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This chapter examines the aspects of folklore employed by The Witch (2015), including its depiction of Satan and witchcraft. The chapter identifies particular sources that resonate with the film, including accounts of witch’s familiars and reports of meetings with the Devil.

This chapter explores how, in early 1643, the rival polemicists shifted their attention from the prince to his dog. First, it shows how a series of disparate events – including a meteor shower near Cirencester – helped to inspire the publication of a pamphlet entitled Observations on Prince Rupert's White Dog, a pamphlet which assured its readers that the prince's canine companion was in fact, a beautiful woman from Lapland who had transformed herself into the shape of a dog through occult art. Second it will demonstrate that it was the anonymous author of this manipulative masterpiece – the anonymous author who is here tentatively identified as the uber-Royalist poet, John Cleveland - who was the true begetter of the Boy myth. Finally, it will investigate the wave of excitement which the appearance of the Observations provoked and the stream of copy-cat publications which swiftly followed. [143 words]

This chapter argues that the remarkable success of the Observations owed much to the subtlety and skill with which its author tapped into a complex web of pre-existent ideas about the supernatural. Notions of the dog as a witch's attendant spirit, or ‘familiar’ – from the trial of Dame Alice Kyteler in 1324-5 right up until the trial of the Lancashire witches in 1634 - are discussed in depth, and particular attention is paid to the possibility that poodles and spaniels may have been regarded with an especially suspicious eye by contemporaries. The influence of a series of polemical works which were produced during 1641-42 – and particularly of the anti-puritan satires of John Taylor, the ‘water poet’ – on the author of the Observations is also explored. [125]

This chapter argues that the anxieties and apprehensions which had been aroused as a result of the propaganda storm which had raged around the figures of Rupert and Boy continued to possess a powerful resonance long after ‘the four legged cavalier’ himself had been removed from the scene. It demonstrates that, after 1644, the conviction that the Royalist cause was diabolically inspired became ever more firmly entrenched in the Parliamentarian camp, and suggests that a number of significant – and hitherto overlooked – connections existed between ‘the Black Legend of Prince Rupert's Dog’ and the great English Witch Hunt of 1645-47. It also discusses the part which the ‘Boy Myth’ may have played in paving the way for the notorious massacre of the king's female camp- followers which was carried out by Parliamentarian soldiers in the wake of the Battle of Naseby in 1645. [145 words]