neither be butter in the churn, nor cow in the close, nor corn in the field, nor fair weather without, nor health within doors.' Indeed, the extent to which people indulged their horrors and suspicions, was in itself the proof of their being fanciful. If, in a small province, or even a petty town, there had existed scores of people possessed of supernatural power, the result would be, that the laws of nature would have been liable to constant interruption. The English judges appointed for Scotland in Cromwell's time, saw the cruelty and absurdity of witch-trials, and endeavoured to put a stop to them; but the thanks which they received were only reflections on their principles of toleration, the benefit of which, in the opinion of the Scots, was extended, by this lenity, not only to heretics of every denomination, but even to those who worshipped the devil. Some went still farther, and accused the Sectaries of holding intercourse with evil spirits in their devotions. This was particularly reported and believed of the Quakers, the most simple and moral of all dissenters from the Church. Wiser and better views on the subject began to prevail in the end of the seventeenth century, and capital prosecutions for this imaginary crime were seen to decrease. The last instance of execution for witchcraft took place in the remote province of Sutherland, in 1727, under the direction of an ignorant provincial judge, who was censured by his superiors for the proceeding. The victim was an old woman in her last dotage, so silly that she was delighted to warm her wrinkled hands. at the fire which was to consume her; and who, while they were preparing for lier execution, repeatedly said, that so good a blaze, and so many neighbours gathered round it, made the most cheerful sight she had seen for many years! The laws against witchcraft, both in England and Scotland, were abolished; and persons who pretend to fortunetelling, the use of spells, or similar mysterious feats of skill, are now punished as common knaves and impostors. Since this has been the case, no one has ever heard of witches or witchcraft, even among the most ignorant of the vulgar; so that the crime must have been entirely imaginary, since it ceased to exist so soon as men ceased to hunt it out for punishment." Perhaps this last statement is worded a little too strongly. We believe it would be still possible to find in the British Isles some ignorant people who believe in witches; let us hope that the now widely-diffused blessing of a sound. education will soon dispel entirely from the minds of our countrymen the few last traces of this singular and terrible superstition. BATTLE OF CRESSY, AND T is not our purpose to give our readers a detailed account of the one hundred years' war with France; but whilst we may admit that Edward III.'s claim to the crown was a strange one, and that the ultimate failure of his attempt was deserved, we cannot help remembering the many brave enterprises of the English. We give here an account of two of these-the Battle of Cressy, and the Siege of Calais. In September, 1339, Edward entered France from Flanders, with a small army of fifteen thousand men, and immediately proceeded to lay waste the country. In January following, by the advice of his ally Jacob von Artaveldt, the famous brewer of Ghent, and leader of the democratic interest in Flanders, he publicly assumed the title of king of France, and quartered the French lilies with the English lions. On the 24th of June, 1340, he obtained a great naval victory over the fleet of Philip off Blakenberg. Hostilities were then for some time suspended; but arms were resumed in the summer of 1345 with much more formidable preparations on both sides. On the 26th of August, 1346, was won the ever memorable victory of Cressy by seven or eight thousand English from a hundred or a hundred and twenty thousand French, in which eighty of the enemy's banners were captured, while in the carnage of that and the following day above thirty thousand of them were slain, including twelve hundred knights and eleven persons of princely rank, among the rest the aged John, king of Bohemia, from whom the Princes of Wales are said, though doubts have been lately cast upon the old story, to have borrowed their plume of three ostrich feathers, with the motto Ich dien (I serve). The young Prince of Wales, called the Black Prince from the colour of his armour, shared, at any rate, among the foremost, boy as he was (he had just entered his fifteenth year), in the peril and glory of the day. Assisted by the Earls of Warwick and Oxford, he commanded the first division of the little army which bore the brunt of the battle. The king himself remained with the reserve. Pressed by the multitude of the enemy, of the enemy, "they with the prince," says Froissart, "sent a messenger to the king, who was on a little windmill hill. Then the knight said to the king, Sir, the Earl of Warwick and the Earl of Oxford, Sir Reynold Cobham, and other such as be about the prince your son, are fiercely fought withal and are sore handled; wherefore they desire. you that you and your army will come and aid them; for if the Frenchmen increase, as they doubt they will, your son and they shall have much ado. Then the king said, Is my son dead or hurt, or on the earth felled? No, Sir, quoth the knight; but he is hardly matched; wherefore he hath need of your aid. Well, said the king, return to him, and to them that sent you hither, and say to them that they send no more to me for any adventure that falleth, as long as my son is alive; and also say to them that they suffer him this day to win his spurs; for, if God be pleased, I will this day be his, and the honour thereof, and to them that be about him." The king's answer, when it was brought to them, only gave new life and courage to the heroic combatants. "This Saturday," the old chronicler further writes, "the Englishmen never departed from their battles for chasing of any man, but kept still their field, and ever defended themself against all such as came to assail them. This battle ended about even-song time. On this Saturday, when the night was come, and that the Englishmen heard no more noise of the Frenchmen, then they reputed themself to have the victory, and the Frenchmen to be discomfited, slain, and fled away. Then they made great fires, and lighted up torches and candles, because it was very dark. Then the king came down from the little hill whereas he stood, and of all that day then his helm came never off on his head. Then he went with all his army to his son the prince, and embraced him in his arms and kissed him, and said, Fair son, God give you good perseverance: ye are my good son: thus ye have acquitted you nobly: ye are worthy to keep a realm. The prince inclined himself to the earth, honouring the king his father. This night they thanked God for their good adventure, and made no boast thereof; for the king would that no man should be proud, or make boast, but every man humbly to thank God." As for Philip of Valois, he had only been able to escape with his life from this disastrous field. "In the evening," says Froissart, "the French king, who had left about him no mo than a threescore persons, one and other, whereof Sir John of Hainault was one, who had remounted once the king, for his horse was slain with an arrow, then he said to the king, Sir, depart hence, for it is time; lose not yourself wilfully; if ye came to the walls, and said, Who is it that calleth there this time of night? Then the king said, Open your gate quickly, for this is the fortune of France. The captain knew that it was the king, and opened the gate, and let down the bridge. Then the king entered, and he had with him but five barons, Sir John of Hainault, Sir Charles of Montmorency, the Lord of Beauvieu, the Lord Daubigny, and the Lord of Montford. The king would not tarry there, but drank and departed thence about midnight; and so rode by such guides as knew the country, till he came in the morning to Amiens, and there he rested." Some time after this Edward was engaged in the memorable siege of Calais, the garrison of which, after a blockade of nearly a year, was forced to surrender by famine, on the 4th of August, 1347. All our readers are no doubt familiar with the scene of the appearance in the English camp of Eustace de St. Pierre and his five fellow-townsmen, come to offer themselves, barefoot and bareheaded, and with halters about their necks, as sacrifices to appease the anger of their long-baffled conqueror, in which Queen Philippa again shines forth so nobly. The story rests upon the authority of Froissart, but has no air of improbability or even of much fanciful embellishment. When Sir Walter Manny, we are told, "presented these burgesses to the king, they kneeled down, and held up their hands and said, 'Gentle king, behold here, we six, who were burgesses of Calais, and great merchants, we have brought to you the keys of the town and of the castle, and we submit ourself clearly into your will and pleasure, to save the residue of the people of Calais, who have suffered great pain: Sir, we beseech your grace to have mercy and pity on us through your high nobless.' Then all the earls and barons, and other that were there, wept for pity. The king looked felly on them, for greatly he hated the people of Calais for the great damages and displeasures they had done him on the sea before. Then he commanded their heads to be stricken off. Then every man required the king for mercy, but he would hear no man in that behalf. Then Sir Walter of Manny said, 'Ah, noble king, for God's sake, refrain your courage; ye have the name of sovereign nobless, therefore now do not a thing that should blemish your renown, nor to give cause to some to speak of you villainy; every man will say it is a great cruelty to put to death such honest persons, who by their own wills put themselves into your grace to save their country. Then the king wried away from him, and commanded to send for the hangman, and said, 'They of Calais had caused many of my men to be slain; wherefore these shall die in likewise.' QUEEN PHILIPPA BEFORE THE KING. The queen kneeled, and weeping said, 'Ah! gentle sir, sith I passed the sea in great peril, I have desired nothing of you: therefore now I humbly require you, in the honour of the son of the Virgin Mary, and for the love of me, that ye will take mercy of these six burgesses.' The king beheld the queen, and stood still in a study a space, and then said, 'Ah, dame, I would ye had been as now in some other place; ye make such request to me that I cannot deny you; wherefore I give them to you to do your pleasure with them.' Then the queen caused them to be brought into her chamber, and made the halters to be taken fro their necks, and caused them to be new clothed, and gave them their dinner at their leisure; and then she gave each of them six nobles, and made them to be brought out of the host in safeguard, and set at their liberty." Calais, thus won, remained an English town for more than two centuries-till it was lost in the reign of Mary, in the year 1558. TEMPLARS. THE FALL OF THE KNIGHTS TEM: HOW THEY DECAYED THROUGH PRIDE." HERE, when they came, whereas those bricky towers, The which on Themmes brode back do ride Where now the studious lawyers have their bowers, There whylome wont the Templar knights to bide Till they decayed through pride. So sings Spenser of the Temple. But it is not our intention to describe the buildings, interesting as they are, which compose this ancient foundation, but to give some brief account of the former possessors. The order of Knights Templars, so called from the Temple at Jerusalem, had arisen, says Hume, during the first fervour of the Crusades; and uniting the two qualities, the most popular in that age, devotion and valour, and exercising both in the most popular of all enterprises, the defence of the Holy Land, they had acquired, from the piety of the faithful, ample possessions in every country of Europe, especially in France. Their great riches relaxed the severity of their virtues, and so lost their popularity. Knowing the fatigues and dangers of those fruitless expeditions to the East, they preferred to enjoy in ease their opulent revenues in Europe, and passed their time wholly in the fashionable amusements of hunting, gallantry, and the pleasures of the table. Their rival order, that of St. John of Jerusalem, whose poverty had as yet preserved them from like corruptions, still distinguished themselves by their enterprises against the infidels, and succeeded to all the popularity, which was lost by the indolence and luxury of the Templars. But though these reasons had weakened the foundations of this order, once so celebrated and revered, the immediate cause of their destruction proceeded from the cruel and vindictive spirit of Philip the Fair, who having entertained a private disgust against some eminent Templars, determined to gratify at once his avidity and revenge, by involving the whole order in an undistinguished ruin. On no better information than that of two knights, condemned by their superiors to perpetual imprisonment for their vices and profligacy, he ordered on one day all the Templars in France to be committed to prison, and imputed to them such enormous and absurd crimes, as are sufficient of themselves to destroy all the credit of the accusation. Besides their being universally charged with murder, robbery, and vices the most shocking to nature; every one, it was pretended, whom they received into their order, was obliged to renounce his Saviour, to spit upon the cross, and to join to this impiety the superstition of worshipping a gilded head, which was secretly kept in one of their houses at Marseilles. They also initiated, it was said, every candidate by such infamous rites, as could serve to no other purpose than to degrade the order in his eyes, and destroy for ever the authority of all his superiors over him. Above a hundred of these unhappy gentlemen were put to the question, in order to extort from them a confession of their guilt; the more obstinate perished in the hands of their tormentors; several, to procure immediate ease in the violence of their agonies, acknowledged whatever was required of them; forged confessions were imputed to others; and Philip, as if their guilt were now certain, proceeded to a confiscation of all their treasures. But no sooner were the Templars relieved from their tortures, |