and a banquet of ale and wine stolen from a locked cellar, was celebrated. Mrs. Brown was hanged for her evil deeds. In this district of Teviotdale the friendship of fairies and witches appears in many folk traditions existing at a much later period.[1]
The last example which I shall give concerns the notorious Major Weir and his sister, whose dealings with Satan cast a horror over Edinburgh in 1670 and for long after. At the trial Jean Weir associated her alleged sorceries with the fairy world. As a younger woman she had kept a school at Dalkeith, and one day a woman had entered the school desiring her to speak with the "Queen of Farie," and "strik and battle with the said queen on her behalf." Next day, a little woman appeared, and gave her the root of a herb, telling her that she would be able to do whatever she desired by its means. This little woman, apparently the fairy queen, laid a cloth on the floor, and caused her to stand on it, with her hand on the crown of her head, and say thrice: "All my cross and my troubles goe to the door with thee." When next Miss Jean span, she found more and better yarn on her pirns than could be spun in such a time—a true fairy gift, though it frightened her, and she believed that she had renounced her baptism — the fairy rite having some resemblance to the traditional Satanic renunciation of Christianity at the Sabbat, and her indictment so regards it. The evidence at the trial of the Weirs is full of diablerie and horror; for our purpose it is interesting as showing how fairydom is mixed up with Satan's craft.[2]
(3) King James VI. was deeply read in the works of the demonologists. His own book recapitulates the current ideas, but it also shows the tendency to make fairyland a
- ↑ Edinburgh Magazine, vi. [1820], 533 ff.
- ↑ G. Sinclair, Satan's Invisible World Discovered, Edinburgh, 1789, pp. 150 ff.; R. Law, Memorialls, ed. C. K. Sharpe, Edinburgh, 1819, p. 27; Books of Adjournal, in Scott, Minstrelsy, p. 206 f.
