The exceeding importance of blood in life has doubtless been evident to man from the earliest times. Man experienced a feeling of weakness after the loss of blood, therefore blood was strength, life itself, and throughout the ages blood has been considered to be of the greatest therapeutic, and the profoundest magical, value. The few drops of blood the witch gave her familiar were not only a reward, a renewal of strength, but also they established a closer connexion between herself and the dog, cat, or bird as the case might be. Blood formed a psychic copula.
At the trial of Elizabeth Francis, Chelmsford, 1556, the accused confessed that her familiar, given to her by her grandmother, a notorious witch, was “in the lykenesse of a whyte spotted Catte,” and her grandmother “taughte her to feede the sayde Catte with breade and mylke, and she did so, also she taughte her to cal it by the name of Sattan and to kepe it in a basket. Item that euery tyme that he did any thynge for her, she sayde that he required a drop of bloude, which she gaue him by prycking herselfe, sometime in one place and then in another.”[1] It is superfluous to multiply instances; in the witch-trials of Essex, particularly whilst Matthew Hopkins and his satellite John Stearne were hot at work from 1645 to 1647 the animal familiar is mentioned again and again in the records. As late as 1694 at Bury St. Edmunds, when old Mother Munnings of Hartis, in Suffolk, was haled before Lord Chief Justice Holt, it was asserted that she had an imp like a polecat. But the judge pooh-poohed the evidence of a pack of clodpate rustics and directed the jury to bring a verdict of Not Guilty.[2] “Upon particular Enquiry,” says Hutchinson, “of several in or near the Town, I find most are Satisfied it was a very right Judgement.” In 1712 the familiar of Jane Wenham, the witch of Walkerne, in Hertfordshire, was, at her trial, stated to be a cat.
In Ford and Dekker’s The Witch of Edmonton the familiar appears upon the stage as a dog. This, of course, is directly taken from Henry Goodcole’s pamphlet The Wonderfull Discouerie of Elizabeth Sawyer (London, 4to, 1621), where in answer to this question the witch confesses that the Devil came to her in the shape of a dog, and of two colours, sometimes of black and sometimes of white. Some children had
