forty-one years. In 1543 she was seized with a serious illness, during which she confessed her impostures and demonic commerce. She was confined for the rest of her life as a penitent in a house of the utmost austerity. Joan Williford, a witch of Faversham, acknowledged “that the Devil promised to be her servant about twenty yeeres, and that the time is now almost expired.”50 In 1646 Elizabeth Weed, a witch of Great Catworth in Huntingdonshire, confessed that “the Devill then offer’d her that hee would doe what mischiefe she should require him; and said she must covenant with him that he must have her soule at the end of one and twenty years which she granted.”51 In 1664, a Somerset sorceress, Elizabeth Style, avowed that the Devil “promised her Mony, and that she should live gallantly, and have the pleasure of the World for Twelve years, if she would with her Blood sign his Paper, which was to give her Soul to him.”52
Satan promises to give his votaries all they desire; knowledge, wealth, honours, pleasure, vengeance upon their enemies; and all that he can give is disappointment, poverty, misery, hate, the power to hurt and destroy. He is ever holding before their eyes elusive hopes, and so besotted are they that they trust him and confide in him until all is lost. Sometimes in the case of those who are young the pact is for a short while, but he always renews it. So at Lille in 1661 Antoinette Bourignon’s pupils confessed: “The Devil gives them a Mark, which Marks they renew as often as those Persons have any desire to quit him. The Devil reproves them the more severely, and obligeth them to new Promises, making them also new Marks for assurance or Pledge, that those Persons should continue faithful to him.”53
The Devil’s Mark to which allusion is here made, or the Witches’ Mark, as it is sometimes called, was regarded as perhaps the most important point in the identification of a witch, it was the very sign and seal of Satan upon the actual flesh of his servant, and any person who bore such a mark was considered to have been convicted and proven beyond all manner of doubt of being in league with and devoted to the service of the fiend. This mark was said to be entirely insensible to pain, and when pricked, however deeply, it did not bleed. So Mr. John Bell, minister at Gladsmuir, in
