THE ELIZABETHAN FAIRIES

168 CHANGELING AND WITCH
that ignorant Magistrates may not punish them for it, as I told
euen now: But as the one sort, for being perforce troubled with
them ought to be pitied, so ought the other sort (who may be
discerned by their taking vpon them to prophesie by them,) that
sort, I say, ought as seuerely to be punished as any other Witches,
and rather the more, that they goe dissemblingly to w0rke.~1
Whatever the cause, the fairies' abduction of witches was
more universally recognized.
On the stage, the connection between the witches and
fairies was shown. The weird sisters who had been
fairies or goddesses of destiny in Shakespeare's ~ource,"~
appeared in Macbeth as witches, practising all the fa-
miliar ceremonies of their profe~sion.~~ The witches'
power for evil through the aid of the fairies was shown
in The Pilgrim 64 of Fletcher. The fact of their execu-
tion because of their seduction by Robin Goodfellow was
mentioned by Ben Jonson in The Devil is an Ass; 66 and
in The Sad Shepherd 66 a witch herself appeared with
Puck-Hairy or Robin Goodfellow as the visible source of
her power and wickedness.
In courts of justice, the stamp of legal recognition was
put upon the fairies' power over witches by the execution
of Joan Willimott, following her trial in I 6 I 8, and her
statement :
That shee hath a Spirit which shee calleth Pretty, which was giuen
vnto her by William Berry of Langholme in Rutlandshire, whom
she serued three yeares; and that her Master when he gaue it vnto
her, willed her to open her mouth, and hee would blow into her a
61 Pages 132, 133.
62 Holinshed, Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland, Vol. 5,
pp. 268-269.
63 I, 3 and IV, I.
6*11, I.
Gifford ed., 1846, I, I.
66 Jonson, Gifford ed., 111, I.