Taylor & Son's Northamptonshire Handbook.
off her paw, when lo, on his return home, he finds his wife minus a hand." On the Continent, these infernal agents were credited with still larger powers. The accompanying cut, copied by Mr. Wright from a carving in Lyons Cathedral, shows a witch seated on a human being, whom she has converted into a goat, and dangling a cat in his face so as to tear him with her claws. The metamorphosis was effected in these cases without any of the
"Τυρóν τε καί ἄλφιτα καί µέλι χλωρὸν"
which Circe found it necessary to use; and which, in Milton's words,
"The visage quite transforms of him that drinks,
And the inglorious likeness of a beast
Fixes instead."
Sometimes the witch became a fox or hare. "Old huntsmen still tell of the witch of Wilby, and the famous 'chivvies' she used to lead the hounds." Even a tree was now and then selected for the purpose, in a fashion quite Ovidian.
The doctrine that witches attended the periodical meetings known as their "sabbaths" seems not to have obtained any extensive currency in this county, though there are indications that it was not entirely unknown. The universal belief, where people were familiar with the complete canon of sorcery, was that at these midnight meetings the Evil One himself appeared, generally in the form of a goat; and the witches assembled, having kissed him in a very unseemly way and gone through some other rites, sat down to a splendid feast, suddenly spread before them by infernal agency; but that if by accident the name of God should be mentioned, the whole scene of revelry would instantly vanish and all become darkness and silence. "In the Northamptonshire version, a young fellow lets himself to a farmer and his wife, who, from their nightly journeyings on calves, he quickly discovers to be witches. One night he is required to attend them on one of these unhallowed expeditions, the object of which is the stealing of a child, to be used, probably, in tho midnight orgies."[1] He accompanies them, but, while passing through the last keyhole, smitten with a sudden terror of remaining therein, he ejaculates, "God save us !" an exclamation which, as the peasants say, "Geunne he the sack, but saved the babby." We are told the same story, with variations, of a man at Loches, another at Lyons, a young girl at Spoleto, a countrymen of the Vosges, and of persons figuring in the Basque superstitions.[2]
73
