I'll mar their syllabubs, and swathy feastings Under cows' bellies, with the parish youths." Maudlin, the witch of Ben Jonson's 'Sad Shep- Down in a pit o'ergrown with brakes and briars, Torn with an earthquake down unto the ground, But her pursuits scarcely required so solemn a Of all her mischiefs, which are manifold." For these ignoble purposes she employs all the spells of classical antiquity; but she is nevertheless nothing more than the traditional English witch who sits in her form in the shape of a hare: "I'll lay My hand upon her, make her throw her skut The peculiar elevation of the weird sisters, as compared with these representations of a vulgar superstition, may be partly ascribed to the higher character of the scenes in which they are introduced, and partly to the loftier powers of the poet who introduces them. But we think it may be also shown, in a great degree, that some of their peculiar attributes belong to the superstitions of Scotland rather than to those of England; and, if so, we may next inquire how the poet became familiarly acquainted with those superstitions. The first legislative enactment against witchcraft in England was in the 33rd of Henry VIII. This bill is a singular mixture of unbelief and credulity. The preamble recites that "Where [whereas] divers and sundry persons unlawfully have devised and practised invocations and conjurations of spirits, pretending by such means to understand and get knowledge for their own lucre in what place treasure of gold and silver should or might be found or had in the earth or other secret places, and also have used and occupied witchcrafts, enchantments, and sorceries, to the destruction of their neighbours' persons and goods." Thus the witches have pretended to get knowledge of treasure, but they have used enchantments to the injury of their neighbours. The enactment makes it felony to use or cause to be used "any invocations or conjurations of spirits, witchcrafts, enchantments or sorceries, to the intent to get or find money or treasure, or to waste, consume, or destroy any person in his body, members, or goods." So little was the offence regarded in England, or the protection of the law desired, that this statute was repealed amongst other new, felonies in the first year of Edward VI., 1547. The Act of the 5th of Elizabeth, 1562-3, exhibits a considerable progress in the belief in witchcraft. It recites that, since the repeal of the statute of Henry VIII., "Many fantastical and devilish persons have devised and practised invocations and conjurations of evil and wicked spirits, and have used and practised witchcrafts, enchantments, charms, and sorceries, to the destruction of the persons and goods of their neighbours, and other subjects of this realm." The enactment makes a subtle distinction between those who "use, practise, or exercise any invocations or conjurations of evil and wicked spirits to or for any intent or purpose," and those who use any witchcraft, enchantment, charm, or sorcery, whereby any person shall happen to be killed or destroyed." The conjuration of spirits, for any intent, was a capital crime: plain witchcraft was only capital when a person was through it killed or destroyed. It would seem, therefore, that witchcraft might exist without the higher crime of the conjuration of evil spirits. By this enactment the witchcraft which destroyed life was punishable by death; but the witchcraft which only wasted, consumed, or lamed the body or member, or destroyed or impaired the goods of any person, was punishable only with imprisonment and the pillory for the first offence. The treasurefinders were dealt with even more leniently. The climax of our witch legislation was the Act of the 1st of James I., 1603-4. This statute deals with the offence with a minute knowledge of its atrocities which the learning of England had not yet attained to. The King brought this lore from his own land: "And for the better restraining the said offences, and more severe punishing the same, be it further enacted by the authority aforesaid, that if any person or 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. persons, after the said Feast of Saint Michael the Archangel next coming, shall use, practise, or exercise any invocation or conjuration of any evil and wicked spirit, or shall consult, covenant with, entertain, employ, feed, or reward any evil and wicked spirit to or for any intent or purpose, or take up any dead man, woman, or On the 2nd of February, 1596, a commission child out of his, her, or their grave, or any other was issued by the King of Scotland “in favour | place where the dead body resteth, or the skin, of the Provost and Baillies of the burgh of Aberbone, or any other part of any dead person, to deen, for the trial of Janet Wishart and others be employed or used in any manner of witch- accused of witchcraft." Other commissions were craft, sorcery, charm, or enchantment; or shall obtained in 1596 and 1597, and during the use, practise, or exercise any witchcraft, enchant- space of one year no less than twenty-three ment, charm, or sorcery, whereby any person women and one man were burned in Aberdeen, shall be killed, destroyed, wasted, consumed, upon conviction of this crime, in addition to pined, or lamed in his or her body, or any part others who were banished and otherwise punished. thereof; that then every such offender or Many of the proceedings on this extraordinary offenders, their aiders, abettors, and counsellors, occasion were recently discovered in an apart being of any the said offences duly and law- ment in the Town House of that city, and they fully convicted and attainted, shall suffer pains were published in 1841 in the first volume of of death as a felon or felons, and shall lose the 'The Miscellany of the Spalding Club,'-a privilege and benefit of clergy and sanctuary." Society established "For the printing of the It is a remarkable proof of the little hold which | historical, ecclesiastical, genealogical, topogra the belief in witchcraft had obtained in Eng-phical, and literary remains of the north-eastern land, 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 a 'An Historical Essay concerning Witchcraft,' by Francis Hutchinson, D.D., 1720. 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 posi- ! tive 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 illus trate, 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 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 Shakpere 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," The second say the witches in the first Scene. "I myself have all the other; Macbeth and Banquo, before they meet the sisters, have not seen 66 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 trials at Aberdeen. But even amongst these there is one incident so In these quotations we shall take the freedom to change the Scottish orthography into English, to save unnecessary difficulty to our readers. 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 'Aroint thee, witch!' the rump-fed ronyon cries. 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, "Though his bark cannot be lost, 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 seaport 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 connection 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 therefore, have gone farther for, especially regarded. Shakspere need not, "Sleep shall neither night nor day Weary sev'n nights nine times nine, But the extent to which this belief was carried 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 in Aberdeen, in 1596-7, is almost beyond cre- with Our Lady, who, as thou sayest, was a fine dence. There was no doubt a contagious | woman, clad in a white walicot, and sundry | distemper ravaging the city and neighbour hood; 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 sweating, 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 witch "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 The witches' dance can scarcely be distinctly "I'll charm the air to give a sound, In 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 "Live elves and fairies in a ring." 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." ■ The reader cannot fail to observe that this article of A winnock-bunker in the east, COSTUME. THE rudely-sculptured monuments and crosses which time has spared upon the hills and heaths of Scotland, however interesting to the antiquary in other respects, afford but very slender and uncertain information respecting the dress and arms of the Scotch Highlanders in the eleventh century; and attempt how we will to decide from written documents, a hundred pens will instantly be flourished against us. Our own opinion, however, formed long ago, has within these few years been confirmed by that of a most intelligent modern historian, who says 'it would be too much, perhaps, to affirm that the dress, as at present worn, in all its minute details, is ancient; but it is very certain that it is compounded of three varieties in the form of dress which were separately worn by the Highlanders in the seventeenth century, and that each of these may be traced back to the remotest antiquity." These are:-1st, The belted plaid; 2nd, The short coat or jacket; 3rd, The truis. With each of these, or, at any rate, with the two first, was worn, from the earliest periods to the seventeenth century, the long-sleeved, saffron-stained shirt, of Irish origin, called the Leni-croich. Pitscottie, in 1573, says, "they (the Scotch Highlanders) be cloathed with ane mantle, with ane schirt, saffroned after the Irish manner, going bare-legged to the knee." And Nicolay d'Arfeville, cosmographer to the King of France, who published at Paris, in 1583, a volume entitled 'La Navigation du Roy d'Escosse Jacques, cinquiesme du nom, autour de son Royaume et Isles Hebrides et Orchades, soutz la conduite d'Alexandre Lindsay, excellent Pilote Escossois,' says, "they wear, like the Irish, a large full shirt, coloured with saffron, and over this a garment hanging to the knee, of thick wool, after the manner of a cassock (soutane). They go with bare heads, and allow their hair to grow very long, and they wear neither stockings nor shoes, except some who have buskins (botines) made in a very old fashion, which come as high as the knees." Lesley, in 1578, says, "all, both nobles and common people, wore mantles of one sort The Highlanders of Scotland,' by W. F. Skene, F.S.A. Scot. 2 vols. 12mo, London, Murray, 1837.--Mr. Skene in this excellent work has also thrown great light upon the real history of Macbeth, from a careful investigation and comparison of the Irish annals and the Norse Sagas. b"From the Irish words leni, shirt, and croich, saffron." -Martin's Western Isles of Scotland.' a (except that the nobles preferred those of different colours); these were long and flowing, but capable of being gathered up at pleasure into folds. . . . . . They had also shaggy rugs, such as the Irish use at the present day. . . . . . The rest of their garments consisted of a short woollen jacket, with the sleeves open below, for the convenience of throwing their darts, and a covering for the thighs of the simplest kind, more for decency than for show or defence against cold. They made also of linen very large shirts, with numerous folds and very large sleeves, which flowed abroad loosely on their knees. These the rich coloured with saffron, and others smeared with some grease to preserve them longer clean among the toils and exercises of a camp, &c." Here we have the second variety -that of the short woollen jacket with the open sleeves; and this confirms most curiously the identity of the ancient Scottish with the ancient Irish dress, as the Irish chieftains who appeared at court in the reign of Elizabeth were clad in these long shirts, short open-sleeved jackets, and long shaggy mantles, the exact form of which may be seen in the woodcut representing them engraved in the History of British Costume,' p. 569, from a rare print of that period in the collection of the late Francis Douce, Esq. The third variety is the truis, or trowse, "the breeches and stockings of one piece," of the Irish in the time of Giraldus Cambrensis, and the bracchæ of the Belgic Gauls and Southern Britons in that of Cæsar. The truis has hitherto been traced in Scotland only as far back as the year 1538; and there are many who deny its having formed a portion of the more ancient Scottish dress: but independently that the document of the date above mentioned recognises it as an established "Highland" garment at that time, thereby giving one a right to infer its having long previously existed, the incontrovertible fact of a similar article of apparel having been worn by all the chiefs of the other tribes of the great Celtic or Gaëlic family is sufficient, in our minds, to give probability to the belief that it was also worn by those of the * Jean de Beaugne, who accompanied the French auxiliaries to Scotland in 1548, in like manner describes "les sauvages," as he calls the Highlanders, naked except their stained shirts (chemises taintes) and a certain light covering made of wool of various colours, carrying large bows and similar swords and bucklers to the others, i. e., the Lowlanders. |