THE SCENE: Lesson learned – never buy a red pig from a dodgy-looking witch.
THE TEXT: For in Ireland (as they have been in England) witches are for fear held in high reverence, and they are so cunning that they can change the shapes of things as they list at their pleasure & so deceive the people thereby that an act was made in Ireland, that no man should buy any red swine. The cause whereof was this. Witches used to send to the markets many red swine fair & fat. But if it chanced that the buyer of them to bring them to any water : immediately they found them returned either into wisps of hay, straw, old rotten boards, or some other such like trickery, by means whereof they have lost their money as they gave in exchange for the pigs.
And I am sure you are not ignorant of the Hermit whom as St. Agustine wrote, a witch would in a donkey’s form ride upon to market. But now how these witches made their swine, whether by some ointment that can deceive men’s sight until either the water washed away the ointment or that the clearness of the water excelled the clearness of the ointment, and so betrayed the operation of it, I am certain as I am sure that it were the spirits called Demons, forced by enchantment to create those bodies, until shame of their shape discovered, caused them to leave them.
– Beware the Cat, William Baldwin, 16th Century AD
