Friends may enjoy this image, which you can buried in a manuscript in the British Library. The cats were drawn to illustrate Daemonologia, a narrative originally written out in hand by the poet Edward Fairfax, a cousin of Thomas Fairfax, Cromwell’s general.
In the poem, Edward Fairfax describes what he believed was the year-long torment suffered by his daughters, who were possessed by demons on the instruction (he said) of six witches living near the family home in Fewston in Yorkshire. Fairfax’s old house is now drowned beneath the waters of the Swinstry Reservoir. His narrative might have been lost had it not been preserved in a single bound collection of family commonplaces, now in the BL, also containing narratives of massacres of Indians at North Carolina, drawings of positions for pike and musket drill for infantry, and figures from Euclid.
The story recorded in the Daemonologia is one of the fullest contemporary accounts of witchcraft recorded anywhere in early modern England.
The story begins with a visit to Fairfax’s home by a woman asking for bread and offering to pay with a penny which she wore on a string around her neck, “I am but a poor neighbour come to see you, and have nothing to bring you but this penny, buy it with what you please”. The poet’s daughter accepted the money, after which her visitor returned, bringing a baby with her, and said, “I will have thy life, and the child shall suck out thy heart’s blood”. After which the family was assailed by demons, “A deformed thing with many feet, black with colour”, “a white cat spotted with black” (presumably the inspiration of the image in the top left-hand corner) etc.
The narrative is made all the more remarkable by Fairfax’s own, distinguished history as a poet and translator, and by the fact that all six women were acquitted at York assize.
lives; running 