One of our earliest English witches, so early indeed that she becomes
mythical and misty and out of all possible proportion, was the celebrated
Witch of Berkeley,[92] who got the reward of her sins in the middle of the
ninth century, leaving behind her a tremendous lesson, by which, however,
after generations did not much profit. The witch had been rich and the
witch had been gay, but the moment of reckoning had to come in the
morning; the feast had been noble and well enjoyed, but the terrible
account had to be paid when all was over; and the poor witch found her
ruddy-cheeked apple, now that the rind was off and eaten, filled with
nothing but dust and ashes--which she must digest as best she may. As the
moment of her death approached, she called for the monks and the nuns of
the neighbouring monasteries, and sent for her children to hear her
confession; and then she told them of the compact she had made, and how
the Devil was to come for her body as well as her soul. "But," said she,
"sew me in the hide of a stag, then place me in a stone coffin, and fasten
in the covering lead and iron. Upon this place another stone, and chain
the whole down with heavy chains of iron. Let fifty psalms be sung each
night, and fifty masses be said by day, to break the power of the demons.
If you can thus keep my body for three nights safe, on the fourth day you
may bury it--the Devil will have sought and not found." The monks and the
nuns did as they were desired; and, on the first night, though the demons
kept up a loud howling and wailing outside the church, the priests
conquered, and the old witch slept undisturbed. On the second night the
demons were more fierce and clamorous, and the monks and the nuns told
their beads faster and faster; but the fiends were getting more powerful
as time went on, and at last broke open the gates of the monastery, in
spite of prayer and bolt and bar; and two chains of the coffin burst
asunder, but the middle one held firm. On the third night the fiends raged
sore and wild. The monastery was shaken to its foundations, and the monks
and the nuns almost forgot their paters and their aves in the uproar that
drowned their voices and quailed their hearts; but they still went on,
until, with an awful crash, and a yell from all the smaller demons about,
a Devil, larger and more terrible than any that had come yet, stalked into
the church and up to the foot of the altar, where the old woman and her
coffin lay. Here he stopped, and bade the witch rise and follow him.
Piteously she answered that she could not--she was kept down by the chain
in the middle: but the Devil soon settled that difficulty; for he put his
foot to the coffin, and broke the iron chain like a bit of burnt thread.
Then off flew the covering of lead and iron, and there lay the witch, pale
and horrible to see. Slowly she uprose, blue, dead, stark, as she was; and
then the Devil took her by the hand, and led her to the door where stood a
gigantic black horse, whose back was all studded with iron spikes, and
whose nostrils, breathing fire, told of his infernal manger below. The
Devil vaulted into the saddle, flung the witch on before him, and off and
away they rode--the yells of the clamouring demons, and the shrieks of the
tortured soul, sounding for hours, far and wide, in the ears of the monks
and the nuns. So here too, in this legend, as in all the rest, the Devil
is greater than God, and prayer and penitence inefficacious to redeem
iniquity.