y, constant the feuds, and unintermitting the respective
criminations of the Erictho and Canidia of Pendle,[33] who had opened
shops for the vending of similar contraband commodities, and were
called upon to decry each other's stock, as well as to magnify their
own. Each "gave her little senate laws," and had her own party (or
tail, according to modern phraseology) in the Forest. Some looked up
to and patronized one, and some the other. If old Demdike could boast
that she had Tibb as a familiar, old Chattox was not without her
Fancy. If the former had skill in waxen images, the latter could dig
up the scalps of the dead, and make their teeth serviceable to her
unhallowed purposes. In the anxiety which each felt to outvie the
other, and to secure the greater share of the general custom of a not
very extended or very lucrative market, each would wish to be
represented as more death-dealing, destructive, and powerful than her
neighbour; and she who could number up the most goodly assortment of
damage done to man and beast, whether real or not was quite
immaterial, as long as the draught was spiced and flavoured to suit
the general taste, stood the best chance of obtaining a monopoly. It
is a curious fact, that the son-in-law of one of these two
individuals, and whose wife was herself executed as a witch, paid to
the other a yearly rent,[34] on an express covenant that she should
exempt him from her charms and witchcrafts. Where the possession of a
commission from the powers of darkness was thus eagerly and
ostentatiously paraded, every death, the cause of which was not
perfectly obvious, whether it ended in a sudden termination or a slow
and gradual decline, would be placed to the general account of one of
the two (to use Master Potts's description,) "agents for the devil in
those parts," as the party responsible for these unclaimed dividends
of mortality. Did a cow go mad, or was a horse unaccountably afflicted
with the staggers, the same solution was always at hand to clear
negligence and save the trouble of inquiry; and so far from modestly
disclaiming these atrocities, the only struggle on the parts of
Mothers Demdike and Chattox would be which should first appropriate
them. And in all this it must not be forgotten that their own
credulity was at least as great as the credulity of their neighbours,
and that each had the power in question was so much an admitted point,
that she had long ceased, in all probability, to ent