The desire for an encounter with magic at the junction of roads testifies to a need for a form of self-determination in which one's knowledge, nous or ability counts for something in the equations of destiny. Scholars have noted a rise in scepticism over Christian religious rituals such as exorcism and consecration in sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury England, but it seems that this did little to weaken people's recourse to the peripheries of orthodoxy and alternative belief in times of trouble, and thus to transformative options at other ‘locations imbued with meaning and power’. In 1590, the experience of rituals outside the Christian norm was familiar enough to people that the preacher Henry Holland could complain credibly of ‘the continual traffic and market which the rude people have with witches’. Something of both credulity and scepticism on these matters may be seen in Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 1 (c. 1597), where without irony Glendower claims that he can ‘call spirits from the vasty deep’, and with equal plausibility Hotspur can reply, ‘Why, so can I, or so can any man; / But will they come when you do call for them?’ (III, i, 51–3). William Vaughan's The Golden-Grove (1600) meanwhile asserts that a man ‘is not adjudged any scholar at all, unless he can tell men's horoscopes, cast out devils, or hath some skill in soothsaying’, and in Hamlet, Marcellus's request of Horatio to speak to the ghost of old Hamlet because he is a ‘scholar’ (I, i, 41) accords with this assumed familiarity with the ins and outs of communication with spirits. In this period, it is likely that those figures known as ‘wizards’ numbered around the same as the parochial clergy so that in early modern Essex, as Keith Thomas tells us, ‘no one lived more than ten miles from a known cunning man’. Seen in this light, Macbeth's witches seem to be presented in such an egregious manner that they must bear little relation to common social experience (although they may still speak to the elemental concerns of some learned contemporaries).