By this devious method, he deduces that evil spirits
exist, quoting the usual testimony from sacred and classical
history; but his common sense prompts him to warn his readers
that those suspected of witchcraft are often mere impostors or
unconsenting agents in working the devil's miracles.
exist, quoting the usual testimony from sacred and classical
history; but his common sense prompts him to warn his readers
that those suspected of witchcraft are often mere impostors or
unconsenting agents in working the devil's miracles.
Cambridge History of English Literature - 1908 - v07
L'Estrange was a better pamphleteer
than journalist; his Observator, issued in later years, consisted of
nothing but comment without news. When Muddiman put an end
to L'Estrange's journals with the Gazette in 1665, L'Estrange, by
the king's orders, was pensioned off with £100 a year charged on the
Gazette, his future services as surveyor of the press being paid for,
in like manner, by £200 a year out of the secret service money.
Of the immense journalistic output which Cromwell had sup-
pressed, the net results at the end of the reign of Charles II were:
first, the official recognition of the necessity to gratify the public
desire for news, shown in the continuance of the Gazette as a per-
manent institution; and, secondly, the striking manner in which
newsletters were permitted, unfettered and uncensored, for the
benefit of the upper classes, to supply the defects of the official
print. No longer ridiculed, newsletters at last obtained a place in
public esteem which had never been obtained by newsbooks. That,
before the end of the century, the liberty of the press should begin
and the modern newspaper follow, was but a logical corollary to
this.
6
1 Jeffreys took the extreme step of suppressing coffee-houses that dealt in news-
letters. ' Ellis correspondence, by A. Ellis, II, p. 243.
## p. 366 (#382) ############################################
CHAPTER XVI
THE TADVENT OF MODERN THOUGHT IN POPULAR
LITERATURE
THE WITCH CONTROVERSY. PAMPHLETEERS
1
THE enlightenment of the renascence had never penetrated the
deeper recesses of the popular mind. The social, religious and
economic revolutions of Tudor times; the fermentation of city
life under Elizabeth and James ; the growth of national conscious-
ness; the discoveries of travellers and men of science; above all,
the popularisation of biblical and classical literature, had added
enormously to the interests and imagination of the ordinary man,
without transforming his sentiments, convictions and ideals. His
mental vision was crowded with new and engrossing objects, but
his outlook remained medieval. It was the task of the Jacobean
and Caroline generations to effect a mental reformation. Had
the age been a time of political peace and social calm, the first
half of the seventeenth century would have proved to be one of
the most interesting epochs in English literature. In an atmo-
sphere of learning and discussion, humanists of the period would
have adjusted their heritage of old-time beliefs and aspirations to
the maturer, more tolerant wisdom of Erasmus, More, Wier,
Bullein, Montaigne, Scot, Ralegh, Shakespeare, Earle and Bacon.
All that was best in the Middle Ages would have expanded into
modern thought, and a second, more spiritual renascence would
have inspired a series of masterpieces, such as the work of Vergil
and Molière, in which the past and present join hands. As it
was, though knowledge continued to increase, the thoughts and
emotions of the people were diverted by class hatred, religious
controversy and the political crisis. The consciousness of fellow-
ship, essential to intellectual progress, had died out. Thus,
humanists, instead of broadening and redirecting the tendencies of
popular thought, either relapsed into scepticism, as in the instances
of Robert Burton and Sir Thomas Browne, or let loose their
## p. 367 (#383) ############################################
Demonology in the Middle Ages 367
augmented volume of learning and sentiment into the old, narrow
channels. Whenever an age fails to find new interests, intellectual
intemperance results. And, just as, at an earlier date, social
writers lost touch with ideas and squandered their originality on
experiments in style? , so, now, the more learned divines and
physicians devoted their scholarship and research to the barren
mysteries of demonology.
In order to understand the witch controversy of the seventeenth
century, it is necessary to remember that primitive people had
always cherished a veneration for the 'wise woman”, probably a
relic of the mother-worship of the premigratory period, and that
her broom, ladle and goat may, possibly, be regarded as symbols
of her domestic power. She was supplanted by the new polytheism
of warrior spirits ; and, when they gave way, in their turn, to
Christianity, some of the dispossessed deities became saints, while
others went to join this earlier deity in the traditions and folk-lore
of the people. As western Christendom became familiar with the
teaching of the Greek church and with eastern religions—at first
by the researches of theologians and then through the Saracenic
wars in Spain and the crusades—these rites and superstitions were
gradually coloured with rabbinical conceptions of the devil's
hierarchy and with the Neoplatonic doctrine of demons and inter-
mediary powers. Despite the rationalism of Jean de Meung and
Roger Bacon", patristic conceptions of demonology were codified
and systematised in the Middle Ages. Such superstitions as the
incubus and succubus, the transmutation of men into beasts, the
power to fly by night were then, definitely, incorporated in
medieval theological conceptions. From the twelfth or thirteenth
century onwards, new feelings of horror and loathing began to be
associated with this entanglement of traditions. Not only was
the underworld of disinherited deities regarded as a rival by the
Church, and, therefore, credited with the infamies which are
usually attributed to heretics", but as men struggled towards a
higher level of civilisation, they instinctively accused these pariahs
of all that they were endeavouring to eliminate from their own
daily lives. The calamities and controversies of the fifteenth and
6
1 See ante, vol. iv, chap. XVI.
2 Karl Pearson: see essays on Woman as Witch,' 'Ashiepattle,' “Kindred Group-
marriage' in vol. 11 of Chances of Death, 1897.
3 Roman de la Rose, pt. II, c. 1280. Epistola fratris Rogerii Baconis de secretis
operibus artis et natura et de nullitate magiae, c. 1250 (ptd Theatrum Chimicum,
Nürnberg, 1732).
• See, especially, the bull of Gregory IX, 13 June 1233.
## p. 368 (#384) ############################################
368 The Advent of Modern Thought
sixteenth centuries only added to men's sense of danger and
misery and inspired a yet more pessimistic school of demonologists,
led by Jacquier, Institoris and Sprenger. By the time we
reach the seventeenth century, the imaginary realm of spirits,
ghosts, gnomes, fairies, demons, prophets and conjurors—now stig-
matised as the implacable enemies of mankind—became allegories
or symbols of all that was degraded, perverted, revolting or terrible.
The devil, from being a denizen of lonely or impassable places,
had now grown to be the monarch of innumerable hosts. As the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries had been disgraced in the eyes
of the priesthood by blasphemous parodies, so, now, the diabolical
empire was believed to be a monstrous imitation of the kingdom
of heaven, with disgusting travesties of church ritual. The
fiend's one object was to seduce mortals from the worship of
God, and as, from early Christian times, both monkish doctrin-
aires and secular humorists had depicted women
women as loose,
malevolent or ridiculous, so, now, it was with this sex rather than
with men that he found his easiest victims and most willing allies.
This predilection stimulated the dreams of diseased imagination.
The witch or 'wise woman’ was looked upon as the devil's chosen
handmaiden. The most elaborate pornography grew up around
this supposed union, and the witches' sabbath or Walpurgis
night-a relic of mother-worship, at which licence abounded-was
conceived to be a kind of devil's mass, at which debauchery ran
riot Other obsessions came to be connected with the witch
horror. From prehistoric times certain animals had been re-
garded as spirits of evil. Recollections of these legends blended
with the fear of noisome and poisonous animals, and led men to
believe that such creatures were auxiliaries of Black Magic.
Human deformity abounded in medieval slums, and people still
believed in monsters half man and half beast. And, as witches
were hideous hags, men attributed to these old women the birth of
abortions such as Hedelin? , Stengesius and Paré+ described and
the people themselves read of in broadsides.
From prehistoric times, men had been, and were still, accus-
tomed to regard the trivial enterprises and interests of bucolic
life as under the influence of witches. Such things as the growth
1 See Jules Baissac, Les Grands Jours de la Sorcellerie, 1890, chap. vi. See, also,
chap. vii in Illustrierte Sittengeschichte, by Fuchs, E. , 1909.
2 Des Satyres, Brutes, Monstres et Demons. De leur Nature et Adoration, par Francois
Hedelin, 1627. (Hedelin is better known as the Abbé d'Aubignac. )
: De Monstris et Monstrosis, 1647 (? ).
* Deux livres de chirurgie, 1573. Eng. trans. by Johnson, T. , 1649.
## p. 369 (#385) ############################################
Belief in Witchcraft
369
of crops, the fall of rain, the churning of milk, the disappearance
of household utensils and the birth of children, came within their
province, but, now that all the mystery of evil and suffering had
gathered round these beings, strange and appalling diseases were
believed to come from their power. Epilepsy, somnambulism,
St Vitus's dance, hysteria and hypnotism were attributed to vene-
fical agency. They could slowly murder human beings by sym-
pathetic magic or change them into animals. Nay, more, with
the help of the devil, they could call back the dead, or some
semblance of the dead, to aid them to win ascendency over human
beings.
It will hence be readily understood that, at the opening of our
period, the belief in witchcraft had grown to be more than an
antiquated superstition. It represented the Gothic obscenity,
grotesqueness, profanity, madness, cruelty and paganism, which
progress had branded as accursed but could not eradicate from the
imaginations of men. Had an age of moral reflectiveness suc-
ceeded to the creative energy of Elizabeth's reign, the Jacobean
and Caroline generations would have turned the light of the new
learning on their own minds and formed a higher conception of
divine power and human dignity. But the heat of controversy
rendered introspection impossible, and humanists were too busy
refuting each other's political and religious errors to cultivate
high seriousness of thought. Thus, those who felt that all was not
well with the world, and who were not inspired by any movement
towards a more cultured and spiritual interpretation of life,
returned to examine the old allegory of human imperfection and
defencelessness, finding in the books of the past and the dis-
order of the present only too much to justify a belief in witchcraft.
To begin with, as progress bad not been universal, those who
could not move with the times tended to cling to old beliefs from
instinctive distrust of what was new; while others, dismayed at
the collapse of faith and tradition, were ready to believe anything
which represented humanity as corrupt and afflicted. The
Faust legend was still a parable of the age. Many who viewed
with horror the careers of John Dee, Walter Kelly, Simon Forman,
Dr Lambe, William Lilly and Elias Ashmole, were not prepared to
deny that witches and magicians bartered their souls in the insane
desire to pass the limits divinely placed to knowledge and power.
Again, the renascence had accustomed men to intenser and more
versatile habits of thought; inventions were more ingenious,
thinkers were more subtle. Consequently, those who were
24
K. L. VII.
CH, XVI.
## p. 370 (#386) ############################################
370 The Advent of Modern Thought
still convinced of original sin, would attribute to the devil the
heightened intelligence and duplicity of man, rather than deny
his existence.
Now that the thoughts of men were turned in this direction,
they continued, like their predecessors from St Augustine down-
wards, to discover authority for superstitions in their most revered
sources of knowledge. Neoplatonism was used to corroborate
the doctrine of spirits and angels, and, besides, to deny that the
world was full of demons was to be a Sadducee. Moreover,
positive proofs of devilry and magic could be deduced from holy
writ. The serpent in the garden of Eden, Pharaoh's conjurors,
the afflictions of Job, Balaam and his ass, the witch of Endor,
the 'voice of the charmer,' the transmutation of Nebuchadnezzar,
the Gadarene swine, 'the lunatic boy,' and Simon Magus were
understood in the light of seventeenth-century demonology,
Classical lore, which carried hardly less weight than Scripture,
could be as easily interpreted. The incubus and succubus were
discerned in the union of gods and goddesses with mortals. The
belief in witch-begotten monsters was confirmed by tales of the
Minotaur, lamiae, empusae, lemures and satyrsIf Circe could
, .
turn men into swine, Neptune and Aeolus raise storms, Juno
travel through the air, Apollo strike down with disease, Venus
become invisible, why should not more modern magicians? They
learnt from Apuleius that men could be changed into animals;
from Horace and Lucan that witches practised abominable rites
in secret, and from Tacitus, Suetonius and Ovid that spells, in-
cantations and sympathetic magic could be used to destroy the
life of a fellow creature.
For many, and, in some cases, subconscious, motives,
,
men wished to believe in witchcraft; and, since the intellect
generally follows the emotions, the age found more reasons for
believing the propositions formulated by Molitoris? , and for
iterally discharging the mistranslated mandate, "Thou shalt not
suffer a witch (Mekasshepha) to live,' than for believing the
arguments of Agrippa, Erasmus, Wier, Reuchlin, the authors of
Litterae Obscurorum Virorum, and Scots Puritanism, with its
1 Cf. Walter Mapes, De nugis curialium, c. 1180, in which Satan admits that Ceres,
Priapus, naiads, fauns, dryads, satyrs, Bacchus and Pan have been changed into
devils.
? See Dialogus de Pythonicis Mulieribus, 1489.
3 For the recrudescence of the witch panic in Tudor times, see ante, vol. 11, chap. v,
pp. 112 ff. ; for the part played by Erasmus see, especially, Colloquia Familiaria ; for
Reuchlin, De verbo mirifico, 1494 ; for Wier, De Praestigiis demonum, 1564.
## p. 371 (#387) ############################################
Gifford's Dialogues of Witches
371
gloom, its intolerance and its sense of spiritual conflict, has been
held largely responsible for the persecution that now arose.
But the causes lay deeper than any sectarian movement and
actuated men of different creeds, who might otherwise have ad-
vanced the culture of their age. Holland, in a tedious dialogue',
a
proved the existence of witches from the Bible, and established
the likelihood of their lust for blood by quoting the sacrifice of
Iphigenia and the cruelties of Nero and Maxentius. He claimed
that they should be put to death, even if unconvicted of magic, as
being renegades and perverters. With soulless resignation, he
recognised in them God's chosen sign of the world's sins, especially
papistry, and His scourge wherewith to plague apostates. Passing
over Nashe's brilliant and erratic protest? against superstition,
which squandered flashes of cultured ridicule on the unessential
question of dreams and probably never reached serious contro-
versialists, we find George Gifford returning to the discussion in
1593. His new production, Dialogues of Witches and Witchcraft,
is an important sign of the times. It treats of rustic superstitions,
and, in a spirit of simple, broad-minded Christianity, he maintains,
as Wier had already asserted, that witches and sorcerers have no
diabolical power; that blight, the sickness of cattle and human ail-
ments are the work of heaven alone and should be atoned for only
by prayer and fasting. The treatise has many touches of character
drawing, and this interest in human nature, combined with a sense
of God's omnipotence, might well have led the author in the steps
of Reginald Scot. But the growing pessimism of the age had
turned Gifford's gaze from what is good in life. He still finds
truth in the scholastic doctrine that the devil is a watchful diplo-
matist who takes possession of some malevolent old hag at a time
when men are disturbed by calamity, causing her to claim the
authorship of what has really been sent from heaven. He argues
that the fiend, thanks to his superhuman knowledge, forecasts the
future and then inspires 'wise men' to make a show of causing
what the devil has merely foreseen. In either case, these impostors
consent to intercourse with the devil, are decoys to lure men from
the worship of God and, therefore, should be put to death“.
1 A Treatise against Witchcraft, 1590.
? The Terrors of the Night, or a Discourse of Apparitions, 1594; see ante, vol. iv,
chap. xvi, p. 325.
* He had already produced Discourse of the Subtle Practices of Devilles, 1587.
Hobbes held nearly the same view; arguing that witches should be punished
although they have no real power, because they think they have, and purpose to do
mischief. See Leviathan, p. 7, ed. 1651.
24-2
## p. 372 (#388) ############################################
372
The Advent of Modern Thought
In 1603, king James, who had taken a prominent part in the
trial of Geilis Duncan and her associates, caused his Daemonologie
to be printed and published in England. This dialogue, despite
the jejuneness and insipidity which characterise all the literary
efforts of that royal pedant, is a remarkable work. Like other witch
treatises at the opening of the century, it still retains a critical and
scholarly attitude towards the subject. James realises, as Burkard
had done, that were wolves are the creation of a disordered fantasy,
and that nightmares (popularly explained as a sensation of diabolical
contact) are some reaction of the 'humours' of the imagination.
He agrees with St Augustine that the apparent miracles of the
devil are merely deceptions practised on the senses, and, though
he naturally believes in demons and spirits, yet he follows the
same authority and Roger Bacon in asserting that the infernal
world is thoroughly under the dominion of God. But James was
a true child of his age. In an epoch of heightened competition
and bitter feuds, he prefers to believe that people invoke infernal
aid from lust for riches or revenge, rather than to attribute all
witchcraft to the influence of melancholy? When convinced of
the probability of a league between devil and man, all the king's
theological erudition is manipulated into proofs of this theory.
The book is a manual, not discussing the question from an indi-
vidual point of view, but recapitulating and enforcing the theories
of previous demonologists, with a wealth of authoritative quotations
dear to this learned age. Thus, despite unnecessary digressions
into the realm of philology and scholasticism, the doctrine is pre-
sented with a realism and fulness of details which always carry
conviction, and every reader found his own superstition recorded
and stamped with the seal of royal approval. This powerful mani-
festo ended with the ill-fated recommendation that death should
be inflicted on the evidence of children or even of fellow criminals
(as in trials for treason) or after the water test and discovery of
the devil's mark 4.
The next few treatises on witchcraft add but little to the
theories of Gifford and king James. William Perkins, in his
Discoverie of the damned Art of Witch craft (1608), is, perhaps,
the most typical. Perkins is oppressed with the spectacle of
1 De Civitate Dei, 1. 18, c. 18, and De Secretis Operibus Artis, C. I, II.
? Bk. II, especially chap. 11.
3 Bk. II, chaps. II, IV, V, VI.
For explanation of water test, see p. 374. The devil's mark was any part of the
body which, after contact with the devil, lost sensation. Such local anaesthesia is a
recognised symptom of hysteria.
## p. 373 (#389) ############################################
William Perkins
373
human error: he sees that men have the instinct to worship some
god and that, in hours of great danger or superhuman effort, they
turn for help to some higher power. But the true God has placed
a limit to the knowledge and power of men, and many ambitious
mortals are blind to these restrictions and endeavour to pass the
goal of ordinance. When an author had taken this condemnatory
view of men's struggle for knowledge and power, he could hardly
refuse to believe that the devil was ready to help them. So he
follows the authority and example of king James, describing
Satan's well-organised kingdom and the illusory signs and wonders
he works for those in his service. But, though he follows his
predecessors by demanding the sentence of death against those
convicted, he is one of the first to discountenancel the old-
fashioned tests by hot iron, water or scratching, and to urge the
necessity of carefully sifting circumstantial evidence.
Perkins's protest marks the beginning of a new phase in this
discussion. So far back as 1576, seventeen or eighteen persons
had been condemned for witchcraft at St Osyth, and three more
at Malden in 15792. After parliament had followed their monarch's
Daemonologie with a law condemning all witches to death, a series
of official inquisitions, held especially in Lancashire, Essex and
Yorkshire, brought to light innumerable cases of women, and
sometimes of men, who confessed to a secret union with the devil.
The seducer had access to them in all conceivable shapes, from a
loathsome animal to a handsome man, leaving some point of
contact on their bodies insensible to pain, and assigning to each
a posse of attendant imps, who sucked their blood through teat-
like orifices in the skin. Thanks to this intercourse, witches
gained power to plague the persons and properties of their
enemies. Modern psychology has recognised in these hallucina-
tions the symptoms of different kinds of insanity and perversion",
and, of course, many confessions were wrung by torture from
0
1 Chap. vi, • The Application of the Doctrine of Witchcraft to our Times. '
* See the pamphlet of that year with a title eminently illustrative of this movement,
Detection of Damnable Drifts, practized by 3 Witches, arraigned at Chelmsforde in
Essez. . . . Set Forth to discover the Ambushementes of Sathan, Whereby He Would Sur.
prise us, lulled in securitie and heardened with contempt of God's vengeance threatened
for our offences.
• See Freimark, Occultismus und Sexualität, 1909; Laurent-Nagour, Occultismus
und Liebe, 1903; Lehmann, Aberglaube, 2nd ed. 1908 ; Delasseux, Les Incubes et les
Succubes, 1897; Brevannes, L'Orgie Satanique, 1904 ; Paul Moreau, Des Aberrations du
Sens Génèsique, 4th ed. 1887; K. H. Ulrichs, Incubus, Urningsliebe und Blutgier, 1869.
See, also, papers by Freud, Jung, Ferenczi and Ernest Jones in The American Journal
of Psychology, April 1910.
## p. 374 (#390) ############################################
374
The Advent of Modern Thought
accused women in the hope of pardon or at least of respite
from their anguish. But, in the seventeenth century, with its
.
ignorance of nervous diseases, tracts? disseminating these accounts
appealed to the people's half suppressed sense of horror and
love of impurity and created a profound impression. Writers now
began to discuss the judicial aspects of witchcraft; but, however
critical might be their attitude to methods of conviction, they
never questioned the reality of the crime. Thus, John Cotta, a
physician, who had insight enough to expose the frauds of quack
doctors, displays all the enlightenment of his age in The Triall
of Witchcraft, showing the true and righte method of discovery
(1616), but cannot dissuade himself from believing in magic
and sorcery. He begins by declaring the subject to be beyond
human knowledge and approachable only through conjecture and
inference.
By this devious method, he deduces that evil spirits
exist, quoting the usual testimony from sacred and classical
history; but his common sense prompts him to warn his readers
that those suspected of witchcraft are often mere impostors or
unconsenting agents in working the devil's miracles. He even
employs his erudition to expose the fallacy of the water test *.
But the many current reports of witchery lead him to agree with
Reginald Scot that magic must have been at work when diseases
produce unaccountable symptoms or defy accredited remedies":
And he maintains that the testimony of reliable witnesses or the
detection of occult practices are enough to bring a witch to the
bar. Edward Fairfax, translator of Tasso, and author of Godfrey
of Bulloigne, succumbed to the prevailing panic. In an admirable
piece of narrative prose", he ascribes the mental disorders of his
children to witchcraft, though the hallucinations and seizures
are mainly due, in the case of younger children, to infantile
hysteria and, of the elder girl, to suppressed eroticism. Nor
could Richard Bernard, though a lucid and scholarly thinker,
resist the conclusion of many confessions and condemnations. In
>
1 See bibliography and a Collection of Rare and Curious Tracts relating to Witch
craft, 1838. For reprint of Thomas Potts's account of the famous trial of the
Lancashire witches, 1613, see Chetham Soc. , vol. vi, 1835.
2 Discovery of. . . Ignorant Practicers of Physice, 1612.
3 The water test consisted in plunging the suspected person into a pond ; if really
a witch, who had renounced her baptism, the water would refuse to take her in and
she would float. See chap. XVI.
+ See chap. x.
• A Discourse of Witch-craft as it was acted in the family of Mr Edw. Fairfar. . . in
1621.
4
## p. 375 (#391) ############################################
Witch-hunting
375
6
his Guide to Grand Jury Men (1627), he restates the arguments
of the demonologists, from Sprenger to Cotta, and elaborates them
with all the thoroughness of conviction. And yet Bernard is fully
conscious of a vast error due to incredulity and inexperience.
In the First Booke, he quotes the Bible to prove how much of
supposed witchcraft is either mental disease or mere self-deception;
and, towards the end of his work, he declares that the rumours
of magic are often the vain conceits of the addle-headed, or of
silly fooles or of prattling gossips or of superstitiously fearful;
or of fansieful melancholicks or of discomposed and crased wits. '
Thus, though Bernard had all the knowledge and penetra-
tion necessary to refute these superstitions, he was too closely in
touch with his age to see differently from his fellows. The evil
had, indeed, reached its climax. Just as the anarchy of the
reformation had made men feel that all the army of Satan was
let loose among them, so, now, in the time of civil war and hatred,
each faction imputed such diabolic criminality to its opponents
that the devil's presence was expected everywhere. The vampires
and jackals of society began to trade on this obsession. Not only
were such lying pamphlets published as A Most certain true and
strange discovery of a witch being overtaken as she was standing
on a small plank board and as sailing it over the river of Newbury,
1643, but 'gul-gropers,' 'falconers,’ ‘ranck-riders' and 'ring-fallers'
found that witch-hunting was more profitable than coney-catching,
with the added luxury of abiding by the law. Children, who had
always figured largely in the felony of the age, made a profession
of feigning the symptoms of the bewitched. Such juvenile
perjurers as the 'Boy of Bilson' and the 'Boy of Battlesdon'
foamed at the mouth and fell into trances in the presence of
certain old women? Matthew Hopkins, a monster of impudence
and iniquity, actually styled himself the Witch-finder General'
and manipulated the panic of his age so successfully that parlia-
ment commissioned him to perform a circuit for the detection
of witches, paying twenty shillings for each conviction. Again,
literature, for want of wider scope, came under this contagion.
Hopkins produced in 1647 The Discovery of Witches; in answer
to severall Queries ; a catechism in which he explains the
symptoms of witchery and his methods of investigation. Yet this
6
6
See vol. II, chap. v, p. 111.
• See Wonderful News from the North, 1650 ; these and other reports of witch trials
have been collected and discussed by Wallace Notenstein in History of English Witch-
craft from 1558 to 1718, published by the American Historical Association, 1911.
## p. 376 (#392) ############################################
376 The Advent of Modern Thought
manifesto is less fantastic than some books thick with academic
learning. Among the rest, John Stearne’s A Confirmation and
Discovery of Witch-Craft (1648) is unique. Though written in
a spirit of impartial enquiry, the treatise contains perhaps the
most bizarre collection of witch confessions in the world.
If intellectual progress can be compared to a journey, the
Caroline age represents that stage in which pilgrims, having lost
the track amid dangers and difficulties, turn backwards and search
frantically for it along the earlier parts of the route. In this
retrogression, the study of witchcraft led thinkers to investigate
other forms of magic and occultism which might quietly have
passed out of memory, especially astrology and alchemy.
From prehistoric times, it had been natural for man to regard
all he sees and hears as connected with or like to himself. This
sense of sympathy with creation had been developed by the
thinkers of different countries till, in Pythagorism, it reached the
doctrine of the 'harmony of the spheres. ' Aristotle had taken
a hint from this theory, in explaining the human body to be an
aggregate of parts, so closely correlated that no unit could
be affected without disturbing the rest. Later, the Stoics, imbued
with eastern cosmic theories, had applied this physiological con-
ception to the world as a whole. As in the human microcosm, so
in the universal macrocosm, there was a constant play of inter-
action among the component parts. When this creed had been
established, it was inevitable that the stars, with their mysterious
motions and strange persistent brightness, should be considered to
hare a special influence over events on earth, and men believed
that the course of mundane affairs could be predicted by studying
these heavenly manifestations. Thus, judicial astrology' came to
be recognised as one of the seven liberal arts. Throughout the
Middle Ages and renascence it was occasionally banned, on the
authority of St Augustine, as heresy against the doctrine of free-
will", but would have been quietly abandoned in favour of astro-
nomy, if men had not either clung to it for want of confidence in the
new culture of their age or else attacked it as being a snare of the
devil. In 1601, John Chamber produced A Treatise against judi-
cial Astrologie. He begins his treatise with a wearisome array of
theological quotations and interpretations, as was inevitable in
1 E. g. John of Salisbury declared astrology to be the beginning of idolatry, Pico
della Mirandola and Savonarola rejected the superstition, and Erasmus ridiculed it in
Encomium Moriae.
## p. 377 (#393) ############################################
Astrology
377
3
9
attacking what Aristotle was considered to have taught and Abraham
was supposed to have practised. He does not deny that astrology
may contain the truth, but he realises that men have not knowledge
enough to find it. On the one hand, the influence of the stars cannot
be calculated, because many exist about which we know nothing ;
and, on the other hand, we cannot discern the critical moments of
life at which the horoscope should be taken. Such events as being
born or falling sick are astrologically unimportant; they are
merely results ; the causes, which really prove the turning points
in life, are too obscure to be timed? Yet this scholar, who studied
astronomy and understood causation, supports Sprenger's conten-
tion that, if astrologers sometimes prophesy truly, it is because
they are witches and in league with the devil. Sir Christopher
Heydon answered this book with an elaborate treatise in which
we still meet the picturesque fantasies of the Middle Ages,
asking Chamber whether it is likely that the stars 'onely be-
spangle Heaven like vaine ornaments while the basest weede
under his feete' has medical power. But, in less than ten years,
Chamber's friend George Carleton, bishop of Chichester, com-
posed, and ultimately printed in 1624, AETPOAOTOMANIA :
the madness of astrologers, a voluminous rejoinder, which con-
demns astrology as being no part of mathematics or natural
philosophy because it proceedeth not by demonstration from
certaine known Principles. ' But, though Carleton exacts a
scientific basis for any system of speculation worthy of credence,
yet he, too, is haunted by fear of the foul fiend. This excessive
desire to know the future is not merely human folly; it is in-
spired by the devil.
Since medieval philosophers had learnt to regard creation as
an aggregate of parts which influence one another, like the organs
of a single body, their aim had always been to discover the innate
sympathies and antipathies of things. When they had gained
control over these tendencies, alchemists hoped to be able to
remodel nature; especially by producing gold and silver out of
inferior metals. These aspirations had not been definitely dis-
proved, and now began to influence religious idealists, who
could find only schism and controversy in the worship of the
1 Chap. VI.
9 Malleus Malef. pt. I, Q. XVI.
* A Defense of Judiciall Astrologie in answer to a treatise lately published by M. John
Chamber, 1603. Among tbe Sa ville MSS at the Bodleian is Chamber's answer :
Confutation of astrological Demonology in the Devil's School. The dedication is dated
2 February 1603/4. Apparently it was never published. See D. of N. B.
## p. 378 (#394) ############################################
378 The Advent of Modern Thought
church. Dissatisfied with what they held to be the sensuous
materialism of Roman worship, these purists declared themselves
Lutherans, but, instinctively in love with pantheism and the
mysteries of intuitive knowledge, they became disciples of Para-
celsus and convinced themselves that they had found out the
secret of all knowledge in a system of magic which penetrated
the interior constitution of things. Yearning vaguely for a more
spiritual conception of life, they professed to be engaged in the
alchemical reconstruction of the world, by curing disease and
creating precious metals. Their love of mysticism was gratified
by uniting all such enthusiasts into a secret society to carry out
the magnum opus under the symbol of the Rosy Cross.
Whether Rosicrucianism be of prehistoric antiquity or not, it
reached England from Germany at the beginning of the seven-
teenth century. The mystery surrounding this brotherhood and
the strange symbolism of their doctrine provoked much misrepre-
sentation, but, as most errors vaguely represent some intellectual
movement, so Rosicrucianism, though retrograde and chimerical,
is a recognition of the immaterial world and an assertion of man's
supremacy over it. With this germ of progress, the fraternity did
not lack apologists among men who could find no saner scope for
their spiritual longings. Robert Fludd mournfully reviews the
ineffectiveness and confusion of modern science, calling on his
contemporaries to turn again and study the occult meanings of
ancient philosophy. John Heydon sought to discover the secret
of healing in the forces of nature, and has left a description
of the Rosicrucian kingdom copied from the renascence Utopians
and almost suggestive of Erewhon. Thomas Vaughan, though
disclaiming all connection with the brotherhood, was yet im-
bued with the same spirit. For him, the coming of Elias meant
the advent of the heavenly alchemist who should transform the
universe into the pure gold of the spiritual city of God. For a
while, these doctrines helped to disseminate a purer, nobler con-
ception, both of God and man, and thus played a part in the change
which came over the nation in the sixties. But such a sect could
end, eventually, only in teaching self-justification and substituting
what is vague and allegorical for practical Christianity. Like the
witch terror, astrology and other relics of the Middle Ages,
hermetic and cabalistic sciences were destined to be discredited
though not effaced-in the spiritual and intellectual revolution
which they contributed, in some measure, to bring about.
1 See Waite, A. E. , The Real History of the Rosicrucians, 1887.
## p. 379 (#395) ############################################
Broadsides
379
This revolution, the advent of modern thought, took place as
soon as the people had cultivated the habit of looking at a
question from more than one point of view. The Baconians and
a few of the Theophrastians had acquired this impartiality and
reflective scepticism from the study of the classics or of Montaigne ;
but the people were already absorbed in a controversy which
appealed to their medieval instinct of unquestioning self-sacrifice
in a cause. At an earlier epoch, this obstinacy and prejudice would
have been a permanent obstacle to intellectual progress. For-
tunately, the seventeenth century was not only an age of factions ;
it was an age which kept a diary. Every outburst of folly or
hatred was printed on the impulse of the moment and scattered
through the streets. Aggregates of people are proverbially irre-
.
sponsible ; but, in this case, the national conscience was gradually
confronted with an incriminating record which with other in-
fluences shamed the people into a united effort towards progress.
The history of this mental awakening is the history of the
broadside. Ever since Tudor times, the people had been ac-
customed to see their thoughts and feelings reflected in penny
flysheets? But, despite its universality of range and immense
popularity, this fugitive literature was still an undeveloped genre.
The effusions which caught the passing attention of 'prentices,
housewives and tradesmen, at street corners and in city squares,
were addressed to narrow, preoccupied intelligences and could
never rise to the level of literature. But London was swarming
with young men of wealth or birth who, as an outcome of
feudalism, believed that only the king had a right to rule and
that gentlemen should be above every profession except that of
fighting for him. These 'Hotspurres of the Time,' as a puritan
writer calls them, amid the disorder and dissipation of London
life, claimed an interest in the literature of the moment. Even
the scapegoat of the Gull's Hornebooke5 was fashionable enough to
compose poems and criticise plays. But, though these 'roaring
boys,' 'hectors' and 'cavaliers' cultivated the clinches and con-
ceits then in vogue, much as they did extravagance of dress,
they found that the recognised vehicles of preciousness, such as
character sketches and epigrams, were too restricted, and, at the
same time, too laboured a field, to suit their full-blooded, though
desultory, attention to the arts. They required a genre which
>
E. g. Earle and Stephens.
3 Ante, vol. iv, chap. Xvi, pp. 362-3.
" Ante, vol. iv, p. 356.
2 Ante, vol. II, chap. v, p. 96.
• Ante, vol. iv, p. 355.
## p. 380 (#396) ############################################
380 The Advent of Modern Thought
would give full vent to their recklessness and animal spirits, and
they found this mode of expression partly in jest-books, but much
more in street ballads, which breathed the very essence of old
London and, almost imperceptibly, had blended with their revels
through the city.
Thus began the first stage in the development of the street
ballad. Cavaliers brought into it their dare-devil joviality and
carelessness and the wider interests of their active lives. At the
same time, the simplicity of ballad metre, adapted to a catch
melody, and the break between each stanza, precluded complexity
of thought or accumulations of periphrases. Old types of humour
still survive, such as mock testaments and burlesque laudations ;
but they take the form of rollicking songs made up of ingenious
conceits. Permanent comic characters like the miller, the tinker
.
or the beggar reappear in the shape of lyricised monologues”.
Drinking songs are plentiful, as in olden times. But, though we
still find coarse merriment over red noses and claret-coloured
complexions, though Walter Mapes's humorous touches of ancient
and ecclesiastical lore are quite discarded, and wine-generally in
opposition to plebeian beer—is frankly prized for its generous heat
and exhilaration, yet the cavaliers also sing of it as the spur to
heroic action and a solace in trouble or captivity. Besides wine,
these songs discuss women. Some recount lawless and ungallant
adventures reminiscent of the Fabliaux and jest-books; others
remain frankly goliardic in their cynical invective against marriage
or in their satire on female vanity, lust and caprice ; some others
are pervaded by the grossest sensuality. Yet, even here, the new
influence is easily recognisable. Many of these effusions are full
of the courtier's cult of the fair sex, which, though fulsome and
extravagant, was introducing new words and expressions into the
language. Even the common paramour is sometimes encircled by
a halo of poetic phraseology which hides her baseness, while other
poems, in the new atmosphere of action, breathe a manly inde-
pendence and contempt of uxorious servitude. But the elevation
of the popular song is most noticeable when it treats, in clear,
simple verse, the more serious subjects which these cavaliers
understood only too well, such as the power of money, the in-
justice of fortune or the tyranny of the sword.
For discussion of these types see ante, vol. n, chap. v, pp. 85–95, and
bibliography, pp. 482-490.
? For the development of . scoundrel verse,' see Chandler, F. W. , The Literature
of Roguery, vol. I, chap. III, sect. iv.
9
## p. 381 (#397) ############################################
Street Ballads and Pamphlets
381
By the
>
Thus, the metres and diction of popular catch-pennies had
risen to the level of educated and experienced men.
third decade of the seventeenth century, these fugitive fly-
sheets had also been called upon to serve the purpose of the
political rancour and indignation which retarded intellectual
progress and plunged England into civil war.
Once again,
the pamphleteers and ballad-mongers of the time had recourse
to old forms of literature to convey their sarcasm and in-
nuendo. For instance, one lampoon on Buckingham's expedition
to France, with the refrain 'The cleane contrary way,' is copied
from the Cujus contrarium verum est of medieval satire, and
two more, in imitation of Lucian or Dekker', are dialogues be-
tween Charon and the murdered duke. Another pamphlet,
travestying the title of a newspaper as Mercurius Diabolicus or
Hell's Intelligencer, shows us the devil, in answer to a citizen's
question, recounting the pressure of work in hell since parlia-
ment came into power; and, in 1660, when that body dissolved
itself and a general desire for the restoration of the king was
felt, a ballad News from Hell or the Relation of a Vision,
represents the devil's amazement and incredulity that England,
lately ‘His sweet darling dear,' was now proving false to her
allegiance to hell. Others, such as Heraclitus' Dream (1642),
representing the shepherd (i. e. the church) shorn by his sheep,
are copied from medieval dream-visions.
The monologue was further developed and reached a high level
of satire in such pieces as Truth Flatters Not (1647), in which,
after pope, priest and prelate have betrayed their worldly am-
bition and duplicity, each in a soliloquy, Truth censures them all
in a closing speech. Or, in Three Speeches (1642), satirising the
narrowness and self-satisfied philistinism of the commercial class,
as exemplified by 'Master Warden's' political oration to his
fellows; his wife's comments on the discourse to her friends
and the chambermaid's views on affairs in general and especially
on papistry. The old dramatic broadside is still found in A coffin
for King Charles ; a Crowne for Cromwell; a Pit for the People
(1649).
Other forms of popular literature were at once adapted to the
factious feelings of the people. In Mercurius Melancholicus, or
1
Ante, vol. II, chap. XVI, p. 386.
· The idea of a visit to hell is almost continuous in literature since Homeric times,
and had been used by Jacobean writers, especially by Dekker, T. , in Newes from Hell,
1606; see ante, vol. iv, chap. XVI, p. 353, and bibliography under Dekker, T. , pp. 526, 527.
IV
## p. 382 (#398) ############################################
382
The Advent of Modern Thought
.
Newes from Westminster (1647), the old idea of a dozen arrant
fooles and knaves' is still preserved. Mock testaments were used
by both parties as at the time of the reformation', much like the
more modern 'burning in effigy,' to vilify not only persons but
causes. In the new spirit of the times, they became more like
allegories than mere lampoons. For instance, A True Inventory
of the goods and chattels of Superstition (1642) tells how Super-
stition, of the parish of Blind Devotion in the county of Corrupt
Doctrine and in the kingdom of Idolatry, bequeaths his goods and
chattels. Puritans, especially familists, constantly resorted to
their Bible to heap obloquy on the worldliness and licence of the
cavaliers. In the Dammee? Cavaliers Warning piece (1643), they
construed Obadiah's tirade against the Idumeans into a censure
of the royalist party; The Debauched Cavalier, or the English
Midianite (1642) is an attempt to discover, in the lives of king
Charles and his supporters, the enormities with which Israel's
enemy was credited: The Downefall of Dagon (1643) is the
demolition of the cross in Cheapside. The dialogue had, for cen-
turies, been a familiar form of discussion and satire, so now, many
puritan pamphlets are modelled on the catechism.
than journalist; his Observator, issued in later years, consisted of
nothing but comment without news. When Muddiman put an end
to L'Estrange's journals with the Gazette in 1665, L'Estrange, by
the king's orders, was pensioned off with £100 a year charged on the
Gazette, his future services as surveyor of the press being paid for,
in like manner, by £200 a year out of the secret service money.
Of the immense journalistic output which Cromwell had sup-
pressed, the net results at the end of the reign of Charles II were:
first, the official recognition of the necessity to gratify the public
desire for news, shown in the continuance of the Gazette as a per-
manent institution; and, secondly, the striking manner in which
newsletters were permitted, unfettered and uncensored, for the
benefit of the upper classes, to supply the defects of the official
print. No longer ridiculed, newsletters at last obtained a place in
public esteem which had never been obtained by newsbooks. That,
before the end of the century, the liberty of the press should begin
and the modern newspaper follow, was but a logical corollary to
this.
6
1 Jeffreys took the extreme step of suppressing coffee-houses that dealt in news-
letters. ' Ellis correspondence, by A. Ellis, II, p. 243.
## p. 366 (#382) ############################################
CHAPTER XVI
THE TADVENT OF MODERN THOUGHT IN POPULAR
LITERATURE
THE WITCH CONTROVERSY. PAMPHLETEERS
1
THE enlightenment of the renascence had never penetrated the
deeper recesses of the popular mind. The social, religious and
economic revolutions of Tudor times; the fermentation of city
life under Elizabeth and James ; the growth of national conscious-
ness; the discoveries of travellers and men of science; above all,
the popularisation of biblical and classical literature, had added
enormously to the interests and imagination of the ordinary man,
without transforming his sentiments, convictions and ideals. His
mental vision was crowded with new and engrossing objects, but
his outlook remained medieval. It was the task of the Jacobean
and Caroline generations to effect a mental reformation. Had
the age been a time of political peace and social calm, the first
half of the seventeenth century would have proved to be one of
the most interesting epochs in English literature. In an atmo-
sphere of learning and discussion, humanists of the period would
have adjusted their heritage of old-time beliefs and aspirations to
the maturer, more tolerant wisdom of Erasmus, More, Wier,
Bullein, Montaigne, Scot, Ralegh, Shakespeare, Earle and Bacon.
All that was best in the Middle Ages would have expanded into
modern thought, and a second, more spiritual renascence would
have inspired a series of masterpieces, such as the work of Vergil
and Molière, in which the past and present join hands. As it
was, though knowledge continued to increase, the thoughts and
emotions of the people were diverted by class hatred, religious
controversy and the political crisis. The consciousness of fellow-
ship, essential to intellectual progress, had died out. Thus,
humanists, instead of broadening and redirecting the tendencies of
popular thought, either relapsed into scepticism, as in the instances
of Robert Burton and Sir Thomas Browne, or let loose their
## p. 367 (#383) ############################################
Demonology in the Middle Ages 367
augmented volume of learning and sentiment into the old, narrow
channels. Whenever an age fails to find new interests, intellectual
intemperance results. And, just as, at an earlier date, social
writers lost touch with ideas and squandered their originality on
experiments in style? , so, now, the more learned divines and
physicians devoted their scholarship and research to the barren
mysteries of demonology.
In order to understand the witch controversy of the seventeenth
century, it is necessary to remember that primitive people had
always cherished a veneration for the 'wise woman”, probably a
relic of the mother-worship of the premigratory period, and that
her broom, ladle and goat may, possibly, be regarded as symbols
of her domestic power. She was supplanted by the new polytheism
of warrior spirits ; and, when they gave way, in their turn, to
Christianity, some of the dispossessed deities became saints, while
others went to join this earlier deity in the traditions and folk-lore
of the people. As western Christendom became familiar with the
teaching of the Greek church and with eastern religions—at first
by the researches of theologians and then through the Saracenic
wars in Spain and the crusades—these rites and superstitions were
gradually coloured with rabbinical conceptions of the devil's
hierarchy and with the Neoplatonic doctrine of demons and inter-
mediary powers. Despite the rationalism of Jean de Meung and
Roger Bacon", patristic conceptions of demonology were codified
and systematised in the Middle Ages. Such superstitions as the
incubus and succubus, the transmutation of men into beasts, the
power to fly by night were then, definitely, incorporated in
medieval theological conceptions. From the twelfth or thirteenth
century onwards, new feelings of horror and loathing began to be
associated with this entanglement of traditions. Not only was
the underworld of disinherited deities regarded as a rival by the
Church, and, therefore, credited with the infamies which are
usually attributed to heretics", but as men struggled towards a
higher level of civilisation, they instinctively accused these pariahs
of all that they were endeavouring to eliminate from their own
daily lives. The calamities and controversies of the fifteenth and
6
1 See ante, vol. iv, chap. XVI.
2 Karl Pearson: see essays on Woman as Witch,' 'Ashiepattle,' “Kindred Group-
marriage' in vol. 11 of Chances of Death, 1897.
3 Roman de la Rose, pt. II, c. 1280. Epistola fratris Rogerii Baconis de secretis
operibus artis et natura et de nullitate magiae, c. 1250 (ptd Theatrum Chimicum,
Nürnberg, 1732).
• See, especially, the bull of Gregory IX, 13 June 1233.
## p. 368 (#384) ############################################
368 The Advent of Modern Thought
sixteenth centuries only added to men's sense of danger and
misery and inspired a yet more pessimistic school of demonologists,
led by Jacquier, Institoris and Sprenger. By the time we
reach the seventeenth century, the imaginary realm of spirits,
ghosts, gnomes, fairies, demons, prophets and conjurors—now stig-
matised as the implacable enemies of mankind—became allegories
or symbols of all that was degraded, perverted, revolting or terrible.
The devil, from being a denizen of lonely or impassable places,
had now grown to be the monarch of innumerable hosts. As the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries had been disgraced in the eyes
of the priesthood by blasphemous parodies, so, now, the diabolical
empire was believed to be a monstrous imitation of the kingdom
of heaven, with disgusting travesties of church ritual. The
fiend's one object was to seduce mortals from the worship of
God, and as, from early Christian times, both monkish doctrin-
aires and secular humorists had depicted women
women as loose,
malevolent or ridiculous, so, now, it was with this sex rather than
with men that he found his easiest victims and most willing allies.
This predilection stimulated the dreams of diseased imagination.
The witch or 'wise woman’ was looked upon as the devil's chosen
handmaiden. The most elaborate pornography grew up around
this supposed union, and the witches' sabbath or Walpurgis
night-a relic of mother-worship, at which licence abounded-was
conceived to be a kind of devil's mass, at which debauchery ran
riot Other obsessions came to be connected with the witch
horror. From prehistoric times certain animals had been re-
garded as spirits of evil. Recollections of these legends blended
with the fear of noisome and poisonous animals, and led men to
believe that such creatures were auxiliaries of Black Magic.
Human deformity abounded in medieval slums, and people still
believed in monsters half man and half beast. And, as witches
were hideous hags, men attributed to these old women the birth of
abortions such as Hedelin? , Stengesius and Paré+ described and
the people themselves read of in broadsides.
From prehistoric times, men had been, and were still, accus-
tomed to regard the trivial enterprises and interests of bucolic
life as under the influence of witches. Such things as the growth
1 See Jules Baissac, Les Grands Jours de la Sorcellerie, 1890, chap. vi. See, also,
chap. vii in Illustrierte Sittengeschichte, by Fuchs, E. , 1909.
2 Des Satyres, Brutes, Monstres et Demons. De leur Nature et Adoration, par Francois
Hedelin, 1627. (Hedelin is better known as the Abbé d'Aubignac. )
: De Monstris et Monstrosis, 1647 (? ).
* Deux livres de chirurgie, 1573. Eng. trans. by Johnson, T. , 1649.
## p. 369 (#385) ############################################
Belief in Witchcraft
369
of crops, the fall of rain, the churning of milk, the disappearance
of household utensils and the birth of children, came within their
province, but, now that all the mystery of evil and suffering had
gathered round these beings, strange and appalling diseases were
believed to come from their power. Epilepsy, somnambulism,
St Vitus's dance, hysteria and hypnotism were attributed to vene-
fical agency. They could slowly murder human beings by sym-
pathetic magic or change them into animals. Nay, more, with
the help of the devil, they could call back the dead, or some
semblance of the dead, to aid them to win ascendency over human
beings.
It will hence be readily understood that, at the opening of our
period, the belief in witchcraft had grown to be more than an
antiquated superstition. It represented the Gothic obscenity,
grotesqueness, profanity, madness, cruelty and paganism, which
progress had branded as accursed but could not eradicate from the
imaginations of men. Had an age of moral reflectiveness suc-
ceeded to the creative energy of Elizabeth's reign, the Jacobean
and Caroline generations would have turned the light of the new
learning on their own minds and formed a higher conception of
divine power and human dignity. But the heat of controversy
rendered introspection impossible, and humanists were too busy
refuting each other's political and religious errors to cultivate
high seriousness of thought. Thus, those who felt that all was not
well with the world, and who were not inspired by any movement
towards a more cultured and spiritual interpretation of life,
returned to examine the old allegory of human imperfection and
defencelessness, finding in the books of the past and the dis-
order of the present only too much to justify a belief in witchcraft.
To begin with, as progress bad not been universal, those who
could not move with the times tended to cling to old beliefs from
instinctive distrust of what was new; while others, dismayed at
the collapse of faith and tradition, were ready to believe anything
which represented humanity as corrupt and afflicted. The
Faust legend was still a parable of the age. Many who viewed
with horror the careers of John Dee, Walter Kelly, Simon Forman,
Dr Lambe, William Lilly and Elias Ashmole, were not prepared to
deny that witches and magicians bartered their souls in the insane
desire to pass the limits divinely placed to knowledge and power.
Again, the renascence had accustomed men to intenser and more
versatile habits of thought; inventions were more ingenious,
thinkers were more subtle. Consequently, those who were
24
K. L. VII.
CH, XVI.
## p. 370 (#386) ############################################
370 The Advent of Modern Thought
still convinced of original sin, would attribute to the devil the
heightened intelligence and duplicity of man, rather than deny
his existence.
Now that the thoughts of men were turned in this direction,
they continued, like their predecessors from St Augustine down-
wards, to discover authority for superstitions in their most revered
sources of knowledge. Neoplatonism was used to corroborate
the doctrine of spirits and angels, and, besides, to deny that the
world was full of demons was to be a Sadducee. Moreover,
positive proofs of devilry and magic could be deduced from holy
writ. The serpent in the garden of Eden, Pharaoh's conjurors,
the afflictions of Job, Balaam and his ass, the witch of Endor,
the 'voice of the charmer,' the transmutation of Nebuchadnezzar,
the Gadarene swine, 'the lunatic boy,' and Simon Magus were
understood in the light of seventeenth-century demonology,
Classical lore, which carried hardly less weight than Scripture,
could be as easily interpreted. The incubus and succubus were
discerned in the union of gods and goddesses with mortals. The
belief in witch-begotten monsters was confirmed by tales of the
Minotaur, lamiae, empusae, lemures and satyrsIf Circe could
, .
turn men into swine, Neptune and Aeolus raise storms, Juno
travel through the air, Apollo strike down with disease, Venus
become invisible, why should not more modern magicians? They
learnt from Apuleius that men could be changed into animals;
from Horace and Lucan that witches practised abominable rites
in secret, and from Tacitus, Suetonius and Ovid that spells, in-
cantations and sympathetic magic could be used to destroy the
life of a fellow creature.
For many, and, in some cases, subconscious, motives,
,
men wished to believe in witchcraft; and, since the intellect
generally follows the emotions, the age found more reasons for
believing the propositions formulated by Molitoris? , and for
iterally discharging the mistranslated mandate, "Thou shalt not
suffer a witch (Mekasshepha) to live,' than for believing the
arguments of Agrippa, Erasmus, Wier, Reuchlin, the authors of
Litterae Obscurorum Virorum, and Scots Puritanism, with its
1 Cf. Walter Mapes, De nugis curialium, c. 1180, in which Satan admits that Ceres,
Priapus, naiads, fauns, dryads, satyrs, Bacchus and Pan have been changed into
devils.
? See Dialogus de Pythonicis Mulieribus, 1489.
3 For the recrudescence of the witch panic in Tudor times, see ante, vol. 11, chap. v,
pp. 112 ff. ; for the part played by Erasmus see, especially, Colloquia Familiaria ; for
Reuchlin, De verbo mirifico, 1494 ; for Wier, De Praestigiis demonum, 1564.
## p. 371 (#387) ############################################
Gifford's Dialogues of Witches
371
gloom, its intolerance and its sense of spiritual conflict, has been
held largely responsible for the persecution that now arose.
But the causes lay deeper than any sectarian movement and
actuated men of different creeds, who might otherwise have ad-
vanced the culture of their age. Holland, in a tedious dialogue',
a
proved the existence of witches from the Bible, and established
the likelihood of their lust for blood by quoting the sacrifice of
Iphigenia and the cruelties of Nero and Maxentius. He claimed
that they should be put to death, even if unconvicted of magic, as
being renegades and perverters. With soulless resignation, he
recognised in them God's chosen sign of the world's sins, especially
papistry, and His scourge wherewith to plague apostates. Passing
over Nashe's brilliant and erratic protest? against superstition,
which squandered flashes of cultured ridicule on the unessential
question of dreams and probably never reached serious contro-
versialists, we find George Gifford returning to the discussion in
1593. His new production, Dialogues of Witches and Witchcraft,
is an important sign of the times. It treats of rustic superstitions,
and, in a spirit of simple, broad-minded Christianity, he maintains,
as Wier had already asserted, that witches and sorcerers have no
diabolical power; that blight, the sickness of cattle and human ail-
ments are the work of heaven alone and should be atoned for only
by prayer and fasting. The treatise has many touches of character
drawing, and this interest in human nature, combined with a sense
of God's omnipotence, might well have led the author in the steps
of Reginald Scot. But the growing pessimism of the age had
turned Gifford's gaze from what is good in life. He still finds
truth in the scholastic doctrine that the devil is a watchful diplo-
matist who takes possession of some malevolent old hag at a time
when men are disturbed by calamity, causing her to claim the
authorship of what has really been sent from heaven. He argues
that the fiend, thanks to his superhuman knowledge, forecasts the
future and then inspires 'wise men' to make a show of causing
what the devil has merely foreseen. In either case, these impostors
consent to intercourse with the devil, are decoys to lure men from
the worship of God and, therefore, should be put to death“.
1 A Treatise against Witchcraft, 1590.
? The Terrors of the Night, or a Discourse of Apparitions, 1594; see ante, vol. iv,
chap. xvi, p. 325.
* He had already produced Discourse of the Subtle Practices of Devilles, 1587.
Hobbes held nearly the same view; arguing that witches should be punished
although they have no real power, because they think they have, and purpose to do
mischief. See Leviathan, p. 7, ed. 1651.
24-2
## p. 372 (#388) ############################################
372
The Advent of Modern Thought
In 1603, king James, who had taken a prominent part in the
trial of Geilis Duncan and her associates, caused his Daemonologie
to be printed and published in England. This dialogue, despite
the jejuneness and insipidity which characterise all the literary
efforts of that royal pedant, is a remarkable work. Like other witch
treatises at the opening of the century, it still retains a critical and
scholarly attitude towards the subject. James realises, as Burkard
had done, that were wolves are the creation of a disordered fantasy,
and that nightmares (popularly explained as a sensation of diabolical
contact) are some reaction of the 'humours' of the imagination.
He agrees with St Augustine that the apparent miracles of the
devil are merely deceptions practised on the senses, and, though
he naturally believes in demons and spirits, yet he follows the
same authority and Roger Bacon in asserting that the infernal
world is thoroughly under the dominion of God. But James was
a true child of his age. In an epoch of heightened competition
and bitter feuds, he prefers to believe that people invoke infernal
aid from lust for riches or revenge, rather than to attribute all
witchcraft to the influence of melancholy? When convinced of
the probability of a league between devil and man, all the king's
theological erudition is manipulated into proofs of this theory.
The book is a manual, not discussing the question from an indi-
vidual point of view, but recapitulating and enforcing the theories
of previous demonologists, with a wealth of authoritative quotations
dear to this learned age. Thus, despite unnecessary digressions
into the realm of philology and scholasticism, the doctrine is pre-
sented with a realism and fulness of details which always carry
conviction, and every reader found his own superstition recorded
and stamped with the seal of royal approval. This powerful mani-
festo ended with the ill-fated recommendation that death should
be inflicted on the evidence of children or even of fellow criminals
(as in trials for treason) or after the water test and discovery of
the devil's mark 4.
The next few treatises on witchcraft add but little to the
theories of Gifford and king James. William Perkins, in his
Discoverie of the damned Art of Witch craft (1608), is, perhaps,
the most typical. Perkins is oppressed with the spectacle of
1 De Civitate Dei, 1. 18, c. 18, and De Secretis Operibus Artis, C. I, II.
? Bk. II, especially chap. 11.
3 Bk. II, chaps. II, IV, V, VI.
For explanation of water test, see p. 374. The devil's mark was any part of the
body which, after contact with the devil, lost sensation. Such local anaesthesia is a
recognised symptom of hysteria.
## p. 373 (#389) ############################################
William Perkins
373
human error: he sees that men have the instinct to worship some
god and that, in hours of great danger or superhuman effort, they
turn for help to some higher power. But the true God has placed
a limit to the knowledge and power of men, and many ambitious
mortals are blind to these restrictions and endeavour to pass the
goal of ordinance. When an author had taken this condemnatory
view of men's struggle for knowledge and power, he could hardly
refuse to believe that the devil was ready to help them. So he
follows the authority and example of king James, describing
Satan's well-organised kingdom and the illusory signs and wonders
he works for those in his service. But, though he follows his
predecessors by demanding the sentence of death against those
convicted, he is one of the first to discountenancel the old-
fashioned tests by hot iron, water or scratching, and to urge the
necessity of carefully sifting circumstantial evidence.
Perkins's protest marks the beginning of a new phase in this
discussion. So far back as 1576, seventeen or eighteen persons
had been condemned for witchcraft at St Osyth, and three more
at Malden in 15792. After parliament had followed their monarch's
Daemonologie with a law condemning all witches to death, a series
of official inquisitions, held especially in Lancashire, Essex and
Yorkshire, brought to light innumerable cases of women, and
sometimes of men, who confessed to a secret union with the devil.
The seducer had access to them in all conceivable shapes, from a
loathsome animal to a handsome man, leaving some point of
contact on their bodies insensible to pain, and assigning to each
a posse of attendant imps, who sucked their blood through teat-
like orifices in the skin. Thanks to this intercourse, witches
gained power to plague the persons and properties of their
enemies. Modern psychology has recognised in these hallucina-
tions the symptoms of different kinds of insanity and perversion",
and, of course, many confessions were wrung by torture from
0
1 Chap. vi, • The Application of the Doctrine of Witchcraft to our Times. '
* See the pamphlet of that year with a title eminently illustrative of this movement,
Detection of Damnable Drifts, practized by 3 Witches, arraigned at Chelmsforde in
Essez. . . . Set Forth to discover the Ambushementes of Sathan, Whereby He Would Sur.
prise us, lulled in securitie and heardened with contempt of God's vengeance threatened
for our offences.
• See Freimark, Occultismus und Sexualität, 1909; Laurent-Nagour, Occultismus
und Liebe, 1903; Lehmann, Aberglaube, 2nd ed. 1908 ; Delasseux, Les Incubes et les
Succubes, 1897; Brevannes, L'Orgie Satanique, 1904 ; Paul Moreau, Des Aberrations du
Sens Génèsique, 4th ed. 1887; K. H. Ulrichs, Incubus, Urningsliebe und Blutgier, 1869.
See, also, papers by Freud, Jung, Ferenczi and Ernest Jones in The American Journal
of Psychology, April 1910.
## p. 374 (#390) ############################################
374
The Advent of Modern Thought
accused women in the hope of pardon or at least of respite
from their anguish. But, in the seventeenth century, with its
.
ignorance of nervous diseases, tracts? disseminating these accounts
appealed to the people's half suppressed sense of horror and
love of impurity and created a profound impression. Writers now
began to discuss the judicial aspects of witchcraft; but, however
critical might be their attitude to methods of conviction, they
never questioned the reality of the crime. Thus, John Cotta, a
physician, who had insight enough to expose the frauds of quack
doctors, displays all the enlightenment of his age in The Triall
of Witchcraft, showing the true and righte method of discovery
(1616), but cannot dissuade himself from believing in magic
and sorcery. He begins by declaring the subject to be beyond
human knowledge and approachable only through conjecture and
inference.
By this devious method, he deduces that evil spirits
exist, quoting the usual testimony from sacred and classical
history; but his common sense prompts him to warn his readers
that those suspected of witchcraft are often mere impostors or
unconsenting agents in working the devil's miracles. He even
employs his erudition to expose the fallacy of the water test *.
But the many current reports of witchery lead him to agree with
Reginald Scot that magic must have been at work when diseases
produce unaccountable symptoms or defy accredited remedies":
And he maintains that the testimony of reliable witnesses or the
detection of occult practices are enough to bring a witch to the
bar. Edward Fairfax, translator of Tasso, and author of Godfrey
of Bulloigne, succumbed to the prevailing panic. In an admirable
piece of narrative prose", he ascribes the mental disorders of his
children to witchcraft, though the hallucinations and seizures
are mainly due, in the case of younger children, to infantile
hysteria and, of the elder girl, to suppressed eroticism. Nor
could Richard Bernard, though a lucid and scholarly thinker,
resist the conclusion of many confessions and condemnations. In
>
1 See bibliography and a Collection of Rare and Curious Tracts relating to Witch
craft, 1838. For reprint of Thomas Potts's account of the famous trial of the
Lancashire witches, 1613, see Chetham Soc. , vol. vi, 1835.
2 Discovery of. . . Ignorant Practicers of Physice, 1612.
3 The water test consisted in plunging the suspected person into a pond ; if really
a witch, who had renounced her baptism, the water would refuse to take her in and
she would float. See chap. XVI.
+ See chap. x.
• A Discourse of Witch-craft as it was acted in the family of Mr Edw. Fairfar. . . in
1621.
4
## p. 375 (#391) ############################################
Witch-hunting
375
6
his Guide to Grand Jury Men (1627), he restates the arguments
of the demonologists, from Sprenger to Cotta, and elaborates them
with all the thoroughness of conviction. And yet Bernard is fully
conscious of a vast error due to incredulity and inexperience.
In the First Booke, he quotes the Bible to prove how much of
supposed witchcraft is either mental disease or mere self-deception;
and, towards the end of his work, he declares that the rumours
of magic are often the vain conceits of the addle-headed, or of
silly fooles or of prattling gossips or of superstitiously fearful;
or of fansieful melancholicks or of discomposed and crased wits. '
Thus, though Bernard had all the knowledge and penetra-
tion necessary to refute these superstitions, he was too closely in
touch with his age to see differently from his fellows. The evil
had, indeed, reached its climax. Just as the anarchy of the
reformation had made men feel that all the army of Satan was
let loose among them, so, now, in the time of civil war and hatred,
each faction imputed such diabolic criminality to its opponents
that the devil's presence was expected everywhere. The vampires
and jackals of society began to trade on this obsession. Not only
were such lying pamphlets published as A Most certain true and
strange discovery of a witch being overtaken as she was standing
on a small plank board and as sailing it over the river of Newbury,
1643, but 'gul-gropers,' 'falconers,’ ‘ranck-riders' and 'ring-fallers'
found that witch-hunting was more profitable than coney-catching,
with the added luxury of abiding by the law. Children, who had
always figured largely in the felony of the age, made a profession
of feigning the symptoms of the bewitched. Such juvenile
perjurers as the 'Boy of Bilson' and the 'Boy of Battlesdon'
foamed at the mouth and fell into trances in the presence of
certain old women? Matthew Hopkins, a monster of impudence
and iniquity, actually styled himself the Witch-finder General'
and manipulated the panic of his age so successfully that parlia-
ment commissioned him to perform a circuit for the detection
of witches, paying twenty shillings for each conviction. Again,
literature, for want of wider scope, came under this contagion.
Hopkins produced in 1647 The Discovery of Witches; in answer
to severall Queries ; a catechism in which he explains the
symptoms of witchery and his methods of investigation. Yet this
6
6
See vol. II, chap. v, p. 111.
• See Wonderful News from the North, 1650 ; these and other reports of witch trials
have been collected and discussed by Wallace Notenstein in History of English Witch-
craft from 1558 to 1718, published by the American Historical Association, 1911.
## p. 376 (#392) ############################################
376 The Advent of Modern Thought
manifesto is less fantastic than some books thick with academic
learning. Among the rest, John Stearne’s A Confirmation and
Discovery of Witch-Craft (1648) is unique. Though written in
a spirit of impartial enquiry, the treatise contains perhaps the
most bizarre collection of witch confessions in the world.
If intellectual progress can be compared to a journey, the
Caroline age represents that stage in which pilgrims, having lost
the track amid dangers and difficulties, turn backwards and search
frantically for it along the earlier parts of the route. In this
retrogression, the study of witchcraft led thinkers to investigate
other forms of magic and occultism which might quietly have
passed out of memory, especially astrology and alchemy.
From prehistoric times, it had been natural for man to regard
all he sees and hears as connected with or like to himself. This
sense of sympathy with creation had been developed by the
thinkers of different countries till, in Pythagorism, it reached the
doctrine of the 'harmony of the spheres. ' Aristotle had taken
a hint from this theory, in explaining the human body to be an
aggregate of parts, so closely correlated that no unit could
be affected without disturbing the rest. Later, the Stoics, imbued
with eastern cosmic theories, had applied this physiological con-
ception to the world as a whole. As in the human microcosm, so
in the universal macrocosm, there was a constant play of inter-
action among the component parts. When this creed had been
established, it was inevitable that the stars, with their mysterious
motions and strange persistent brightness, should be considered to
hare a special influence over events on earth, and men believed
that the course of mundane affairs could be predicted by studying
these heavenly manifestations. Thus, judicial astrology' came to
be recognised as one of the seven liberal arts. Throughout the
Middle Ages and renascence it was occasionally banned, on the
authority of St Augustine, as heresy against the doctrine of free-
will", but would have been quietly abandoned in favour of astro-
nomy, if men had not either clung to it for want of confidence in the
new culture of their age or else attacked it as being a snare of the
devil. In 1601, John Chamber produced A Treatise against judi-
cial Astrologie. He begins his treatise with a wearisome array of
theological quotations and interpretations, as was inevitable in
1 E. g. John of Salisbury declared astrology to be the beginning of idolatry, Pico
della Mirandola and Savonarola rejected the superstition, and Erasmus ridiculed it in
Encomium Moriae.
## p. 377 (#393) ############################################
Astrology
377
3
9
attacking what Aristotle was considered to have taught and Abraham
was supposed to have practised. He does not deny that astrology
may contain the truth, but he realises that men have not knowledge
enough to find it. On the one hand, the influence of the stars cannot
be calculated, because many exist about which we know nothing ;
and, on the other hand, we cannot discern the critical moments of
life at which the horoscope should be taken. Such events as being
born or falling sick are astrologically unimportant; they are
merely results ; the causes, which really prove the turning points
in life, are too obscure to be timed? Yet this scholar, who studied
astronomy and understood causation, supports Sprenger's conten-
tion that, if astrologers sometimes prophesy truly, it is because
they are witches and in league with the devil. Sir Christopher
Heydon answered this book with an elaborate treatise in which
we still meet the picturesque fantasies of the Middle Ages,
asking Chamber whether it is likely that the stars 'onely be-
spangle Heaven like vaine ornaments while the basest weede
under his feete' has medical power. But, in less than ten years,
Chamber's friend George Carleton, bishop of Chichester, com-
posed, and ultimately printed in 1624, AETPOAOTOMANIA :
the madness of astrologers, a voluminous rejoinder, which con-
demns astrology as being no part of mathematics or natural
philosophy because it proceedeth not by demonstration from
certaine known Principles. ' But, though Carleton exacts a
scientific basis for any system of speculation worthy of credence,
yet he, too, is haunted by fear of the foul fiend. This excessive
desire to know the future is not merely human folly; it is in-
spired by the devil.
Since medieval philosophers had learnt to regard creation as
an aggregate of parts which influence one another, like the organs
of a single body, their aim had always been to discover the innate
sympathies and antipathies of things. When they had gained
control over these tendencies, alchemists hoped to be able to
remodel nature; especially by producing gold and silver out of
inferior metals. These aspirations had not been definitely dis-
proved, and now began to influence religious idealists, who
could find only schism and controversy in the worship of the
1 Chap. VI.
9 Malleus Malef. pt. I, Q. XVI.
* A Defense of Judiciall Astrologie in answer to a treatise lately published by M. John
Chamber, 1603. Among tbe Sa ville MSS at the Bodleian is Chamber's answer :
Confutation of astrological Demonology in the Devil's School. The dedication is dated
2 February 1603/4. Apparently it was never published. See D. of N. B.
## p. 378 (#394) ############################################
378 The Advent of Modern Thought
church. Dissatisfied with what they held to be the sensuous
materialism of Roman worship, these purists declared themselves
Lutherans, but, instinctively in love with pantheism and the
mysteries of intuitive knowledge, they became disciples of Para-
celsus and convinced themselves that they had found out the
secret of all knowledge in a system of magic which penetrated
the interior constitution of things. Yearning vaguely for a more
spiritual conception of life, they professed to be engaged in the
alchemical reconstruction of the world, by curing disease and
creating precious metals. Their love of mysticism was gratified
by uniting all such enthusiasts into a secret society to carry out
the magnum opus under the symbol of the Rosy Cross.
Whether Rosicrucianism be of prehistoric antiquity or not, it
reached England from Germany at the beginning of the seven-
teenth century. The mystery surrounding this brotherhood and
the strange symbolism of their doctrine provoked much misrepre-
sentation, but, as most errors vaguely represent some intellectual
movement, so Rosicrucianism, though retrograde and chimerical,
is a recognition of the immaterial world and an assertion of man's
supremacy over it. With this germ of progress, the fraternity did
not lack apologists among men who could find no saner scope for
their spiritual longings. Robert Fludd mournfully reviews the
ineffectiveness and confusion of modern science, calling on his
contemporaries to turn again and study the occult meanings of
ancient philosophy. John Heydon sought to discover the secret
of healing in the forces of nature, and has left a description
of the Rosicrucian kingdom copied from the renascence Utopians
and almost suggestive of Erewhon. Thomas Vaughan, though
disclaiming all connection with the brotherhood, was yet im-
bued with the same spirit. For him, the coming of Elias meant
the advent of the heavenly alchemist who should transform the
universe into the pure gold of the spiritual city of God. For a
while, these doctrines helped to disseminate a purer, nobler con-
ception, both of God and man, and thus played a part in the change
which came over the nation in the sixties. But such a sect could
end, eventually, only in teaching self-justification and substituting
what is vague and allegorical for practical Christianity. Like the
witch terror, astrology and other relics of the Middle Ages,
hermetic and cabalistic sciences were destined to be discredited
though not effaced-in the spiritual and intellectual revolution
which they contributed, in some measure, to bring about.
1 See Waite, A. E. , The Real History of the Rosicrucians, 1887.
## p. 379 (#395) ############################################
Broadsides
379
This revolution, the advent of modern thought, took place as
soon as the people had cultivated the habit of looking at a
question from more than one point of view. The Baconians and
a few of the Theophrastians had acquired this impartiality and
reflective scepticism from the study of the classics or of Montaigne ;
but the people were already absorbed in a controversy which
appealed to their medieval instinct of unquestioning self-sacrifice
in a cause. At an earlier epoch, this obstinacy and prejudice would
have been a permanent obstacle to intellectual progress. For-
tunately, the seventeenth century was not only an age of factions ;
it was an age which kept a diary. Every outburst of folly or
hatred was printed on the impulse of the moment and scattered
through the streets. Aggregates of people are proverbially irre-
.
sponsible ; but, in this case, the national conscience was gradually
confronted with an incriminating record which with other in-
fluences shamed the people into a united effort towards progress.
The history of this mental awakening is the history of the
broadside. Ever since Tudor times, the people had been ac-
customed to see their thoughts and feelings reflected in penny
flysheets? But, despite its universality of range and immense
popularity, this fugitive literature was still an undeveloped genre.
The effusions which caught the passing attention of 'prentices,
housewives and tradesmen, at street corners and in city squares,
were addressed to narrow, preoccupied intelligences and could
never rise to the level of literature. But London was swarming
with young men of wealth or birth who, as an outcome of
feudalism, believed that only the king had a right to rule and
that gentlemen should be above every profession except that of
fighting for him. These 'Hotspurres of the Time,' as a puritan
writer calls them, amid the disorder and dissipation of London
life, claimed an interest in the literature of the moment. Even
the scapegoat of the Gull's Hornebooke5 was fashionable enough to
compose poems and criticise plays. But, though these 'roaring
boys,' 'hectors' and 'cavaliers' cultivated the clinches and con-
ceits then in vogue, much as they did extravagance of dress,
they found that the recognised vehicles of preciousness, such as
character sketches and epigrams, were too restricted, and, at the
same time, too laboured a field, to suit their full-blooded, though
desultory, attention to the arts. They required a genre which
>
E. g. Earle and Stephens.
3 Ante, vol. iv, chap. Xvi, pp. 362-3.
" Ante, vol. iv, p. 356.
2 Ante, vol. II, chap. v, p. 96.
• Ante, vol. iv, p. 355.
## p. 380 (#396) ############################################
380 The Advent of Modern Thought
would give full vent to their recklessness and animal spirits, and
they found this mode of expression partly in jest-books, but much
more in street ballads, which breathed the very essence of old
London and, almost imperceptibly, had blended with their revels
through the city.
Thus began the first stage in the development of the street
ballad. Cavaliers brought into it their dare-devil joviality and
carelessness and the wider interests of their active lives. At the
same time, the simplicity of ballad metre, adapted to a catch
melody, and the break between each stanza, precluded complexity
of thought or accumulations of periphrases. Old types of humour
still survive, such as mock testaments and burlesque laudations ;
but they take the form of rollicking songs made up of ingenious
conceits. Permanent comic characters like the miller, the tinker
.
or the beggar reappear in the shape of lyricised monologues”.
Drinking songs are plentiful, as in olden times. But, though we
still find coarse merriment over red noses and claret-coloured
complexions, though Walter Mapes's humorous touches of ancient
and ecclesiastical lore are quite discarded, and wine-generally in
opposition to plebeian beer—is frankly prized for its generous heat
and exhilaration, yet the cavaliers also sing of it as the spur to
heroic action and a solace in trouble or captivity. Besides wine,
these songs discuss women. Some recount lawless and ungallant
adventures reminiscent of the Fabliaux and jest-books; others
remain frankly goliardic in their cynical invective against marriage
or in their satire on female vanity, lust and caprice ; some others
are pervaded by the grossest sensuality. Yet, even here, the new
influence is easily recognisable. Many of these effusions are full
of the courtier's cult of the fair sex, which, though fulsome and
extravagant, was introducing new words and expressions into the
language. Even the common paramour is sometimes encircled by
a halo of poetic phraseology which hides her baseness, while other
poems, in the new atmosphere of action, breathe a manly inde-
pendence and contempt of uxorious servitude. But the elevation
of the popular song is most noticeable when it treats, in clear,
simple verse, the more serious subjects which these cavaliers
understood only too well, such as the power of money, the in-
justice of fortune or the tyranny of the sword.
For discussion of these types see ante, vol. n, chap. v, pp. 85–95, and
bibliography, pp. 482-490.
? For the development of . scoundrel verse,' see Chandler, F. W. , The Literature
of Roguery, vol. I, chap. III, sect. iv.
9
## p. 381 (#397) ############################################
Street Ballads and Pamphlets
381
By the
>
Thus, the metres and diction of popular catch-pennies had
risen to the level of educated and experienced men.
third decade of the seventeenth century, these fugitive fly-
sheets had also been called upon to serve the purpose of the
political rancour and indignation which retarded intellectual
progress and plunged England into civil war.
Once again,
the pamphleteers and ballad-mongers of the time had recourse
to old forms of literature to convey their sarcasm and in-
nuendo. For instance, one lampoon on Buckingham's expedition
to France, with the refrain 'The cleane contrary way,' is copied
from the Cujus contrarium verum est of medieval satire, and
two more, in imitation of Lucian or Dekker', are dialogues be-
tween Charon and the murdered duke. Another pamphlet,
travestying the title of a newspaper as Mercurius Diabolicus or
Hell's Intelligencer, shows us the devil, in answer to a citizen's
question, recounting the pressure of work in hell since parlia-
ment came into power; and, in 1660, when that body dissolved
itself and a general desire for the restoration of the king was
felt, a ballad News from Hell or the Relation of a Vision,
represents the devil's amazement and incredulity that England,
lately ‘His sweet darling dear,' was now proving false to her
allegiance to hell. Others, such as Heraclitus' Dream (1642),
representing the shepherd (i. e. the church) shorn by his sheep,
are copied from medieval dream-visions.
The monologue was further developed and reached a high level
of satire in such pieces as Truth Flatters Not (1647), in which,
after pope, priest and prelate have betrayed their worldly am-
bition and duplicity, each in a soliloquy, Truth censures them all
in a closing speech. Or, in Three Speeches (1642), satirising the
narrowness and self-satisfied philistinism of the commercial class,
as exemplified by 'Master Warden's' political oration to his
fellows; his wife's comments on the discourse to her friends
and the chambermaid's views on affairs in general and especially
on papistry. The old dramatic broadside is still found in A coffin
for King Charles ; a Crowne for Cromwell; a Pit for the People
(1649).
Other forms of popular literature were at once adapted to the
factious feelings of the people. In Mercurius Melancholicus, or
1
Ante, vol. II, chap. XVI, p. 386.
· The idea of a visit to hell is almost continuous in literature since Homeric times,
and had been used by Jacobean writers, especially by Dekker, T. , in Newes from Hell,
1606; see ante, vol. iv, chap. XVI, p. 353, and bibliography under Dekker, T. , pp. 526, 527.
IV
## p. 382 (#398) ############################################
382
The Advent of Modern Thought
.
Newes from Westminster (1647), the old idea of a dozen arrant
fooles and knaves' is still preserved. Mock testaments were used
by both parties as at the time of the reformation', much like the
more modern 'burning in effigy,' to vilify not only persons but
causes. In the new spirit of the times, they became more like
allegories than mere lampoons. For instance, A True Inventory
of the goods and chattels of Superstition (1642) tells how Super-
stition, of the parish of Blind Devotion in the county of Corrupt
Doctrine and in the kingdom of Idolatry, bequeaths his goods and
chattels. Puritans, especially familists, constantly resorted to
their Bible to heap obloquy on the worldliness and licence of the
cavaliers. In the Dammee? Cavaliers Warning piece (1643), they
construed Obadiah's tirade against the Idumeans into a censure
of the royalist party; The Debauched Cavalier, or the English
Midianite (1642) is an attempt to discover, in the lives of king
Charles and his supporters, the enormities with which Israel's
enemy was credited: The Downefall of Dagon (1643) is the
demolition of the cross in Cheapside. The dialogue had, for cen-
turies, been a familiar form of discussion and satire, so now, many
puritan pamphlets are modelled on the catechism.
