casse, la parole malarticulee, & peu intelligible, parcequ'il a tousiours la voix triste & enroüee'. On occasions also 'il quitoit la forme de Bouc, & prenoit celle d'homme'.[1] In 1614 at Orleans Silvain Nevillon said 'qu'il vit à la cheminée vn homme noir duquel on ne voyoit pas la teste. Vit aussi vn grand homme noir à l'opposite de celuy de la cheminée, & que ledit home noir parloit comme si la voix fut sortie d'vn poinson. Dit: Que le Diable dit le Sermõ au Sabbat, mais qu'on n'entend ce qu'il dit, parce qu'il parle come en grõdant.'[2] The devil who appeared to Joan Wallis, the Huntingdonshire witch, in 1649, was in the shape of a man dressed in black, but he 'was not as her husband, which speaks to her like a man, but he as he had been some distance from her when he was with her'.[3] Thomazine Ratcliffe, a Suffolk witch, said that the Devil 'spoke with a hollow, shrill voyce'.[4] According to Mary Green (1665) the Somerset Devil, who was a little man, 'put his hand to his Hat, saying, How do ye? speaking low but big'.[5] In the same year Abre Grinset, another Suffolk witch, confessed that she met the Devil, who was in the form of 'a Pretty handsom Young Man, and spake to her with a hollow Solemn Voice'.[6] John Stuart at Paisley (1678) said the Devil came to him as a black man, 'and that the black man's Apparel was black; and that the black man's Voice was hough and goustie'.[7]
The coldness of the devil's entire person, which is vouched for by several witches, suggests that the ritual disguise was not merely a mask over the face, but included a covering, possibly of leather or some other hard and cold substance, over the whole body and even the hands. Such a disguise was apparently not always worn, for in the great majority of cases there is no record of the Devil's temperature except in the sexual rites, and even then the witch could not always say whether the touch of the Devil was warm or not. In 1565 the Belgian witch, Digna Robert, said the devil 'était froid dans tous ses membres'.[8] In 1590, at North Berwick, 'he caused all the company to com and kiss his ers,
