The Mystery of Witchcraft - History, Mythology & Art. William Godwin. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

Автор: William Godwin
Издательство: Bookwire
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Жанр произведения: Социология
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isbn: 4064066051785
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thousands were sacrificed in the Jacobian persecution in Scotland alone from existing historical records, which would express, however, but a small proportion of the actual number: and parish registers may still attest the quantity of fuel provided at a considerable expense, and the number of the fires. By a moderate computation an average number of two hundred annually, making a total of eight thousand, are reckoned to have been burned in the last forty years of the sixteenth century.134

      Equally monstrous and degrading were the disclosures in the torture-chambers; and many admitted that they had had children by the devil. The circumstances of the Sabbath, the various rites of the compact, the forms and method of bewitching, the manner of sexual intercourse with the demons—these were the principal staple of the judicial examinations.

      In the southern part of the island witch-hanging or burning proceeded with only less vehemence than in Scotland. One of the most celebrated cases in the earlier half of the seventeenth century (upon which Thomas Shadwell the poet laureate, who, under the name of MacFlecknoe, is immortalised by the satire of Dryden, founded a play) is the story of the Lancashire Witches. This persecution raged at two separate periods; first in 1613, when nineteen prisoners were brought before Sir James Altham and Sir Edward Bromley, Barons of Exchequer. Elizabeth Southern, known as 'Mother Demdike' in the poet laureate's drama, is the leader of the criminals. In 1634 the proceedings were renewed wholly on the evidence of a boy who, it was afterwards ascertained, had been instructed in his part against an old woman named Mother Dickenson. The evidence was of the feeblest sort; nor are its monotonous details worth repetition. Out of some forty persons implicated on both occasions, fortunately the greater number escaped. 'Lancashire Witches,' a term so hateful in its origin, has been long transferred to celebrate the superior charms (of another kind) of the ladies of Lancashire; and the witches' spells are those of natural youth and beauty.

      Two women were executed at Lincoln, in 1618, for bewitching Lord Rosse, eldest son of the Earl of Rutland, and others of the family—Lord Rosse being bewitched to death; also for preventing by diabolic arts the parents from having any more children. Before the Lord Chief Justice of the Common Pleas and one of the Barons of the Exchequer, it was proved that the witches had effected the death of the noble lord by burying his glove in the ground, and 'as that glove did rot and waste, so did the liver of the said lord rot and waste.' Margaret Flower confessed she had 'two familiar spirits sucking on her, the one white, the other black spotted. The white sucked under her left breast,' &c.

      The Scotch trials and tortures, of which the above cases are but one or two out of a hundred similar ones, are perhaps the more extraordinary as being the result of mere superstition: religious or political heresy being seldom an excuse for the punishment and an aggravation of the offence.