WITCHCRAFT.
While, as we have seen, princes and warriors were toying with the
dangerous mysteries of the occult sciences, influencing the destinies of
states, there had been for half a century a gradually increasing
development of sorcery in a different direction among the despised
peasantry, which, before it ran its course, worked far greater evils
than any which had thus far sprung from the same source, and left an
ineffaceable stain upon the civilization and intelligence of Europe.
There is no very precise line of demarcation to be drawn between the
more pretentious magic and the vulgar details of witchcraft; they find
their origin in the same beliefs and fade into each other by
imperceptible gradations, and yet, historically speaking, the witchcraft
with which we now have to deal is a manifestation of which the
commencement cannot be distinctly traced backward much beyond the
fifteenth century. Its practitioners were not learned clerks or shrewd
swindlers, but ignorant peasants, for the most part women, who professed
to have skill to help or to ban, or who were credited by their neighbors
with such power, and were feared and hated accordingly. Of such we hear
little during the darkest portion of the Middle Ages, but with the dawn
of modern culture they confront us as a strange phenomenon, of which the
proximate cause is exceedingly obscure. Probably it may be traced to the
effort of the theologians to prove that all superstitious practices were
heretical in implying a tacit pact with Satan, as declared by the
University of Paris. Thus the innocent devices of the wise-women in
culling simples, or in muttering charms, came to be regarded as implying
demon-worship. When this conception once came to be firmly implanted in
the minds of judges and inquisitors, it was inevitable that with the
rack they should extort from their victims confessions in accordance
with their expectations. Every new trial would add fresh embellishments
to this, until at last there was built up a stupendous mass of facts
which demonologists endeavored to reduce to a science for the guidance
of the tribunals.
That such was the origin of the new witchcraft is rendered still more
probable by the fact that its distinguishing feature was the worship of
Satan in the Sabbat, or assemblage, held mostly at night, to which men
and women were transported through the air, either spontaneously or
astride of a stick or stool, or mounted on a demon in the shape of a
goat, a dog, or some other animal, and where hellish rites were
celebrated and indiscriminate license prevailed. Divested of the
devil-worship now first introduced, such assemblages have formed part of
the belief of all races. In Hindu superstition the witches, through the
use of mystic spells, flew naked through the night to the places of
meeting, where they danced, or to a cemetery, where they gorged
themselves with human flesh or revived the dead to satiate their lust.
The Hebrew witch flew to the Sabbat with her hair loosened, as when it
was bound she was unable to exercise her full power. Among the Norsemen
we have seen the _trolla-thing_, or assemblage of witches, for their
unholy purposes.[542] In the Middle Ages the first allusion which we
meet concerning it occurs in a fragment, not later than the ninth
century, in which it is treated as a diabolical illusion--"Some wicked
women, reverting to Satan, and seduced by the illusions and phantasms of
demons, believe and profess that they ride at night with Diana on
certain beasts, with an innumerable multitude of women, passing over
immense distances, obeying her commands as their mistress, and evoked by
her on certain nights. It were well if they alone perished in their
infidelity and did not draw so many along with them. For innumerable
multitudes, deceived by this false opinion, believe all this to be true,
and thus relapse into pagan errors. Therefore, priests everywhere should
preach that they know this to be false, and that such phantasms are sent
by the Evil Spirit, who deludes them in dreams. Who is there who is not
led out of himself in dreams, seeing much in sleeping that he never saw
waking? And who is such a fool that he believes that to happen in the
body which is only done in the spirit? It is to be taught to all that
he who believes such things has lost his faith, and he who has not the
true faith is not of God, but the devil." In some way this utterance
came to be attributed to a Council of Anquira, which could never be
identified; it was adopted by the canonists and embodied in the
successive collections of Regino, Burchard, Ivo, and Gratian--the latter
giving it the stamp of unquestioned authority--and it became known among
the doctors as the _Cap. Episcopi_. The selection of Diana as the
presiding genius of these illusory assemblages carries the belief back
to classical times, when Diana, as the moon, was naturally a
night-flyer, and was one of the manifestations of the triform Hecate,
the favorite patroness of sorcerers. Under the Barbarians, however, her
functions were changed. In the sixth century we hear of "the demon whom
the peasants call Diana," who vexed a girl and inflicted on her visible
stripes, until expelled by St. Cæsarius of Arles. Diana was the
_dæmonium meridianum_, and the name is used by John XXII. as synonymous
with succubus. In some inexplicable way Bishop Burchard, in the eleventh
century, when copying the text, came to add to Diana Herodias, who
remained in the subsequent recensions, but Burchard in another passage
substitutes as the leader Holda, the Teutonic deity of various aspect,
sometimes beneficent to housewives and sometimes a member of Wuotan's
Furious Host. In a tract attributed to St. Augustin, but probably
ascribable to Hugues de S. Victor, in the twelfth century, the companion
of Diana is Minerva, and in some conciliar canons of a later date there
appears another being known as Benzozia, or Bizazia; but John of
Salisbury, who alludes to the belief as an illustration of the illusions
of dreams, speaks only of Herodias as presiding over the feasts for
which these midnight assemblages were held. We also meet with Holda, in
her beneficent capacity as the mistress of the revels, under the name of
the Domina Abundia or Dame Habonde. She was the chief of the _dominæ
nocturnæ_, who frequented houses at night and were thought to bring
abundance of temporal goods. In the year 1211 Gervais of Tilbury shows
the growth of this belief in his account of the _lamiæ_ or _mascoe_, who
flew by night and entered houses, performing mischievous pranks rather
than malignant crimes, and he prudently avoids deciding whether this is
an illusion or not. He also had personal knowledge of women who flew by
night in crowds with these _lamiæ_, when any one who incautiously
pronounced the name of Christ was precipitated to the earth. Half a
century later Jean de Meung tells us that those who ride with Dame
Habonde claim that they number a third of the population, and when the
Inquisition undertook the suppression of sorcery, in its formula of
interrogatories, as we have seen in the preceding chapter, there was a
question as to the night-riding of the good women.[543]
Thus the Church, in its efforts to suppress these relics of pagandom,
preferred to regard the nocturnal assemblages as a fiction, and
denounced as heretical the belief in the reality of the delusion. This,
as part of the canon law, remained unalterable, but alongside of it grew
up, with the development of heresy, tales of secret conventicles,
somewhat similar in character, in which the sectaries worshipped the
demon in the form of a cat or other beast, and celebrated their impious
and impure rites. Stories such as this are told of the Cathari punished
at Orleans in 1017, and of their successors in later times; and the
Universal Doctor, Alain de Lille, even derives the name of Cathari from
their kissing Lucifer under the tail in the shape of a cat.[544] How
the investigators of heresy came to look for such assemblages as a
matter of course, and led the accused to embellish them until they
assumed nearly the development of the subsequent Witches' Sabbat, is
seen in the confessions of Conrad of Marburg's Luciferans, and in some
of those of the Templars.
Yet the belief in the night-riders with Diana and Herodias continued,
until the latter part of the fifteenth century, to be denounced as a
heresy, and any one who persisted in retaining it after learning the
truth was declared to be an infidel and worse than a pagan.[545] It was
too thoroughly implanted, however, in ancestral popular superstition to
be eradicated. In the middle of the thirteenth century the orthodox
Dominican, Thomas of Cantimpré, speaks of the demons who, like Diana,
transport men from one region to another and delude them into
worshipping mortals as gods. Others, he says, carry away women,
replacing them with insensible images, who are sometimes buried as
though dead. Thus, when the peasant wise-women came to be examined as to
their dealings with Satan, they could hardly help, under intolerable
torture, from satisfying their examiners with accounts of their
nocturnal flights. Between judge and victim it was easy to build up a
coherent story, combining the ancient popular belief with the heretical
conventicles, and the time soon came when the confession of a witch was
regarded as incomplete without an account of her attendance at the
Sabbat, which was the final test of her abandonment to Satan. These
stories became so universal and so complete in all their details that
they could not be rejected without discrediting the whole structure of
witchcraft. The theory of illusion was manifestly untenable, and
demonologists and inquisitors were sadly at a loss to reconcile the
incontrovertible facts with the denunciations by the Church of such
beliefs as heresy. A warm controversy arose. Some held to the old
doctrine that the devil cannot transport a human body or make it pass
through a disproportionate opening, but they endeavored to explain the
admitted facts by enlarging on his powers of creating illusions. The
witch consecrated herself to him with words and with anointing, when he
would take her figure or phantasm and lead it where she wished, while
her body remained insensible and covered with a diabolical shadow,
rendering it invisible; when the object had been accomplished, he
brought back the phantasm, reunited it to the body, and removed the
shadow. The question turned upon the ability of the devil to carry off
human beings, and this was hotly debated. A case adduced by Albertus
Magnus, in a disputation on the subject before the Bishop of Paris, and
recorded by Thomas of Cantimpré, in which the daughter of the Count of
Schwalenberg was regularly carried away every night for several hours,
gave immense satisfaction to the adherents of the new doctrine, and
eventually an ample store of more modern instances was accumulated to
confirm Satan in his enlarged privileges.[546]
In 1458 the Inquisitor Nicholas Jaquerius hit upon the true solution of
the difficulty by arguing that the existing sect of witches was wholly
different from the heretics alluded to in the _Cap. Episcopi_, and
adduced in evidence of their bodily presence in the Sabbat numberless
cases which had come before him in his official capacity, including one
of a man who, as a child, fifty-five years before, had been carried
thither by his mother in company with an infant brother, and presented
to Satan wearing the form of a goat, who with his hoofs had imprinted on
them an indelible mark--the _stigma diabolicum_. Jaquerius, however,
adds, reasonably enough, that even if the affair is an illusion, it is
none the less heretical, as the followers of Diana and Herodias are
necessarily heretics in their waking hours. These speculations of
Jaquerius attracted little attention at the time. Thirty years later,
Sprenger, who did so much to formulate belief and organize persecution,
found the _Cap. Episcopi_ a constant stumbling-block in his path, as
sceptics were apt to argue that, if the Sabbat was an illusion, all
witchcraft was illusory. He endeavored, therefore, to argue it away,
assuming that, while the devil undoubtedly possessed the power of
transportation, the presence of the witch frequently was only mental. In
such case she lay down on the left side and invoked the devil, when a
whitish vapor would issue from her mouth, and she saw all that occurred.
If she went personally, and had a husband, an accommodating demon would
assume her shape and take her place to conceal her absence.
Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola takes the same ground, that presence
at the Sabbat was sometimes real and sometimes imaginary; the place of
assemblage was beyond the river Jordan, and transportation thither took
place instantaneously. He avoids the definition of the _Cap. Episcopi_
by assuming that the Decretum of Gratian had not the authority of law,
and was corrupt in many places. The Inquisitor Bernardo di Como, about
1500, in addition to these arguments, had triumphantly adduced the fact
that numerous persons had been burned for attending the Sabbat, which
could not have been done without the assent of the pope, and this was
sufficient proof that the heresy was real, for the Church punishes only
manifest crimes.[547]
About this time the learned jurist, Gianfrancesco Ponzinibio, wrote a
tract on the subject of witchcraft in which he upheld the doctrine of
the _Cap. Episcopi_ and boldly applied it to all magic and sorcery,
which he treated as delusions. With a vast array of authorities he
proved his case; he exposed the baldness of the pretence that existing
witches belonged to a different sect; he argued that their confessions
are not to be received, as they confess what is illusory and impossible,
and that their evidence as to their associates is to be rejected, as
they are deluded and can only delude others. Lawyers, he added, ought to
take part in trials before the Inquisition, as they are trained to deal
with criminal cases. This aroused the learned theologian, Silvestro
Mozzolino of Prierio, Master of the Sacred Palace and subsequently
Dominican General, who, in 1521, responded in a voluminous treatise
devoted to the disputed canon. As the utterance of the Council of
Anquira, presumably confirmed by the Holy See, he does not dare to deny
its authority, but he adopts the same reasoning as Jaquerius, and
laboriously argues that the heretics to whom it refers had disappeared,
that the existing witches are a new sect, originating in 1404, and that
the definitions of the canon are, therefore, obsolete and inapplicable
to existing circumstances. To deny the bodily presence of witches at the
Sabbat, he says, is to discredit the infinite number of cases tried by
the Inquisition, and consequently to discredit the laws themselves.[548]
He was followed by his successor in the mastership of the Sacred Palace,
Bartolomeo de Spina, who devoted three tracts to the annihilation of
Ponzinibio. The latter had suggested, logically enough, though
maliciously, that as the _Cap. Episcopi_ had defined as a heresy the
belief that witches are corporally carried to the Sabbat, inquisitors in
administering abjuration to their penitents ought to make them abjure
this heresy among others. The absurd position in which this placed the
Inquisition aroused Spina's indignation to the utmost. "O wonderful
presumption! O detestable insanity!" he exclaimed. "Only heretics
abjure, only heresies are abjured before inquisitors. Is then that
belief a heresy which inquisitors defend, and according to which they
judge the enemies of the faith to be worthy of extreme damnation?--that
opinion which illustrious theologians and canonists prove to be true and
catholic? O the extreme stolidity of the man! Must, then, all
theologians and judges, the inquisitors themselves, of all Italy,
France, Germany, and Spain, holding this opinion abjure before the
Inquisition?"--and he concludes by calling upon the Inquisition to
proceed against Ponzinibio as vehemently suspect of heresy, as a fautor
and defender of heretics, and as an impeder of the Holy Office.[549]
This sufficiently shows that the new beliefs had completely conquered
the old. The question had passed beyond the range of reason and
argument, and everywhere throughout Europe the Witches' Sabbat was
accepted as an established fact, which it was dangerous to dispute.
Jurists and canonists might amuse themselves with debating it
theoretically; practically it had become the veriest commonplace of the
courts, both secular and ecclesiastical.
That the details of the Sabbat varied but little throughout Europe is
doubtless to be ascribed to the leading questions habitually put by
judges, and to the desire of the tortured culprits to satisfy their
examiners, yet this consentaneity at the time was an irrefragable proof
of truth. The first step of the witch was to secure a consecrated wafer
by pretending to receive communion, and carrying the sacrament home. On
this was fed a toad, which was then burned, and the ashes were mixed
with the blood of an infant, unbaptized if possible, powdered bone of a
man who had been hanged, and certain herbs. With this mixture the witch
anointed the palms of her hands, or her wrist, and a stick or stool
which she placed between her legs, and she was at once transported to
the place of meeting. As a variant of this the ride was sometimes made
on a demon in the shape of a horse, or goat, or dog. The assembly might
be held anywhere, but there were certain spots specially resorted to--in
Germany the Brocken, in Italy an oak-tree near Benevento, and there was,
besides, the unknown place beyond the Jordan. At all these they gathered
in thousands. Thursday night was the one generally selected. They
feasted at tables loaded with meat and wine which rose from the earth at
the command of the presiding demon, and they paid homage to the devil,
who was present, usually in the form of a goat, dog, or ape. To him they
offered themselves, body and soul, and kissed him under the tail,
holding a lighted candle. They trampled and spat upon the cross and
turned up their backs to heaven in derision of God. The devil preached
to them, sometimes commencing with a parody of the mass; he told them
that they had no souls and that there was no future life; they were not
to go to church or confession, or to use holy water, or, if they did so
to avoid suspicion, they must say "By leave of our Master," and they
were to bring him as many converts as they could, and work all possible
evil to their neighbors. There was usually a dance, which was unlike any
seen at honest gatherings. At Como and Brescia a number of children from
eight to twelve years of age, who had frequented the Sabbat, and had
been reconverted by the inquisitors, gave exhibitions in which their
skill showed that they had not been taught by human art. The woman was
held behind her partner and they danced backwards, and when they paid
reverence to the presiding demon they bent themselves backwards, lifting
a foot in the air forwards. The rites ended with indiscriminate
intercourse, obliging demons serving as incubi or succubi as required.
The reality of all this did not depend alone upon the confessions of the
accused, for there was a well-known case occurring about the year 1450,
when the Inquisitor of Como, Bartolomeo de Homate, the podestà Lorenzo
da Concorezzo, and the notary Giovanni da Fossato, either out of
curiosity or because they doubted the witches whom they were trying,
went to a place of assembly at Mendrisio and witnessed the scene from a
hiding-place. The presiding demon pretended not to know their presence,
and in due course dismissed the assembly, but suddenly recalled his
followers and set them on the officials, who were so beaten that they
died within fifteen days.[550]
All this was, of course, well fitted to excite the horror of the
faithful and stimulate the zeal of the inquisitor, but it was only the
pastime of the witch, and the reward given to her by her master for her
labors and her allegiance. Her serious occupation was in works of evil.
She was abandoned, body and soul, to Satan, and was the instrument which
he used to effect his malignant purposes. The demonologists argued that
the witch was as necessary to the demon as the demon to the witch, and
that neither could operate without the other. She was not like the
magicians and sorcerers, who merely earned their livelihood by selling
their services, sometimes for good purposes and sometimes for bad, but
she was a being wholly evil, delighting in the exercise of her powers
for the destruction of her neighbors, and constantly exhorted to
activity by her master. Those powers, moreover, were sufficient to
justify the terror in which she was held by the people. Sprenger divides
witches into three classes, those who can injure and not cure, those who
can cure and not injure, and those who can do both, and the worst are
those who unite these faculties, for the more they insult and offend
God, the greater power of evil he gives them. They kill and eat
children, or devote them to the devil if unbaptized. They cause abortion
by merely laying a hand upon a woman, or dry up her milk if she is
nursing. By twirling a moistened broom, or casting flints behind them
towards the east, or boiling hogs' bristles in a pot, or stirring a pool
with a finger, they raise tempests and hail-storms which devastate whole
regions; they bring the plagues of locusts and caterpillars which devour
the harvests; they render men impotent and women barren, and cause
horses to become suddenly mad under their riders. They can make hidden
things known and predict the future, bring about love or hatred at will,
cause mortal sickness, slay men with lightning, or even with their looks
alone, or turn them into beasts. We have the unquestioned authority of
Eugenius IV. that by a simple word or touch or sign they can bewitch
whom they please, cause or cure sickness, and regulate the weather.
Sometimes they scattered over the fields powders which destroyed the
cattle. They constantly entered houses at night, and, sprinkling a
powder on the pillows of the parents which rendered them insensible,
would touch the children with fingers smeared with a poisonous unguent
causing death in a few days; or they would thrust needles under the
nails of an infant and suck the blood, which was partly swallowed and
partly spit into a vessel to serve in the confection of their infernal
ointments; or the child would be put upon the fire and its fat be
collected for the same purpose. Witches, moreover, could transform
themselves into cats and other beasts, and Bernardo di Como gravely
cites the case of the companions of Ulysses, as adduced by St. Augustin,
to prove the reality of such illusions. Ludicrous as all this may seem,
every one of these details has served as the basis of charges under
which countless human beings have perished in the flames.[551]
One very peculiar power ascribed to witches was that of banqueting in
the Sabbat on infants and cattle, and then restoring them to life. We
have seen the belief in early times, and among races far apart, that
sorceresses could gnaw and eat men internally, which probably arose from
painful gastric maladies ascribed to sorcery. In the genesis of the
Sabbat this took the shape, as described by Bishop Burchard in the
eleventh century, that in the nocturnal meetings under the guidance of
Holda men would be slain without weapons, their flesh cooked and eaten,
and then they would be brought to life again, with straw or a piece of
wood substituted for their hearts. The Church was not as yet ready to
accept these marvels, and Burchard penances belief in them with fasting
on bread and water for seven Lents. In the next century John of
Salisbury ascribes to the illusion of dreams the popular superstition
that lamiæ tore children to pieces, devoured them, and returned them to
their cradles; and about 1240 Guillaume d'Auvergne speaks of the
superstition spread by old women of the "ladies of the night" or "good
women" who appear to tear children to pieces, or to cook them on the
fire. Of course this formed part of the perfected stories of the Sabbat.
In some witch-trials in the Tyrol, in 1506, there are frequent allusions
to children and domestic animals carried to the feast and devoured, and
though they remained alive, they were doomed to die soon afterwards. The
witches of the Canavese confessed that their practice was to select fat
cattle from a neighboring farmer, slaughter and eat them, and then,
collecting the bones and hides, resuscitate them with the simple formula
"_Sorge, Ranzola_." In one case a farmer of Levone, named Perino
Pasquale, killed a sick ox and skinned it, and, naturally enough,
himself died within a week, as well as his dog, which lapped some of the
blood; and the occurrence, according to custom, was subsequently
explained by a witch on trial, who confessed that the ox was one which
had thus been eaten and resuscitated, when the assembled witches
resolved that whoever killed it, and the first who should eat of it,
should perish. Such feats as these, it is true, gave the opponents of
witchcraft the advantage of arguing that they attributed to Satan the
power of God in resuscitating and recreating the dead, and the
demonologists, thus hard pushed, were obliged to admit that this portion
of the Sabbat was illusory, but they triumphantly added that this only
proved the empire of Satan over his dupes.[552]
The killing of unbaptized children was one of the special duties imposed
by Satan on his servants, which the theologians explained by the fact
that they were thus damned for original sin, and, therefore, the Day of
Judgment was postponed, as the number of the elect requisite before the
destruction of the world is thus more tardily completed. At a little
town near Basle a witch who was burned confessed that while acting as
midwife she had killed more than forty infants by thrusting a needle
into the superior fontanelle. Another, of the diocese of Strassburg, had
thus disposed of innumerable children, when she was detected by
accidentally letting fall the arm of a new-born child while passing the
gate of a town in which she had been performing her functions. Witch
midwives, when they abstained from this, were in the habit of dedicating
to Satan the babes whom they delivered. It was doubtful whether the
infants were thus in reality surrendered to Satan, but at least they
were subjected to his influence, and likely to grow up witches. This,
and dedication by witch mothers, explain the fact that girls even of
eight and ten years of age were able to bewitch people and to raise
tempests of hail and rain. In Swabia a case occurred of one who, at the
age of eight, innocently revealed her power to her father, in
consequence of which her mother, who had thus dedicated her, was burned.
The witch midwives were so numerous that there was scarce a hamlet
without them.[553]
There was apparently no limit to the evil wrought by Satan through the
instrumentality of those who had thus surrendered themselves to him.
Sprenger relates that one of his colleagues on a tour of duty reached a
town almost depopulated on account of pestilence. Hearing a report that
a woman lately buried was swallowing her winding-sheet, and that the
mortality would not cease until she had accomplished the deglutition, he
caused the grave to be opened and the sheet was found half swallowed.
The mayor of the town drew his sword and cut off the head of the corpse
and threw it out of the grave, when the pest ceased at once. An
inquisition was held and the woman was found to have long been a witch.
Sprenger might well deplore the threatened devastation of Christendom
arising from the neglect of the authorities to suppress these crimes
with due severity.[554]
To understand the credulity which accepted these marvels as the most
portentous and dreadful of realities, it must be borne in mind that they
were not the wild inventions of the demonologists, but were facts
substantiated by evidence irrefragable according to the system of
jurisprudence. Torture by this time had long been used universally in
criminal trials when necessary; no jurist conceived that the truth could
be elicited in doubtful cases without it. The criminal whom endless
repetition of torment had reduced to stolid despair naturally sought to
make his confession square with the requirements of his judge; the
confession once made he was doomed, and knew that retraction, in place
of saving him, would only bring a renewal and prolongation of his
sufferings. He therefore adhered to his confession, and when it was read
to him in public at his condemnation he admitted its truth.[555] In many
cases, moreover, torture and prolonged imprisonment in the foulest of
dungeons doubtless produced partial derangement, leading to belief that
he had committed the acts so persistently imputed to him. In either
case, desire to obtain the last sacrament, which was essential to
salvation and which was only administered to contrite and repentant
sinners, would induce him to maintain to the last the truth of his
confession. No proof more unquestionable than this could be had of any
of the events of life, and belief in the figments of witchcraft was
therefore unhesitating. To doubt, moreover, if not heresy, was cause for
vehement suspicion. The Church lent its overpowering authority to
enforce belief on the souls of men. The malignant powers of the witch
were repeatedly set forth in the bulls of successive popes for the
implicit credence of the faithful, and the University of Cologne, in
1487, when expressing its approval of the _Malleus Maleficarum_ of
Sprenger, warned every one that to argue against the reality of
witchcraft was to incur the guilt of impeding the Inquisition.[556]
What rendered the powers of the witch peculiarly dreadful was the
deplorable fact that the Church had no remedy for the evils which she so
recklessly wrought. It is true that the sign of the cross, and holy
water, and blessed oil, and palms, and candles, and wax and salt, and
the strict observance of religious rites were in some sense a safeguard
and a preventive. A witch confessed that she had been employed to kill a
certain man, but when she invoked the devil for the purpose he replied
that he could not do it, as the intended victim kept himself protected
by the sign of the cross, and that the utmost injury that could be
inflicted on him was the destruction of one eleventh of his harvests;
and another one stated that on their nocturnal rounds to destroy
children they were unable to enter houses in which were kept palms and
blessed bread or crosses of palms or olive, or to injure those who
habitually protected themselves with the sign of the cross. But it was
acknowledged that, when once the spell had been cast, the victim could
find no relief on earth or in heaven--human means were useless, and
exorcism and the invocation of saints were powerless except in
demoniacal possession. The only cure was from the devil through other
witches. Curative sorcery had long been a subject of debate in theologic
ethics, but it had been formally condemned as inadmissible. It not only
was a pact, tacit or expressed, with Satan, but it was ascertained that
one of his leading objects in urging his acolytes to injure their
neighbors was to force the sufferer in despair to have recourse to
sorcery and thus be drawn into evil ways. This was illustrated by a
case, celebrated among demonographers, of a German bishop who, in Rome,
fell madly in love with a young girl and induced her to accompany him
home. During the journey she undertook to kill him by sorcery, that she
might make off with the jewels with which he had loaded her, and he was
nightly attacked with a burning pain in his chest which resisted all the
resources of his physicians. His life was despaired of, when recourse
was had to an old woman who recognized the source of his affection and
told him he could only be saved by the same methods, involving the death
of the bewitcher. His conscience would not allow him to assent to this
without permission; he applied to Pope Nicholas V., who kindly granted
him a dispensation, and then he ordered the old woman to do what she
proposed. That night he was perfectly well, and word was brought him
that his young paramour was dying. He went to console her, but she
naturally received him with maledictions, and died devoting her soul to
Satan. As Bodin admiringly remarks, the devil was cunning enough to make
a pope, a bishop, and a witch all obey him, and all become accomplices
in a homicide.[557]
Thus a very profitable trade sprang up in counteracting witchcraft, and
many witches confined themselves to this branch of the profession,
although they were as liable as their adversaries to condemnation for
compact with the devil, for it was an incontrovertible fact that they
could only relieve a sufferer by transferring his disease to some one
else or by performing some equivalent evil act. Sprenger tells us that
they were to be found every German mile or two. At Reichshofen was one
whose business was so large that the lord of the place levied a toll of
a penny on every one who came to her for relief, and used to boast of
the large revenue which he derived from this source. A man named Hengst,
at Eningen, near Constance, had more applicants than any shrine of the
Virgin--even than that at Aix--and in winter, when the highways were
blocked with snow, those which led to his house were trampled smooth by
the crowds of his patients.[558]
When once the belief was fairly started in the existence of beings
possessed of the powers which I have described, and actuated by motives
purely malignant, it was destined to inevitable extension under the
stimulus afforded by persecution. Every misfortune and every accident
that occurred in a hamlet would be attributed to witchcraft. Suspicion
would gradually attach to some ill-tempered crone, and she would be
seized, for inquisitors held that a single careless threat, such as "You
will be sorry for this," if followed by a piece of ill-luck, was
sufficient to justify arrest and trial.[559] All the neighbors would
flock in as accusers--this one had lost a cow, that one's vintage had
been ruined by hail, another's garden-patch had been ravaged by
caterpillars, one mother had suffered an abortion, another's milk had
suddenly dried, another had lost a promising child, two lovers had
quarrelled, a man had fallen from an apple-tree and had broken his
neck--and under the persuasive influence of starvation or of the rack
the unfortunate woman would invent some story to account for each
occurrence, would name her accomplices in each, and tell whom she had
met in the Sabbats, which she attended regularly. No one can read the
evidence adduced at a witch-trial, or the confessions of the accused,
without seeing how every accident and every misfortune and every case of
sickness or death which had occurred in the vicinage for years was thus
explained, and how the circle of suspicion widened so that every
conviction brought new victims; burnings multiplied, and the terrified
community was ready to believe that a half or more of its members were
slaves of Satan, and that it would never be free from their malignant
vengeance until they should all be exterminated. For more than two
centuries this craze was perpetually breaking out in one part of Europe
after another, carefully nursed and stimulated by popes and inquisitors
like Innocent VIII. and Leo X., Sprenger and Institoris, Bernard of Como
and Bishop Binsfeld, and the amount of human misery thence arising is
simply incomputable.
Fortunately on one side there was a limitation upon the otherwise
illimitable powers of the witch. The contrast was so absurd between the
faculties attributed to her and her utter inability to protect herself
against those who tortured and burned her with impunity, that some
explanation of the inconsistency was requisite. The demonologists
therefore invented the comforting theory that through the goodness of
God the witch instantaneously lost her power as soon as the hand of an
officer of justice was laid upon her. But for this, indeed, it might
have been difficult to find men hardy enough to seize, imprison, try,
and execute these delegates of Satan, whose slightest ill-will was so
dangerous. Judges and their officials thus were encouraged to perform
their functions and were told that they need dread no reprisals. It was
true that, like all theories framed to meet artificial conditions, this
one was not always reconcilable to the facts. The strange fortitude with
which the culprits occasionally endured the severest and most prolonged
tortures, so far from being a proof of innocence, was regarded as
showing that even in the hands of justice the devil was sometimes able
to protect his servants by endowing them with what was called the gift
of taciturnity, and the ingenuity of the inquisitors was taxed to the
utmost to overcome his wiles. When this was once admitted it was
difficult to deny that he could assist them in other ways, and it was
recommended to the officers charged with the arrest that when they
seized a witch they should on no account allow her to enter her chamber,
lest she should secure some charm that would enable her to endure the
torture. Such charms might be secreted about her person, or under the
skin, or even in accessible cavities of the body, so the first thing to
be done was to shave the prisoner from head to foot and subject her to
the most indecent examination. It was on record that in Ratisbon some
heretics condemned to be burned remained unhurt in the flames; vainly
were they submerged in the river and roasted again. A three days' fast
was ordered for the whole city, when it was revealed that they had
charms concealed in a certain spot under the skin, and after the removal
of these there was no further trouble in reducing them to ashes. Charms
could also be used from a distance. At Innsbruck a witch boasted that if
she had a single thread of a prisoner's garment she could cause him to
endure torture to the death without confessing. Some inquisitors, to
break the spell of taciturnity, were wont to try sacred magic by
administering to the prisoner, on an empty stomach, after invoking the
Trinity, three drinks of holy water in which blessed wax had been
melted. In one case the most excruciating torture, continued through two
whole days, failed to elicit confession, but the third day chanced to be
the feast of the Virgin, and during the celebration of the holy rites
the devil lost the power with which he had thus far sustained the
prisoner, who revealed a plot to make way with the implacable judge,
Peter of Berne, by means of sorcery. These were simple devices; a more
elaborate one was to take a strip of paper of the length of the body of
Christ, and write on it the seven words uttered on the cross; on a holy
day, at the hour of mass, this was to be bound around the waist of the
witch with relics, she was to be made to drink holy water, and be at
once placed on the rack. When all these efforts failed it was a mooted
question whether the Church in her extremity could have recourse to the
devil by calling in other magicians to break the spell, and Prierias
succeeds by ingenious casuistry in proving that she could. One
precaution, held indispensable by some experienced practitioners, was
that the witch on arrest was to be placed immediately in a basket and
thus be carried to prison, without allowing her feet to touch the earth,
for if she were permitted to do so she could slay her captors with
lightning and escape.[560]
There was another comfortable theory that those who exercised public
functions for the suppression of witchcraft were not subject to the
influence of witches or demons. Sprenger tells us that he and his
colleagues had been many times assailed by devils in the shape of
monkeys, dogs, and goats, but by the aid of God they had always been
able to overcome the enemy. Yet there were exceptions to this, as we
have seen in the case of the unlucky inquisitor and podestà of Como; and
the lenity of some judges was explained by the fact that the witch was
sometimes able so to affect their minds that they were unable to
convict. This steeled the heart of the conscientious inquisitor, who
repressed all sentiments of compassion in the belief that they were
prompted by Satan. The witch was specially able to exert this power over
her judge when she looked upon him before he saw her, and it was a wise
precaution to make her enter the court backwards, so that the judge had
the advantage of the first glance. He and his assistants were also
advised to be very careful not to let a witch touch them, especially on
the wrist or other joint, and to wear around the neck a bag containing
salt exorcised on Palm Sunday, with consecrated herbs enclosed in
blessed wax, besides constantly protecting themselves with the sign of
the cross. It was doubtless through neglect of these salutary
precautions that at a witch-burning in the Black Forest, as the
executioner was lifting the convict on the pile she blew in his face,
saying, "I will reward you," whereupon a horrible leprosy broke out
which spread over his body, and in a few days he was dead. Occasionally,
moreover, the familiar demon of the witch, in the shape of a raven,
would accompany her to the place of execution and prevent the wood from
burning until he was driven off.[561]
To combat an evil so widespread and all-pervading required the combined
exertions of Church and State. The secular and episcopal courts both had
undoubted jurisdiction over it; the action of John XXII., in 1330, may
have caused some question as to the Inquisition, but if so it was
settled in 1374, when the Inquisitor of France was proceeding against
some sorcerers and his competence was disputed, and Gregory XI., to whom
the matter was referred, instructed him to prosecute them with the full
severity of the laws. Commissions issued in 1409 and 1418 to Pons
Feugeyron, Inquisitor of Provence, enumerate sorcerers, conjurers, and
invokers of demons among those whom he is to suppress. As the growth of
witchcraft became more alarming, Eugenius IV., in 1437, stimulated the
inquisitors everywhere to greater activity against it, and these
instructions were repeated in 1445. In 1451 Nicholas V. even enlarged
the powers of Hugues le Noir, Inquisitor of France, by granting him
jurisdiction over divination, even when it did not savor of heresy.
There was occasional clashing, of course, between the episcopal
officials and the inquisitors, but the rule seems to have been generally
observed that either could proceed separately, while the Clementine
regulation should be observed which prescribed their co-operation in the
use of torture and punitive imprisonment and when rendering final
sentence. The bishops, moreover, assumed that their assent was necessary
to the action of the secular courts. In the case of Guillaume Edeline,
condemned to perpetual imprisonment at Evreux in 1453, when the sentence
was read by the episcopal official the bishop added "We retain our power
of pardon," but the inquisitor at once entered a formal protest that the
prisoner should not be released without the consent of the
Inquisition.[562]
Yet in France at this period the royal jurisdiction, as embodied in the
Parlement, was, as we have seen in a former chapter, successfully
exerting its superiority over both bishops and inquisitors. A curious
case occurring in 1460 illustrates both this and the superstitions
current at the time. A priest of the diocese of Soissons named Yves
Favins brought a suit for tithes against a husbandman named Jean Rogier,
who held of the Hospitallers. These, like the Templars, were exempt from
tithes; Favins lost his case, was condemned in the expenses, which were
heavy, and was eager for revenge. A poor woman of the village who had
come from Merville in Hainault, had quarrelled with the wife of Rogier
over the price of some spinning, and to her Yves had recourse. She gave
him a great toad which she kept in a pot, and told him to baptize it and
feed it on a consecrated wafer, which he did, giving it the name of
John. The woman then killed it and made of it a "_sorceron_," which her
daughter took to Rogier's house under pretence of demanding the money in
dispute, and cast it under the table at which Rogier, his wife, and his
son were dining. They all died within three days; suspicion was
aroused, and the two women were arrested and confessed. The mother was
burned, but the daughter obtained a respite on the plea of pregnancy,
escaped from jail and fled to Hainault, but was brought back and was
carried on appeal to Paris. Yves was rich and well-connected. He was
arrested and confined in the prison of the Bishop of Paris, but he
obtained counsel and appealed to the Parlement; the Parlement allowed
the appeal, tried him, and acquitted him.[563]
All secular tribunals were not as enlightened as the Parlement of Paris,
but there seems to have been at least sometimes an effort to administer
even-handed justice. About this time a case occurred at Constance in
which an accuser formally inscribed himself against a peasant whom he
had met riding on a wolf, and had immediately become crippled. He
applied to the peasant, who cured him, but observing that the wizard
bewitched others, he felt it his duty to prosecute him. The case was
exhaustively argued before the magistrates, for the prosecution and the
defence, by two eloquent advocates, Conrad Schatz and Ulric Blaser.
Torture was not used, but the accused was condemned and burned on the
testimony of witnesses.[564]
In the ecclesiastical tribunals offenders had not the same chance. We
have seen in a former chapter how skilfully the inquisitorial process
was framed to secure conviction, and when, after a prolonged period of
comparative inactivity, the Inquisition was aroused to renewed exertion
in combating the legions of Satan, it sharpened its rusted weapons to a
yet keener edge. The old hesitation about pronouncing a sentence of
acquittal was no longer entertained, for though the accused might be
dismissed with a verdict of not proven, the inquisitor was formally
instructed never to declare him innocent. Yet few there were upon whom
even this doubtful clemency was exercised, for all the resources of
fraud and force, of guile and torment, were exhausted to secure
conviction with even less reserve than of old. Engaged in a personal
combat with Satan, the inquisitor was convinced in advance of the guilt
of those brought before him as defamed for sorcery, and the ancient
expedients were refined upon and improved. Formerly endurance of torture
might be regarded as an evidence of innocence, now it was only an
additional proof of guilt, for it showed that Satan was endeavoring to
save his servitor, and the duty to defeat him was plain, even though, as
Sprenger tells us was frequently the case, the witch would allow herself
to be torn in pieces before she would confess. Though, as formerly,
torture could not be repeated, it could be "continued" indefinitely,
with prolonged periods of intervening imprisonment in dungeons of which
the squalor was purposely heightened to exhaust the mental and physical
forces of the victim. It is true that confession was not absolutely
requisite, for when the evidence was sufficient the accused could be
convicted without it, but it was held that common justice required that
the criminal should avow his guilt, and therefore the use of torture was
universal when confession could not be otherwise secured. Yet in view of
the satanic gift of taciturnity it was desirable to avoid recourse to
it, and therefore promises of pardon, not indefinitely veiled under a
juggle of words as of old, but positive and specifying a moderate
penance or exile, were to be freely made. If the fraud was successful,
the inquisitor could let the sentence be pronounced by some one else, or
allow a decent interval to elapse before himself sending his deluded
victim to the stake. All the other devices to entrap or seduce the
prisoner to confession which we have seen employed by the older
inquisitors were also still recommended. One new and infallible sign was
the inability of the witch to shed tears during torture and before the
judges, though she could do so freely elsewhere. In such a case the
inquisitor was instructed to adjure her to weep by the loving tears shed
for the world by Christ on the cross, but the more she was adjured, we
are told, the drier she would become. Still, with the usual logic of the
demonologist, if she did weep it was a device of the devil and was not
to be reckoned in her favor.[565]
The most significant change, however, between the old procedure and the
new regarded the death-penalty. We have seen that with the heretic the
object was held to be the salvation of his soul, and, except in case of
relapse, he could always purchase life by recantation, at the expense of
lifelong imprisonment, with the prospect that in time submission might
win him release. At what period the rule changed with respect to witches
is uncertain. When convicted by the secular courts they were invariably
burned, and the Inquisition came to adopt the same practice. In 1445 the
Council of Rouen still treats them with singular mildness. Invokers of
demons were to be publicly preached with mitres on their heads, when, if
they abjured, the bishop was empowered to release them after performance
of appropriate penance; after this, if they relapsed, clerks were to be
perpetually imprisoned, and laymen abandoned to the secular arm, while
for minor superstitions and incantations a month's prison and fasting
were sufficient, with heavier penance for relapse. In 1448 the Council
of Lisieux contented itself with ordering priests on all Sundays and
festivals to denounce as excommunicate all usurers, sorcerers, and
diviners. In 1453 Guillaume Edeline escaped with abjuration and prison.
In 1458 Jaquerius laboriously argues that the witch is not to be treated
like other heretics, to be spared if she recants, showing that the
change was still a novelty, requiring justification. In 1484 Sprenger
says positively that while the recanting heretic is to be imprisoned,
the sorcerer, even if penitent, is to be put to death, indicating that
by this time there was no longer any question on the subject. There was,
as usual, a pretence of shifting the responsibility of this upon the
secular authorities, for Sprenger adds that the most the ecclesiastical
judge can do is to absolve the penitent and converted witch from the
_ipso facto_ excommunication under which she lies and let her go, to be
apprehended by the lay courts and be burned for the evil which she has
wrought. Silvester Prierias shows us how transparent was this juggle,
when he instructs the inquisitor that if the witch confesses and is
penitent she is to be received to mercy and not be delivered to the
secular arm: she is to abjure, is absolved and sentenced to perpetual
imprisonment in a black dress; the dress is put on her and she is led to
the church-door--but not to prison. The Inquisition takes no further
concern about her; if the secular court is content, well and good--if
not, it does as it pleases. What the inquisitors would have said if it
pleased the secular authorities to let the witch go free may be judged
by the maledictions of Sprenger on the incredulous laity who disbelieved
in the reality of witchcraft, and through whose supineness the secular
arm had allowed the cursed sect to so increase that its extirpation
appeared impossible.[566] Still more instructive, as we shall see
hereafter, was the indignation of Leo X. when the Signory of Venice
refused to burn the witches of Brescia condemned by the Inquisition.
Equally frivolous was the pretence that the punishment of burning was
merely for the injuries wrought by the witch, for we shall see that in
the case of the Vaudois of Arras the convicts were burned as a matter of
course, although attendance upon the Sabbat was the only crime with
which most of the sufferers were charged, and that they were delivered
for the purpose by the ecclesiastical court to the magistrates, and even
burned without such formality. Besides, Sprenger tells us that in the
case of prominent and influential witches the death-penalty was
frequently commuted to perpetual imprisonment on bread and water, as a
reward for betraying their accomplices, which shows that the fate of the
accused in reality rested with the inquisitor. Still, there appears to
have been, in at least one case, a simulacrum of judgment by the secular
court which I have rarely met where heretics were concerned. November 5,
1474, at Levone, in Piedmont, Francesca Viloni and Antonia d' Alberto
were condemned by the acting inquisitor Francesco Chiabaudi. The
sentence orders their delivery to the secular arm with a protest that no
corporal punishment was thereby indicated, directly or indirectly,
although the goods of the convicts were declared confiscated. The same
day the assistant inquisitor, Frà Lorenzo Butini, delivered them to the
podestà, Bartolomeo Pasquale, with the protest, to protect himself from
"irregularity," that he did not intend to indicate for them any corporal
punishment or to consent to it. The podestà allowed two days to elapse
and then held, November 7, a solemn court to which the population was
summoned by blast of trumpet. The convicts were brought before him, when
his _consultore_, or legal adviser, Lorenzo di Front, addressed him to
the effect that the women had been condemned by the Inquisition for
witchcraft, heresy, and apostasy, and that, according to the laws, he
must sentence them to the legal punishment of burning alive, which he
incontinently did. It evidently was the merest formality, and possibly,
as the death of two of the podestà's children had been attributed to one
of the witches, he may have wished to magnify his share in the
retribution.[567]
As of old, practically the sole defence of the accused lay in disabling
the witnesses for enmity, and judges were reminded that the enmity must
be of the most violent nature, for, with the wonted happy facility of
assuming guilt in advance, they were told that there was almost always
some enmity involved, since witches were odious to everybody. At the
same time all the old methods of reducing this slender chance to a
minimum were followed, supplemented with such as additional experience
had suggested. The names of the witnesses were generally suppressed, but
if they were communicated they were so arranged as to mislead, and in
advance effort was made to debar the accused from disabling the most
damaging ones by enticing her to deny all knowledge of them or to
declare them to be her friends. If she insisted on seeing the evidence,
it might be given to her after interpolating in it extraneous matters
and accusations to lead her astray.[568]
Appeals were always to be refused if possible. Outside of France the
only one that could be made was to Rome for refusing counsel, for
improper torture, and other unjust proceeding; and then, as we have
seen, the inquisitor could either refuse "apostoli" or grant either
reverential or negative ones. If conscious of injustice and aware that
an appeal was coming, he could elude it by appointing some one to sit in
his place. The danger of appeals was small, however, for if the accused
insisted on having counsel she was not allowed to select him. The
inquisitor appointed him; he was bound not to assume the defence if he
knew it to be unjust; he was not allowed to know the names of the
witnesses, and his functions were restricted to advising his client
either to confess or to disable the witnesses. If he made difficulties
and delays and interjected appeals he was subject to excommunication as
a fautor of heresy, and was worse than the witches themselves--of all of
which he was to be duly warned when accepting the case.[569]
The consequences of neglecting these salutary precautions are seen in
two trials in 1474, at Rivara in Piedmont. A number of witches had been
burned, and as usual they had implicated others. The matter had been
conducted by Francesco Chiabaudi, a canon regular, commissioned by both
the Bishop of Turin and Michele de' Valenti, the Inquisitor of Lombardy.
Inexperienced and unskilled, he had appointed Tommaso Balardi, parish
priest of Rivara, to make the preliminary informations in five fresh
accusations. The evidence, as usual, was overwhelming; Balardi arrested
the culprits and gave them ten days to show cause why they should not be
tortured. At the same time, with incredible ignorance of his duties, he
allowed them to select defenders, when they chose their husbands or
brothers or sons. In the case of three, these defenders did nothing and
the trials were conducted as usual, though the fragmentary documents
remaining do not acquaint us with the result. The other two, Guglielmina
Ferreri and Margherita Cortina, were more fortunate. They seem to have
been rich peasants, and their families retained three able lawyers for
their defence. When these were once admitted before the tribunal the
prosecution went to pieces. Chiabaudi, unacquainted with the privileges
of the inquisitorial process, was wholly unable to control them. He
allowed them to enter protests against the initial informations for
irregularity, and even permitted them, against all precedent, to
introduce witnesses for the defence. They had the audacity to summon
Balardi himself, and made him testify that the accused were regular in
all religious observances; after which they poured in evidence that the
so-called witches were eminently pious and charitable women, and that
the rumors against them had only arisen a couple of years before, on the
burning of three sisters who were said to have named them in their
confessions. Chiabaudi sought refuge in appointing Antonio Valo, a
local legal luminary, as procurator-fiscal, or prosecutor, an official
unknown to the Inquisition of the period, whom the counsel for the
accused speedily drove out of court. With each hearing they grew more
aggressive. They boldly quoted the Digest and the rules of law and
justice as though such things had not been expressly prohibited in
inquisitorial trials. Finally they told Chiabaudi that he was himself
suspect; that as a canon he had no right to leave his convent for such
business, and that all his acts were null. The whole prosecution, they
said, was merely an attempt to extort money and to divide the plunder of
the accused, and they appealed to the episcopal vicar of Turin, with a
threat, if necessary, to obtain the intervention of the Duke of Savoy
himself. Chiabaudi yielded to the storm which he had imprudently allowed
to gather strength, and in February, 1375, he permitted the transfer of
the case to the episcopal court of Turin. Whether the unfortunate women
fared better there will, doubtless, never be known, but the case shows
the wisdom of the precautions adopted by the regular inquisitors of
selecting counsel themselves and threatening them with excommunication
if they defended their clients. It is interesting, moreover, as probably
the only inquisitorial trial on record, save that of Gilles de Rais, in
which the forbidden _litis contestatio_ was carried out.[570]
A much more typical and illustrative case, of which we happen to have
the details, is that of the "Vaudois,"[571] or witches of Arras, showing
how witchcraft panics were developed and what could be accomplished by
inquisitorial methods, even under the supreme jurisdiction of the
Parlement of Paris. In 1459, while a general chapter of the Dominican
Order was in session at Langres, there chanced to be burned there as a
witch a hermit named Robinet de Vaulx. He was forced to name all whom he
had seen in the Sabbat, and among them was a young _femme de folle vie_
of Douai, named Deniselle, and a resident of Arras, advanced in years,
named Jean la Vitte--a painter and poet, who had written many beautiful
ballads in honor of the Virgin, and who was a general favorite, though,
as he was popularly known as the Abbé-de-peu-de-sens, he was probably
not a very sedate character.[572] Pierre le Brousart, the Inquisitor of
Arras, was present at the chapter, and on his return he lost no time in
looking after the accused. Deniselle was soon arrested and thrown into
the episcopal prison; Jean, Bishop of Arras, whom we have seen promoted
to the cardinalate for his services in procuring the repeal of the
Pragmatic Sanction, was then in Rome; his suffragan was a Dominican,
Jean, titular Bishop of Beirut, formerly a papal penitentiary, and his
vicars were Pierre du Hamel, Jean Thibault, Jean Pochon, and Mathieu du
Hamel. These took up the matter warmly and were earnestly supported by
Jacques du Boys, a doctor of laws and dean of the chapter, who thrust
himself into the affair and pushed it with relentless vigor. After
repeated torture, Deniselle confessed to have attended the Sabbat and
named various persons seen there, among them Jean la Vitte. He had
already been compromised by Robinet, and had gone into hiding, but the
inquisitor hunted him up at Abbeville, arrested him, and brought him to
Arras, when he was no sooner in prison than in despair he tried to cut
out his tongue with a pocket-knife, so as to prevent himself from
confessing. He did not succeed, but though he was long unable to speak,
this did not save him from torture, for he could use the pen and was
obliged to write out his confession. Forced to name all whom he had seen
in the Sabbat, he implicated a large number, including nobles,
ecclesiastics, and common folk. Six more arrests were made among the
latter, including several women of the town; the affair threatened to
spread farther than had at first been expected; the vicars grew timid
and concluded to discharge all the prisoners. Then Jacques du Boys and
the Bishop of Beirut constituted themselves formal complainants; the
latter, moreover, went to Péronne and brought to Arras the Comte
d'Estampes, Captain-general of Picardy for Philippe le Bon of Burgundy,
who ordered the vicars to do their duty under threats of prosecuting
them.