Virtual Grub Street: Fairies and Ghosties and Witches! Halloween Edition!

It's the Halloween Edition of Tudor Trivia Tuesday!!!

1) Samuel Harsnet, in his " Declaration of Popish Impostures" (1603), speaks of a witch as "an old weather-beaten crone, having her chin and knees meeting for age, walking like a bow, leaning on a staff, hollow-eyed, untoothed, furrowed, having her limbs trembling with palsy going mumbling in the streets; one that hath forgotten her paternoster, yet hath a shrewd tongue to call a drab a drab."

2) In spite of witches being able to assume the form of any animal at pleasure, the tail was always missing. For this reason, in Macbeth (I.iii.), the first witch says:

And, like a rat without a tail,

I'll do, I'll do, and I'll do.

3) Witches were believed to be able to sell or give winds, a notion thus described in Drayton's "Moon-Calf":

" She could sell winds to any one that would

Buy them for money, forcing them to hold

What time she listed, tie them in a thread,

Which ever as the seafarer undid

They rose or scantled, as his sails would drive

To the same port whereas he would arrive."

So, in Macbeth (I.iii.):

2nd Witch. I'll give thee a wind.

1st Witch. Thou'rt kind.

3rd Witch. And I another.

4) Ariel celebrates his imminent release, at the end of The Tempest, by singing of the life to which he will return:

Where the Bee sucks, there suck I,

In a Cowslips bell, I lie,

There I cowch when Owles doe crie,

On the Batts backe I doe flie

after Sommer merrily.

Merrily, merrily, shall I live now,

Under the blossom that hangs on the Bow.

Ariel’s song

The Tempest (V.i.100-6)

He surely rode a bat rather than a bird because fairies avoid sunlight.

5) It was the custom in medieval and Tudor times to bury a dog or a boar alive under the cornerstone of a church, that its ghost might haunt the churchyard, and drive off any who would profane it, i. e. witches or warlocks.

6) The magpie is considered in Sweden a downright witches' bird, belonging to the Evil One and the other powers of night. When the witches on Walpurgis night ride to the Blakulli, they go in the form of magpies. These birds moult in summer, and become bald about the neck ; and then the country people say they have been to the Blakulli and helped the Evil One to get his hay in, and that the yoke has rubbed their feathers off.

7) The belief in the efficacy of south-running water is apparently of very old date. Mention is made of it in a case of witchcraft recorded in a Book of Depositions from the year 1565 to 1573, extracted in Depositions and other Ecclesiastical Proceedings from the Courts of Durham. The alleged witch was one Jennet Pereson, who was supposed to use witchcraft in measuring belts to preserve folks from the fairy, and who took at one time 6d. at another 3d. to heal persons taken with the fairy. Of her a girl named Catherine Fenwicke deposed thus: " She saithe that about two yeres ago, hir cosyn Edward Wyddrington had a child seke, and Jenkyn Pereson wyfe axed of Thomas Blackberd, then this deponent's mother's servaunte, how Byngemen (Benjamin) the child did, and bade the said Blackberd comme and speke with hir. And upon the same this deponent went unto him; and the said Pereson wyfe said the child was taken with the farye, and bade her send 2 for south-rowninge (south-running) water, and theis 2 shull not speak by the waye, and that the child shuld be washed in that water, and dip the shirt in the water, and so hang it upon a hedge all that night, and that on the morrow the shirt should be gone and the child shud recover health : but the shirt was not gone, as she said. And this deponent paid to Pereson's wyfe 3d. for her paynes; otherwais she knoweth not whether she is a wytche or not."

8) Mention is made of elf-stones in the confession of Isabel Gowdie, who was tried for witchcraft in April 1662, and afterwards executed. She declared that the elves formed them from the rough flint, the archfiend himself perfecting or " dighting " them; and she gave the names of many persons whom she and her comrades had slain with them, stating that whoever failed to bless himself when the little whirl wind passed which accompanied their locomotion fell under their power, and they had the right of shooting at him.

The elf-stone is described as sharp, and with many corners and points, so that whichever way it falls it inflicts a wound on the being it touches. Popular belief maintains that, the elves received these stones from old fairies, who wore them as breast pins at the fairy court, and that the old fairies received them in turn from mermaids.

9) In Tudor times it was still the custom, as in Celtic days, to light "need-fires" on the occasion of epidemics among cattle. The fire was required to be started by rubbing two pieces of wood together and was carried from place to place all through the infected area as a charm against more cattle catching the disease. Bonfires were kindled with it and the cattle driven through the smoke.

10) In Shakespeare’s time, witches had facial hair. In The Merry Wives of Windsor (IV.ii.), Sir Hugh Evans says of the disguised Falstaff:

By yea and no, I think the 'oman is a witch indeed: I like not when a 'oman has a great peard; I spy a great peard under her muffler.

The full beard was surely an exaggeration for laughs.

Many of these facts are taken all or in part from Dyer’s Folk-Lore of Shakespeare, Brands Observations of Popular Antiquities, Notes on the Folk Lore of the Northern Counties of England, and An historical account of the manners, customs... of the Ancient Scandinavians.