What have we here? Hemten, hamten,
Here will I never more tread nor stampen.
Again:[332]
"The Faeries do principally inhabit the mountains and caverns of the earth, whose nature is to make strange apparitions on the earth, in meadows or on mountains, being like men and women, soldiers, kings, and ladies, children and horsemen, clothed in green, to which purpose they do in the night steal hempen stalks from the fields where they grow, to convert them into horses, as the story goes.
"Such jocund and facetious spirits," he continues, "are said to sport themselves in the night by tumbling and fooling with servants and shepherds in country houses, pinching them black and blue, and leaving bread, butter, and cheese, sometimes with them, which, if they refuse to eat, some mischief shall undoubtedly befal them by the means of these Faeries; and many such have been taken away by the said spirits for a fortnight or a month together, being carried with them in chariots through the air, over hills and dales, rocks and precipices, till at last they have been found lying in some meadow or mountain, bereaved of their senses, and commonly one of their members to boot."
Elsewhere[333] he gives the following goodly catalogue of these objects of popular terror:—"Our mother's maids have so frayed us with Bull-beggars, Spirits, Witches, Urchins, Elves, Hags, Faeries, Satyrs, Pans, Faunes, Sylens, Kit-wi-the-Canstick, Tritons, Centaurs, Dwarfs, Gyants, Impes, Calcars, Conjurors, Nymphs, Changelings, Incubus, Robin Goodfellow, the Spoorn, the Mare, the Man-in-the-Oak, the Hell-wain, the Firedrake, the Puckle, Tom-thombe, Hob-goblin, Tom-tumbler, Boneless, and such other Bugs, that we are afraid of our shadow."[334]
Burton, after noticing from Paracelsus those which in Germany "do usually walk in little coats, some two foot long," says,[335] "A bigger kind there is of them called with us Hobgoblins and Robin Goodfellows, that would, in those superstitious times, grind corn for a mess of milk, cut wood, or do any manner of drudgery work." And again: "Some put our Fairies into this rank (that of terrestrial devils), which have been in former times adored with much superstition, with sweeping their houses, and setting of a pail of clean water, good victuals, and the like, and then they should not be pinched, but find money in their shoes, and be fortunate in their enterprises." In another place (p. 30,) he says, "And so those which Miyaldus calls Ambulones, that walk about midnight, on heaths and desert places, which (saith Lavater) draw men out of the way and lead them all night a by-way, or quite barre them of their way; these have several names, in several places; we commonly call them Pucks."
Harsenet thus speaks of them in his Declaration:[336]—
"And if that the bowl of curds and cream were not duly set out for Robin Goodfellow, the friar, and Sisse the dairy-maid, why then, either the pottage was burned the next day in the pot, or the cheeses would not curdle, or the butter would not come, or the ale in the fat never would have good head. But if a Peter-penny or a Housle-egge[337] were behind, or a patch of tythe unpaid—then 'ware of bull-beggars, spirits, &c."
Nash thus describes them:[338]—