The precautions used against witchcraft do not belong to London, where the belief in the superstition took a less active form than in the country. A pebble with a natural hole in it, a horseshoe picked up by accident and nailed up over the door, a hare’s foot in the pocket, a bit of witchwood, were simple precautions against the witch. I do not think that these superstitions were much followed in London, though there are examples that the terror of the witch prevailed in the City as well as in the country.
It is remarkable that the spread of education and the toleration of fine thoughts in religion did not destroy this horrible superstition. On the contrary it increased, and the seventeenth century, when the greatest amount of religious freedom was practised if not allowed, only made the belief in witchcraft more profound.
Who could choose but to believe when Ben Jonson himself could write of witches as follows?
“Within a gloomy dimble she doth dwell,
Down in a pit o’ergrown with brakes and briars,
Close by the ruins of a shaken abbey,
Torn with an earthquake down into the ground,
’Mongst graves and grots, near an old charnel-house
Where you shall find her sitting in her form,
As fearful and melancholie as that