thomas Southwell, a canon of St. Stephen’s Chapel, were arrested on a charge of high treason; ‘for it was said that the said Master Roger should labour to consume the King’s person by way of necromancy; and that the said Master Thomas should say masses upon certain instruments with the which the said Master Roger should use his said craft of necromancy.’ Bolingbroke was a scholar, an adept in natural science, and an ardent student of astronomy: William of Worcester describes him as one of the most famous clerks of the world. One Sunday, after having undergone rigorous examination, he was conveyed to St. Paul’s Cross, where he was mounted ‘on a high stage above all men’s heads in Paul’s Churchyard, whiles the sermon endured, holding a sword in his right hand and a sceptre in his left, arrayed in a marvellous array, wherein he was wont to sit when he wrought his necromancy.’ The Duchess of Gloucester, meanwhile, perceiving that her ruin was intended, fled to sanctuary at Westminster. Before the King’s Council Bolingbroke was brought to confess that he had plied his magical trade at the Duchess’s instigation, ‘to know After this, he and Southwell were indicted as principals of treason, and the Duchess as accessory, though, if his story were true, their positions should have been reversed. At the same time, a woman named Margery Goodman, and known as the ‘Witch of Eye,’ was burned at Smithfield because in former days she had given potions and philtres to Eleanor Cobham, to enable her to secure the Duke of Gloucester’s affections. Roger Bolingbroke was hung, drawn, and quartered, according to the barbarous custom of the age; Southwell escaped a similar fate by dying in the Tower before the day appointed for his trial. The charge of high treason brought against them rested entirely on the allegation that, at the Duchess’s request, they had made a waxen image to resemble the King, and had placed it before a fire, that, as The charge of sorcery which Richard III. brought against Lord Hastings, accusing him of having wasted his left arm, though from his birth it had been fleshless, dry, and withered, is made the basis of an effective scene in Shakespeare’s ‘Richard III.’ His brother’s widow, Queen Elizabeth Woodville, was included in the charge, and Jane Shore was named as her accomplice. This frail beauty was brought before the Council, and accused of having ‘endeavoured the ruin and destruction of the Protector in several ways,’ and particularly ‘by witchcraft had decayed his body, and with the Lord Hastings had contrived to assassinate him.’ The indictment, however, was not In 1480 Pope Innocent VIII. issued a Bull enjoining the detection, trial, and punishment (by burning) of witches. This was the first formal recognition of witchcraft by the head of the Church. In England the first Act of Parliament levelled at it was passed in 1541. Ten years later two more statutes were enacted, one relating to false prophecies, and the other to conjuration, witchcraft and sorcery. But in no one of these was witchcraft condemned qua witchcraft; they were directed against those who, by means of spells, incantations, or compacts with the devil, threatened the lives and properties of their neighbours. When, in 1561, Sir Edward Waldegrave, one of Mary Stuart’s councillors, was arrested by order of Secretary Cecil as ‘a mass-monger,’ the Bishop of London, to whom he was remitted, felt no disposition to inflict a heavy penalty for hearing or saying of mass; but, on inquiry, he discovered that the ‘Ung homme fut prinse en Southwark avec ung teste et ung visaige dung homme morte avec ung lyvre de sorcerie en son male et fut amesnÉ en banke du Roy devant Knyvet Justice, mais nulle indictment fut vers lui, por qui les clerkes luy fierement jurement que jamais ne feroit sorcerie en aprÈs, et fut delyvon del prison, et le teste et les lyvres furent arses a Totehyll a les costages du prisonnier.’ (That is: A man was taken in Southwark, with a dead man’s skull and a book of sorcery in his wallet, and was brought up at the King’s Bench before Knyvet Justice; but no indictment was laid against him, for that the clerks made him swear he would meddle no more with sorcery, and the head and the books were burnt at Tothill Fields at the prisoner’s charge.) But in the following year Parliament passed an Act which defined witchcraft as a capital crime, whether it was or was not exerted to the injury of the lives, limbs, and possessions of the lieges. Thenceforward the persecution of witches took its place among English institutions. During the latter years of Elizabeth’s reign several instances occurred. Thus, on July 25, 1589, three witches were burnt at Chelmsford. The popular mind was gradually familiarized with the idea of witchcraft, and led to concentrate its The witches in ‘Macbeth’—those weird sisters who met at midnight upon the blasted heath, and in their caldron brewed so deadly a ‘hell-broth’—partake of the dignity of the poet’s genius, and belong to the vast ideal world of his imagination. No such midnight hags crossed the paths of ordinary mortals. The Elizabethan witch, who scared her neighbours in town and village, and flourished on their combined ignorance and superstition, appears, however, in ‘The Merry Wives of Windsor,’ where Master Ford describes ‘the fat woman of Brentford’ as ‘a witch, a quean, an old cozening quean!’ He adds: ‘Have I not forbid her my house? She comes of errands, does she? We are simple men; we do not know what’s brought to pass under the profession of fortune-telling. She works by charms, by spells, by the figure; and such daubery as this is beyond our Near Warboise, in Huntingdonshire, in 1593, lived two gentlemen of good estate—Mr. Throgmorton and Sir Samuel Cromwell. The former had five daughters, of whom the eldest, Joan, was possessed with a lively imagination, which busied itself constantly with ghosts and witches. On one occasion, when she passed the cottage of an old and infirm woman, known as Mother Samuel, the good dame, with a black cap on her head, was sitting at her door knitting. Mistress Joan exclaimed that she was a witch, hurried home, went into convulsions, and declared that Mother Samuel had bewitched her. In due course, her sisters followed her example, and they too laid the blame of their fits on Mother Samuel. The parents, not less infatuated than the children, lent ready ears to their wild tales, and carried them to Lady Cromwell, who, as a friend of Mrs. Throgmorton, took the matter up right earnestly, and resolved that the supposed witch should be put to the ordeal. Sir Samuel was by no means unwilling; and the children, encouraged by this prompt credulity, let loose their fertile At length the aggrieved Throgmorton, summoning all his courage, repaired to Mother Samuel’s humble residence, seized upon the unhappy old crone, and dragged her into his own grounds, where Lady Cromwell and Mrs. Throgmorton and her children thrust long pins into her body to see if they could draw blood. With unmeasured violence, Lady Cromwell tore the old woman’s cap from her head, and plucked out a handful of her gray hair, which she gave to Mrs. Throgmorton to burn, as a charm that would protect her from all further evil practices. Smarting under these injuries, the poor old woman, in a moment of passion, invoked a curse upon her torturers—a curse afterwards remembered against her, though at the time she was allowed to depart. For more than a year her life was made miserable by the incessant persecution inflicted upon her by the two hostile families, who, on their part, declared that her demons brought upon them all kinds of physical ills, prevented their ewes and cows from bearing, and turned the milk sour in the dairy-pans. It so happened that Lady Cromwell was seized with a sudden illness, of which she died, and though some fifteen months By this time the old woman, partly through listening to the incessant repetition of the charges against her, and partly, perhaps, from a weak delight in the notoriety she had attained, had come to believe, or to think she believed, that she was really the witch everybody declared her to be—just as a young versifier is sometimes deluded into a conviction of his poetic genius through unwisely crediting the eulogies of an admiring circle of friends and relatives. On one occasion, she was forcibly conveyed into Mrs. Throgmorton’s house when Joan was in one of her frequently-recurring fits, and ordered to exorcise the demon that was troubling the maid, with the formula: ‘As I am a witch, and the causer of Lady Cromwell’s death, I charge thee, fiend, to come out of her!’ The poor creature did as she was told, and confessed, besides, that her husband and her daughter were her associates in witchcraft, and that all three had sold their souls to the devil. On this confession the whole family were arrested, and sent to Huntingdon Gaol. Soon afterwards they were tried before Mr. Justice Fenner, and put to the torture. In her agony the old woman confessed anything that was required of her—she was a witch, she had bewitched the Throgmortons, she had caused the death of Lady Cromwell. Her husband and her daughter, stronger-minded, resolutely asserted their Out of the confiscated property of the Samuels, Sir Samuel Cromwell, as lord of the manor, received a sum of £40, which he converted into an annual rent-charge of 40s. for the endowment of an annual sermon or lecture on the iniquity of witchcraft, to be delivered by a D.D. or B.D. of Queen’s College, Cambridge. This strange memorial of a shameful and ignorant superstition was discontinued early in the eighteenth century. In 1594, Ferdinando, Earl of Derby, died in and from the firm conviction that he was mortally bewitched, though he had no knowledge of the person who had so bewitched him. About the same time there lived in an obscure part of Lancashire, not far from Pendle, two families of the names of Dundike and Chattox respectively, who Mother Dundike must have been a woman of lively imagination, if we may form conclusions from her graphic account of the circumstances attending her initiation into the great army of ‘the devil’s own.’ One day, when returning from a begging expedition, she was accosted by a boy, dressed in a parti-coloured garment of black and white, who proved to be a demon, or evil spirit, and promised her that, in return for the gift of her soul, she should have anything and everything she desired. On inquiring his name, she was told it was Tib; and here I may note that the ‘princes and potentates’ of the nether world seem to have had a great predilection for monosyllabic names, and names of a vulgar and commonplace character. The upshot of the conversation between Tib and the woman was the surrender of her soul on the liberal conditions promised, and for the next five or six years the said devil frequently appeared unto her ‘about daylight-gate’ (near evening), and asked what she would have or do. With wonderful unselfishness she replied, ‘Nothing.’ Towards the end of the sixth year, on a quiet Sabbath morning, while she lay The matter-of-fact style which distinguishes Mother Dundike’s confession may also be traced in the statements of her children and grandchildren, who all speak as if witchcraft were an everyday reality, and as if evil spirits in various common disguises went to and fro in the land with edifying regularity. Let us turn to the evidence, if such it may be called, of Alison Device, a girl of about thirteen or fourteen years of age. Incriminating her grandmother without scruple, she declared that when they were on the tramp, the old woman frequently persuaded her to allow a devil or ‘familiar’ to suck at some part of her body, after which she might have and do what she would—though, strange to say, neither she nor anyone else ever availed themselves of their powers to improve their material condition, but lingered on in poverty and privation. James Device, one of Mother Dundike’s grandsons, said that on Shrove Tuesday she bade him go to church to receive the sacrament—not, however, to eat the consecrated bread, but to bring it away, and deliver it to ‘such a Thing’ as should meet him on his way homeward. But he disobeyed the injunction, and ate the sacred bread. On his way home, when about fifty yards from the Some few days later, hard by the new church in Pendle, a Thing appeared to him like to a brown dog, asked him for his soul, and promised in return that he should be avenged on his enemies. The virtuous youth replied, somewhat equivocatingly, that his soul was not his to give, but belonged to his Saviour Jesus Christ; as much as was his to give, however, he was contented to dispose of. Two or three days later James Device had occasion to go to Cave Hall, where a Mrs. Towneley angrily accused him of having stolen some of her turf, and drove him from her door with violence. When the devil next appeared—this time like a black dog—he found James Device in the right temper for a deed of wickedness. He was instructed to make an image of clay like Mrs. Towneley; which he did, and dried it the same night by the fire, and daily for a week crumbled away the said image, and two days after it was all gone Mrs. Towneley died! In the following Lent, one John Duckworth, of the Launde, promised him an old shirt; but when young Device went to his house for the gift, he was denied, and sent away with contumely. The spirit ‘Dandy’ then appeared to him, and exclaimed: ‘Thou didst touch the man Duckworth,’ which he, James Device, denied; but the spirit persisted: ‘Yes; thou didst It is a curious fact that the old woman Chattox, the head of the rival faction of practitioners in witchcraft, accused Mother Dundike of having inveigled her into the ranks of the devil’s servants. This was about 1597 or 1598. To Mrs. Chattox the Evil One appeared—as he has appeared to too many of her sex—in the shape of a man. Time, midnight; place, Elizabeth Dundike’s tumble-down cottage. He asked, as usual, for her soul, which she at first refused, but afterwards, at Mother Dundike’s advice and solicitation, agreed to part with. ‘Whereupon the said wicked spirit then said unto her, that he must have one part of her body for him to suck upon; the which she denied then to grant unto him; and withal asked him, what part of her body he would have for that use; who said, he would have a place of her right side, near to her ribs, for him to suck upon; whereunto she assented. And she further said that, at the same time, there was a Thing in the likeness of a spotted bitch, that came with the said spirit unto the said Dundike, which did then speak unto her in Anne Chattox’s hearing, and said, that she should have gold, silver, and worldly wealth at her will; and at the same time she saith there was victuals, viz., flesh, butter, cheese, bread, and drink, and bid them eat enough. And after their eating, the devil called Fancy, and the other spirit In a later chapter I shall have occasion to refer to the confessions of the various persons implicated in this ‘Great Oyer’ of witchcraft. What comes out very strongly in them is the hostility which existed between the Chattoxes and the Dundikes, and their respective adherents. In Pendle Forest there were evidently two distinct parties, one of which sought the favour and sustained the pretensions of Mother Dundike, the other being not less steadfast in allegiance to Mother Chattox. As to these two beldams, it is clear enough that they encouraged the popular credulity, resorted to many ingenious expedients for the purpose of supporting their influence, and unscrupulously employed that influence in furtherance of their personal aims. They knowingly played at a sham game of commerce with the devil, and enjoyed the fear and awe with which their neighbours looked up to them. It flattered their vanity; and perhaps they played the game so long as to deceive themselves. ‘Human passions are always to a certain degree infectious. Perceiving the hatred of their neighbours, they began to think that they were worthy objects of detestation and terror, that their imprecations had a real effect, and For awhile the witches created a reign of terror in the forest. But the interlacing animosities which gradually sprang up between its inhabitants were the fertile source of so much disorder that, at length, a county magistrate of more than ordinary energy, Roger Nowell, Esq., described as a very honest and religious gentleman, conceived the idea that, by suppressing them, he should do the State good service. Accordingly he ordered the arrest of Dundike and Chattox, Alison Device, and Anne Redfern, and each, in the hope of saving her life, having made a full confession, he committed them to Lancaster Castle, on April 2, 1612, to take their trials at the next assizes. No attempt was made, however, to search Malkin Tower. This lonely ruin was regarded with superstitious dread by the peasantry, who durst never approach it, on account of the strange unearthly noises and the weird creatures that haunted its wild recesses. James Device, when examined afterwards by Nowell, deposed that about a month before his It was the general belief that the Malkin Tower was the place where the witches annually kept their Sabbath on Good Friday, and in 1612, after Dame Dundike’s arrest, they met there as usual, in exceptionally large numbers, and, after the usual feasting, conferred together on ‘the situation’—to use a slang phrase of the present day. Elizabeth Device presided, and asked their advice as to the best method of obtaining her mother’s release. There must have been some daring spirits among those old women; for it was proposed—so runs the record—to kill Seldom, if ever, do conspirators meet without a traitor in their midst; and on this occasion there was a traitor in Malkin Tower in the person of Janet Device, the youngest daughter of Alison Device, and grand-daughter of the unfortunate old woman who was lying ill and weak in Lancaster Gaol. A girl of only nine years of age, she was an experienced liar and thoroughly unscrupulous; and having been bribed by Justice Nowell, she informed against the persons present at this meeting, and secured their arrest. The number of prisoners at Lancaster was increased to twelve, among whom were Elizabeth Device, her son James, and Alice Nutter, of Rough Lea, a lady of good family and fair estate. There is good reason to believe that the last-named was in no way implicated in the doings of the so-called witches, but that she was introduced by Janet Device to gratify the greed of some of her relatives—who, in the event of her death, would inherit her property—and the ill-feeling of Justice Nowell, whom she had worsted in a dispute about the boundary of their respective lands. The charges against her were trivial, and amounted to no more than that she had been present at the Malkin Tower convention, and had joined with Mother Dundike and Blind old Mother Dundike escaped the terrible penalty of an unrighteous law by dying in prison before the day of trial. But justice must have been well satisfied with its tale of victims. Foremost among them was Mother Chattox, the head of the anti-Dundike faction—‘a very old, withered, spent, and decrepit creature,’ whose sight was almost gone, and whose lips chattered with the meaningless babble of senility. When judgment was pronounced upon her, she uttered a wild, incoherent prayer for Divine mercy, and besought the judge to have pity upon Anne Redfern, her daughter. The next person for trial was Elizabeth Device, who is described as having been branded ‘with a preposterous mark in nature, even from her birth, which was her left eye standing lower than the other; the one looking down, the other looking up; so strangely deformed that the best that were present in that honourable assembly and great audience did affirm they had not often seen the like.’ When this woman discovered that the principal witness against her was her own child, she broke out into such a storm of curses and reproaches that the proceedings came to a sudden stop, and she had to be removed from the court before her daughter could summon up courage to repeat the fictions she had learned or concocted. The woman was, of course, found guilty, as were Janet Device, as King’s evidence, obtained a pardon, though she acknowledged to have taken part in the practices of her parents, and confessed to having learned from her mother two prayers, one to cure the bewitched, and the other to get drink. The former, which is obviously a pasticcio of the old Roman Catholic hymns and traditional rhymes, runs as follows: The other prayer consisted only of the Latin phrase: ‘Crucifixus hoc signum vitam Æternam. Amen.’ FOOTNOTES |