positions are of the Horatian and Shakspearian sort. With the intestines of cocks were sacrificed various herbs, the nails of dead men, hair, brains, and clothes of children dying unbaptized, with other equally efficacious ingredients, boiled in the skull of a certain famous robber recently beheaded: powders, ointments, and candles of fat boiled in the same skull were the intended instruments for exciting love or hatred, and in affecting the bodies of the faithful. An unholy connection existed between the Lady Alice and a demon in the form sometimes of a black dog, sometimes of a cat. She was possessed of a secret ointment for impregnating a piece of wood, upon which, with her companions, she was carried to any part of the world without hurt or hindrance in her house was found a wafer of consecrated bread inscribed with the name of the devil. The event of this trial was the conviction and imprisonment of the criminals, with the important exception of the chief object of the bishop's persecution, who contrived an escape to England. Petronilla de Meath was the first to suffer the extreme penalty. This lady, by order of the bishop, had been six times flogged, when, to escape a repetition of that barbarous infliction, she made a public confession involving her fellow-prisoners. After which Petronilla was carried out into the city and burned before all the people-the first witch, it is said, ever burned in

Ireland.

FATE OF THE ACCUSED.

83

Of the other accused all were treated with more or less severity; two were subsequently burned, some were publicly flogged in the market-place and through the city, others banished; a few, more fortunate, escaping altogether.

CHAPTER III.

Witchcraft and Heresy purposely confounded by the ChurchMediæval Science closely connected with Magic and SorceryIgnorance of Physiology the Cause of many of the Popular Prejudices-Jeanne d'Arc-Duchess of Gloucester-Jane Shore -Persecution at Arras.

WHAT can hardly fail to be discerned in these prosecutions is the confusion of heresy and sorcery industriously created by the orthodox Church to secure the punishment of her offending dissentients. There are few proceedings against the pretended criminals in which it is not discoverable; the one crime being, as a matter of course, the necessary consequence of the other. In the interest of the Church as much as in the credulity of the people must be sought the main cause of so violent an epidemic, of so fearful a phenomenon in its continuance and atrocities, a fact demonstrated by the whole course of the superstition in the old times of Catholicism. Materials for exciting animosity and indignation against suspected heretics were near at hand. In the assurance of the

HERETICS OF THE TWELFTH CENTURY. 85

pre-scientific world everything remote from ordinary knowledge or experience was inseparable from supernaturalism. What surpassed the limits of a very feeble understanding, what was beyond the commonest experience of every-day life, was with one accord relegated to the domain of the supernatural, or rather to that of the devil. For what was not done or taught by Holy Church must be of 'that wicked One'-the cunning imitator.

In the twelfth century the Church was alarmed by the simultaneous springing up of various sects, which, if too hastily claimed by Protestantism as Protestants, in the modern sense, against Catholic theology, were yet sufficiently hostile or dangerous to engage the attention and to provoke the enmity of the pontiffs. The fate of the Stedingers and others in Germany, of the Paulicians in Northern France; of the Albigenses and Waldenses in Southern Europe, is in accordance with this successful sort of theological tactics. Many of the articles of indictment against those outlaws of the Church and of society are extracted from the primitive heresies, in particular from * the doctrines of the anti-Judaic and spiritualising Gnostics, and their more than fifty subdivided sects -Marcionites, Manicheans, &c. Gregory IV. issued a bull in 1232 against the Stedingers, revolted from the rule of the Archbishop of Bremen, where they are declared to be accustomed to scorn the sacraments,

hold communion with devils, make representative images of wax, and consult with witches.*

Alchymy, astrology, and kindred arts were closely allied to the practice of witchcraft: the profession of medicine was little better than the mixing of magical ointments, love-potions, elixirs, not always of an innocent sort; and Sangrados were not wanting in those days to trade upon the ignorance of their patients.† Nor, unfortunately, are the genuine seekers after truth who honestly applied to the study of nature exempt from the charge of often an unconscious fraud. Monstrous notions mingled with the more real results of their meritorious labours. Science was in its infancy, or rather was still struggling to be freed from the oppressive weight of speculative and theological nonsense before emerging into existence. Many of the fancied phenomena of witch-cases, like other

* A second bull enters into details. On the reception of a convert, a toad made its appearance, which was adored by the assembled crowd. On sitting down to the banquet a black cat comes upon the stage, double the size of an ordinary dog, advancing backwards with up-turned tail. The neophytes, one after another, kissed this feline demon, with due solemnity, on the back. Walter Mapes has given an account of the similar ceremonies of the Publicans (Paulicians). Heretical worship was of a most licentious as well as disgusting kind. The religious meetings terminate always in indiscriminate debauchery.

Pliny (Hist. Natur. xxx.) 'observes,' as Gibbon quotes him, 'that magic held mankind by the triple chain of religion, of physic, and of astronomy.'