And seizing a twig she soared up the chimney, whither she was followed by all save Madge. As the latter was making her preparations Shamus rushed into the kitchen, snatched the cap from her, and placing himself astride of her twig uttered the magic formula. He speedily found himself high in the air over the Irish Sea, and swooping through the empyrean at a rate unequalled by the fastest aeroplane. They rapidly neared the Welsh coast, and espied a castle afar off, towards the door of which they rushed with frightful velocity; Shamus closed his eyes and awaited the shock, but found to his delight that he had slipped through the keyhole without hurt. The party made their way to the cellar, where they caroused heartily, but the wine proved too heady, and somehow Shamus was captured and dragged before the lord of the castle, who sentenced him to be hanged. On his way to the gallows an old woman in the crowd called out in Irish “Ah, Shamus alanna! Is it going to die you are in a strange place without your little red cap?” He craved, and obtained, permission to put it on. On reaching the place of execution he was allowed to address the spectators, and did so in the usual ready-made speech, beginning,
“Good people all, a warning take by me.”
But when he reached the last line,
“My parents reared me tenderly”
instead of stopping he unexpectedly added,
“By yarrow and rue,” &c.,
with the result that he shot up through the air, to the great dismay of all beholders. Our readers will at once recall Grandpapa’s Tale of the Witches’ Frolic in the Ingoldsby Legends. Similar tales appear in Scotland, for which see Sharpe, pp. 56, 207; the same writer (p. 212) makes mention of a red cap being worn by a witch.
After the opening years of the eighteenth century, when once it had ceased to attract the unwelcome attentions of judge, jury, and executioner, witchcraft degenerated rapidly. It is said by some writers that a belief in the old-fashioned witch of history may still be found in the remoter parts of rural England; the same can hardly be said of Ireland, this being due to the fact that witchcraft was never, at its best (or worst) period, very prevalent in this country. But its place is taken by an ineradicable belief in pishogues, or in the semi-magical powers of the bone-setter, or the stopping of bleeding wounds by an incantation, or the healing of diseases in human beings or animals by processes unknown to the medical profession, or in many other quaint tenets which lie on the borderland between folklore and witchcraft, and at best only represent the complete degeneracy and decay of the latter. Yet these practices sometimes come, for one reason or another, within the wide reach of the arm of the law, though it is perhaps unnecessary to state that they are not treated as infringements of the Elizabethan Statute. For example, some years ago a case was tried at New Pallas in co. Limerick, where a woman believed that another desired to steal her butter by pishogues, flew in a passion, assaulted her and threw her down, breaking her arm in the fall.[61] That appalling tragedy, the “witch-burning” case that occurred near Clonmel in 1895, is altogether misnamed. The woman was burnt, not because she was a witch, but in the belief that the real wife had been taken away and a fairy changeling substituted in her place; when the latter was subjected to the fire it would disappear, and the wife would be restored. Thus the underlying motive was kindness, but oh, how terribly mistaken! Lefanu in his Seventy Years of Irish Life relates a similar incident, but one which fortunately ended humorously rather than tragically: while Crofton Croker mentions instances of wives being taken by the fairies, and restored to their husbands after the lapse of years.
Even as late as the summer of 1911 the word “witch” was heard in an Irish law-court, when an unhappy poor woman was tried for killing another, an old-age pensioner, in a fit of insanity.[62] One of the witnesses deposed that he met the accused on the road on the morning of the murder. She had a statue in her hand, and repeated three times: “I have the old witch killed: I got power from the Blessed Virgin to kill her. She came to me at 3 o’clock yesterday, and told me to kill her, or I would be plagued with rats and mice.” She made much the same statement to another witness, and added: “We will be all happy now. I have the devils hunted away. They went across the hill at 3 o’clock yesterday.” The evidence having concluded, the accused made a statement which was reduced to writing: “On the day of the thunder and lightning and big rain there did a rat come into my house, and since then I was annoyed and upset in my mind.... A lady came to me when I was lying in bed at night, she was dressed in white, with a wreath on her head, and said that I was in danger. I thought that she was referring to the rat coming into the house.... The lady who appeared to me said, If you receive this old woman’s pension-book without taking off her clothes and cleaning them, and putting out her bed and cleaning up the house, you will receive dirt for ever, and rats and mice.”
Imagine the above occurring in 1611 instead of 1911! The ravings of the poor demented creature would be accepted as gospel-truth; the rat would be the familiar sent by the witch to torment her, the witnesses would have many more facts to add to their evidence, the credulous people would rejoice that the country-side had been freed from such a malignant witch (though they might regret that she had been given her congé so easily), while the annals of Irish witchcraft would be the richer by nearly as extraordinary a case as that of Florence Newton, and one which would have lost nothing in the telling or the printing. Shorn of their pomp and circumstance, no doubt many witch-stories would be found to be very similar in origin to the above.