offerings at stated times; once a fortnight, or at least once a month, the murder of some child, or some mortal poisoning, and every week to plague mankind with evils and mischiefs, hailstorms, tempest, fires, cattle-plagues and the like.
The Liber Pænitentialis of S. Theodore, Archbishop of Canterbury 668–690, the earliest ecclesiastical law of England, has clauses condemning those who invoke fiends, and so cause the weather to change “si quis emissor tempestatis fuerit.” In the Capitaluria of Charlemagne (died at Aachen, 28 January, 814), the punishment of death is declared against those who by evoking the demon, trouble the atmosphere, excite tempests, destroy the fruits of the earth, dry up the milk of cows, and torment their fellow-creatures with diseases or any other misfortune. All persons found guilty of employing such arts were to be executed immediately upon conviction. Innocent VIII in his celebrated Bull, Summis desiderantes affectibus, 5 December, 1484, charges sorcerers in detail with precisely the same foul practices. The most celebrated occasion when witches raised a storm was that which played so important a part in the trial of Dr. Fian and his coven, 1590–1, when the witches, in order to drown King James and Queen Anne on their voyage from Denmark, “tooke a Cat and christened it,” and after they had bound a dismembered corpse to the animal “in the night following the said Cat was convayed into the middest of the sea by all these witches, sayling in their riddles or cives, … this doone, then did arise such a tempest in the sea, as a greater hath not bene seene.”[1] The bewitching of cattle is alleged from the earliest time, and at Dornoch in Sutherland as late as 1722, an old hag was burned for having cast spells upon the pigs and sheep of her neighbours, the sentence being pronounced by the sheriff-depute, Captain David Ross of Little Dean. This was the last execution of a witch in Scotland.
With regard to the sacrifice of children there is a catena of ample evidence. Reginald Scott[2] writes in 1584: “This must be an infallible rule, that euerie fortnight, or at the least euerie month, each witch must kill one child at the least for hir part.” When it was dangerous or impossible openly to murder an infant the life would be taken by poison, and in 1645 Mary Johnson, a witch of Wyvenhoe, Essex, was
