Glanvill writes that Julian Cox, one of the Somerset coven (1665), said “that one evening she walkt out about a Mile from her own House and there came riding towards her three persons upon three Broom-staves, born up about a yard and a half from the ground. Two of them she formerly knew, which was a Witch and a Wizzard.” It might easily be that there is some exaggeration here. We know that a figure in one of the witch dances consisted of leaping as high as possible into the air, and probably the three persons seen by Julian Cox were practising this agile step. A quotation from Bodin by Reginald Scot is very pertinent in this connexion. Speaking of the Sabbat revels he has: “And whiles they sing and dance, euerie one hath a broome in his hand, and holdeth it vp aloft. Item he saith, that these night-walking or rather night-dansing witches, brought out of _Italie_ into _France_, that danse which is called _La Volta_.”[44] Sir John Davies in his _Orchestra or A Poeme on Dauncing_ (18mo, 1596) describes the lavolta as “A loftie iumping, or a leaping round.” De Lancre observes that after the regular country dance at the Sabbat the witches sprang high into the air. “Après la dance ils se mettent par fois à sauter.”[45] At their assembly certain of the Aberdeen witches (1597) “danced a devilish dance, riding on trees, by a long space.” In an old representation of Dr. Fian and his company swiftly pacing round North Berwick church withershins the witches are represented as running and leaping in the air, some mounted on broomsticks, some carrying their besoms in their hands. There was discovered in the closet of Dame Alice Kyteler of Kilkenny, who was arrested in 1324 upon the accusation of nightly meeting a familiar Artisson and multiplied charges of sorcery, a pipe of ointment, wherewith she greased a staff “upon which she ambolled and gallopped thorough thicke and thin, when and what manner she listed.”[46] In the trial of Martha Carrier, a notorious witch and “rampant hag” at the Court of Oyer and Terminer, held by adjournment at Salem, 2 August, 1692, the eighth article of the indictment ran: “One _Foster_, who confessed her own share in the Witchcraft for which the Prisoner stood indicted, affirm’d, that she had seen the prisoner at some of their _Witch-meetings_, and that it was this _Carrier_, who perswaded her to be a Witch. She confessed that the Devil carry’d them on a pole, to a Witch-meeting: but the pole broke, and she hanging about _Carriers_ neck, they both fell down, and she then received an hurt by the Fall, whereof she was not at this very time recovered.”[47] In many of these instances it is plain that there is no actual flight through the air implied; although there is a riding a-cock-horse of brooms or sticks, in fact, a piece of symbolic ritual.