Witchcraft in Northamptonshire.
Of witchcraft, witches, and unholy rites
Practised on blasted heath or barren moor,
By lightning's forked flash and thunder's roar;
Of rides on hurdles, and of broomstick flights
By withered hags, on wild tempestuous nights
Of impious incantations, hellish lore,
Of impish whelps that fiendish amours bore;
Of philters, charms, and strange, uncanny sights:
How ancient grandames in the olden times,
By public laws, or private judgment, found
Guilty of witchcraft (worst of human crimes),
Died at the stake, or in the mill-pond drowned;
Of conjurations dire, forbidden spells,
And lawless orgies, this our history tells.
R iding through the air on a broomstick, and playing mischievous pranks with her neighbours' pigs and poultry make up the current idea of a witch's business in these degenerate days; but there was a time when her vocation was more glorious, her arts more insidious, and her power more terrible. When the learned author of the "Counterblast against Tobacco" was metamorphosed from a Scotch into an English king, his wondering subjects had their eyes opened to the fact that not a child could talk incoherently or fall into a fit, not a harvest could fail or a vessel be wrecked at sea, not a black dog or a scarecrow grimalkin could cross one's path after dark, but the devil had some land in it, with a sorceress for his agent. But, in days before these, the black art, if it had fewer victims, was thought to be still more formidable in its potency. Old women, with "wrinkled faces, hairy lips, gobber teeth, and squint eyes," whom Reginald Scot took for his pattern witches at the end of the sixteenth century, were not the then prevailing type, for the informers of the period flew at much higher game. It is said that one of the charges brought against Thomas à Becket by his irate master, when he was put upon his defence at Northampton Castle, in 1164, was that of sorcery, though his modern biographer, Robertson, makes no mention the fact. witchcraft.
Even a hundred and fifty years later it was quite the fashion, both in England and Ireland, to seek for vengeance upon persons in high station by accusing them of In the latter country a lady of title, Kyteler by name, was put on her defence, by the Bishop of Ossory, for sacrificing red cocks and peacocks' eyes to the Evil One; and, by means of "certain horrible worms," the nails of dead men, the hair, brains, and clothes of children who had died unbaptized, boiled in the skull of a decapitated robber, having invoked aid from the nether world to do mischief to some of her relatives. In The case ended in her exile, and the burning or flagellation of several of her friends. the same way John of Nottingham and another necromancer were said to have conspired with
- ↑ Written expressly for this article.
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