Page:The history of Witchcraft and demonology.djvu/140

 of the Sabbat, and they must have been carried for the purely practical purpose of affording light.

Very often when going to a local Sabbat the coven of witches used to meet just beyond the village and make their way to the appointed spot in a body for mutual help and security. This is pointed out by Bernard of Como, a famous scholar, who says: “When they are to go to some spot hard by they proceed thither on foot cheerily conversing as they walk.” The fact that the dark initiates walked to the Sabbat is frequently mentioned in the trials. Boguet, who is most exact in detail, writes: “Sorcerers, nevertheless, sometimes walk to the Sabbat, and this is generally the case when the spot where they are to assemble does not lie very far from their dwellings.” And in the interrogatory, 17 May, 1616, of Barthélemi Minguet of Brécy, a young fellow of twenty-five, accused with seventeen more, we have: “He was then asked in what place the Sabbat was held the last time he was present there.

“He replied that it was in the direction of Billeron, at a cross-road which is on the high-road leading to Aix, in the Parish of Saint Soulange. He was asked how he proceeded thither. He replied that he walked to the place.”

When Catharine Oswald of Niddrie (1625) one night took Alexander Hamilton “a known warlock” “to a den betwixt Niddrie and Edmiston, where the devill had trysted hir,” it is obvious that the couple walked there together.

On one occasion the truly subtle point was raised whether those who walked to the Sabbat were as guilty as those who were conveyed thither by the Devil. But De Lancre decides: “It is truly as criminal & abominable for a Sorcerer to go to the Sabbat on foot as to be voluntarily conveyed thither by the Devil.”

Major Weir and his sister seem to have gone to a meeting with the Devil in a coach and six horses when they thus drove from Edinburgh to Musselburgh and back again on 7 September, 1648. So the woman confessed in prison, and added “that she and her brother had made a compact with the devil.”

Agnes Sampson, the famous witch of North Berwick (1590), confessed “that the Devil in mans liekness met her going out to the fields from her own house at Keith, betwixt five