SEXUAL AND SPIRITUAL POLITICS
golden leashes. When the dogs would not run after a hare, he beat them, and they changed into Dicconson’s wife and a young boy.3 According to Edmund Robinson, Frances Dicconson ‘put her hand into her pocket, and pulled out a peace of silver much like to a faire shillinge and offered to give him to hould his tongue, and not to tell, whiche hee refused, saying, nay thou art a witch’. He went on to tell that she bridled her boy companion, who ‘stood up a white horse’ and then rode with Robinson to a witches’ congregation at Hoarestones House. Here Robinson claimed that he had seen meat roasting and ‘other meate stirring in the house’, that he had been served bread and meat and an ill-tasting drink which ‘was nought’. He had then entered the adjoining barn to witness ‘Sixe of them kneeling, and pulling at sixe severall roapes … at or with which pullinge came then in this informers sight flesh smoakeing, butter in lumps, and milke as it were syleing [straining through] from the saide roapes’. Robinson also claimed that he had seen Jennet Davies ‘at severall tymes in a croft or close adjoining to his fathers house, which put him in a greate feare’ and that ‘upon Thursday after New Yeares day last past’ he had seen Loynd’s wife sitting on a ‘crosse peece of wood’ (either a cross or a beam) in his father’s chimney, up which she disappeared. He alleged having witnessed Loynd’s wife appear from a lantern, in another incident where he was fighting a boy with a cloven foot, and also claimed that she and two other women had taken down pictures pricked through with thorns. Robinson’s description of the witches’ feast perhaps recalls the Malkin Tower meeting of 1612, while his references to swift movement, haunting a building, transmutation, and the use of effigies are scraps drawn from popular witchcraft folklore and belief. When cross-examined in London by George Long, JP for Middlesex, Robinson admitted ‘all that tale is false and feigned, and has no truth at all, but only as he has heard tales and reports made by women’.4 Robinson’s allegations of witchcraft in Lancashire were supported by the confession of sixty-year-old Margaret Johnson, made on 2 March before the same justices. Although not mentioned by Robinson, she claimed the Devil had appeared to her as a spirit called Mamilion ‘apparrelled in a suite of black, tyed about with silk points, who offered that if shee would give him her soule hee would supply all her wants’.5 She too was familiar with the conventions of demonological practice as discussed in numerous European and British treatises on the subject, referring to transgressive sexual practices with the Devil (‘committing wicked uncleannesse’), to the provision of incubi for female and succubi for male witches, and to the suckling of spirits or familiars at a special ‘pappe or dugge’. Johnson claimed that spirits could transport humans to ‘any place upon a sodaine’ by animating a rod, dog or other means of conveyance. Her confession simultaneously tuned into more mundane, local explanations of witchcraft as maleficium, which typically blamed the suspect as the cause of some material disaster in the community, often a physical ailment in humans or animals. Johnson testified that covens ‘can cause 147