or her breasts, she was put to extreme pain; which pain she had not
when she heated the same deer suet and the same rose water in a common
spoon. So, suspecting harm in the dish, she put it into the fire, "which
then presently vanished, and nothing of it was afterwards to be found."
Alice Duke also said that she called the devil "Robin," and demanded of
him aid and help in her undertakings. Like Styles and many others, she
said that when the devil vanished he left an ill smell behind him; which
is explained as, "Those ascititious Particles he held together in his
visible vehicle, being loosened at his vanishing, and so offending the
Nostrils by their floating and diffusing themselves in the open air."

ROBIN AND HIS SERVANTS[148]

Somersetshire was sorely afflicted at this time. On the 2nd of March still
in the year of grace, 1664, Christian Green, aged about thirty-three, and
wife of Robert Green of Brewham, was taken before Robert Hunt, Esq., to be
examined and induced to confess. She did confess, without torture as it
would appear; at all events without more than the ordinary torture of
"pricking" and sleeplessness always applied to witches. She said that
about a year and a half ago, she being in great poverty, was induced by
one Catherine Green (her husband's sister?) to give her body and soul to
the devil on condition that he would give her clothes, victuals, and
money, as she might desire. She was to keep his secrets, and suffer him to
suck her once in the twenty-four hours; to which at last she consented,
the devil giving her fourpence-halfpenny as earnest money wherewith to buy
bread in Brewham. Since this time he came to her ever at five o'clock in
the morning, much in the likeness of a hedgehog bending, and sucked her
left breast: a painful process, though she was generally in a kind of
trance at the time. Christian Green gave no new particulars relative to
the devil and his works. He was always as a man in black clothes; and he
charmed pictures to the undoing of those for whom they were designed; and
when he vanished he left an ill smell behind him; and he spake them very
low when they arrived; and they did three horses to death by saying
simply, "A Murrain on them Horses to death;" and they bewitched unlikely
sinners by mere word or look: all of which processes we have read of
twenty times before. Nor was there much more to be got out of "the
villainous Feats of that rampant hag Margaret Agar," of Brewham,