A Man changed into a Horse.
Mr. Williams writes of the same servant man who figures in the preceding tale:—”However, after that, she (Betty’r Bont) turned him into a grey mare, saddled him, and actually rode him herself; and when he woke in the morning, he was in a bath of perspiration, and positively declared that he had been galloping all night.”
Singularly enough Giraldus Cambrensis mentions the same kind of transformation. His words are:—
“I myself, at the time I was in Italy, heard it said of some districts in those parts, that there the stable-women, who had learnt magical arts, were wont to give something to travellers in their cheese, which transformed them into beasts of burden, so that they carried all sorts of burdens, and after they had performed their tasks, resumed their own forms.”—Bohn’s Edition, p. 83.
From Brand’s Popular Antiquities, p. 225, I find that a common name for nightmare was witch-riding, and the night-mare, he tells us, was “a spectre of the night, which seized men in their sleep and suddenly deprived them of speech and motion,” and he quotes from Ray’s Collection of Proverbs:—
“Go in God’s name, so ride no witches.”
I will now leave this subject with the remark that people separated by distance are often brought together by their superstitions, and probably, these beliefs imply a common origin of the people amongst whom these myths prevail.
The following tales show how baneful the belief in witchcraft was; but, nevertheless, there was some good even in such superstitions, for people were induced, through fear of being witched, to be charitable.