152 Witches’ Brooms. 
witch could make men and animals “ dwindle, peak and pine,”’ she 
could influence the fruits and crops, and could make the trees bear 
brooms for her use. Under her spells the cows would refuse to 
give milk and milk would yield no butter, for she milked the cows 
in the night and dropped witches’ butter about, which botanists 
now call Exidia glandulosa. She could raise storms, as King James 
believed he had found to his cost. She could summon the Devil 
by beating three times on the ground and saying “ Rise up, foul 
thief!”’?; she could change herself into a hare or any other animal 
by “ throwing a glamour,” greatly to the annoyance of sportsmen. 
She could make philtres which if dropped into the eye produced 
love; and she could distil a venom from poisonous herbs which 
might be dropped into the ear as Shakespeare has beautifully told. 
She could heal sicknesses or transfer them to others, and she could 
take away the spells of other witches. In 1588 Alison Pearson 
was tried for having cured the Archbishop of Saint Andrews by 
witchcraft. He had suffered from ague, with palpitation, and 
feebleness in his back and loins, and Alison confessed that a green 
man, who was her familiar, had told her to make a salve of hart’s 
grease and spikenard, and rub it on the nape of His Grace’s neck, 
chest, and stomach. She also gave him ewe’s milk, claret mulled 
with herbs, and some boiled fowl. By these means the Archbishop _ 
recovered, and his sickness was transferred from His Grace to His _ 
Grace’s palfrey, which died, or, as says the legend :— 
“They laid it on his fat white horse, 
As all men saw, it soon deceased.” 
On the margin of the court record two words are written, ‘“ convicta 
et combusta,” so that the poor woman was burnt although “she 
made him droggis that did him gude.”’ In the same year the Earl 
of Angus was ill unto death, and was said by the physicians to be 
bewitched. A wizard offered to remove the spell if the old Earl 
would allow him, but—unlike the Archbishop—he refused to be 
healed, ‘‘I shall never be beholden to a devil’s instrument,” he said, 
and died. 
The extent to which this metaphysical crime grew gave rise to a 
new profession, and each district had its witch-finder, who appears 
