Fairfax described cavorting with devils, big black dogs, people struck dumb and wax effigies. Often the devil appeared in the guise of a witch’s familiar (accompanying demon) – a cat or sometimes a bird or something even stranger. The account was later published a century after it was written (the original has been lost, but it was copied and distributed among interested scholars), and the printed book had additional numbered illustrations to accompany Fairfax’s text. The witches are depicted as old and hunched, carrying a stick alongside their familiars: birds, goats, a many-legged sort of
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