and shall lose the privilege and benefit of clergy and sanctuary." It is a remarkable proof of the little hold which the belief in witchcraft had obtained in England, that the legislation against the crime appears to have done very little for the production of the crime. "In one hundred and three years from the statute against witchcraft, in the 33rd of Henry VIII. till 1644, when we were in the midst of our civil wars, I find but about sixteen executed."* The popular fury against witchcraft in England belongs to a later period, which we call enlightened; when even such a judge as Hale could condemn two women to the flames, and Sir Thomas Browne, upon the same occasion, could testify his opinion that "the subtlety of the devil was co-operating with the malice of these which we term witches." It was in 1597 that James VI. of Scotland [James I.] published his Dæmonology,' written "against the damnable opinions of two principally, in our age, whereof the one called Scott, an Englishman, is not ashamed, in public print, to deny that there can be such a thing as witchcraft." The opinions of the King gave an impulse, no doubt, to the superstitions of the people, and to the frightful persecutions to which those superstitions led. But the popular belief assumed such an undoubting form, and displayed itself in so many shapes of wild imagination, that we may readily believe that the legal atrocities were as much a consequence of the delusion as that they fostered and upheld it. If Shakspere were in Scotland about this period, he would find ample materials upon which to found his creation of the weird sisters, materials which England could not furnish him, and which it did not furnish to his contemporaries. On the 2nd of February, 1596, a commission was issued by the King of Scotland "in favour of the Provost and Baillies of the burgh of Aberdeen, for the trial of Janet Wishart and others accused of witchcraft." Other commissions were obtained in 1596 and 1597, and during the space of one year no less than twenty-three women and one man were burned in Aberdeen, upon conviction of this crime, in addition to others who were banished and otherwise punished. Many of the proceedings on this extraordinary occasion were recently discovered in an apartment in the Town House of that city, and they were published in 1841 in the first volume of 'The Miscellany of the Spalding Club,'-a Society established "For the printing of the historical, ecclesiastical, genealogical, topographical, and literary remains of the north-eastern counties of Scotland." These papers occupy more than a hundred closely-printed quarto pages; and very truly does the editor of the volume say "There is a greater variety of positive incident, and more imagination, displayed in these trials than are generally to be met with in similar records. They reflect a very distinct light on many obsolete customs, and on the popular belief of our ancestors." We opened these most curious documents with the hope of finding something that might illustrate, however inadequately, the wonderful display of fancy in the witches of Shakspere-that extraordinary union of a popular belief and a poetical creation which no other poet has in the slightest degree approached. We have not been disappointed. The documents embody the * An Historical Essay concerning Witchcraft,' by Francis Hutchinson, D.D., 1720. superstitions of the people within four years of the period when Shakspere is supposed to have visited Scotland; and when the company of which he was one of the most important members is held to have played at Aberdeen. The popular belief, through which twenty-four victims perished in 1597, would not have died out in 1601. Had Shakspere spent a few weeks in that city, it must have encountered him on every side, amidst the wealthy and the poor, the learned and the ignorant, the clergy and the laity. All appear to have concurred in the unshaken confidence that they were acting rightly in the allegation and the credence of the most extraordinary instances of supernatural power. It was unnecessary that Shakspere should have heard the trials or read the documents which are now open to us, if he had dwelt for a short time amongst the people who were judges and witnesses. The popular excitement did not subside for many years. To the philosophical poet the common delusion would furnish ample materials for wonder and for use. 'Graymalkin' the cat, and 'Paddock' the toad, belong to the witch superstitions of the south as well as the north. The witches of the extreme north, the Laplanders and Finlanders, could bestow favourable winds. Reginald Scott, with his calm and benevolent irony, says, "No one endued with common sense but will deny that the elements are obedient to witches and at their commandment, or that they may, at their pleasure, send rain, hail, tempests, thunder, lightning, when she, being but an old doting woman, casteth a flint stone over her left shoulder towards the west." Shakspere in Macbeth dwells upon this superstition :— "Fair is foul, and foul is fair," say the witches in the first scene. The second and third sisters will each give their revengeful sister "a wind:" "I myself have all the other; Macbeth and Banquo, before they meet the sisters, have not seen "so foul and fair a day." Macbeth, in the incantation scene, invokes them with, "Though you untie the winds, and let them fight : In the Dittay against Issobell Oige' at Aberdeen she is thus addressed :— "Thou art indicted and accused of practising of thy witchcraft in laying of the wind, and making of it to become calm and lowdin [smooth] a special point teached to thee by thy master Satan."* In those humble practices of the witches in Macbeth which assimilate them to common witches, such as "killing swine" in the third scene of the first act, Shakspere would scarcely need the ample authority which is furnished by charge upon charge in the * In these quotations we shall take the freedom to change the Scottish orthography into English, to save unnecessary difficulty to our readers. trials at Aberdeen. But even amongst these there is one incident so peculiar that we can scarcely believe that the poet could have conceived it amongst the woods and fields of his own mid-England : "A sailor's wife had chestnuts in her lap, And mounch'd, and mounch'd, and mounch'd:- Give me,' quoth I: 'Her husband's to Aleppo gone, master o' the Tiger: But in a sieve I'll thither sail, And, like a rat without a tail, I'll do, I'll do, I'll do.'" One of the images here employed certainly came from Scotland. The witches who were evidence against Dr. Fian, the notable sorcerer who was burnt at Edinburgh in 1591, in their discovery "how they pretended to bewitch and drown his Majesty in the sea coming from Denmark," testified "that all they together went to sea, each one in a riddle or sieve." The revengeful witch goes on to say, In the indictment against Violet Leys, she is told that "Alexander Lasoun thy husband, being one long time mariner in William Finlay's ship, was put forth of the same three years since. Thou and thy umquhile mother together bewitched the said William's ship, that since thy husband was put forth of the same she never made one good voyage; but either the master or merchants at some times through tempest of weather were forced to cast overboard the greatest part of their lading, or then to perish, men, ship, and gear." This is a veritable sea-port superstition; and it is remarkable that nearly all the dialogue of the witches before "Macbeth doth come," is occupied with it. Such delusions must have been rife at Aberdeen at the beginning of the seventeenth century. In the witch superstitions of England, whether recorded in legislative enactments, in grave treatises, or in dramatic poetry, we find nothing of witchcraft in connexion with maritime affairs. We have seen that in the enactment of Henry VIII., the superstitious belief that the power of witchcraft could waste the body was especially regarded. Shakspere need not, therefore, have gone farther for, "Sleep shall neither night nor day Hang upon his pent-house lid; Shall he dwindle, peak, and pine." But the extent to which this belief was carried in Aberdeen, in 1596-7, is almost beyond credence. There was no doubt a contagious distemper ravaging the city and neighbourhood; for nearly all the witches are accused of having produced the same effects upon their victims-" The one half day rossin [roasting] as in a fiery furnace, with an extraordinary kind of drought that she could not be slockit [slaked], and the other half day in an extraordinary kind of sweat ing, melting and consuming her body as a white burning candle, which kind of sickness is a special point of witchcraft." Still this is not essentially a superstition of the north. Bishop Jewell, preaching before the Queen previous to the revived statute against witchcraft, says, "Your grace's subjects pine away even unto the death. Their colour fadeth, their flesh rotteth, their speech is benumbed, their sense is bereft." But there is a superstition alluded to in Macbeth which we do not find in the south. Banquo addresses the weird sisters, "If you can look into the seeds of time, And say, which grain will grow, and which will not, This may be metaphorical, but the metaphor is identical with an Aberdeen delusion. In the accusation against Johnnet Wischert there is this item,— "Indicted for passing to the green growing corn in May, twenty-two years since or thereby, sitting thereupon tymous in the morning before the sun-rising, and being there found and demanded what she was doing, thou answered, I shall tell thee, I have been piling [peeling] the blades of the corn, I find it will be one dear year, the blade of the corn grows withersones [contrary to the course of the sun], and when it grows sonegatis about [with the course of the sun] it will be good cheap year." The witches' dance can scarcely be distinctly found in any superstition of the south. In Macbeth the first witch says, "I'll charm the air to give a sound While you perform your antique round." The Aberdeen trials abound with charges against those who partook in such fearful merriment. They danced early in the morning upon St. Catherine's Hill; they danced at twelve-hours at even round the Fish Cross of the borough. The devil, their master, was with them, playing on his form of instruments. Marion Grant is thus accused: "Thou confessed that the devil thy master, whom thou termest Christsonday, caused thee dance sundry times with him, and with Our Lady, who, as thou sayest, was a fine woman, clad in a white walicot, and sundry others of Christsonday's servants with thee whose names thou knowest not, and that the devil played on his form of instruments very pleasantly unto you."* Here is something like the poetry of witchcraft opening upon us. Here are dances something approaching to those of Hecate, "Like elves and fairies in a ring." The reader cannot fail to observe that this article of the witch-belief lingered in Scotland until the period when Burns preserved it for all time in 'Tam o' Shanter :'— "Warlocks and witches in a dance; Nae cotillon brent new frae France, But hornpipes, jigs, strathspeys, and reels, Put life and mettle in their heels. A winnock-bunker in the east, There sat auld Nick in shape o' beast; A towzie 66 Here is what the editor of the Witchcraft Trials' so justly calls a display of imagination." What if we here should find the very character of Hecate herself, something higher than the Dame Hecate of Ben Jonson,-more definite in her attributes than the Hecate of the mythology? Andro Man is thus indicted:"Thou art accused as a most notorious witch and sorcerer, in so far as thou confessest and affirmest thyself that by the space of threescore years since or thereby the devil thy master came to thy mother's house in the likeness and shape of a woman, whom thou callest the Queen of Elphen." The Queen of Elphen, with others, rode upon white hackneys. She and her company have shapes and clothes like men, and yet they are but shadows, but are starker [stronger] than men; "and they have playing and dancing when they please, and also that the Queen is very pleasant, and will be old and young when she pleases." The force of imagination can scarcely go farther than in one of the confessions of this poor old man:- "Thou affirmest that the Queen of Elphen has a grip of all the craft, but Christsonday is the good man, and has all power under God, and that thou kennest sundry dead men in their company, and that the king who died in Flodden and Thomas Rymour is there." There is here almost imagination enough to have suggested the scene of that vision of the dead of which Macbeth exclaimed, "Now I see 't is true: For the blood-bolter'd Banquo smiles upon me." When Jonson produced the Masque of Queens' at Whitehall, in 1609, he did not hesitate to allude to the opinions of James as an authority for some of the imagery of his witch-scenes. In his note upon the goat which the witch Dame was to ride, he says-" His Majesty also remembers the story of the devil's appearance to those of Calicut, in that form, Dæmonol. lib. ii. cap. 3." But the witch Dame of Jonson was a being not to be found in the popular superstitions of Scotland, or in the King's confiding description of the supernatural evils with which that country was afflicted. Jonson says "This Dame I make to bear the person of Ate, or Mischief, for so I interpret it out of Homer's description of her." The precision with which the poet describes this personage leaves nothing doubtful for a proper conception of his idea :-" At this the Dame entered to them, naked-armed, bare-footed, her frock tucked, her hair knotted, and folded with vipers; in her hand a torch made of a dead man's arm, lighted, girded with a snake. To whom they all did reverence, and she spake, uttering, by way of question, the end wherefore they came." The Dame of Ben Jonson is thus entirely unconnected with the popular superstitions of his own time and country. But King James had associated the belief in fairies and in witches: "Witches have been transported with the pharie to a hill, A towzie tyke, black, grim, and large, To gie them music was his charge: |