Volume I Part 44 (2/2)

The mill went merrily round, and Giles the miller sang and whistled from morning to noon, and from noon till evening, save when the mulcting-dish was about to be embowelled in the best sack; a business too serious for such levity, requiring careful and deliberate thought.

Goody d.i.c.kisson, the miller's wife, was a fat, round, pursy dame, of some forty years' travel through this wilderness of sorrow, and a decent, honest, sober, and well-conditioned housewife she was; cleanly, thrifty, and had an excellent cheesepress, which the whole neighbourhood could testify.

But the days of man's happiness are numbered, and woman's too, as the following narrative will set forth.

The mill had stood, for ages it may be, at the foot of a wild and steep cliff, forming the eastern extremity of the dreary range of Cliviger;[37] an elevated mountainous pa.s.s, from whence the waters descend both to the eastern and western seas. Upon those almost inaccessible crags the rock-eagle and falcon built their nests, unscared by the herdsmen, who in vain attempted their destruction. Through this pa.s.s, the very gorge of the English Apennines, the Calder,[38] a rapid and narrow torrent, brought an unfailing supply of grist to the ever-going hopper of Giles d.i.c.kisson.

Not far from this happy abode, in the innermost part of the gorge, where the rocks of Lancas.h.i.+re and Yorks.h.i.+re frown in close but harmless proximity, at an immense height,--the road and this narrow cleft only separating their barriers,--rises a crag of a singular shape, jutting far out from the almost perpendicular strata beneath. Its form is precisely that of a gigantic helmet, hammered out by the fanciful artist into the likeness of an eagle, its wings partly outstretched, and its beak--the point of the crag--overshadowing the grim head of some gaunt warrior. With but little aid from the imagination, the whole features may be discerned; hence it was denominated, ”_The Eagle Crag_.” But another appellation, more awful and mysterious, might be attached to it--a reminiscence of those ”deeds without a name,” which have rendered this district of Lancas.h.i.+re so fearfully notorious--”The witches'

horse-block.”

The narrow pa.s.s we have described opens out into a succession of picturesque valleys, abounding in waterfalls of considerable depth and beauty, and expanding towards the north in tracts of fertile pasture-ground to the base of Pendle, well known as the reputed scene of those mysteries in which ”the witches of Pendle” acted so conspicuous a part.

Towards the close of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century, the fame, or rather the infamy, of witchcraft, infested this once peaceful and sequestered district. The crag we have just noticed was, no doubt, to the apprehensions of the simple-hearted peasant, oft visited by the unhallowed feet of weirds and witches pluming themselves for flight to the great rendezvous at Malkin Tower, by the side of ”the mighty Pendle.”

[Ill.u.s.tration: EAGLE CRAG, VALE OF TODMORDEN.

_Drawn by G. Pickering. Engraved by Edw^d Finden._]

Little did our country deserve, in those days, the name of ”Merry England.” Plague or the most noisome pestilence would have been a visitation of mercy compared to the miseries caused by so dark a superst.i.tion. ”Even he who lived remote from the scene of this spiritual warfare, though few such there could be, so rapidly was it transferred from county to county to the remotest districts;--he, in whose vicinity no one was suspected of dealing with the foul fiend, whose children, cattle, or neighbours, showed no symptoms of being marks for those fiery darts which often struck from a distance, yet would he not escape a sort of epidemic gloom, a vague apprehension of the mischief which might be.

The atmosphere he breathed would come to him thick with foul fancies; he would ever be hearing or telling some wild and melancholy tale of crime and punishment. His best feelings and enjoyments would be dashed with bitterness, suspicion, and terror, as he reflected that, though uninvaded, yet these were at the mercy of malignant fellow-mortals, leagued with more malignant spirits, the laws and limits of whose operations were wholly undefinable.

”What must have been his feelings on whom the evil eye had glared,--against whom the spell had been p.r.o.nounced; on whom misfortunes came thick and fast, by flood and field, at home and abroad, in business and in pleasure; whose cattle died, whose crops were blighted, and about whose bed and board, invisible, unwelcome, and mischievous guests held their revels; who saw not in his calamities the results of ignorance and error, to be averted by caution, nor the inflictions of Heaven to be borne with resignation, but was the victim of a compact, in which his disasters were part of the price paid by the powers of darkness for an immortal soul! He who pined in consumption supposed that his own waxen effigy was revolving and melting at the charmed fire; the changes of his sensations told him when wanton cruelty damped the flame, to waste it lingeringly, or roused it in the impatience of revenge: and when came those sharp and shooting pains, the hags were thrusting in their bodkins, and their laugh rang in his ears: they sat upon his breast asleep,--he awoke gasping, and, as he started up, he saw them melting into air. Yet more miserable was the wight whom the fiends were commissioned bodily to possess;--with whose breathing frame an infernal substance was incorporate and almost identified;--whose thoughts were sufferings, and his words involuntary blasphemies. Can we wonder that all this was not borne pa.s.sively;--that its authors were hunted out, even, if needful, by their own charms;--that suspicion grew into conviction, and conviction demanded vengeance;--that it was deemed a duty to hold them up to public hatred, and drag them to the bar of public justice;--and that their blood was eagerly thirsted after, of which the shedding was often believed not merely a righteous retribution, but the only efficient relief for the sufferers?

”The notion of witchcraft was no innocent and romantic superst.i.tion, no scion of an elegant mythology, but was altogether vulgar, repulsive, b.l.o.o.d.y, and loathsome. It was a foul ulcer on the face of humanity.

Other vagaries of the mind have been a.s.sociated with lofty or with gentle feelings;--they have belonged more to sportiveness than to criminality;--they are the poetry interspersed on the pages of the history of opinions;--they seem to be dreams of sleeping reason, and not the putrescence of its mouldering carcase; but this has no bright side, no redeeming quality whatever.”[39]

The human body is not more liable to contagion than is that faculty of the mind which is called imagination. That many of the accused believed in their crime, we have sufficient evidence in their own voluntary confessions, as well as in the traditions handed down to us on this subject. Both knavery and delusion were at work, as the following incidents will abundantly manifest. They have been selected from a wide range of materials on this important topic, as ill.u.s.trating the varied operations of the same delusion on different orders and grades of mind,--the temptations warily suited to each disposition, all tending to the same crime, and ultimately to the same punishment.

Our l.u.s.ty miller had no children: it was a secret source of grief and anxiety to his dame, and many an hour of repining and discontent was the consequence. Yet Giles d.i.c.kisson's song was none the heavier; and if his wheel went merrily round, his spirits whirled with it, and danced and frolicked in the suns.h.i.+ne of good humour, like the spray and sparkle from his own mill-race. But a change was gathering on his wife's countenance: her grief grew sullen; her aspect stern and forbidding:--some hidden purpose was maturing: she seldom spoke to her husband. When addressed, she seemed to arouse from a sort of stupor, unwillingly forcing a reply. ”She is bewitched,” thought Giles. He had his suspicions; but he could not confidently point out the source of the mischief.

One evening, as Goody d.i.c.kisson was sitting alone, pondering and discontented, there came in one Mal Spencer, a dark and scowling hag, to whom Giles bore no good-will. He had beforetime forbidden his wife to hold any intercourse with this witch-woman, who was an object generally of suspicion and mistrust. If the ”evil eye” can be supposed to inhabit a human frame, this old woman had an undisputed claim to its possession.

This night, however, old Molly came hobbling in without further ceremony than a ”Good e'en, thou d.i.c.kisson wife,” and took her seat opposite the dame in the miller's own chair. ”Aroynt thee, witch,” should have been returned to such an ill-omened salute; but the miller's wife was either unwilling or unable to utter this well-known preservative against the malice of the Evil Ones.

The horse-shoe had been taken down from the door, and the blessed herb, moly, was incautiously thrown aside; neither had Goody d.i.c.kisson offered up the usual pet.i.tion that evening, to be defended from the snares of the devil. Her discontent was too great, and she was in a fitter mood for murmuring than prayer.

Leaning her long thin chin upon a little crutch, and throwing her bleared eyes full upon the dame, old Molly abruptly exclaimed, in a voice like the croaking of a raven--

”Thou hast asked for children, but they are denied thee. What said I to thee, Goody d.i.c.kisson, in the clough yonder, by the hollow trunk of the oak? Rememberest thou, when thou saidest thou wouldst p.a.w.n thy body for the wish of thy soul?”

Dame d.i.c.kisson waxed pale, and her knees shook; but the hag went on.

”Wors.h.i.+p the master I serve, and thou shalt have thy desire--ay and more!”

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