oodfellow ceaseth now
to be much feared, and popery is sufficiently discovered.

Book I, chap. iv.--"What miraculous actions are imputed to witches by
witchmongers, papists, and poets."

[Quoted here to show that certain attributes of Shakespeare's fairies
belong also to witches.]

[They] raise hail, tempests, and hurtful weather, as lighting, thunder,
&c.... These can pass from place to place in the air invisible.... These
can alter men's minds to inordinate love or hate.... Ovid affirmeth that
they can raise and suppress lighting and thunder, rain and hail, clouds and
winds, tempests and earthquakes. Others do write that they can pull down
the moon and the stars.... They can also bring to pass, that, churn as long
as you list, your butter will not come.

Book III, chap. iv.

The Fairies do principally inhabit the mountains and caverns of the earth,
whose nature is to make strange apparitions on the earth, in meadows or on
mountains, being like men and women, soldiers, kings, and ladies, children
and horsemen, clothed in green, to which purpose they do in the night steal
hempen stalks from the fields where they grow, to convert them into horses,
as the story goes.... Such jocund and facetious spirits are said to sport
themselves in the night by tumbling and fooling with servants and shepherds
in country houses, pinching them black and blue, and leaving bread, butter,
and cheese sometimes with them, which, if they refuse to eat, some mischief
shall undoubtedly befall them by the means of these Fairies; and many such
have been taken away by the said spirits for a fortnight or a month
together, being carried with them in chariots through the air, over hills
and dales, rocks and precipices, till at last they have been found lying in
some meadow or mountain, bereaved of their senses and commonly one of their
members to boot.

Book III, chap. xvi.

It may not be omitted that certain wicked women ... being seduced by the
illusion of devils, believe and profess that in the night-times they ride
abroad with Diana, the goddess of the Pagans, or else with Herodias, with
an innumerable multitude, upon certain beasts, and pass over many countries
and nations in the silence of the night, and do whatsoever those fairies or
ladies command.

Book IV, chap. x.

Indeed your grandam's maids were wont to set a bowl of milk before him and
his cousin, Robin Goodfellow, for grinding of malt or mustard, and sweeping
the house at mid