Thomas Harley was born in 1613. That was the year in which London’s Globe Theatre burned to the ground during a performance of Shakespeare’s Henry VIII; mathematician John Napier finished twenty-five years of research perfecting Logarithms; Puritan concern was increasing over the growth of ‘alehouses’ as social centres, with dancing, ‘mummers’ and sundry celebrations; and people shuddered at the recent revelations about the evil activities of the ‘Witches of Pendle’ – and at all witchcraft tales.