The Superstitions of Witchcraft Part 10

Such examinations were conducted with disregard equally for humanity and decency. All the disgusting circ.u.mstances must be sought for in the works of the writers upon the subject. Reginald Scot has collected many of the commonest. These marks were considered to be teats at which the demons or imps were used to be suckled. Many were the judicial and vulgar methods of detecting the guilty--by repeating the 'Lord's Prayer;' weighing against the church Bible; making them shed tears--for a witch can shed tears only with the left eye, and that only with difficulty and in limited quant.i.ty. The counteracting or preventive charms are as numerous as curious, not a few being in repute in some parts at this day. 'Drawing blood' was most effective. Nailing up a horse-shoe is one of the best-known preventives. That efficacious counter-charm used to be suspended over the entrance of churches and houses, and no wizard or witch could brave it.[145] 'Scoring above the breath' is omnipotent in Scotland, where the witch was cut or 'scotched' on the face and forehead. Cutting off secretly a lock of the hair of the accused, burning the thatch of her roof and the thing bewitched; these are a few of the least offensive or obscene practices in counter-charming.[146] In what degree or kind the Fetish-charms of the African savages are more ridiculous or disgusting than those popular in England 200 years ago, it would not be easy to determine.

[145] Gay's witch complains:

'Straws, laid across, my pace r.e.t.a.r.d.

The horse-shoe's nailed, each threshold's guard.

The stunted broom the wenches hide For fear that I should up and ride.

They stick with pins my bleeding seat, And bid me show my secret teat.'

[146] The various love-charms, amulets, and spells in the pharmacy of witchcraft are (like the waxen image known, both to the ancient and modern art) equally monstrous and absurd.

Of a more natural and pleasing sort was the [Greek: himas poikilos], the irresistible charm of Aphrodite. Here--

[Greek: Thelkteria panta tetykto; Enth' eni men philotes, en d' himeros, en d' oaristys, Parphasis, he t' eklepse noon pyka per phroneonton.]

Matthew Hopkins pursued a lucrative trade in witch-hunting for some years with much applause and success. His indiscriminating accusations at last excited either the alarm or the indignation of his townspeople, if we may believe the tradition suggested in the well-known verses of Butler, who has no authority, apparently, for his insinuation ('Hudibras,' ii. 3), that this eminent _Malleus_ did not die 'the common death of all men.'

However it happened, his death is placed in the year 1647. An Apology shortly before had been published by him in refutation of an injurious report gaining ground that he was himself intimately allied with the devil, from whom he had obtained a memorandum book in which were entered the names of all the witches in England. It is ent.i.tled 'The Discovery of Witches; in Answer to several Queries lately delivered to the Judge of a.s.size for the County of Norfolk; and now published by Matthew Hopkins, Witchfinder, for the Benefit of the whole Kingdom. Printed for R.

Royston, at the Angel in Inn Lane, 1647.'[147] It is, indeed, sufficiently probable that, confident of the increasing coolness, and perhaps of the wishes, of the magistrates, the mob, ever ready to wreak vengeance upon a disgraced favourite who has long abused the public patience, retaliated upon Hopkins a method of torture he had frequently inflicted upon others.[148]

[147] Quoted by Sir W. Scott from a copy of this 'very rare tract' in his possession.

[148] Dr. Francis Hutchinson (Historical Essay), referring to the verses of Samuel Butler, says that he had often heard that some persons, 'out of indignation at the barbarity [of the witchfinder], took him and tied his own thumbs and toes, as he used to tie others; and when he was put into the water, he himself swam as they did.' But whether the usual fate upon that event awaited him does not appear. The verses in question are the following:--

'has not he, within a year, Hang'd threescore of 'em in one s.h.i.+re,

Who after prov'd himself a witch, And made a rod for his own breech?'

The Knight's Squire on the same occasion reminds his master of the more notorious of the devil's tricks of that and the last age:--

'Did not the devil appear to Martin Luther in Germany for certain, And would have gull'd him with a trick But Mart was too, too politic?

Did he not help the Dutch to purge At Antwerp their cathedral church?

Sing catches to the saints at Mascon, And tell them all they came to ask him?

Appear in divers shapes to Kelly, And speak i' th' nun of Loudun's belly?

Meet with the Parliament's committee At Woodstock on a pers'nal treaty?

... &c. &c.'

_Hudibras_, II. 3.

Hopkins is the most famous of his cla.s.s on account of his superior talent; but both in England and Scotland witchfinders, or _p.r.i.c.kers_, as they were sometimes called, before and since his time abounded--of course most where the superst.i.tion raged fiercest. In Scotland they infested all parts of the country, practising their detestable but legal trade with entire impunity.

The Scottish p.r.i.c.kers enjoyed a great reputation for skill and success; and on a special occasion, about the time when Hopkins was practising in the South, the magistrates of Newcastle-upon-Tyne summoned from Scotland one of great professional experience to visit that town, then overrun with witches. The magistrates agreed to pay him all travelling expenses, and twenty s.h.i.+llings for every convicted criminal. A bellman was sent round the town to invite all complainants to prefer their charges. Some thirty women, having been brought to the town-hall, were publicly subjected to an examination. By the ordinary process, twenty-seven on this single occasion were ascertained to be guilty, of whom, at the ensuing a.s.sizes, fourteen women and one man were convicted by the jury and executed.

Three thousand are said to have suffered for the crime in England under the supremacy of the Long Parliament. A respite followed on this b.l.o.o.d.y persecution when the Independents came into power, but it was renewed with almost as much violence upon the return of the Stuarts. The Protectors.h.i.+p had been fitly inaugurated by the rational protest of a gentleman, witness to the proceedings at one of the trials, Sir Robert Filmore, in a tract, 'An Advertizement to the Jurymen of England touching Witches.' This was followed two years later by a similar protest by one Thomas Ady, called, 'A Candle in the Dark; or, a Treatise concerning the Nature of Witches and Witchcraft: being Advice to Judges, Sheriffs, Justices of the Peace and Grand Jurymen, what to do before they pa.s.s Sentence on such as are arraigned for their Lives as Witches.' Notwithstanding the general toleration of the Commonwealth, in 1652, the year before Cromwell a.s.sumed the Dictators.h.i.+p (1653-1658), there appeared to be a tendency to return to the old system, and several were executed in different parts of the country. Six were hanged at Maidstone. 'Some there were that wished rather they might be burned to ashes, alleging that it was a received opinion amongst many that the body of a witch being burned, her blood is thereby prevented from becoming hereafter hereditary to her progeny in the same evil, while by hanging it is not; but whether this opinion be erroneous or not,'

the reporter adds, 'I am not to dispute.'

CHAPTER IX.

Glanvil's Sadducismus Triumphatus--His Sentiments on Witchcraft and Demonology--Baxter's 'Certainty of the World of Spirits,' &c.--Witch Trial at Bury St. Edmund's by Sir Matthew Hale, 1664--The Evidence adduced in Court--Two Witches hanged--Three hanged at Exeter in 1682--The last Witches judicially executed in England--Uniformity of the Evidence adduced at the Trials--Webster's Attack upon the Witch-Creed in 1677--Witch Trials in England at the end of the Seventeenth Century--French Parliaments vindicate the Diabolic Reality of the Crime--Witchcraft in Sweden.

The bold licentiousness and ill-concealed scepticism of Charles II. and his Court, whose despotic prejudices, however, supported by the zeal of the Church, prosecuted dissenters from a form of religion which maintained 'the right divine of kings to govern wrong,' might be indifferent to the prejudice of witchcraft. But the princes and despots of former times have seldom been more careful of the lives than they have been of the liberties, of their subjects. The formal apology for the reality of that crime published by Charles II.'s chaplain-in-ordinary, the Rev.

Dr. Joseph Glanvil, against the modern Sadducees (a very inconsiderable sect) who denied both ghosts and witches, their well-attested apparitions and acts, has been already noticed.

His philosophic inquiry (so he terms it) into the nature and operations of witchcraft (_Sadducismus Triumphatus_, Sadduceeism Vanquished, or 'Considerations about Witchcraft'), was occasioned by a case that came under the author's personal observation--the 'knockings' of the demon of Tedworth in the house of a Mr.

Mompesson. The Tedworth demon must have been of that sort of active spirits which has been so obliging of late in enlightening the spiritual _seances_ of our time.

Glanvil traces the steps by which a well-meaning student may unwarily be involved in _diablerie_. This philosophical inquirer observes:--'Those mystical students may, in their first address to the science [astrology], have no other design than the satisfaction of their curiosity to know remote and hidden things; yet that in the progress, being not satisfied within the bounds of their art, doth many times tempt the curious inquirer to use worse means of information; and no doubt those mischievous spirits, that are as vigilant as the beasts of prey, and watch all occasions to get us within their envious reach, are more constant attenders and careful spies upon the actions and inclinations of such whose genius and designs prepare them for their temptations. So that I look on judicial astrology as a fair introduction to sorcery and witchcraft; and who knows but it was first set on foot by the infernal hunters as a lure to draw the _curiosos_ into those snares that lie hid beyond it. And yet I believe it may be innocently enough studied.... I believe there are very few among those who have been addicted to those strange arts of wonder and prediction, but have found themselves attacked by some unknown solicitors, and enticed by them to the more dangerous actions and correspondencies. For as there are a sort of base and sordid spirits that attend the envy and malice of the ignorant and viler sort of persons, and betray them into compacts by promises of revenge; so, no doubt, there are a kind of more airy and speculative fiends, of a higher rank and order than those wretched imps, who apply themselves to the curious....

Yea, and sometimes they are so cautious and wary in their conversations with more refined persons, that they never offer to make any _express_ covenant with them. And to this purpose, I have been informed by a very reverend and learned doctor that one Mr. Edwards, a Master of Arts of Trinity College, in Cambridge, being reclaimed from conjuration, declared in his repentance that the demon always appeared to him like a man of good fas.h.i.+on, and never required any compact from him: and no doubt they sort themselves agreeably to the rate, post, and genius of those with whom they converse.'[149]

[149] _Sadducismus Triumphatus_, section xvi.

The sentiments of the royal chaplain on demonology are curious.

'Since good men,' he argues, 'in their state of separation are said to be [Greek: isangeloi], why the wicked may not be supposed to be [Greek: isodaimones] (in the worst sense of the word), I know nothing to help me to imagine. And if it be supposed that the imps of witches are sometimes wicked spirits of our own kind and nature, and possibly the same that have been witches and sorcerers in this life: this supposal may give a fairer and more probable account of many of the actions of sorcery and witchcraft than the other hypothesis, that they are always devils. And to this conjecture I will venture to subjoin another, which hath also its probability, viz. that it is not improbable but the familiars of witches are a vile kind of spirits of a very inferior const.i.tution and nature; and none of those that were once of the highest hierarchy now degenerated into the spirits we call devils.... And that all the superior--yea, and inferior--regions have their several kinds of spirits, differing in their natural perfections as well as in the kinds and degrees of their depravities; which being supposed, 'tis very probable that those of the basest and meanest sorts are they who submit to the servilities.'[150] It is a curious speculation how the old apologists of witchcraft would regard the modern 'curiosos'--the adventurous _spirit-media_ of the present day, and whether the consulted spirits are of 'base and sordid rank,' or are 'a kind of airy and more speculative fiends.' It is fair to infer, perhaps, that they are of the latter cla.s.s.

[150] _Sadducismus Triumphatus_, Part I. sect. 4. Affixed to this work is a _Collection of Relations_ of well-authenticated instances. Glanvil was one of the first Fellows of the recently established Royal Society. He is the author of a philosophical treatise of great merit--the _Scepsis Scientifica_--a review of which occupies several pages of _The Introduction to the Literature of Europe_, and which is favourably considered by Hallam. Not the least unaccountable fact in the history and literature of witchcraft is the absurd contradiction involved in the unbounded credulity of writers (who were sceptical on almost every other subject) on the one subject of demonology.

The author of the 'Saints' Everlasting Rest,' the moderate and conscientious Baxter, was a contemporary of the Anglican divine.

In another and later work this voluminous theological writer more fully developed his spiritualistic ideas. 'The Certainty of the World of Spirits fully evinced by unquestionable Histories of Apparitions, Witchcrafts, Operations, Voices, &c., proving the Immortality of Souls, the Malice and Misery of Devils and the d.a.m.ned, and the Blessedness of the Justified. Written for the Conviction of Sadducees and Infidels,' was a formidable inscription which must have overawed, if it did not subdue, the infidelity of the modern Sadducees.[151]

[151] It would not be an uninteresting, but it would be a melancholy, task to investigate the reasoning, or rather unreasoning, process which involved such honest men as Richard Baxter in a maze of credulity. While they rejected the principle of the ever-recurring ecclesiastical miracles of Catholicism (so sympathetic as well as useful to ardent faith), their devout imagination yet required the aid of a present supernaturalism to support their faith amidst the perplexing doubts and difficulties of ordinary life, and they gladly embraced the consoling belief that the present evils are the work of the enmity of the devil, whose temporary sovereignty, however, should be overthrown in the world to come, when the faith and constancy of his victims shall be eternally rewarded.

The sentence and execution of two old women at Bury St. Edmund's, in 1664, has been already noticed. This trial was carried on with circ.u.mstances of great solemnity and with all the external forms of justice--Sir Matthew Hale presiding as Lord Chief Baron: and the following is a portion of the evidence which was received two hundred years ago in an English Court of Justice and under the presidency of one of the greatest ornaments of the English Bench.

One of the witnesses, a woman named Dorothy Durent, deposed that she had quarrelled with one Amy Duny, immediately after which her infant child was seized with fits. 'And the said examinant further stated that she being troubled at her child's distemper did go to a certain person named Doctor Job Jacob, who lived at Yarmouth, who had the reputation in the country to help children that were bewitched; who advised her to hang up the child's blanket in the chimney-corner all day, and at night when she put the child to bed to put it into the said blanket; and if she found anything in it she should not be afraid, but throw it into the fire. And this deponent did according to his direction; and at night when she took down the blanket with an intent to put the child therein, there fell out of the same a great toad which ran up and down the hearth; and she, having a young youth only with her in the house, desired him to catch the toad and throw it into the fire, which the youth did accordingly, and held it there with the tongs; and as soon as it was in the fire it made a great and terrible noise; and after a s.p.a.ce there was a flas.h.i.+ng in the fire like gunpowder, making a noise like the discharge of a pistol, and thereupon the toad was no more seen nor heard. It was asked by the Court if that, after the noise and flas.h.i.+ng, there was not the substance of the toad to be seen to consume in the fire; and it was answered by the said Dorothy Durent that after the flas.h.i.+ng and noise there was no more seen than if there had been none there. The next day there came a young woman, a kinswoman of the said Amy, and a neighbour of this deponent, and told this deponent that her aunt (meaning the said Amy) was in a most lamentable condition, having her face all scorched with fire, and that she was sitting alone in her house in her smock without any fire. And therefore this deponent went into the house of the said Amy Duny to see her, and found her in the same condition as was related to her; for her face, her legs, and thighs, which this deponent saw, seemed very much scorched and burnt with fire; at which this deponent seemed much to wonder, and asked how she came in that sad condition. And the said Amy replied that she might thank her for it, for that she (deponent) was the cause thereof; but she should live to see some of her children dead, and she upon crutches. And this deponent further saith, that after the burning of the said toad her child recovered and was well again, and was living at the time of the a.s.sizes.' The accused were next arraigned for having bewitched the family of Mr. Samuel Pacy, merchant, of Lowestoft. The witch turned away from their door had at once inflicted summary vengeance by sending some fearful fits and pains in the stomach, apparently caused by an internal p.r.i.c.king of pins; the children shrieking out violently, vomiting nails, pins, and needles, and exclaiming against several women of ill-repute in the town; especially against two of them, Amy Duny and Rose Cullender.

A friend of the family appeared in court, and deposed: 'At some times the children would see things run up and down the house in the appearance of mice, and one of them suddenly snapt one with the tongs and threw it into the fire, and it screeched out like a bat. At another time the younger child, being out of her fits, went out of doors to take a little fresh air, and presently a little thing like a bee flew upon her face and would have gone into her mouth, whereupon the child ran in all haste to the door to get into the house again, shrieking out in a most terrible manner. Whereupon this deponent made haste to come to her; but before she could get to her the child fell into her swooning fit, and at last, with much pain and straining herself, she vomited up a twopenny nail with a broad head; and being demanded by this deponent how she came by this nail, she answered that the bee brought this nail and forced it into her mouth. And at other times the elder child declared unto this deponent that during the time of her fits she saw flies come unto her and bring with them in their mouths crooked pins; and after the child had thus declared the same she fell again into violent fits, and afterwards raised several pins. At another time the said elder child declared unto this deponent, and sitting by the fire suddenly started up and said she saw a mouse; and she crept under the table, looking after it; and at length she put something in her ap.r.o.n, saying she had caught it. And immediately she ran to the fire and threw it in; and there did appear upon it to this deponent like the flas.h.i.+ng of gunpowder, though she confessed she saw nothing in the child's hands.' Another witness was the mother of a servant girl, Susanna Chandler, whose depositions are of much the same kind, but with the addition that her daughter was sometimes stricken with blindness and dumbness by demoniacal contrivance at the moment when her testimony was required in court. 'Being brought into court at the trial, she suddenly fell into her fits, and being carried out of the court again, within the s.p.a.ce of half an hour she came to herself and recovered her speech; and thereupon was immediately brought into the court, and asked by the Court whether she was in condition to take an oath and to give evidence. She said she could. But when she was sworn and asked what she could say against either of the prisoners, before she could make any answer she fell into her fits, shrieking out in a miserable manner, crying "Burn her! burn her!"

which was all the words she could speak.' Doubts having been hazarded by one or two of the less credulous of the origin of the fits and contortions, 'to avoid this scruple, it was privately desired by the judge that the Lord Cornwallis, Sir Edmund Bacon, and Mr. Serjeant Keeling and some other gentlemen there in court, would attend one of the distempered persons in the farthest part of the hall whilst she was in her fits, and then to send for one of the witches to try what would then happen, which they did accordingly.' Some of the possessed, having been put to the proof by having their eyes covered, and being touched upon the hand by one of those present, fell into contortions as if they had been touched by the witches.

The suspicion of imposture thus raised was quickly silenced by fresh proof. Robert Sherringham, farmer, deposed that 'about two years since, pa.s.sing along the street with his cart and horses, the axle-tree of his cart touched her house and broke down some part of it; at which she was very much displeased, threatening him that his horses should suffer for it. And so it happened; for all those horses, being four in number, died within a short time after. Since that time he hath had great losses by sudden dying of his other cattle. So soon as his sows pigged, the pigs would leap and caper, and immediately fall down and die. Also, not long after, he was taken with a lameness in his limbs that he could neither go nor stand for some days.'[152]

[152] This witness finished his evidence by informing the Court that 'after all this, he was very much vexed with a great number of lice, of extraordinary bigness; and although he many times s.h.i.+fted himself, yet he was not anything the better, but would swarm again with them. So that in the conclusion he was forced to burn all his clothes, being two suits of apparel, and then was clear from them.'--_Narratives of Sorcery_, &c., from the most authentic sources, by Thomas Wright.

The extreme ridiculousness, even more than the iniquity, of the accusations may be deemed the princ.i.p.al characteristic of such procedures: these _childish_ indictments were received with eagerness by prosecutors, jury, and judge. After half an hour's deliberation the jury returned a unanimous verdict against the prisoners, who were hanged, protesting their innocence to the end. The year before, a woman named Julian c.o.xe was hanged at Taunton on the evidence of a hunter that a hare, which had taken refuge from his pursuit in a bush, was found on the opposite side in the likeness of a witch, who had a.s.sumed the form of the animal, and taken the opportunity of her hiding-place to resume her proper shape. In 1682 three women were executed at Exeter.

Their witchcraft was of the same sort as that of the Bury witches. Little variety indeed appears in the English witchcraft as brought before the courts of law. They chiefly consist in hysterical, epileptic, or other fits, accompanied by vomiting of various witch-instruments of torture. The Exeter witches are memorable as the last executed judicially in England.

Attacks upon the superst.i.tion of varying degrees of merit were not wanting during any period of the seventeenth century.

Webster, who, differing in this respect from most of his predecessors, declared his opinion that the whole of witchcraft was founded on natural phenomena, credulity, torture, imposture, or delusion, has deserved to be especially commemorated among the advocates of common sense. He had been well acquainted in his youth with the celebrated Lancas.h.i.+re Witches' case, and enjoyed good opportunities of studying the absurd obscenities of the numerous examinations. His meritorious work was given to the world in 1677, under the t.i.tle of 'The Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft.' Towards the close of the century witch-trials still occur; but the courts of justice were at length freed from the reproach of legal murders.

The great revolution of 1688, which set the principles of Protestantism on a firmer basis, could not fail to effect an intellectual as well as a political change. A recognition of the claims of common sense (at least on the subject of diabolism) seemed to begin from that time; and in 1691, when some of the criminals were put upon their trial at Frome, in Somersets.h.i.+re, they were acquitted, not without difficulty, by the exertion of the better reason of the presiding judge, Lord Chief Justice Holt. Fortunately for the accused, Lord Chief Justice Holt was a person of sense, as well as legal acuteness; for he sat as judge at a great number of the trials in different parts of the kingdom. Both prosecutors and juries were found who would willingly have sent the proscribed convicts to death. But the age was arrived when at last it was to be discovered that fire and torture can extinguish neither witchcraft nor any other heresy; and the princes and parliaments of Europe seemed to begin to recognise in part the philosophical maxim that, 'heresy and witchcraft are two crimes which commonly increase by punishment, and are never so effectually suppressed as by being totally neglected.'

In France, until about the year 1670, there was little abatement in the fury or number of the prosecutions. In that year several women had been sentenced to death for frequenting the _Domdaniel_ or Sabbath meeting by the provincial parliament of Normandy.

Louis XIV. was induced to commute the sentence into banishment for life. The parliament remonstrated at so astonis.h.i.+ng an interference with the due course of justice, and presented a pet.i.tion to the king in which they insist upon the dread reality of a crime that 'tends to the destruction of religion and the ruin of nations.'[153]

[153] 'Your parliament,' protest these legislators, 'have thought it their duty on occasion of these crimes, the greatest which men can commit, to make you acquainted with the general and uniform feelings of the people of this province with regard to them; it being moreover a question in which are concerned the glory of G.o.d and the relief of your suffering subjects, who groan under their fears from the threats and menaces of this sort of persons, and who feel the effects of them every day in the mortal and extraordinary maladies which attack them, and the surprising damage and loss of their possessions.' They then review the various laws and decrees of Church and State from the earliest times in support of their convictions: they cite the authority of the Church in council and in its most famous individual teachers. Particularly do they insist upon the opinions of St. Augustin, in his _City of G.o.d_, as irrefragable. 'After so many authorities and punishments ordained by human and divine laws, we humbly supplicate your Majesty to reflect once more upon the extraordinary results which proceed from the malevolence of this sort of people; on the deaths from unknown diseases which are often the consequence of their menaces; on the loss of the goods and chattels of your subjects; on the proofs of guilt continually afforded by the insensibility of the marks upon the accused; on the sudden transportation of bodies from one place to another; on the sacrifices and nocturnal a.s.semblies, and other facts, corroborated by the testimony of ancient and modern authors, and verified by so many eyewitnesses, composed partly of accomplices and partly of people who had no interest in the trials beyond the love of truth, and confirmed moreover by the confessions of the accused parties themselves, and that, Sire, with so much agreement and conformity between the different cases, that the most ignorant persons convicted of this crime have spoken to the same circ.u.mstances and in nearly the same words as the most celebrated authors who have written about it; all of which may be easily proved to your Majesty's satisfaction by the records of various trials before your parliaments.'--Given in _Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions_. Louis XIV., with an unaccustomed care for human life, resisting these forcible arguments, remained firm, and the condemned were saved from the stake.

While most of the Governments of Europe were now content to leave sorcerers and witches to the irregular persecutions of the people, tacitly abandoning to the mob the right of proceeding against them as they pleased, without the interference of the law, in a remote kingdom of Europe a witch-persecution commenced with the ordinary fury, under express sanction of the Government.

It is curious that at the last moments of its existence as a legal crime, one of the last fires of witchcraft should have been lighted in Sweden, a country which, remote from continental Europe, seems to have been up to that period exempt from the judicial excesses of England, France, or Germany. The story of the Mohra witches is inserted in an appendix to Glanvil's 'Collection of Relations,' by Dr. Anthony Horneck. The epidemic broke out in 1669, in the village of Mohra, in the mountainous districts of Central Sweden. A number of children became affected with an imaginative or mischievous disease, which carried them off to a place called Blockula, where they held communion and festival with the devil. These, numbering a large proportion of the youth of the neighbourhood, were incited, it seems, by the imposture or credulity of the ministers of Mohra and Elfdale, to report the various transactions at their spiritual _seances_. To such a height increased the terrified excitement of the people, that a commission was appointed by the king, consisting of both clergy and laity, to enquire into the origin and circ.u.mstances of the matter. It commenced proceedings in August 1670. Days for humiliation and prayer were ordered, and a solemn service inaugurated the judicial examinations. Agreeably to the dogma of the most approved foreign authorities, which allowed the evidence of the greatest criminals and of the youngest age, the commission began by examining the children, three hundred in number, claiming to be bewitched, confronting them with the witches who had, according to the indictment, been the means of the devil's seduction. They were strictly interrogated whether they were certain of the fact of having been actually carried away by the devil in his proper person. Being answered in the affirmative, the royal commissioners proceeded to demand of the accused themselves, 'Whether the confessions of those children were true, and admonished them to confess the truth, that they might turn away from the devil unto the living G.o.d. At first most of them did very stiffly, and without shedding the least tear, deny it, though much against their will and inclination. After this the children were examined every one by themselves, to see whether their confessions did agree or no; and the commissioners found that all of them, except some very little ones, which could not tell all the circ.u.mstances, did punctually agree in their confessions of particulars. In the meanwhile, the commissioners that were of the clergy examined the witches, but could not bring them to any confession, all continuing steadfast in their denials, till at last some of them burst out into tears, and their confession agreed with what the children said; and these expressed their abhorrence of the fact, and begged pardon, adding that the devil, whom they called _Locyta_, had stopped the mouths of some of them, so loath was he to part with his prey, and had stopped the ears of others. And being now gone from them, they could no longer conceal it, for they had now perceived his treachery.' The Elfdale witches were induced to announce--'We of the province of Elfdale do confess that we used to go to a gravel-pit which lies hard by a cross-way, and there we put on a vest over our heads, and then danced round; and after this ran to the cross-way and called the devil thrice, first with a still voice, the second time somewhat louder, and the third time very loud, with these words, "Antecessor, come and carry us to Blockula." Whereupon immediately he used to appear, but in different habits; but for the most part we saw him in a grey coat and red and blue stockings.[154] He had a red beard, a high-crowned hat with linen of divers colours wrapt about it, and long garters about upon his stockings. Then he asked us whether we would serve him with soul and body. If we were content to do so, he set us on a beast which he had there ready, and carried us over churches and high walls, and after all he came to a green meadow where Blockula lies [the Brockenberg in the Hartz forest, as Scott conjectures]. We procured some sc.r.a.pings of altars and filings of church clocks, and then he gave us a horn with a salve in it, wherewith we do anoint ourselves, and a saddle, with a hammer and a wooden nail thereby to fix the saddle. Whereupon we call upon the devil, and away we go.'

[154] Accommodating himself to modern refinement, the devil usually discards the antiquated horns, hoofs, and tail; and if, as Dr. Mede supposed, 'appearing in human shape, he has always a deformity of some uncouth member or other,' such inconvenient appendages are disguised as much as possible.