The hare is the English werewolf, though she seems a frightened harmless creature to keep company with witches. Mrs. Morrison told me of a witch drama in South Wales, with a strong family likeness to the story of Lyddie Shears. This witch was a middle-aged woman living with her old mother, and she too was credited with the power of changing herself into a hare. All the troubles in the district were laid at her door. She put spells on the ewes and they died in lambing: she dried up the cows: she sent children into such paroxysms of terror that they became imbeciles for life.
Mrs. Morrison was one day walking near the witch’s cottage when she heard a gunshot. Almost immediately she came upon one of her keepers, who said breathlessly:
‘I’ve just shot Ruth Colt.’
‘Shot her?’ exclaimed Mrs. Morrison, aghast.
‘Yes. I caught her coming out of the cowshed, and when she saw me, she ran away. I went after her, and just outside her own door, I saw her change into a hare. I fired, and she fell, but she got up again, and she managed to get indoors. But I think I’ve done for her.’
Mrs. Morrison walked about the fields, pondering over this extraordinary story, and last she made up her mind to call upon the Colt family. The old mother came to the door, and invited her to come in. They sat talking by the fire.
‘Is Ruth out?’ asked Mrs. Morrison at last.
‘No. She’s in bed. She’s not well.’
Mrs. Morrison was then allowed to visit the invalid, and found her lying in bed with a large patch of blood on the front of her nightgown. An abscess was said to have broken in her chest.
From the stories told by oldest inhabitants, it would seem that until about 1860, the countryside was haunted by congregations of witches. Many people testify to having seen and known them, but the witnesses, like the witches, are dead. It is a curious phase of human history, and the attitude of their neighbours towards them was also curious. It was a mixture of toleration, fear, and respect, changing into actual antagonism only after the witch had gone to the length of becoming a hare. But I know one Wiltshire witch story of a later date, and it is vouched for by a panel doctor, which gives it a very matter-of-fact local-government atmosphere.
Within the last twenty years, there lived in a village near Wilton a man who was such a complete neurasthenic that he had not even the energy to walk down the street to the surgery, but, day in and day out, he sat by his own fireside, bent and bowed in sullen gloom. He had hardly the wits to answer the doctor’s questions when his club certificate had to be signed. After some years of this semi-imbecility, the man one morning walked briskly into the surgery, and asked to be signed off. He returned at once to work, and he remained at it.
A week or two later, the doctor heard the story which was believed by all the village. When the man had been ill for five years, a friendly neighbour offered to consult a witch who lived a few miles away. The witch pronounced that the man had had the evil eye ‘put on him’ by two Warlocks, but she could not utter the names of these monsters, as this would ‘add to their power’. She produced photographs of them, and she promised to ‘break the spell’. This she did in a manner which was never explained, but which was so effective that within a few weeks, both the sorcerers ‘died raving—a judgment of God for the wickedness they had done’. The witch would take no fee, and on the morning after the second of his two enemies had been buried, the bewitched man had come to see the doctor.
My father’s two old sisters were wonderful raconteuses, and if they would, they could have told us some good stories of Wiltshire in the old days. Unluckily they entered with such violent prejudice into all the contemporary family events, that when they had finished with the misdemeanours of their nephews and nieces they had few words left for the past. But Aunt Margaret Bruce could sometimes be drawn, and then she was always entertaining.
She was staying once in a house where Keble was a fellow guest, and one evening their host read aloud, with great enthusiasm, The Raven of Edgar Allen Poe. In the impressed silence which followed, Mr. Keble remarked:
‘Don’t you think it would have been better if that had never been printed?’
Thomas Moore was in those days a neighbour, and he often came to Potterne to hear my grandmother sing his ‘Irish Melodies’. She had a very beautiful voice, and he used to stand by the piano as she sang, regulating her interpretation by gestures with his hands. He also liked to be asked to sing his own songs, and he sang one night at Wans when Aunt Margaret was there. During the song, two of the guests exchanged a whispered remark. Tommy Moore was extremely conceited and touchy, and now he seized his music and rushed out of the room. In the awed silence which followed, the front door slammed loudly.
