Scene 4. Page 468.
Fal. ... he of Wales, that gave Amaimon the bastinado.
Amaimon, king of the East, was one of the principal devils who might be bound or restrained from doing hurt from the third hour till noon, and from the ninth hour till evening. See Scot's Discovery of witchcraft, B. xv. ch. 3.
ACT III.
Scene 1. Page 487.
Glen. The front of heaven was full of fiery shapes
Of burning cressets.
A cresset light was the same as a beacon light, but occasionally portable. It consisted of a wreathed rope smeared with pitch and placed in a cage of iron like a trivet, which was suspended on pivots in a kind of fork. The light sometimes issued from a hollow pan filled with combustibles. The term is not, as Hanmer and others have stated, from the French croissette, a little cross, but rather from croiset, a cruet or earthen pot; yet as the French language furnishes no similar word for the cresset itself, we might prefer a different etymology. Our Saxon glossaries afford no equivalent term, but it may perhaps exhibit a Teutonic origin in the German kerze, a light or candle, or even in the French cierge, from cereus, because the original materials were of wax. Stowe the historian has left us some account of the marching watches that formerly paraded many of the streets of London, in which he says that "the whole way ordered for this watch extended to two thousand three hundred taylors yards of assize, for the furniture wherof with lights there were appointed seven hundred cressets, five hundred of them being found by the companies, the other two hundred by the chamber of London. Besides the which lights every constable in London, in number more than two hundred and forty, had his cresset, the charge of every cresset was in light two shillings fourepence, and every cresset had two men, one to beare or hold it, another to beare a bagge with light, and to serve it: so that the poore men pertaining to the cressets, taking wages, besides that every one had a strawne hat, with a badge painted, and his breakfast in the morning, amounted in number to almost two thousand."—Survay of London, 1618, 4to, p. 160. The following representations of ancient cressets have been collected from various prints and drawings.
Scene 1. Page 492.