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"To Get Myself a Glory." Relatively few witches practiced under "satanic" guidance. Many of them carried on mild witchery during weekdays and attended church on Sundays. It was the hysterical accusers and the insincere practitioners who caused most of the harm. Many a "bewitched" person, confronted by skeptical judges, broke down and confessed, like Thomas Darling in 1599, that his hair-raising charges were fabrications "either of ignorance, or to get myself a glory thereby." Or precocious, abnormal children would describe how they had seen their mother or father sticking pins into a wax image, nursing a spotted cat at a secret teat (usually a mole or wart), flying through the air on a broomstick.
Few accusers would swear to having seen a witch in actual aerial motion. The average witch, says Author Hole, was quite content to keep her feet on the ground—like Dame Alice Kyteler, an aristocratic Irish witch who bestrode an anointed staff on which she "ambled and gallopped through thick and thin."
Right Man, Wrong Tower. One of the chief troubles with witches was that a man could never be dead certain of following their instructions. One of the Dukes of Suffolk, for instance, was warned by his pet necromancer "to beware of the Tower." So when the Duke was arrested for high treason in 1450, he hastily escaped from London and embarked on a ship bound for France—only to find that the name of the ship was Nicolas of the Towre. "And then," says the chronicler,
". . . his heart failed him, for he thought he was deceived, and in the sight of all his men he was drawn out of the great ship into [a] boat; and there was an axe and a block, and one of the lewdest of the ship bade him lay down his head, and he should be fair dealt with and die on a sword; and took a rusty sword and smote off his head within half a dozen strokes, and took away his gown of russett and his doublet of velvet mailed, and laid his body on the sands of Dover."
* Unlike the scholarly, but by no means sober work of the Rev. Alphonsus Joseph-Mary Augustus Montague Summers, English priest and authority on Restoration literature, who in 1927 startled the British public with his best-selling History of Witchcraft and Demonology—"written from what people are pleased to call a 'medieval' standpoint, an absolute and complete belief in the supernatural, and hence in witchcraft."