with you, and found the key of the door in that same place where you left it, and declared that neither your husband nor any other in the house was waking at your return'.[1] At Lille (1661) the girl Bellot, then aged fifteen, said that 'her Mother had taken her with her when she was very Young, and had even carried her in her Arms to the Witches Sabbaths or Assemblies'.[2] At Strathdown (eighteenth century) the witches went along the side of the river Avon to Craic-pol-nain, fording the river on foot.[3]
In the cases cited above there is nothing in the least bizarre or extraordinary, but there are other methods recorded of reaching the distant meetings. Sometimes the obvious means was by riding on a horse; sometimes the witches were accused, or claimed the power, of flying through the air, of riding in the air on a stick, of riding on animals or human beings, which latter were sometimes in their own natural form and sometimes enchanted into the form of animals.
The following instances are of those who rode to or from the meetings on horseback. Agnes Sampson of North Berwick (1590) said that 'the Devil in mans likeness met her going out in the fields from her own house at Keith, betwixt five and six at even, being her alone and commanded her to be at North-berwick Kirk the next night: And she passed there on horse-back, conveyed by her Good-son, called Iohn Couper'.[4] Boguet (1608) mentions, in passing, the fact that the witches sometimes rode on horses.[5] The Lancashire witches (1613), after the meeting at Malking Tower, 'went out of the said House in their owne shapes and likenesses. And they all, by that they were forth of the dores, gotten on Horse-back, like vnto foals, some of one colour, some of another.'[6] This was the usual mode of locomotion among the Lancashire witches, for Margaret Johnson (1633) said that at the meeting at Hoarstones 'there was, at yt tyme, between 30 and 40 witches, who did all ride to the said meetinge'.[7] Isobell Gowdie (1662) said, 'I haid a little horse, and wold say, "Horse
