¹ Historical Register, 7 March 1716.

² Halley, Edmund, “An Account of the Late Surprizing Appearance of the Lights in the Air,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 29 (1714–1716): 406–28, 428Google Scholar.

³ Whiston, William, An Account of a Surprizing Meteor Seen in the Air, March 1715/6 at Night (London, 1716), pp. 26–27, 29, 38, 49Google Scholar.

⁴ A Full and True Relation of the Strange and Wonderful Apparitions Which Were Seen in the Clouds upon Tuesday … the 6th and 7th of March 1715/6 (n.d.), pp. 4–5. The battle was followed by the apparition of two flaming swords, and those replaced by daggers, pikes, spears, and other weaponry. Individual reports on flaming swords were common throughout the period. It is worth noting with what speed pamphleteers seized on the new topic; The Flying Post of 10 March informed readers of the newly published Their Vision at Deal; Being an Account of Most Wonderful Apparitions of Ships, Castles and Other Figures in the Air, to Which Is Added an Account of the Late Strange Appearance in the Sky over City of London (London, 1716)Google Scholar.

⁵ Skeet, F. J. A., The Life of the Right Hon. James Radcliffe Third Earl of Derwentwater (London, 1929), p. 119Google Scholar.

⁶ Wilson, Kathleen, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715–1785 (Cambridge, 1995), p. 16Google Scholar.

⁷ Godfridus, , The New Book of Knowledge (London, 1758), p. 85Google Scholar; Mirabilis Annus, or the Year of Prodigies (London, 1661), p. 49Google Scholar; Strange and Wonderful News from Chippingnorton in the County of Oxon (London, 1716), p. 3Google Scholar; A Full and True Relation of the Strange and Wonderful Apparitions, p. 4.

⁸ Looke up and See Wonders: A Miraculous Apparition in the Ayre, lately seen in Barkeshire at Bawlkin Greene meere Hatford, April 9, 1628 (London, 1628), p. 2Google Scholar.

⁹ Thomas, Keith, Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York, 1971)Google Scholar, chap. 4; Park, Katharine and Daston, Lorraine J., “Unnatural Conceptions: The Study of Monsters in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century France and England,” Past and Present, no. 92 (1981): 20–54Google Scholar; Todd, Dennis, Imagining Monsters: Miscreation of the Self in Eighteenth-Century England (Chicago, 1995)Google Scholar; Clark, Sandra, The Elizabethan Pamphleteers: Popular Moralistic Pamphlets, 1580–1640 (Rutherford, N.J., 1983)Google Scholar; Redwood, John, Reason, Ridicule and Religion (London, 1976)Google Scholar, chap. 6; White, Andrew Dickson, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896; reprint, Gloucester, Mass., 1978)Google Scholar; Shaaber, Matthias A., Some Forerunners of the Newspaper in England, 1476–1622 (Philadelphia, 1929)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, chap. 6; Jankovic, Vladimir, Reading the Skies: A Cultural History of English Weather (Chicago, 2001)Google Scholar, chaps. 2 and 3.

¹⁰ Walsham, Alexandra, “Aspects of Providentialism in Early Modern Europe” (Ph.D. diss., Cambridge University, 1995), pp. 43, 49Google Scholar.

¹¹ Dear, Peter, “Miracles, Experiments, and the Ordinary Course of Nature,” Isis 81 (1990): 671CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Frei, Hans, Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics (New Haven, Conn., 1978), pp. 77–78Google Scholar; Daston, Lorraine, “Marvelous Facts and Miraculous Evidence in Early Modern Europe,” Critical Inquiry 18 (1991), 93–124CrossRefGoogle Scholar; McKeon, Michael, The Origins of the English Novel (Baltimore, 1987), pp. 83–84Google Scholar.

¹² Schaffer, Simon, “Making Certain,” Social Studies of Science 14 (1984): 137–52, 146CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see also Buell, Llewellyn, “Elizabethan Portents: Superstition or Doctrine?” in his Essays Critical and Historical (Berkeley, 1950), pp. 27–41, 29Google Scholar; Frei, Eclipse of Biblical Narrative. On strange news as an embodiment of the “proto-journalist” interest in latest events, see Hunter, J. Paul, Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction (New York, 1990), pp. 167–85Google Scholar. The psychology of the marvelous is discussed in Muchembled, Robert, Popular Culture and Elite Culture in France, 1400–1750 (Baton Rouge, La., 1985), pp. 25–26Google Scholar. On social millenarianism in Puritan sermons, see Baskerville, Stephen, Not Peace but a Sword: The Political Theology of the English Revolution (London, 1993), pp. 63–67Google Scholar; see also Hill, Christopher, “Till the Conversion of the Jews,” in Millenarianism and Messianism in English Literature and Thought, 1650–1800, ed. Popkin, Richard (Leiden, 1988), pp. 12–37Google Scholar; Froom, Le Roy Edwin, Prophetic Faith of Our Fathers: The Historical Development of Prophetic Interpretation (Washington, D.C., 1946–1954), vol. 2Google Scholar. On “metaphysical sermons” see Davies, Horton, Like Angels from a Cloud: The English Metaphysical Preachers, 1588–1645 (San Marino, 1986), pp. 58–66Google Scholar. Meteorological providentialism is the subject of Anderson, J. L., “Combined Operations and the Protestant Wind: Some Maritime Aspects of the Glorious Revolution of 1688,” Great Circle 5 (1983): 13–23Google Scholar.

¹³ Quoted in Curry, Patrick, “Astrology in Early Modern England: The Making of a Vulgar Knowledge,” in Science, Culture and Popular Belief in Renaissance Europe, ed. Pumfrey, Stephenet al. (Manchester, 1989), pp. 274–91, 281Google Scholar.

¹⁴ Pointer, John, A Rational Account of Weather, Showing the Signs of Its Several Changes (London, 1738), pp. 196–97Google Scholar. See also Warneke, Sara, “A Taste for Newfangledness: The Destructive Potential of Novelty in Early Modern England,” Sixteenth Century Journal 26 (1995): 881–96, 887CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁵ Holmes, Geoffrey, British Politics in the Age of Anne (New York, 1967), p. 218Google Scholar, and “Catholicism and Jacobitism, 1689–1746,” in The Age of Oligarchy, ed. Holmes, Geoffrey and Szechi, Daniel (London, 1993), pp. 89–100Google Scholar; Monod, Paul Kleber, Jacobitism and the English People, 1688–1788 (Cambridge, 1989)Google Scholar; Pittock, Murray G. H., Poetry and Jacobite Politics in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland (Cambridge, 1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Szechi, Daniel, The Jacobites: Britain and Europe, 1688–1788 (Manchester, 1994)Google Scholar; Bennett, G. V., The Tory Crisis in Church and State (Oxford, 1975), pp. 206–41Google Scholar; Rogers, Nicholas, “Riot and Popular Jacobitism in Early Hanoverian England,” in Ideology and Conspiracy: Aspects of Jacobitism, 1689–1759, ed. Cruickshanks, Eveline (Edinburgh, 1982)Google Scholar. The nature of royal legitimacy and its relevance in the discussion of natural order is discussed in Shapin, Steven, “Of Gods and Kings: Natural Philosophy and Politics in the Leibniz-Clarke Disputes,” Isis 72 (1981): 187–215CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁶ Stevenson, John, Popular Disturbances in England, 1700–1832 (New York, 1992), pp. 23–30Google Scholar.

¹⁷ Rogers, Nicholas, “Popular Protest in Early Hanoverian London,” Past and Present, no. 79 (1978): 70–100, 100Google Scholar. Political press is discussed in Hyland, P. B. J., “Liberty and License: Government and the Press during the Succession Crisis in Britain, 1712–1716,” English Historical Review 101 (1986): 863–88, 868CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁸ Blanchard, R., Richard Steele's Periodical Journalism, 1714–1716 (Oxford, 1959), pp. xxv, 257Google Scholar.

¹⁹ Arnold, Ralph, Northern Lights: The Story of Lord Derwentwater (London, 1959), p. 14Google Scholar. The association between the lights and the hearse is also mentioned by Thomas Bewick. See Bain, Ian, ed., A Memoir of Thomas Bewick (Oxford, 1975), p. 8Google Scholar.

²⁰ Armitage, Angus, Edmond Halley (Nelson, 1966), p. 180Google Scholar. The tradition has it that the same night the “read Streamers of the North” stained the Devil's Water, the stream near the ruins of Askew, Dilston. H., “The Aurora Borealis,” Notes and Queries (20 November 1937), p. 377Google Scholar. For a historical association of blood and auroral displays, see review of Das Polarlicht, by Fritz, Von Hermann, Edinburgh Review 164 (1886): 416–47Google Scholar; Jeremiah, John, “Early Mention of the Aurora Borealis,” Nature 3 (29 December 1870): 174–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²¹ [Ward, Edward], British Wonders: Or, a Poetical Description of the Several Prodigies and Most Remarkable Accidents That Have Happened in Britain since the Death of Queen Anne (London, 1717), 48–53Google Scholar.

²² Flying Post (6 March 1716), p. 2Google Scholar. Chat-Chat mentioned “the ridiculous Construction that the Disaffected put on the late Lightning … their Accounts of it not being more Monstrous, than their Observations drawn from it,” quoted in Nicolson, Marjorie and Rousseau, G. S., “This Long Disease, My Life”: Alexander Pope and the Sciences (Princeton, N.J., 1968), pp. 164–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²³ A Full and True Relation of the Strange and Wonderful Apparitions, p. 2. The pamphlet has an exegesis of the great ball of fire (religious passion, fury and rage), two blazing stars (two great enemies), armies lasting until 11 o'clock at night (an undecided eleven-month war), two flaming swords (two great kings), etc.

²⁴ Diary of Lady Cowper (London, 1864), pp. 91–92Google Scholar; italics added.

²⁵ Ibid., p. 92.

²⁶ Woolf, D. R., “The ‘Common Voice’: History, Folklore, and Oral Tradition in Early Modern England,” Past and Present, no. 120 (1988): 26–52Google Scholar.

²⁷ Looke Up and See Wonders (1628), p. 2Google Scholar; A Strange Wonder or the Cities Amazement (London, 1641), p. 1Google Scholar; Strange News from France (London, 1641), p. 2Google Scholar; Mirabilis Annus, p. 40; A True Relation of the Terrible Earthquake (London, 1676), p. 1Google Scholar; A Brief Relation of a Wonderful Account of a Wonderful Accident of a Dissolution of the Earth (London, 1679)Google Scholar, preface; A Strange and Wonderful Account of the Appearance of a Fiery Meteor (Stamford, Lincolnshire, 1719)Google Scholar, title page.

²⁸ Whiston, , An Account of a Surprizing Meteor, p. 28Google Scholar.

²⁹ Ibid., p. 49.

³⁰ An Essay Concerning the Late Apparition in the Heavens (London, 1716), p. 21Google Scholar.

³¹ Worden, Blair, “Providence and Politics in Cromwellian England,” Past and Present, no. 105 (1985): 55–99, 61Google Scholar. See also Hill, Christopher, God's Englishman (New York, 1970)Google Scholar, chap. 9.

³² An Essay concerning the Late Apparition in the Heavens, p. 16.

³³ A similar “argument from numbers” was used in the context of witchcraft theory by Meric Casaubon, who considered the consensus generi humani as indispensable in the confutations of atheism. See Bostridge, Ian, Witchcraft and Its Transformations, c. 1650–1750 (Oxford, 1997), p. 67CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁴ Ibid., pp. 17–18.

³⁵ [William Lux], Poems on Several Occasions, viz., the Garden, the Phenomenon a Poem on the Late Surprizing Meteor, Seen in the Sky, Mar. 19, 1719, preface.

³⁶ Bostridge, , Witchraft and Its Transformations, p. 131Google Scholar.

³⁷ Addison, Joseph, The Free-Holder, or Political Essays (1716; reprint, London, 1758), pp. 192–94Google Scholar.

³⁸ Blanchard, , Richard Steele's Periodical Journalism, p. 261Google Scholar.

³⁹ Daily Courant, 7 March 1716.

⁴⁰ Whiston, , An Account of a Surprizing Meteor, p. 78Google Scholar.

⁴¹ Ibid., p. 62.

⁴² Ibid., p. 74.

⁴³ A Strange and Wonderful Relation of a Clap of Thunder (London, 1677)Google Scholar.

⁴⁴ Strange and Wonderful News from Chippingnorton, p. 3.

⁴⁵ Looke Up and See Wonders, p. 4; A True Relation of the Terrible Earthquake at West-Brummidge in Staffordshire and the Places Adjacent on Tuesday the 4th of This Instant January 1675/6 (London, 1676)Google Scholar; A True Relation of the Wonderful Apparition of a Cross in the Moon (Dublin, 1688)Google Scholar; Whiston, An Account of a Surprizing Meteor.

⁴⁶ Daston, Lorraine and Park, Katharine, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York, 1998), p. 335Google Scholar.

⁴⁷ Clark, Stuart, “The Rational Witchfinder: Conscience, Demonological Naturalism and Popular Superstitions,” in Science, Culture and Popular Beliefs in Renaissance Europe, ed. Pumfrey, Stephen, Rossi, Paolo, and Slawinski, Maurice (Manchester, 1991), pp. 222–49Google Scholar.

⁴⁸ Morton, John, Natural History of Northamptonshire (London, 1712), p. 7Google Scholar. Looke Up and See Wonders (1628), p. 5Google Scholar. On historical uses of “superstition” see O'Neil, Mary R., “Superstition,” in Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. Eliade, Mircea, 16 vols. (New York, 1982), 5:225Google Scholar; Monter, William, Ritual, Myth and Magic in Early Modern Europe (Athens, Ohio, 1984), pp. 114–29Google Scholar.

⁴⁹ More, Henry, Enthusiasmus Triumphatus (1662; reprint, Los Angeles, 1966), pp. 12–13Google Scholar; Causabon, Meric, A Treatise concerning Enthusiasm (London, 1655)Google Scholar. See also Iliffe, Rob, “That Puzleing Problem: Isaac Newton and the Political Physiology of Self,” Medical History 39, no. 4 (1995): 433–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵⁰ Descartes, Rene, Discourse on Method, Optics, Geometry, and Meteorology (1627; reprint, Indianapolis, 1965), p. 330Google Scholar; Sprat, Thomas, The History of the Royal-Society of London, for the Improving of Natural Knowledge (London, 1667), p. 364Google Scholar. For a survey of natural philosophical explanations, see Pointer, , A Rational Account of the Weather, pp. 184–87Google Scholar.

⁵¹ “I have met several who tell me they saw swords drawn and Armies flghtning in the Sky. But as I was out myself, and saw almost the Whole, you may depend upon it there was nothing of this Nature, any further than large Rays of Light are like blood swords and the Playing of the Streams within one another, their advancing and intermingling may somewhat represent the Mustering of Soldiers.” Whiston, , An Account of a Surprizing Meteor, p. 50Google Scholar. William Maunder wrote three years later that the aurora of which he was a witness “was represented here in all sorts of Appearances, Armies, Battles, etc., and has put abundance of People in dismal Frights: But I had not an Imagination strong enough for it.” [William, ], “A Relation of [the Luminous Appearance], seen at Cruwys Morchard in Devonshire,” Philosophical Transactions 368 (1719): 1101–4Google Scholar.

⁵² Ashworth, William B., “Natural History and the Emblematic Worldview,” in Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution, ed. Lindberg, David C. and Westman, Robert S. (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 303–33Google Scholar; Fara, Patricia, “‘A Treasure of Hidden Vertues’: The Attraction of Magnetic Marketing,” British Journal for the History of Science 28 (1995): 5–35, 9CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For other uses of natural philosophy in the public domain, see Schaffer, Simon, “Natural Philosophy and Public Spectacle in the Eighteenth Century,” History of Science 21 (1983): 1–43CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Shapin, Steven, “Social Uses of Science,” in The Ferment of Knowledge: Studies in the Historiography of Eighteenth Century Science, ed. Rousseau, George and Porter, Roy (Cambridge, 1980), pp. 93–139CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and “Of Gods and Kings: Natural Philosophy and Politics in the Leibniz-Clarke Disputes,” Isis 72 (1981): 187–215CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Stewart, Larry, The Rise of Public Science (Cambridge, 1992)Google Scholar, and “Samuel Clarke, Newtonianism, and the Factions of Post-revolutionary England,” Journal of the History of Ideas 42 (1981): 53–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Golinski, Jan, Science as Public Culture (Cambridge, 1992)Google Scholar; Thackray, Arnold, “The Business of Experimental Philosophy: The Early Newtonian Group at the Royal Society,” Actes du XII^e Congrés International d'Histoire des Sciences (1970–1971), 3B: 155–59Google Scholar. For political overtones of the Newtonianism, see Jacob, Margaret C., The Newtonians and the English Revolution, 1679–1720 (Hassocks, Sussex, 1976)Google Scholar; Porter, Roy, “Science, Provincial Culture and Public Opinion in Enlightenment England,” British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 3 (1980): 20–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵³ In the Highland tradition, visions of the armies in the sky went under the name of Sluagh or the “spirit multitude” or “spirit host.” “In a nebular state, the armies of the Spirit-Host hover above the places where, when in human form, the individuals composing it transgressed. These armies of the Sluagh manøuvre in mid-air, where in seeming bewilderment and pother, they fly hither and thither, until at length they come into conflict.” See MacGregor, Alasdair Alpin, The Peat-Fire Flame: Folk Tales and Traditions of the Highlands and Islands (Edinburgh, 1937), p. 88Google Scholar.

⁵⁴ The Young Pretender's Destiny Unfolded: Being an Exact Account of Several Prodigies Seen in the Highlands before the Breaking Out of the Present Rebellion (London, 1745), pp. 9–13Google Scholar.

⁵⁵ Ibid., pp. 14–15.

⁵⁶ Howie, John, An Alarm unto a Secure Generation (Kilmanrock, 1809), pp. 6, 17, 18–27Google Scholar.

⁵⁷ Ibid., pp. 29, 31.

⁵⁸ Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (New York, 1983)Google Scholar.

⁵⁹ Thomlison, John, Cultural Imperialism: A Critical Introduction (Baltimore, 1991), pp. 83–84Google Scholar.

⁶⁰ The task of delineating “popular” was taken up by numerous scholars. See Burke, Peter, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (New York, 1978)Google Scholar; Thompson, E. P., “Eighteenth-Century English Society: Class Struggle without Class?” Social History 3 (1978): 133–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bouwsma, William J., “Anxiety and the Formation of Early Modern Culture,” in After the Reformation: Essays in Honor of J. H. Hexter, ed. Malament, Barbara C. (Philadelphia, 1980), pp. 215–46Google Scholar; Scribner, Robert, “The Reformation, Popular Magic, and the Disecnhantment of the World,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 23 (1993): 475–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Harrison, J. F. C., The Common People (London, 1984)Google Scholar; Bushaway, Bob, “‘Tacit, Unsuspected, but Still Implicit Faith’: Alternative Belief in Nineteenth-Century Rural England,” in Popular Culture in England, c. 1500–1850, ed. Harris, Tim (New York, 1995), pp. 189–215CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Obelkevich, James, Religion and Rural Society: South Lindsey, 1825–1875 (Oxford, 1976)Google Scholar.

⁶¹ Freethinker (24 October 1718), no. 62 (London, 1711–1721), p. 34Google Scholar; and Moreton, Andrew [Defoe, Daniel], The Secrets of the Invisible World Disclose'd, or an Universal History of Apparitions Sacred and Prophane (London, 1729), pp. 390–91Google Scholar.

⁶² Moreton, , The Secrets of the Invisible World, p. 392Google Scholar.

⁶³ Ibid., p. 392.

⁶⁴ The Craftsman (10 February 1733), quoted in Wilson, , The Sense of the People, p. 27Google Scholar.

⁶⁵ Behringer, Wolfgang, Shaman of Oberstdorf: Conrad Stoeckhlin and the Phantoms of the Night (Charlottesville, Va., 1998), p. 28Google Scholar. See also Sabean, David, “A Prophet in the Thirty Years' War: Penance as a Social Metaphor,” in his Power in the Blood: Popular Culture and Village Discourse in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 61–93, 90Google Scholar.

⁶⁶ de Spinoza, Baruch, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (Leiden, 1989), p. 67Google Scholar.

⁶⁷ [Ward, ], British Wonders, pp. 19–21Google Scholar.

⁶⁸ Clark, Stuart, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford, 1997), pp. 5–6Google Scholar.

⁶⁹ Ibid., p. 9.

⁷⁰ Defoe, Daniel, History of the Plague in London, 1665, in The Novels and Miscellaneous Works of Daniel Defoe (London, 1911), 5:16Google Scholar.

⁷¹ Hervey, J., Meditations and Contemplations (Liverpool, 1774), pp. 301–2Google Scholar. Illich, Ivan and Sanders, Barry, ABC, Alphabetization of the Popular Mind (London, 1988), p. 95Google Scholar. See also Shibutani, Tamotsu, Improvised News: A Sociological Study of Rumor (Indianapolis, 1966), pp. 129–62Google Scholar.

⁷² “Manipulation” of the common opinion by print was discussed in Sharpe, J. A., “‘Last Dying Speeches’: Religion, Ideology, and Public Execution in Seventeenth-Century England,” Past and Present, no. 107 (1985): 144–67, 148Google Scholar. See also James, Mervyn, English Politics and the Concept of Honour, 1482–1647 (Oxford, 1978)Google Scholar.

⁷³ Gaskill, Malcolm, “Reporting Murder: Fiction in the Archives in Early Modern England,” Social History 23, no. 1 (1998): 1–30, 16CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The notion of a “world as if” can be seen as an ethnographic complement to Davis's and Gaskill's historical analyses. See Saada, Jeanne Favret, Deadly Words: Witchcraft in the Bocage (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 229–31Google Scholar.

⁷⁴ Gibson, Marion, Reading Witchcraft: Stories of Early English Witches (London, 1999)Google Scholar. Strange events moved from streets into a larger discourse by means of the printed materials that “petrified” street rumor and secondhand report. Conversely, through reading, the printed information returned back to oral culture where it generated a “buzz”: “print not only replaced orality, but over the short term it also stimulated and perpetuated oral culture.” Origins of the English Novel, pp. 50–51Google Scholar. Lucien Fevbre, and Martin, Henri-Jean, The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing, 1450–1800 (Atlantic Heights, N.J., 1976)Google Scholar. On the interaction of the oral and the printed see also Watt, Tessa, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640 (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 323–n24Google Scholar.

⁷⁵ This is not to say that providential politics was a privilege of Tories. For Whig uses of providence see Reading the Skies, pp. 56–64Google Scholar; and John, , “‘Virtue, Religion and Government’: The Anglican Uses of Providence,” in The Politics of Religion in Restoration England, ed. Harris, Tim, Seaward, Paul, and Goldie, Mark (London, 1990), pp. 29–47Google Scholar; Israel, Jonathan I. and Parker, Geoffrey, “Of Providence and Protestant Winds: The Spanish Armada of 1688,” in Essays on the Glorious Revolution, ed. Israel, Jonathan I. (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 335–63Google Scholar.

⁷⁶ Fara, Patricia, “Lord Derwentwater's Lights: Prediction and the Aurora Borealis,” Journal for the History of Astronomy 27 (1996): 239–58, 242CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and “Northern Possessions: Laying Claims to the Aurora Borealis,” History Workshop Journal 42 (1996): 37–57Google Scholar. The Whig association of the lights with the Jacobite cause is illustrated in Sherburn, George, The Early Career of Alexander Pope (Oxford, 1934), pp. 160–61Google Scholar.

⁷⁷ Rogers, , “Riot and Popular Jacobitism in Early Hanoverian England,” p. 72Google Scholar.

⁷⁸ Bostridge, , Witchcraft and Its Transformations, p. 135Google Scholar.

⁷⁹ Curry, Patrick, Prophecy and Power: Astrology in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1989), p. 161Google Scholar. John Rule wrote that—rather than a survival of traditional forms—the eighteenth-century popular culture was the creation of working people who were “defensive against repression and reactive against constraints.” Rule, John, The Labouring Classes in Early Industrial England, 1750–1850 (London, 1986), p. 226Google Scholar, quoted in Curry, , Prophecy and Power, p. 114Google Scholar.

⁸⁰ To Begin Harvest Three Days Too Soon (London, 1708), p. 5Google Scholar.

⁸¹ Ibid., p. 5.

⁸² Popular religion, magic, and prophecy “will always have been most powerful at the popular level, where the superstitious believer had least need to erect rationalist defenses around his beliefs.” Thompson, E. P., “Anthropology and the Discipline of Historical Context,” Midland History 1 (1972): 41–55, 49CrossRefGoogle Scholar (emphasis mine).

⁸³ Clark, , Thinking with Demons, p. 398Google Scholar.