Mr. Bulwer very properly resents the disposition of this enchantress to exercise her diabolical spells upon him, and if he were allowed to take the law into his own hands we should in all likelihood find him adopting an old-fashioned and summary mode of self-protection.
It will hardly cure a rooted belief, such as that by which this yokel is possessed, to fine him twelve and sixpence for assaulting a witch’s daughter.
Moreover, the magisterial decision, besides displaying an irritating indifference to the danger in which he stands, must seem doubly harsh to this young man, since it was imposed in face of his offer to bring the “walking toad” into court as evidence for the defence.
The brick which proved the house Jack Cade lived in was not more conclusive testimony.
This case of witchcraft at Etling-green will appear the more remarkable if we just apply a brief comparison.
The last execution for witchcraft in England was that of a Mrs. Hicks and her daughter, aged nine, who were hanged at Huntingdon in 1716 for selling their souls to the devil, and raising a storm by pulling off their stockings and raising a lather of soap.
This was the sort of diabolism those weird sisters used to work, and such was the machinery they used.
Thus, in the two most frightful cases of witch-torturing in Scotland—those of Janet Comphat and Bettie Laing—the overt act was of a kind to raise more than a doubt of the sanity of those who believed it.
The Pittenweem witch, Beatrix Laing, after many a Walpurgis and much riding of broomsticks with impunity, ordered nails from a blacksmith named Patrick Mourton.
Being otherwise occupied, he refused to make them, whereupon she went off muttering. A week afterwards the honest blacksmith, passing the old woman’s door with another man, saw a vessel with water outside the threshold.