Penal Methods of the Middle Ages_ Criminals_ Witches_ Lunatics George Burnham Ives 1164 downloads.pdf

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Penal Methods of the Middle
Ages: Criminals, Witches, Lunatics
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you
will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: Penal Methods of the Middle Ages: Criminals, Witches, Lunatics

Author: George Burnham Ives

Release date: May 16, 2019 [eBook #59520]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/59520

Credits: Produced by deaurider, Barry Abrahamsen, and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
file was produced from images generously made available
by The Internet Archive)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PENAL
METHODS OF THE MIDDLE AGES: CRIMINALS, WITCHES,
LUNATICS ***

PENAL METHODS OF THE
MIDDLE AGES

PENAL METHODS OF THE
MIDDLE AGES

CRIMINALS, WITCHES, LUNATICS

BY
GEORGE IVES, M.A.

PRINTED FOR PRIVATE CIRCULATION
1910

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I
PAGE

Penal Methods of the Middle Ages 1
CHAPTER II
The Witch Trials 107
CHAPTER III
Treatment of the Insane 142
FOOTNOTES
For all Chapters 179

CHAPTER I

PENAL METHODS OF THE MIDDLE AGES

Prisons as places of detention are very ancient institutions. As soon as
men had learned the way to build, in stone, as in Egypt, or with bricks, as in
Mesopotamia, when kings had many-towered fortresses, and the great
barons castles on the crags, there would be cells and dungeons in the
citadels.[1] But prisons as places for the reception of “ordinary” (as distinct
from state or political) criminals for definite terms only evolved in England
many centuries afterwards[2]; whilst imprisonment as a punishment in itself,
[3]
to be endured under rules made expressly punitive and distressful, may be
described as essentially modern, and reached its worst phase in the
nineteenth century.[4]
The Teutonic Tribes of the bays and forests were fierce and free. They
exemplified, in fact, the theory of Nietzsche, that liberty cannot be granted
but must be taken.[5] They had not cowered before Oriental superstitions,[6]
and as they lived in widely scattered hordes a central government could not
impose its yoke upon the savage warriors. With the wild clansmen of the
fierce Norse nations, where every man was always ready armed[7] and boys
received their weapons at fifteen,[8] the great desideratum was the
maintenance of peace.
The instinct of retaliation throbs in all men, and vengeance swift and
bloody would be sought for, which, where the kindred ties were close and
strong, might spread a feud through villages and clans, such that the very
children might be born devoted to the duty of a family revenge. The
Teutonic nations, like the free peoples they were, always assumed that for a
crime to have been committed, an individual must have suffered injury.[9]
And they conceived the aggrieved plaintiff as no cowed weakling (or he
would not have counted), but as a fighting freeman with spear and shield,

who would repay a wrong with interest, and whom, if slain, his kinsmen
would avenge.
Thus the placation[10] of the injured party was the objective of the oldest
laws. Allowance was made for human feelings[11] and impulses. Some
ancient codes[12] permitted him like for like; an eye for an eye, and a tooth
for a tooth, in the sense of so much, and no more.[13] But the Teutonic laws
offered him compensation,[14] and, when it was possible, compelled him to
accept it.[15] Thus crimes were met by restitution, not by punishment.[16]
Every sort of injury which one freeman could do to another was first of
all atonable by bōt (a money compensation paid to the injured man or his
relations).[17] What this fine was depended firstly upon the nature and extent
of the damage done, and secondly upon the rank and importance of the
person injured.[18] For every man had his class and value; and every form of
aggression against a freeman, from a wound which killed him outright to a
blow which deprived him of a single tooth,[19] as well as the theft of
anything he possessed, had its appointed fine according to his wer.[20]
The tariffs varied with the different tribes,[21] but the main principle—of
compensation—extends through all. In Mercia the wer-gild of a king was
fixed at 7200 shillings or 120 Mercian pounds of silver,[22] to which great
sum was added the cynebot of a similar amount which was payable to his
people.[23] The wer-gild of a thane (i.e. county magnate) came to 1200
shillings, that of a ceorl (labourer) was 200 shillings.[24]
These murder-fines, however, were much heavier than they look;[25] those
of the kings,[26] numerous as they were, would in most cases have been
hopelessly unpayable by private people, and those of the thanes by humble
families. Even the wer-gild of the ceorl, or labourer, which was 200
scillings, or about four pounds, was not inconsiderable when we remember
that in Æthelstan’s time one scilling would buy a sheep, and six scillings (or
thirty pence)[27] an ox—the cost would be the price of a small herd.[28]
So that frequently the man-fines[29] were never paid, and then we perceive
that the wise compensation system of the codes arose more out of the fear
of the vendetta than from humane principles;[30] if they were not paid,
vengeance would be let loose.

If the offender were not slain or abused,[31] if he did not escape and live as
an outlaw and a “wolf’s head”[32] (which was frequently done,[33] for there
were some ten men outlawed[34] to every one hanged[35]), he might be sold[36]
as a wite theow[37] into penal slavery.[38] For there were slaves as a class in
Christendom and in England up to the twelfth century,[39] and they being
helpless, like our “submerged” masses, were of little account at all in the
community.
Derived mainly from the conquered taken in wars and raids,[40] their ranks
were recruited by men sold for their offences, and likewise, it is said, from
those who sold themselves in times of starvation;[41] many were sent as
slaves beyond the seas,[42] and the fact that we find this custom repeatedly
prohibited[43] testifies also to its prevalence.[44]
From the poor slaves there need be no fear of vengeance or retaliation;
they were a voteless minority amidst Saxon freemen. If a slave were slain
only eight shillings were payable to his kinsfolk,[45] while a man-bōt of
thirty shillings was claimed by his master.[46] And that, it would seem, was
all on the part of the State.[47] The Church, however, to its credit, imposed a
penance, a two years’ fast.[48] Other injuries to the theow (slave) were
treated with proportional mildness,[49] but of Church laws and discipline I
shall have to speak presently.[50]
For the damage done by his slave the master was liable,[51] as for a
trespass by his cattle.[52] For the more serious offences the theow would be
handed over to the kinsfolk of the injured party, unless perchance his master
should redeem him by payment.[53] If upon accusation he failed at the
ordeal, he was to be forthwith branded the first time;[54] but the second
conviction would be capital, “seconda vice non compenset aliquid nisi
caput.”[55]
Apart from legal or revengeful penalties for wrongs done to any freeman,
[56]
the theow was absolutely at the mercy of his master.[57] If he were not
allowed to “redeem his hide” by such small compensation or atonement of
which he was capable, he might have one leg fastened by a ring to a stake,
round which he would be lashed with a three-thonged whip.[58] It was
composed of cords knotted at the ends.[59] If a ceorl were goaded into
homicide, vengeance might then be taken upon six of his kinsfolk[60] (upon
the principle that the thane had six times his value,[61] see wer-gilds, ante,

and Maitland, Domesday Book, p. 53). If a theow killed his lord[62] he was to
perish in torments;[63] for revenge was sweet,[64] and the strong took it
without stint.[65]
Clearly, then, from the nature of early Saxon society, elaborate penal
machinery had no place. The freemen atoned for their transgressions with
fines when possible, and by slavery, mutilation, outlawry, or death when
they could not pay. Cruelly as the slaves might be flogged or slaughtered,
there were no prisons in the land even for them.[66] The villages were mere
groups of wooden homesteads with barns and cattle sheds surrounded by
rough stockades and destitute of roads or communications. Even the palace
of the king was a long wooden hall with numerous outhouses, for the
English built no stone houses and burnt down those of their Roman
predecessors.[67]
The Teutons, according to Tacitus, abhorred walled towns as the defences
of slavery and the graves of freedom. The Frisians forbade the construction
of any walls more than 12 feet high.[68] In the course of time the crown, or
central government, grew in power; the king, and even the great lords,
spiritual and temporal, were able to enforce obedience and order, at any rate
upon those in their neighbourhood.[69] The royal authority could defy the
vendetta, and from very early times had claimed a share in the
compensation,[70] so that, along with the wer-gild, payable to the injured
party, the wite, or additional fine, had to be paid to the sovereign (or
overlord) for the disturbance of his peace.[71]
Sometimes he would take vengeance for the State or for an aggrieved
person.[72] Thus in the reign of Æthelstan a man might forfeit his hand for
coining, and have it nailed over the door of the mint;[73] and in the reign of
Cnut a woman might lose her nose and ears if she committed adultery. In
the early period these mutilations appear to have often been intended to be
mortal, for in the laws of Alfred and Guthrum we read that “If a malefactor,
having forfeited himself, has had a limb cut off, and, being left to himself,
survive the third night; afterwards he that is willing to take care of his sore
and soul may help him with the Bishop’s leave.”[74]
But the maimed criminals were also allowed at large to be a living
warning to others. That the Saxons could be cruel enough when bōt was not
made, and to habitual criminals and slaves, we have seen already; how

barbarous the amputations were may be gleaned from the words of our
Danish monarch: “... At the second time let there be no other bōt if he be
foul” (at the ordeal) “than that his hands be cut off or his feet, or both
according as the deed may be, and if then he have wrought yet greater
wrong, then let his eyes be put out, or his nose and his ears and the upper lip
be cut off; or let him be scalped ... so that punishment be inflicted and also
the soul preserved.”[75]
William the Norman enjoined that offenders should not be slain outright,
but hacked about.[76] “Interdicimus,” he commands, “eciam ne quis
occidatur vel suspendatur pro aliqua culpa sed enerventur oculi, et
abscindantur pedes vel testiculi, vel manus ita quod truncus remaneat vivus
in signum prodicionis et nequicie sue.”[77]
About the tenth century, after the ending of the Danish troubles, and in
the eleventh under the Norman rule, the king was strong enough to extend
his power and protection.[78] In the twelfth the old system of bōt and wer,
designed to compensate the injured and keep the peace among a fierce and
warlike race of freemen,[79] began to give place to one under which the king
exacted punishment and tribute,[80] which he administered and collected
through itinerant judges, sheriffs, and other officers.[81]
The heavy fines imposed on places and people[82] became an important
source of revenue to the crown[83] and to the barons and the lords of
manors[84] when they held rights of private jurisdiction[85] (Sake and Soke,
Courts Leet,[86] etc.), which were frequently delegated.[87]
The State was growing strong enough to take vengeance; the common
man was no longer feared as had been the well-armed Saxon citizen of old,
and to the “common” criminal was extended the ruthless severity once
reserved for the slaves.[88] Then likewise Glanville and the lawyers,[89] under
the influence of Rome and Constantinople, drew a sharp and arbitrary
distinction between the criminal and the civil pleas, and the idea of
compensation began to wane before the revenge instinct now backed by
power. If there was money obtainable, the king’s judges would seize it;[90]
the idea of damage done to the individual was merged and lost in the greater
trespass[91] alleged to have been committed by the offender against the
peace, against the code and king.

Up to the middle of the twelfth century[92] some counties were without
public gaols or prisoners’ cages,[93] and Henry II. commanded their
construction at the Assize of Clarendon, 1166. By the seventh article[94]
gaols were to be made in the walled towns or erected within royal castles[95]
with the king’s timber or other wood that might be available.[96] They were
evidently light improvised structures[97]—sheds knocked up beneath
massive walls of city or castle. The king’s strong places or the larger
monasteries would be prisonous enough with little alteration. These early
prisons of the Angevin kings were collecting depots or remand prisons for
the safe custody of persons accused. Bracton, who died in 1268, expressly
wrote that prison was to confine and not to punish.[98]
Bishop Britton[99] (thirteenth century) says that only those accused of
felony were to be kept in irons, and none were to be ill-treated except
according to sentence. In the Mirror of Justice we read that “every common
prison[100] is a gaol, and only the king has the keeping of it[101]; every other
man’s prison is private, etc.; and because it is forbidden that any one be
tormented before judgment, the law wills that no one be placed among
vermin and putrefaction, or in any horrible or dangerous place, or in the
water, or in the dark, or any other torment; but it is lawful for gaolers to put
fetters upon those whom they suspect of trying to escape, but the fetters
must not weigh more than 12 oz....”[102]
The captives having been collected together within the gaols would have
to wait till the next assize. It might be a long time—months (as even now)
or years[103]—for the king’s judges were dreaded—and of those who could
not get mainpernors (bail),[104] many would die of want or disease before the
justices were ready to try them.
Meanwhile the prisoners and their families were to be kept at their own
expense; according to Bishop Britton[105] the gaoler was required to take
nothing from the poor—who would in general possess nothing to be taken
—and not more than fourpence for the keep of any prisoner.[106] None were
to be detained from inability to pay the fees. Such were the rules approved
by Edward I. In practice, it appears probable that, for the next five hundred
years or so, the prisoners would be well fed if they had means, and might be
starved to death if they had not.[107]

Those who survived until the opening of the court would be brought up,
according to Bracton,[108] with their hands free, though sometimes in leg-
irons. We find the description amplified by Britton;[109] they were to be
“barefooted, uncoifed and bareheaded, in their coat only, without irons of
any kind,[110] so that they might not be deprived of reason by pain, nor be
constrained to answer by force.”[111] But thus far no punishments had been
meted out; these followed upon conviction, and were of a physical and
sanguinary character.
According to Bracton an offender might be broken on the wheel for
treason, a crime so great that it was scarcely to be permitted that the
relations should live.[112] For the “common” criminal there was hanging,[113]
and the ghastly mutilations enjoined by the Norman kings were continued;
indeed they were made more savage for many offences after 1176.[114] Up to
the reign of Henry III. the penalty for poaching in the king’s forests was
death or the loss of eyesight.[115] Rape up to the reign of Edward I. might
also involve loss of eyes and emasculation.[116]
Stealing from a dwelling appears to have met with the same barbarous
punishment. A glimpse of the gentle ways of twelfth-century “justice” is
revealed in an account of a supposed miracle. A certain Ailward, being
accused of housebreaking (committed apparently under considerable
provocation to recover a debt), was lodged for some time in Bedford Prison.
[117]
After having failed in the water ordeal and being convicted, he was
taken out to the usual place of punishment, where his eyes were blinded, he
was mutilated, and the parts were buried in the ground. He is said to have
been restored through St. Thomas of Canterbury.
By the time of Edward I. we begin to arrive at sentences of
imprisonment, and read of such penalties as one year and then a fine, or two
years in default of fine, in the first Statutes of Westminster. For such
offences as carrying off a nun, allowing a prisoner to evade prison, or
stealing tame beasts out of parks, a sentence of three years might be
awarded besides the customary fine. As we have seen, the profits of
“justice” were highly regarded; the fines were precious perquisites of the
Crown (and sometimes of subordinate administrators and officials as well).
The prisons were used as “squeezers” to extort them. “Imprisonment,” say
Pollock and Maitland,[118] “was, as a general rule, but preparatory to a fine.
After a year or two the wrongdoer might make fine; if he had no money he

was detained for a while longer. In the thirteenth century the king’s justices
wield a wide ‘common law’ power of ordering that an offender be kept in
custody. They have an equally wide power of discharging him upon his
making a fine with the king.”
In Henry III.’s reign “The wrongdoer but rarely goes to prison, even for a
moment.[119] On the plea roll the custodiatur which sends him to gaol is
followed at once by ‘Finem fecit per unam markam’ (or whatever the sum
might be), and then come the names of those who are pledges for the
payment. The justices do not wish to keep him in prison; they wish to make
him pay money.” The authors just quoted say that the fines were generally
light, and give several instances[120]—it doubtless depended much upon the
judges and the reign. But wherever there are enclosing walls, there are
certain to be abuses behind them.[121] Judicial and administrative scandals
kept on occurring.[122]
In the fourteenth century many persons are said to have perished of
hunger and thirst,[123] and many died in prison about the time of the Black
Death (1349).[124] Into the fifteenth century the complaints continue; we read
the following in the Liber Albus:[125] “Whereas great outcry has been made
heretofore as to many wrongs and misprisons done by the gaolers of
Newgate and Ludgate and their officers and servants, ...” and new
regulations were made (and no doubt broken, as the others had been)
respecting fees the prisoners should pay.
The sixteenth century showed no advance in the matter of humanity.[126]
Torture, which, legally or illegally, has always been a ready trick of
statesmen, developed after 1468,[127] and under the Tudor sovereigns the
rack was ever creaking to extort confessions. The “common” criminals
were treated with the utmost severity; in 1530 an Act was passed by which
all poisoners were to be boiled alive.[128] Burning was the penalty appointed
for heresy, high and petty treason[129] (i.e. murder of a husband by a wife,
murder of a master or mistress by a servant,[130] and several offences against
the coin), and, unlike the punishment of boiling, continued legal until 1790.
[131]
The right hand might be taken off before hanging for aggravated
murder, or a man might be hung in chains and left to perish.[132] There was
the drawing and quartering in some executions, and ordinary hangings were
exceedingly numerous.[133] Men lost their hands for exporting sheep and for

libel,[134] and there was branding, etc., for perjury, and sometimes for
persistent vagrancy.[135]
A picture of the prisons has been left us in a work of 1545. “I see,”
observes the monk whose complaint[136] is given, “also a pytyful abuse for
presoners. O Lord God, their lodging is to bad for hoggys, and as for their
meat it is euil enough for doggys, and yet, the Lord knoweth, thei haue not
enough thereof. Consyder, all ye that be kyngs and lordys of presons, that
inasmoch as ye shut up any man from his meate, ye be bound to giue him
sufficyant fode for a man and not for a dogge.” He further declares that the
charges were greater than any at the “dearest inn in Ingland,” and says that
men lay six and seven years in prison before the oncoming of their case.
About the year 1552 the City authorities selected what had been a palace
at Bridewell[137] (given by Edward VI.) for (among other purposes) locking
up, employing, and (as heretofore, according to Holinshed) whipping
beggars, prostitutes, and night-walkers of all sorts.[138] Later on similar
detention places were also called Bridewells, after the first one at
Blackfriars just alluded to. In 1597 they planned Houses of Correction,[139]
and in 1609 it was ordered that they should be builded in every county.[140]
Though they became, in practice, one with the common gaols, they lasted at
least in name till 1865.[141] But to resume our survey of ordinary prisons.
The seventeenth century affords the usual evidence of what walls can hide.
The gaolers, as of old, appear to have been all powerful;[142] sometimes
friendly, often the reverse, always extortionate. John Bunyan, during his
twelve years’ incarceration, was allowed to work for his family—for a large
part of the time in tolerable surroundings; but while in the Gate House
prison he was charged huge fees.[143] The prisoners hung collecting bags out
of their windows on Sunday mornings.
George Fox,[144] the Quaker, agreed with the keeper and his wife for meat
and drink, chamber, and other accommodation at a certain rate. But he
refers to one of their party being put “down in the Doomesdale[145] amongst
the felons,” and this, it appears, was a “noysome, filthy, stinking hole,
where was a puddle of ... and filth over their shoes and the ... of the felons,
and straw almost broken to chaffe with their long lying thereon and full of
vermin, wherein is neither chimney nor easing house.” Confirmatory
evidence as to how felons fared in 1667 may be deduced out of a Statute of
Charles II.[146] “Whereas,” it says, “there is not yet any sufficient provision

made for the relief and setting to work of poor and needy persons
committed to the common gaol for felony and other misdemeanours, who
many times perish before their trial, and the poor there living idly and
unemployed become debauched and come forth instructed in the practice of
thievery and lewdness,” etc.
The excellent plan was proposed that the profits of the prisoners’ labour
should be placed to their relief. But to find useful labour within prison walls
has always been a most difficult problem, and the world outside was always
far too busy to see to it. The prisons of the eighteenth century were very
much like those that had been before, but perhaps we know more about
them through the great work of John Howard, The State of the Prisons. It is
a matter of history how that grim, conscientious Puritan went where the
ruling classes neither cared nor dared to venture.[147] For, besides the
dreadful stench which stuck to his notes and garments, deep in the
windowless (window tax), airless rooms and dungeons through which he
went, down in the stale, cramped yards[148]—when there were any—without
space or sun, and in which even the supply of water was mostly beyond the
bounds and so inaccessible,[149] rising amidst the putrefaction of those
places, there lurked the dreaded typhus or gaol fever.
It had always been about since prisons were used, and sometimes proved
the Nemesis of neglect.[150] In 1522, at the assize in the castle at Cambridge,
[151]
many of the knights and gentlemen attending caught the infection from
the “sauor of the prisoners or the filthe of the house.” Writing of the year
1577, we read in Baker’s Chronicle:[152] “About this time when the judges
sate at the Assize in Oxford, and one Rowland Jenks, a bookseller, was
questioned for speaking opprobrious words against the queen, suddenly
they were surprised with a pestilent savour, whether rising from the
noisome smell of the prisoners or from the damp of the ground is uncertain;
but all that were present, almost every one, within forty hours died.” Much
the same happened at Exeter in 1586[153] and at Taunton in 1730, and some
hundreds perished at both these places.
Thomas Allen, in his History of London,[154] relates that in 1750 “The
Lord Mayor, some of the aldermen, two of the judges, the under sheriff,
many lawyers, and a number of lookers-on, died of the gaol distemper.” The
prison was afterwards cleansed! Howard asserts that in 1773–4 more people
died from the gaol fever than were executed in the kingdom;[155] we lost

2000 sailors (criminals were often given the choice between punishment
and the services) with the fleet in the war with America.[156] He quotes Lord
Bacon as saying that the most pernicious infection next to the plague is the
smell of the jail.[157] Such were the mephitic dens into which were cast men,
women, and children of all sorts; and there they would rot away or survive,
as the case might be, until the expiration of their (generally short) sentences
of imprisonment, if they could pay the fees charged on their coming out; or
until they ultimately came up for trial, after which they would either be
acquitted and discharged (again when they paid the fees), or they would be
convicted and transported or executed.[158]
The number of capital offences was truly enormous. Onward from 1688
they steadily increased,[159] owing, as has been well remarked, to the
“unhappy facility afforded to legislation by Parliamentary government.”[160]
Members who could not become ministers, and who yet wanted to do
something, often had interest enough to hang somebody, or at least to get a
law passed creating a new capital felony.[161]
Thus through the ambitions of private members and the general
callousness of the ruling class, the number of capital offences kept ever
growing, until, in theory, there were more than two hundred of them.[162]
The law, however, had overreached; rough and often most brutal as the
people of that day were, they would not enforce the penalties provided,[163]
so that the hangman’s ministrations were invoked for only twenty-five
classes of offences in London,[164] and for not more than thirty throughout
England.[165] In fact, it was found that conscientious people refused to
prosecute for the lesser crimes, dreading to have a share in taking life. But
actually the gallows load was heavy; an instance appeared in a Times[166]
paragraph—18th January 1801—which tells how a certain Andrew
Branning, a luckless urchin aged only thirteen, had broken into a house and
carried off a spoon. Others were with him, but they ran away, and only he
was captured and brought to trial. His story ended in two words, which
were short and customary: Guilty—Death. Thus transportation and the
extreme penalty kept clearing the prisons, but those within them were the
while exploited, being entirely the prey and property of warders, keepers,
and assistant gaolers, all of whom made the most of their positions—which
might be given out like pensions or be purchased[167]—to wring out fees[168]
and make their places pay;[169] and having what amounted to unlimited

power, and being, by the nature of their office, used and inured to
witnessing suffering, the gaolers,[170] from the beginning and right into the
eighteenth century, shrank from no means, however mediæval, by which
they could extract their fees and charges.[171] Thumbscrews and iron skull-
caps were sometimes used,[172] and were produced in court as evidence.[173]
Prisoners might be loaded with heavy irons unless they would pay to be
allowed lighter ones.[174] They were liable to be flogged with ropes or whips
or anything that came handy,[175] the common instrument of flagellation,
however, being the formidable membrum tauri.[176] They might be kept in
damp dungeons and darkness; the living were sometimes locked up with the
dead. They could be set apart and purposely exposed to utter starvation,[177]
gaol fever, and small-pox, or actually done to death by their keepers’
violence.[178]
The prisoners were robbed for room, squeezed for food,[179] and dealt
with for drink of all kinds, spirits, and tobacco, in which the officials did a
roaring trade.[180] Lastly, the new arrivals at a prison were fleeced and
pillaged by their fellow gaol-birds for “chummage” or “garnish” money,[181]
and failing this, they were frequently stripped of their very clothing, a
process termed “letting the black dog walk.”[182]
And in all these vile places there was generally no production of
anything. The prisons and Bridewells were supposed originally to set
rogues to work,[183] but the authorities took no trouble to organise it, and
throughout the detention-places useful employment (if we except
occasional work done for the gaoler, or permitted in particular instances)
was impossible. It was found in 1818,[184] that, out of the 518 prisons in the
United Kingdom, in 445 there was no employment, and that in the
remaining 73 it was of the slightest possible description. Such were the bad
old prisons of the past. Their faults were many, glaring, and obvious, but
they had yet a human side, too, and a better one. Though the idiot might be
laughed at and the new-comer despoiled, though the keepers might be
brutal and the atmosphere poisonous, still in the midst of evil there would
be individual acts of kindness and self-sacrifice. If the captives were in
chains and rags,[185] they were not cut off from the outside world or striped
and spotted in a livery of shame.[186] If gaols were hotbeds of infection and
cesspools of corruption,[187] at least they were not the ghastly whited
sepulchres which were built in the nineteenth century.

Mitigations and Peculiarities

So far we have endeavoured to trace the course of the usual punishments
inflicted in various ages on the “common” criminals when they were
brought up charged with the graver crimes. There were, however, ways of
escape open, which are sufficiently general and important to be dealt with
separately.
The Ordeals.—The invocation of miraculous guidance, to determine the
guilt or innocence of a person accused, has been resorted to from time
immemorial by all manner of methods throughout the four continents.
There were many ordeals in mediæval England. There was the corsned,
or consecrated barleycake, which was supposed to choke a perjurer if he
tried to swallow it; when mouth and throat were dry from fear or excitement
this was quite possible. There was a test by immersion, in which the
accused had to sink two ells deep—over seven feet. A rope was attached
round the body, and it is interesting to notice that Archbishop Hincmar
(ninth century) gave express directions for the rescuing of those who, by
thus sinking, were declared to be innocent.[188] There was a test tried with
hot water, in which a stone had to be picked up out of boiling liquid without
the arm being scalded. There was a test, to pass which the hand had to be
inserted into a glove of hot iron without being burned by it. There was a test
in which the suspected person must walk through flames without being
scorched. There was a test which consisted in having to walk over nine red-
hot ploughshares, blindfolded and unseared.[189]
Perhaps, however, the best-known ordeal was that which was worked out
with a heated iron bar or ring.[190] This generally weighed three pounds, and
had to be carried—they were always personal and picturesque in the middle
ages—for a distance of nine times the length of the bearer’s foot.[191] His
hand was then bound up and left alone for three days.[192] At the end of these
it was examined, and if found clean and free from suppuration[193] the
accused was acquitted.
Doubtless, in deeply superstitious times the ordeals, with their solemn
prayers and incantations, were fairly effective. But yet they do not seem to

have been altogether trusted, at any rate in the later period,[194] since even
those who passed successfully through them were obliged to quit the
country within forty days.[195] Most people, however, who underwent
ordeals had been arraigned by twelve knights of the county (who thus
resembled a Grand Jury) and were already under grave suspicion;[196] the
ordeal, then, could only say not proven. Moreover, it would appear from
various sources that the tests and trials were frequently tampered with,[197]
the elaborate ritual giving plenty of opportunity;[198] at least one king
scoffed at priestly acquittals.[199]
After incurring the disapproval of many Popes, the ordeals were
condemned at the fourth Council of Lateran in 1215, and by the eighteenth
canon priests were forbidden to pronounce their blessing upon them.[200] The
ordeals were abolished in England in the reign of Henry III. and the juries
took their place.[201]
Another species of ordeal, and certainly another means of escape from
the criminal law, was the wager of battle. This very ancient mode of trial[202]
was introduced into England by the Normans under William I. If a man
made a charge against another, and proofs of guilt were not obvious and
overwhelming, the latter could demand trial by battle,[203] unless the
complainant were over sixty years old or were sick and infirm,[204] or
laboured under some physical disability,[205] in which case he might choose
the ordeal.[206] Priests, infirm persons, and women might have champions to
represent them.[207] The knights fought with their usual weapons,[208] the
plebeians with staves forty-five inches long, which were tipped with iron
heads shaped like rams’ horns.[209] They were to be bareheaded, barefooted,
and close-shaven; and so they fought till death or surrender,[210] at first with
the clubs, and afterwards, failing them, in hideous grapple, killing as best
they could. If the accuser were defeated he could be committed to gaol as a
calumniator,[211] but was not to lose life or limb; he was, however, fined
sixty shillings and lost civil rights.[212]
If the person who was accused—were he knight or peasant—yielded, he
was then forthwith hanged or beheaded as being guilty.[213] If, however, he
prevailed in the combat or defended himself till the stars came out,[214] he
might leave the field as being acquitted,[215] unless, perchance, the justices
desired to put him on trial for something else, which they occasionally did.

The custom of trial by battle, along with all other kinds of ordeals,[216]
dropped out of practical usage during the thirteenth century,[217] but
continued the law for five hundred years afterwards. In 1818 it was recalled
into action.[218] One Abraham Thornton was strongly suspected of having
outraged and murdered a girl, Mary Ashford. Although he was acquitted
when tried by a jury, he was immediately accused by her brother and heir-
at-law, and claimed to defend by the wager of battle. The fight was refused
by the plaintiff, and shortly afterwards there was passed “An Act to abolish
Appeals of Murder, Treason, Felony, or other Offences ... and Wager of
Battel,”[219] so it could not be claimed again.
Another haven of refuge from the clutches of the State was found within
the pale of Sanctuary. Although, like prayer or sacrifice,[220] existing round
the globe from the beginning, we may confine ourselves to Christian
shelters, as they alone affected our laws.
The early Church doubtless afforded refuge as soon as it possessed the
power to do so, and gave asylum from the reign of Constantine.[221] Laws
were made on the right of refuge by Theodosius in 392,[222] boundaries of
sanctuary were extended by Theodosius junior in the fifth century,[223] while
many kinds of offenders were debarred from it under Justinian (483–565).
[224]

The saving power of sanctuary[225] would seem to have been but feeble
and tentative in the earlier period, since debtors to the State, Jewish
converts who were debtors, heretics and apostates, the slaves of orthodox
masters (the slaves of heretics and heathens obtained their freedom[226]), and
persons guilty of the more serious offences, were refused privilege.[227]
But the protection of the mighty Roman Church was to be something
more than a mere respite for the lesser grades of offenders. In the year 511 a
Council of Orleans[228] ordered that criminals who sought refuge in a church
or house of a bishop should not be dragged forth from it. Even the slave
given up to his master was not to be hurt by him. About a century later Pope
Boniface V. (619–625)[229] commanded that none who had taken refuge
should be abandoned. The same spirit is found in the Decretum Gratiani
compiled in 1151. Pope Innocent III., in a letter written in 1200,[230] ordered
that only night robbers, bandits, and persons doing violence within the
church should be given up.[231] And this we find reaffirmed by Gregory IX.

in the year 1234.[232] In 1261 Boniface, Archbishop of Canterbury, in his
Constitutions[233] expressly forbade that any obstacle should be placed in the
way of food being brought to such as were in a sanctuary—so much had the
Church increased in power since Alfred’s time—and that any should be
molested who, having taken it, had forsworn the country.[234]
The exiles to whom this thirteenth-century archbishop alludes were
persons who had fled into churches, where they could then claim refuge for
forty days.[235] The buildings were watched that no one should escape, and if
a man got away the parish was fined. At the end of this period the refugees
must surrender,[236] but they might make an oath before the coroner
admitting their guilt, and also promising to quit the realm. A road and port
of destination were then assigned them,[237] and they might travel thither
“with a wooden cross in their hands, barefooted, ungirded, and bareheaded,
in their coats only.[238] And,” said the king, “we forbid any one under peril of
life and limb to kill them so long as they are on their road pursuing their
journey.”[239] But they would forfeit goods and chattels if they had any.[240]
Under the masterful tyranny of Henry VIII. it was held that too many
British subjects escaped this wise, and it was enacted in 1530[241] that those
who had taken sanctuary should not leave the realm, but should be sent to
one of the privileged places (if it were not full, which at that time meant if it
contained not more than twenty people), there to remain as sanctuary
persons for the rest of their lives; and they were also to be branded on the
thumb.[242]
The great sanctuaries comprised Westminster Abbey, and at least thirty
other celebrated monasteries,[243] amongst which were St. Martin-le-Grand,
Beverley, Hexham, Durham, and Beaulieu, which possessed special
charters and immunities.[244] Though traitors, Jews, infidels, and those guilty
of sacrilege were not to be received, and though even the peace of a minster
might, in the strifes of State, be broken through as in 1398, or evaded as in
1483, yet those within were generally safe from all men. A follower of Jack
Cade[245] was protected against the king, and even one of the murderers[246]
of the little princes in the Tower found refuge in St. Martin’s Sanctuary.[247]
There were whole colonies of these fugitives round the great abbeys
already mentioned. “The right of asylum,” says Dean Stanley,[248] “rendered
the whole precinct a vast Cave of Adullam for all the distressed and

discontented in the metropolis who desired, according to the phrase of the
time, to take Westminster.” But the power of the State increased more and
more, and the dominion of the Church was sapped away.[249] In 1483 King
Henry VII. obtained a Bull from Innocent VIII. which allowed malefactors
to be taken from the sanctuaries if it were proved that they had sallied out
from them to commit crimes. In 1504 he procured a Bull allowing him to
take out persons suspected of treason. In 1534 King Henry VIII. said that
lese-majesty was treason, and deprived those guilty of privilege.[250] In 1535
sanctuary persons were forbidden to carry weapons or to go out between
sunset and sunrise.[251] In 1540 many sanctuaries were extinguished, and
several offences, such as wilful murder, rape, burglary, and arson, were
excluded from privilege.[252]
The sanctuary at the Abbey was broken up in 1566,[253] and doubtless all
the others came to a sudden end upon the dissolution of the monasteries. In
1604 the old rules and laws about sanctuaries were repealed.[254] In the year
1623 all rights of refuge were taken away.[255] The idea lingered in the
popular imagination, however, and in 1697 it had to be pointed out by
statute that arrests for debt could be made in “pretended privileged
places.”[256] These districts (such as the Mint, Suffolk Place, etc.) were
alluded to again in 1722,[257] and likewise in 1724[258] as regards Wapping,
Stepney, in Middlesex—more than a century after legal abolition.
Yet another way was open to people of good position or repute by which
they could extricate themselves from the ordinary course of law[259] (but not
against the suit of the king, and there were also other limitations), and that
was by means of formal Compurgation. We have seen that in Teutonic
communities the oath of a slave had no legal value, while the oath of a
thane was worth those of six labourers. Thus kings and bishops might
sometimes rebut accusations by means of their word alone.[260] The
Visigoths allowed an accused person (of credit) to reply in this manner,[261]
but the practice was condemned by the Church as inciting to perjury.[262]
The usual course[263] was for the accused to obtain eleven or twelve
compurgators[264]—relations, neighbours, or fellow-craftsmen who would
swear with him to the justice of his cause.[265] Perjury was indeed often
suspected in these compurgations, and if a man of bad character got his co-
witnesses[266] (and if he could not he was generally sent to the ordeal) he
was frequently banished in spite of their testimony.[267]

In the beginning of the thirteenth century Pope Innocent III. modified the
oath,[268] and afterwards witnesses swore only to character, to their belief in
the accused’s credibility. Compurgation appealed especially to the clergy,
[269]
and was even called the Purgatio Canonica.[270] Cut off by their calling
from all lay connections, they could rely the more upon their own brethren.
It was by solemnly swearing with twelve priests as compurgators that Pope
Leo III. elected to clear himself from certain accusations, in the presence of
Charlemagne (in A.D. 800);[271] and in 803 that emperor ordered priests to
defend themselves by taking an oath with three, five, or seven
compurgators. The practice began to decline towards the close of the
twelfth century,[272] but still lingered on into the sixteenth century in
England, and in isolated cases to later times. The Wager of Law was not
formally repealed till 1833.[273]

The Rule of the Church

The Christians had always been an exclusive body of people, at first from
fear, and afterwards from fanaticism. They excommunicated all offending
members, thus not only cutting them off from fellowship, but also depriving
them of those rites which in their creed were necessary for salvation. This
custom of excluding from communion was from the first a formidable
spiritual weapon among believers; what it became when the Christians
could also wield the sword of temporal power we shall see in the course of
time. In the early days they were a world within the world—vehement in
convictions, stimulated by persecutions, and extremely well organised.
Their bishops arbitrated and ruled in ecclesiastical matters,[274] and also in
civil suits between individuals who were unwilling to go to law before
unbelievers, and doubtless they sat in judgment on their own followers
before the advent of the regular Ecclesiastical Courts of subsequent ages.[275]
From the Apostolic times they had resented resort to external tribunals,[276]
and, in a series of Councils,[277] the Church had forbidden appeal to the civil
powers against the decisions of Christian Courts; by the eighty-seventh
Canon of the Fourth Council of Carthage (A.D. 398) no Catholic was to
bring any cause, whether just or unjust, before an heretical judge.
The time came when the State accepted Christianity, and when that
religion influenced the laws.[278] Under Constantine the civil officers were
obliged to carry out the decrees of the Christian bishops, who exercised a
wide jurisdiction. In 376 their Courts were given the same status as
belonged to those of the imperial magistrates.[279] From the beginning, and
under the Theodosian and Justinian Codes, the bishops possessed great
disciplinary powers; and after the death of Charlemagne, in the midst of a
period of violence and disruption, the Ecclesiastical Courts were firmly
established and gained in power as the centuries went by.[280] They had their
own rules and codes to determine cases,[281] and came to adjudicate upon
many things which do not concern us, such as tithes, breaches of covenant,
births, marriages, and wills.[282]
It used to be a custom in ancient times for the bishop to go journeying
through his diocese. As he entered each parish he would be met by the

inhabitants, from amongst whom he would select seven men of mature age
and strait character,[287] who were then sworn on holy relics to relate all they
knew, or possibly imagined, about their neighbours and their shortcomings.
The bishop or his archdeacon[288] would then investigate and summon
suspected persons before them for examination and sentence.[289]
It would appear that these inquisitions with the Testes Synodales could be
extremely punitive when undertaken by a vigilant and censorious Christian
moralist. We find that an energetic Bishop of Lincoln so harried his diocese,
[290]
and with amazing and minutely personal examinations[291] unearthed so
many scandals among all ranks of the people,[292] that he was checked by
Henry III.[293]
Although the nations and the laws of Europe ceased to be pagan, and
became Christianised, the Church, with its haughty claims and well-learned
rulers, sought for autonomy. Had not the Apostle Paul said that they should
judge angels,[294] and that the saints some day should judge, the world?[295]
After such a text it was easy to claim that the Emperor Constantine had
declared at the great Council of Nicaea[296] (in A.D. 325) that priests could be
judged by God, but not by men. The clergy wanted to be tried by their
peers, and looked askance at the other Courts; the times were given over to
violence, the punishments were always sanguinary, and the lay lords and
judges were exceedingly rapacious.[297] If there were no more open pagans
in high places, there came along various heretics certain to be abhorred at
least equally.
So the Church started on a long contention, in which there were many
struggles, with local victories and defeats in different countries. In the
earlier period the State was the stronger; a law of Gratian[298] (fourth
century) reserved to the Secular Court all but the slight offences of the
clergy. It was laid down at the Council of Agde in 506,[299] and again at the
Council of Epaone in 517,[300] that while the clergy should not appeal to the
civil power as plaintiffs,[301] they were to attend if summoned to the Secular
Courts. At a Council of Macon in 581[302] it is implied that criminal cases
were to be conceded to them. At the same time the clergy were forbidden to
accuse one another before civil magistrates.[303]
The fear and jealousy of the Secular Courts persisted; by a Canon of the
Third Council of Orleans (A.D. 538),[304] the bishop’s permission was to be

given before a cleric could attend as plaintiff or defendant. By the fourth
Canon of the Fifth Council of Paris (A.D. 615),[305] no judge was to try any
ecclesiastic without first giving notice to his ordinary; this order is repeated
in a Capitulary of Charlemagne of A.D. 769. Pope Gregory the Great (540–
604)[306] had contended for the principle that a clerical defendant was
entitled to be tried by his own Court, and this was established by Welsh
Canons of the seventh century.[307]
A Capitulary of Charlemagne gave the bishops criminal jurisdiction over
the clergy,[308] though the emperor reserved to himself the right of final
decision in all cases.[309] By the year 853 his grandson, the superstitious
Charles the Bald, was appealing to the bishops at Soissons against the
person of a humble clerk who was accused of forging the royal signature.
[310]
In A.D. 866[311] Pope Nicholas I., in his advice to the Bulgarians, declared
that laymen had no right to scrutinise or condemn any priests, who were to
be left to the control of their prelates. The Council of Ravenna in 877[312]
ordered that none who were under the bishops’ guardianship should be
seized by the seculars.
The two systems drifted farther and farther apart;[313] clerks were
forbidden under pains and penalties to attend secular summonses. The
Emperor Frederic II.[314] decreed in 1220 that no one might drag a clerk
before a secular tribunal; any lay judge who convicted one was to forfeit his
place, besides incurring spiritual penalties.[315] The Emperor Charles IV.
made similar laws in 1359 (Constit. Caroli IV. 5), and punished the
imprisonment of a clerk with outlawry and loss of possessions.[316] This was
confirmed by Pope Martin V. in 1418. The right to clerical immunity[317]
was reasserted at the twenty-fifth session (20) of the General Council of
Trent in 1563.[318]
The Church, as we have already seen, had been allowed and appointed to
regulate the faith and morals of all men. It also claimed, and, in the long-
run, secured, the right to demand all clerics accused of crimes,[319] except in
cases of high treason, highway marauding,[320] and deliberate house burning,
[321]
offences against the laws of the forest (that is hunting the king’s deer,
etc.),[322] and misdemeanours (i.e. slight offences).[323] In time all clerks
claimed privilege of clergy, and these consisted not only of those in priests’
orders[324] (of minor orders there were four degrees below subdeacons[325]),

but of all those who were tonsured and had their hair cut in the clerical
fashion.[326]
All anywise connected with Church work, such as the readers, acolytes,
and door-keepers, could claim clergy.[327] So that the state of clerkship was
frequently claimed,[328] both justly and fraudulently, by extremely humble
people, and the existence of the tonsure, and also its genuineness, were very
important in criminal cases, for it was sometimes assumed as a claim to
immunity,[329] and occasionally the accused would have their heads shaved
by the prosecutors in order to obliterate it.[330]
By the statute Pro Clero of 1350,[331] “all manner of clerks, as well
secular as religious, which shall be from henceforth convicted before the
secular justices aforesaid for any treasons or felonies touching other persons
than the King himself or his royal majesty, shall from henceforth freely
have and enjoy the privilege of Holy Church, and shall be, without any
impeachment or delay, delivered to the ordinaries demanding them.” This
came to mean immunity for all who could read.[332]
A man who claimed clergy was examined as to his scholarship, being
required to read a passage,[333] usually from the 51st Psalm, which was
called his “neck verse.”[334] Then said the lay Court to the bishop’s
representative, “Legit ut clericus?” and the examiner replied, “Legit,” or
“Non legit”;[335] and the person would either be remitted to the ordinary or
sentenced by the judge, although it was forbidden to teach an accused
person his letters[336] while he awaited trial (and he might have to lie five or
six years in the bishop’s prison until he could be presented at the assizes—
Pollock and Maitland, Hist. Eng. Law, p. 442); yet foreigners might read
from books in their own language,[337] and the blind could claim clerkship if
they could speak in the Latin tongue.
Clearly, to be tried by the Ecclesiastical Courts was looked upon as being
a privilege and an advantage by the person accused.[338] He had every
chance of acquitting himself[339] by means of the Canonical Purgation (see
Compurgation, ante);[340] and even if he happened to be condemned by
bishop or abbot,[341] in case he failed to obtain the necessary compurgators,
or were delivered over absque purgatione (i.e. not allowed to make his
purgation),[342] or even if, from religious fears, he refused to swear

innocence,[343] the ecclesiastical punishments were generally merciful,
except for such deadly sins as heresy or witchcraft.
The clergy were forbidden by the Canons to impose sentences of death or
mutilation;[344] the injunction was repeated by Archbishop Ecgberht.[345] “We
threaten anathema,” wrote Archbishop Richard in the year 1175,[346] “to that
priest who takes the office of sheriff or reeve.” Again in 1215 were the
clergy forbidden the judgment of blood.[347] They were not, said a Council
of Toledo,[348] to sit as judges, even at the command of a ruler, in cases of
treason, unless he first promised to remit the red penalties. At the Council of
Auxerre[349] the clergy were prohibited from witnessing the usual torturing,
of the prisoners, or from lingering round the trepalium when it was in
progress. In fact, except for acts or thoughts which it considered to be high
crimes against the soul, the Church was milder than the mediæval State.
The Church being debarred from the employment of the swift and
sanguinary penalties of those times, had to resort to other methods of
disapproval, and it evolved the penitential discipline. At first it wielded only
spiritual weapons—none the less terrible in those days because they were
ghostly—and by refusing access to Church or Communion, and thereby (as
all concerned fully believed) closing on kings the everlasting doors, it
sometimes brought the mightiest to their knees to implore pardon from the
priests of God.[350] On confessing a crime, or upon being condemned, all
manner of tasks and toils were laid upon the penitent. Sometimes they were
capricious and poetic; thus if a man had slain his near kindred,[351] the
weapon with which the deed was committed could then be forged into a
penal chain, and, bound therewith, arrayed in the sclavinia,[352] or, it might
be, naked, he would have to trudge away, staff in hand, to his destination,
which might be some local shrine, or that of St. Thomas of Canterbury; but
which might be far off, across and beyond the seas, to Compostela, Rome,
or Palestine.[353] The ordinary penitent wore no chains, but he was usually
required to go unarmed, to eat no flesh, to take no strong drink, and to
abstain from warm baths, and sometimes he had to fulfil weird and painful
conditions particularly imposed by his penitentiary;[354] as, for instance,
when Robert, called the Devil, was ordered by a certain hermit[355] to eat
only bones and scraps which had been thrown to dogs, and to be dumb and
act like one insane. Our own King Edgar[356] was condemned not to wear his
crown for seven years. Examples could be multiplied indefinitely. A much-

employed form of correction consisted in imposing penitential fasts,[357]
during which the offender was to subsist upon bread and water,[358] and was
subject to many disabilities and restrictions.[359] These sentences might be
for any period ranging from a single day to twenty years, and even longer,
and all the while the penitent was supposed to drag out his existence in
shame and disgrace, making prayers for deliverance.[360]
The Church allowed class distinctions in several ways;[361] offences might
be punished according to the rank of the aggrieved party, so that the
penance for the murder of a bishop was for twelve or fourteen years, or
longer, upon bread and water, while the slaying of a deacon could be atoned
for by seven or ten years’, and of a layman by four, five, or seven years’
discipline.
On the other hand, people, and especially the clergy, were liable to be
sentenced more severely in proportion to their rank.[362] Thus for homicide,
where a layman would get four or five years’ penance from the ordinary,[363]
a clerk would receive six years, a priest ten, and a bishop as much as twelve
years (seven on bread and water).[364] These long-enduring penances sound
severe, and doubtless were for devout believers. But the Roman Church,
always a marvel of organisation, allowed its bishops very great latitude,
both in imposing and removing penances. “I require not the continuance of
time,” said Chrysostom, “but the correction of the soul; demonstrate your
contrition, demonstrate your reformation, and all is done.” By the authority
of the Councils[365] they could increase or mitigate sentences,[366] so that the
infirm and the over-sensitive might have their tasks modified.[367]
But they dealt gently with the men of might;[368] the wind was tempered
to the woolly lamb.[369] In spite of Cuthbert’s Canons at Cloves-Hoo in the
eighth century,[370] the rich were generally enabled to perform their
pilgrimages vicariously (whereby there had arisen a class of professional
pilgrims; Thrupp, p. 239, etc.), and to atone for sins by almsgiving and
payment.[371] “Thou hast money, buy off thy sin,” Ambrose had written in
the fourth century.[372] “The Lord is not for sale, but thou thyself art for sale.
Restore thee by thy works. Buy thyself back by thy money.”
This exhortation was followed and given the lowest possible
interpretation in the Canons made (by Dunstan, probably) in the reign of
King Edgar in the year 963.[373] When a great man had been condemned to

fast, say seven years, he was to lay aside his weapons, and take his staff in
his hand and walk barefoot, clad in wool or haircloth, and he was not to go
to bed or banquet for three days.
He was to take to his assistance twelve men, and they were to fast three
days on bread, raw herbs, and water: thus thirty-six fasts were kept. He was
to get together seven times 120 men and set them to fast three days; thus he
secured 7 × 120 × 3 + 36 fasts, or 2556, which meant as many fasts as there
were days in seven years, counting a leap year! And thus his penance was
done, or rather evaded.[374]
But the Church did not usually allow its penalties to be disregarded;
against heretics there were, even in England, severe statutes,[375] and they
would be seized by the civil forces and burned alive. Any one who had
offended against the Canons, and who refused to do penance, could be
excommunicated, and then he became liable to arrest.[376] In this country if
the offender ignored it for forty days,[377] the King’s Court, on the request of
the bishop,[378] issued a Writ of Significavit,[379] or some similar injunction,
ordering the sheriff to imprison him until he had satisfied the claims of the
Church.[380]
The hierarchy, although, as we have seen, debarred from directly
inflicting such penalties as death or amputation of members, resorted to
many forms of corporal punishment. Floggings for penance or discipline
were administered frequently;[381] the younger monks in the monasteries
commonly received thirty-nine stripes.[382]
But the bishops had other and worse penalties in reserve, and, unlike the
secular rulers, they employed imprisonment as a means of punishment in
itself. The Catholic Church, with its ideals of cloistral life and ascetic
seclusion, sought to produce remorse through mental affliction, and in its
high-walled abbeys and gloomy courts had buildings ready to immure any
one. The first cells were among the exedrae round churches and bishops’
houses and were called the decanica,[383] while refractory monks were freely
imprisoned in the great monasteries.[384]
Though the ecclesiastical punishments[385] were accounted generally
merciful—as we shall see presently from English comments on them—they
could be pitiless enough on occasions, especially against heretics. The
secret and dreadful Inquisition had its own prisons,[386] in which it tortured

its victims by every means that subtlety could suggest, and in which the
mind-wrecking results of solitary confinement were probably first
discovered, and at any rate utilised.
Already back in the thirteenth century the authorities had frowned on
prison association.[387] In 1229 a Council of Toulouse ordered that the
“converted” heretics (i.e. those who had recanted from the fear of
execution, and who were even then sentenced to imprisonment for life; vide
Lea, on Laws of Frederic II., Bull of Gregory IX., etc., in his Middle Ages,
i. pp. 321, 484) should be kept from corrupting others. The new prisons
built for the Church and the Inquisition[388] were ordered to have small dark
dungeons for solitary confinement. In 1246 a Council of Beziers[389] ordered
that the captives should be kept separate in secret cells, so that no one might
corrupt another. It speaks of the “enormis rigor carceris.”
The prisoners of the Church[390] were subjected to various kinds of
incarceration. There was the Murus Largus, under which they were allowed
about the place;[391] the Murus Strictus, Durus, or Arctus, by which they
were supposed to be confined in separate cells upon bread and water;[392]
and the Murus Strictissimus, where they were kept in dungeons and in
heavy irons.[393] The Inquisition employed, besides, innumerable torments,
and could learn little from the imaginings of Dante; but that dread
organisation has a history of its own.
Apart from it, the bishops[394] possessed their prisons, and the great
convents had penal cells,[395] and these they would use to inflict penance or
punishment.[396] Thus at Canossa, in 1077, Pope Gregory VII.[397] consigned
the rebellious German prelates to solitary cells with bread and water dietary.
Again we may read of another example occurring in the year 1283. A
certain Brother John had, it appears, bitten his prior’s finger “like a dog,” it
was said; and for this we find the bishop ordering the outraged prior[398] “to
keep the said Brother John in prison under iron chains, in which he shall be
content with bread, indifferent ale, pottage, and a pittance of meat or fish
(which on the sixth day he shall do without) until he is penitent.” A worse
fate befell Alexander de Langley in the same century.[399] This unfortunate
creature was a man of great culture and was the keeper of the abbot’s seal.
Either from approaching general paralysis, or from some other form of
insanity, he passed into a state of extreme exaltation, perhaps to the extent

of being, as they would take it, mutinous or blasphemous. A severe flogging
having failed to restore his sense of proportion, he was consigned in fetters
to a cell in which he ultimately died, and was buried, the corpse still
chained.
There had also existed within the monasteries the dreadful punishment of
solitary confinement known as In Pace. “Those subjected to it,” says Dr.
Lea,[400] “died in all the agonies of despair. In 1350 the Archbishop of
Toulouse appealed to King John to interfere for its mitigation, and he issued
an ordinance that the superior of the convent should, twice a month, visit
and console the prisoners, who, moreover, should have the right, twice a
month, to ask for the company of one of the monks. Even this slender
innovation incurred the bitterest resistance of the Dominicans and
Franciscans, who appealed to Pope Clement VI., but in vain.”
There could indeed be abuses and cruelties in ecclesiastical prisons, as
there always are where high walls conceal. For instance, we may read[401]
that in A.D. 1283 certain monks were seized by the Abbot of Westminster,
“and so greatly beaten that one of them has miserably expired.” There were
cases where the Church took the extreme step of degrading from orders. In
the very early period this often meant that degraded clerics would be
immediately claimed by the secular authorities and set servile tasks[402]—
after which they could not be reinstated. Very often they were shut up in the
monasteries,[403] a course which the bishops preferred to remitting them to
lay punishment.[404] Innocent III. (1198–1216), however, directed that clergy
who had been degraded should then be handed over to the secular powers.
[405]

But in actual practice clerks were not often totally degraded.[406] To be
deprived of orders was looked upon as a terrible punishment;[407] it was the
final casting from the fold and was inflicted with great difficulty.[408] Three
bishops were required to degrade even a deacon; six were necessary to
unfrock a priest; and it took twelve prelates to adjudicate upon a bishop.[409]
When any were degraded, excommunicated, and sent to the seculars, the
sanguinary lay penalties took their course.[410] The chief offence for which
the Church withdrew all protection was obstinate or repeated heresy. In the
earlier period those found guilty were branded on the forehead[411] and cast
out[412] (as once from Oxford, to die of cold and starvation) excommunicate,

or they might be imprisoned and have their property confiscated.[413] But
with the rise and multiplication of militant sectaries, the Church urged the
State to proceed to extremities.
Heretics were ruthlessly burned alive by popular custom[414] (and were
sometimes “lynched” like negro criminals in the United States; vide Lea,
Middle Ages, i. pp. 219, 222, 308), and in time this became formally
recognised.[415] Pedro of Aragon in 1197, the Emperor Frederic II. by the
Edict of Cremona in 1238, Louis IX. of France by his Établissements in
1270, and Henry IV.[416] of England in 1400, made burning at the stake the
legitimate punishment of persistent or relapsed heretics.[417]
But it was not the severities of the Church that kept arousing the jealousy
and opposition of the secular power. It was the immunity it afforded to
those under its protection[419] which moved the State to attack clerical
privileges, and, in the course of ages, to remove them entirely. In Saxon
times lay and episcopal authorities acted closely together, but William of
Normandy, doubtless continuing the Continental movement already alluded
to, separated the ecclesiastical from the secular courts.
King Henry II. had succeeded to the throne after a period of civil war and
devastating brigandage, in which the Church had fortified its position and
extended its jurisdiction,[420] and was bent upon reasserting the power of the
central government. He found that the clergy and the clerks[421] were outside
his control, and in the middle ages they were a numerous body,[422] as many
people were received into orders who had little or nothing to do in their
own profession, and who were debarred by rule from obtaining a livelihood
otherwise.[423] So the king employed all his efforts to place the clerks under
his justices.
A crucial case arose in 1163. A certain Philip de Broi or de Brois,[424] who
was probably an Archdeacon of Bedford and a Canon of Lincoln, had
previously escaped personal punishment on a charge of manslaughter, but
was afterwards denounced as a murderer by Simon FitzPeter, who was one
of the king’s justices. On this he protested vehemently and abused the
judge. There had been several other cases about that time, including a bad
one of murder and rape by a cleric from Worcester,[425] and another of
homicide out of Salisbury,[426] in which the offender escaped with
imprisonment, and King Henry took action with great fury.[427] He claimed

to have been insulted in the person of his delegate, and ordered that de Broi
should be brought to trial, not only for this, but for the original
manslaughter; he wished, in fact, to send him to the gallows. But the
archbishop refused to reopen the matter already tried and decided, but for
having insulted the king’s officer the rebellious priest was severely dealt
with,[428] as he was stripped and flogged before the angry judge, and lost his
office and stipend on being banished for two years.[429] The king was
dissatisfied, desiring nothing less than the death of the canon, and
vigorously proceeded towards the subjugation of the clergy.
In 1164 he promulgated the Constitutions of Clarendon, by which he
desired that criminous clerks should incur the lay penalties. The offender
was first to be accused in the temporal court;[430] then tried, convicted, and
degraded by the ecclesiastical tribunal; thence sent back for sentence to the
secular court, to receive the customary draconic punishments. But
Archbishop Becket and the English hierarchy declared that to degrade a
clerk and then remit him to the secular judges was to punish him twice for
the same offence.[431] “Affliction,” they said, quoting a Hebrew prophet,[432]
“shall not rise up a second time.” All they would concede was that if a clerk
after being degraded[433] committed the offence again he might be handed
over as an ordinary layman.[434]
The death of Archbishop Thomas stayed all Henry’s plans as regards the
Church. “The temporal courts maintained their claim to bring the criminous
clerk before them; they abandoned their claim to punish the degraded
clerk.”[435] In the thirteenth century it had become the custom that the
clerk[436] should first be indicted and inquired upon before he could claim
his clergy;[437] by the reign of Henry VI.—1422–1461—he must first be
convicted[438] before being passed into the hands of his bishop.[439]
In 1261 Archbishop Boniface[440] ordered that the clerks in their bishops’
custody for capital crimes should suffer perpetual imprisonment. In 1275
Edward I. expressly ordered that the bishops were to allow no clerks to
depart without purgation.[441] In 1276,[442] the Bigami, i.e. the persons who
had been twice married or those who had married widows[443] (highly
respectable acts at the present time), were excluded from claiming clergy.
[444]
In 1279 Archbishop Peckham decreed in his Constitutions:[445] “Let not
clerks that are in prison for their crimes, and afterwards delivered to the
Church as convicts, be easily enlarged, or admitted to purgation upon too

slight pretence, but with all solemnity of law and with such provident
deliberation that it may not offend against the king’s majesty or any that
have a regard to equity.”
In 1350 there came the statute Pro Clero.[446] Many persons had, it
appears, been seized by the seculars. By this Act the Church’s privileges
were reaffirmed,[447] and the offending clerks were ordered to be handed
over to the spiritual courts. But for this grant the king demanded that the
clerical convicts should thenceforth be safely kept and duly punished, “so
that no clerk shall take courage to offend for default of correction.” Thus
urged by the Crown, and perhaps fearful of other enactments, Simon Islip,
Archbishop of Canterbury, endeavoured to make things harder for the
Church’s prisoners. “They are,” he complains, “with so much backwardness
and favour committed to gaol, and are so deliciously fed there, that the
prison intended for a punishment for their crimes is turned into a
refreshment and delicious solace, and they are pampered in their vices by
ease and such inducements and yet make their escape out of custody as
injurious to them.... And some notoriously infamous criminals, that are in
truth wholly without excuse, are yet so easily admitted to their purgations,
that every clerk thus delivered (by the secular judge) hath sure hopes of
returning to his former evil life by one means or other.... Therefore we have
thought fit thus to ordain concerning the imprisoned clerks[448] ... (they are)
to be closely imprisoned with all proper care and expedition according to
the quality of their persons and the heinousness of their crimes, that they
may not to the scandal of the Church return to their former way of life from
an imprisonment intended for a punishment.” Clerks guilty of bad offences
are, on Wednesday, Friday, and Sabbath day, to have bread and water; on
the other days, bread and small beer; “but on the Lord’s day, bread, beer,
and pulse, for the honour and eminence of that day. And let nothing else be
given them by way of alms or gratuity from their acquaintance and friends,
or for any pretence or reason whatsoever; nor let any purgation be granted
them.” These severe rules, which, coming from the archbishop,[449] were, of
course, repeated by all the prelates, resembled the penal systems of
discipline which reached their maximum of cruelty in the nineteenth
century.
But there seems good reason to believe that the Church’s treatment of its
prisoners remained, on the whole, mild and humane. The clergy were not

hardened prison officials; their calling was spiritual rather than military.
They were dealing with men belonging more or less to their own order, and
were prone to class loyalty.[450]
In the light of subsequent criticism and legislation,[451] it seems that even
after Islip’s ordinance the Church’s convicts were much better treated than
were the laymen in the common gaols. Moreover, either (or both) from a
sense of humanity,[452] or because the bishops disliked having to pay for the
keep of their prisoners,[453] long sentences were avoided and life sentences
were inflicted as rarely as possible; the prisoners would be pardoned[454] on
jubilees and special occasions, and sometimes released on their friends
paying ransom (apparently of such sums as £20 or £40; vide Lea, Studies in
Church History, p. 202, and the statute 23 Hen. VIII. c. 1). The State all
along appeared on the side of severity, and, from the thirteenth century, was
in the habit of sending clerks to their bishop absque purgatione, who, in
theory at least, were to be life prisoners. Indeed, if the ordinary should
attempt to release such persons, he could be restrained from doing so by a
writ out of the Chancery.[455]
So early as 1238 a Bishop of Exeter[456] was in trouble for having sent a
certain clerk to purgation. Later on an Abbot of St. Albans[457] was accused
of allowing some prisoners to escape; and there are doubtless other
instances. But evidently the prisoners of the bishops were continually being
released, for we find a special statute[458] passed in the year 1402 forbidding
that clerks found guilty of treason (of less degree than plotting against the
king himself), or who were known to be common thieves, should be
allowed any sort of purgation. In 1485 an Act[459] was passed by which the
bishops might commit priests, clerks, and religious men to ward and prison
for advowtry (i.e. adultery), fornication, incest, or any other fleshly
incontinence, and they were not to be liable for actions for wrongful
imprisonment.
In 1487 a severe blow was aimed at immunity. By this Act,[460] clerks (i.e.
such as could read, but who were not actually within orders) were to enjoy
their privilege only once; and to ensure that they should no longer be
“continually admitted as oft as they did offend,” it was ordained that clerks
not within orders, who should hereafter be convicted of murder, should be
forthwith branded[461] by the gaoler in open court with the letter M upon the

brawn of the left thumb, and, if found guilty of theft,[462] with the letter T,
before being handed over to the ordinary’s officer.
An ordained priest could appeal to his Church again, but if he should
claim his clergy a second (or other) time, he was to have his letters of
ordination ready at hand, though he might be allowed one day’s grace in
which to obtain them—or equivalent evidence from the nearest bishop—
and if they were not forthcoming he forfeited all clerical privileges.[463] In
1496 lay persons who should murder their lord, master, or sovereign
immediate were deprived of their clergy; and in the fourth year of the
following reign more exceptions were made, and clergy was taken from all,
not actually within orders, who committed a felony in a church, or upon the
king’s highway, or who slew anybody in his own house.[464]
We have already seen with what exceeding difficulty a clerk, and more
especially a priest, could be degraded and cast out of orders. To remedy
this. Cardinal Wolsey, Archbishop of York, obtained a Bull[465] (as regarded
England) from Pope Clement VII. in 1528, by which a single bishop,
assisted by two abbots or other high dignitaries, could perform the
ceremony.[466]
The statute 23 Hen. VIII. c. 1 (1531) alludes to the monition of Edward I.
(1275), to the effect that no Church prisoners should depart without strict
purgation, on which Henry VIII. observes that, nevertheless, they were
released very easily. It cites the statute of Henry IV. (1402), which ordered
that notorious criminals should make no purgation, and goes on to say that
the ordinaries kept releasing offenders speedily and hastily “for corruption
and lucre,” or because the clergy will in no wise consent to take charge of
prisoners. The law then proceeds to take away the benefit of clergy from the
various petit treasons previously referred to, and also for arson, from all
clerks—subdeacons and the grades above them still excepted. The clergy
within orders were to have lifelong imprisonment for these crimes,
By the fourth Canon at the thirteenth session of the Council of Trent in
1551, it was decreed that a bishop or his vicar-general could condemn, and
even degrade criminous clergy, with the assistance of as many mitred
abbots, or, in default of them, as many high ecclesiastics as there would
have been bishops under the old system. Lecourayer, i. p. 550; Luzio, Cath.
Ency. iv. p. 678.] unless they could find guarantees for good conduct—the

accused to the extent of £40, with two substantial sureties in £20 apiece. By
this statute it was also intended to relieve the bishops of the burden of
maintaining their prisoners, and they were empowered to degrade such
offending clerks, and to hand them over “in sure and safe keeping into the
King’s Bench,” with a certificate certifying their degradation—now so
much easier—upon which the king’s judges were to pass such sentences
(usually of death) as would have been passed upon the convicted if, at the
time of their accusation, they had been laymen and not clerks of any kind.
Nor was this all, for in the same year (1531) an Act[467] was passed by
which escapes from the bishop’s prison were made felony for the clerks;
those within orders were to be sent back to their prison, to abide there
without release. In 1533[468] clergy was taken away from all who refused to
plead, or who challenged above twenty jurymen peremptorily. In 1536[469]
clergymen within orders were to be placed on the same footing with other
clerks, but this law only lasted about a decade. But now the immunity of the
clergy began to be taken away by a long series of statutes exempting
particular crimes from any indulgence.[470]
In 1576 convicted clerks ceased to be handed over to the bishops to make
purgation.[471] For all “clergyable” felonies, Lords of Parliament[472] (even
when they could not read) and the clergy in orders were immediately
released. The rest who could read were discharged for a first offence upon
being branded, but the Court might also order their detention in prison for
not more than a year; the captives who could not read were speedily
hanged.[473]
As the privilege of clergy became less worth having it was extended: to
the bigami, or twice married, in 1547, and to women[474] (professed nuns
had always lived under the Church’s rule) in 1692. Upon conviction they
were to be treated in the same way as the men in similar cases, that is,
branded upon the hand, and then discharged, either at once or after
imprisonment not exceeding one year.
In 1699[475] it was ordered that the branding should be done upon the face,
but this cruel marking was found to prevent the victims from obtaining
employment and to render them desperate, and the law was repealed six
years afterwards in the reign of Anne.[476] In 1705 the reading test was
abandoned. The distinction had come to lie between offences, not offenders,

[477]
and all were admitted to “clergy” who had been convicted of any of
these minor felonies which still remained clergyable.[478] The Act of 1705
also provided that such convicts should be liable to be sent to houses of
correction or to public work-houses, for periods of not less than six months
or exceeding two years, at the discretion of the magistrates.
In 1717[479] it was enacted that persons (other than peers or clerks in
orders) guilty of clergyable offences might be transported for seven
years[480] (the usual sentence was for fourteen), instead of being branded or
whipped.[481] In 1779[482] persons liable to be burned in the hand might
escape with a fine, or they might be whipped in public or private, not more
than three times; women were to be flogged in the presence of females. By
this Act the branding was abolished in practice; and about half a century
later all that remained of the old privilege was done away with in the reign
of George IV.[483]
It has been customary to condemn all these old rights for so many years
accorded to clerkship, because they are supposed to have constituted
infringements of the principle that all men should be equal before the law.
[484]
But when we consider the barbarities they prevented, and after we have
examined and ascertained the aimlessness and inutility of mere
punishments, we may be forced to think that they were not an unmixed evil,
and that, perhaps, they rather made for good.

Summary and “Poetic” Punishments

Since the poor human body has always been sensitive, so at the
promptings of the revenge instinct it has always been assailable and most
readily beaten. Naturally enough the Duke of Gloster exclaims—in that
most subtle second act of Henry VI.—“Have you not beadles in your town
and things called whips?” Of course they had. The serf, the varlet, the
vagabond, the lunatic, and the petty offender were all whipped with
uncertain severity;[485] most likely until the victim was bloody and until the
operator was tired and felt he had earned his fee. Doubtless the whips were
of all sorts and sizes. They are frequently represented as having three
thongs;[486] Titus Oates was flogged with a whip of six.[487] I have seen and
handled a lash of transportation times, which had a thick leather thong
bound with wire.[488] The cat-o’-nine-tails is alluded to in the eighteenth
century.[489]
Both men and women[490] (the latter up to 1817[491]) were flagellated in
public, being either tied up to a post, or fastened behind a cart and so
thrashed along the road. Perhaps the most obvious thing to do, next to
flogging an offender, was to exhibit him to the populace. The country was
immeasurably more parochial than it is now in these times of travel, and to
be rendered infamous in one’s village or neighbourhood was no trifling
penalty; and so we find the stocks set up in the towns and hamlets,[492] and,
for more serious misdemeanours, there was the lofty pillory or neck-catcher
(the heals-fang).
This well-known instrument[493] was made of all shapes and sizes, and
varied from a forked post or a slit pillar[494] to what must have looked like a
penal dovecote made to hold several prisoners.[495] The convicted were
sometimes drawn thither on hurdles, and might be accompanied by
minstrels on the way.[496] The hair of the head and beard was shaved off, and
sometimes the victims were secured by being nailed through the ears to the
framework, and might also be branded.[497] With faces protruding through
the strong beams, and with hands through two holes, secured and helpless,
they were made to stand defenceless before the crowd as targets for any
missiles that might be thrown. To those who were hated this was a serious

ordeal, for they would be so pelted and knocked about by the mob as to be
badly wounded, if not actually done to death. At length those who had stood
their time were released, and those who had had their ears nailed would be
cut free, and then they might slink away from the scene of shame, or be
carried back to prison to endure additional punishment. The pillory was
abolished for all offences except perjury and subornation in 1816,[498] and
altogether in the year 1837.[499]
Before leaving the middle ages we must examine what I have classed as
the poetic punishments. These were the spontaneous reprisals with which
the community strove to repay the criminals in kind, and by which, if strict
taliation were seldom attainable, our ancestors succeeded in contriving
many chastisements that were, at any rate, associable equivalents. Of these
a few examples may be given. For instance, a baker who sold loaves which
were short of weight was shown with the bread tied round his neck.[500] A
fishmonger who had been selling bad fish was paraded with a collar of
stinking smelts slung over his shoulders.[501] A grocer who had been selling
much-adulterated spices was placed in the pillory and had the powders
burned beneath his nose (A.D. 1395).[502] A heretic who had advocated strict
Judaism was sentenced to prison and to be fed entirely upon pork.[503] The
Inquisition attached two pieces of red cloth in the shape of tongues to the
breast, and two more upon the shoulders of a false witness, which were to
be worn for life.[504] Indeed, badges and crosses were often imposed, and
were in these times a dreadful mark of Cain.[505] In 1505 two men were
sentenced by the archbishop to wear a faggot (or a badge representing one)
upon the left shoulder, to show that they stood in danger of the flames.[506] It
would seem they did, for they were burned alive in 1511.
Louis IX. ordered that those who had spoken indecently should have
their tongues pierced and their upper lips cut away.[507] Pope Innocent IV.
remonstrated with the king against this barbarity. The mutilation of the
tongue was a punishment known and inflicted in England for blasphemy. In
1656 one James Nayler, “the mad Quaker,” had his tongue pierced with a
hot iron for claiming to be the Messiah.[508] He was also whipped at the
cart’s tail, and kept in prison for two years. A drunkard was sometimes
walked about in a barrel, his head protruding from the top and his hands
from two holes made in its sides.[509]

For the village scold[510] they kept the brank or bridle of iron, which
contained a flat (and for the unfortunate witches[511] occasionally a spiked
and painful) gag that went into the mouth and pressed down the tongue.
They might also be placed in the local ducking chair[512] and immersed in
water. A remarkable illustration[513] of the intensely individual and personal
aspect of primitive penalties[514] is furnished where—as it sometimes
happened—the prosecutor had himself to execute his convict assailant, “or
dwelle in prison with the felon unto the time that he wyll do that office or
else find a hangman.”[515]

CHAPTER II

THE WITCH TRIALS

Towards the middle of the seventeenth century there lived at Manningtree
a certain Matthew Hopkins, whose name deserves perhaps to be recorded.
Not that he stands by any means apart, a veritable Lucifer among the devils.
Sprenger in Germany, Torquemada in Spain, Grillandus in Italy, de l’Ancre
in France, and other persecutors over Christendom, were better known and
had killed more people. But Hopkins went to work on English ground. The
people were then professing the same creed that the majority do now.
Shakespeare had been in his grave more than a generation, and trees may
have been standing as bushes in the fields and lanes of Essex which will yet
renew leaves and branches at the kiss of coming spring. Hopkins reveals the
spirit of his time, for it has been wisely observed that every society has the
criminals it deserves. His kind remain with us still as spies and
blackmailers, traitors and “friendly natives” of the tribe of Judas generally.
But they derive their power to harm from the community in which they live.
Parasites need a proper “host” to flourish in. A dark and superstitious age it
must have been to countenance this man; for he was a professional
“discoverer,” or, as he was sometimes called and styled, Witch-Finder
General. He began with the destruction of some half-dozen persons in his
native hamlet. We cannot determine what had marked them down—perhaps
they were his private enemies—moral reform has always been a ready
pretext to work vengeance with, and has been much employed in these
latter days. They may have been old, eccentric, isolated, or insane; in any
case, once seized they had to die, and in their torments implicated others,
most likely any names conveniently suggested to them. The fame of the
new discoverer spread far and wide. Towns and hundreds in the eastern
county, and even places far outside its boundaries, sent to this fell apostle,
saying, “Come over and help us,” and on the track of blood the monster

went. It was his wont to ride upon these expeditions accompanied by
another man, and by a female searcher, whose services would be required in
the minute personal examinations which were carried out, especially on
women. He made an open charge of twenty shillings for each village
visited, but no doubt in this nefarious calling there were other and more
profitable ways of extorting money. Can we not well imagine what sums
may have been paid to him (as they are to the “sex” blackmailers of to-day)
to avoid accusation? How many may have yielded their little all to save
some one who was dear to them from common ill-usage, probable death,
and certain disgrace, which such a charge involved? Who knows how
extorted gold might influence the ordeals enforced? Who shall say what
may have come by stealth to the witch-finders to bring ruin upon some
enemy, perhaps upon some rival? Who, indeed? From place to place
swooped this bird of prey, descending on peaceful homesteads and
capturing whom he chose. Woe to the man, and still more to the woman,
who lived alone, who kept a black cat, or who was found to carry
birthmarks on her body, or to be the least out of the normal in physical
structure! Woe to the person who was eccentric, subject to fits or trances, or
who might be in any way deranged or of weak intellect! Woe, in fact, to the
unhappy creature who by any means came in for accusation! The Pishogue
mark would thenceforth be upon them; relations would drop away as from
contamination with the plague[516]; and the most brutal rabble of that time
would jostle round, intent upon the chase, with their fierce lust for blood not
the less keen from the idea that there was something Christian in their
cruelty. The victim would then be seized and carried off to further
interrogation, ill-treatment, and torture. Parents and children, comrades and
lovers, might weep in secret, and the boldest might even venture to
denounce the senseless iniquity of the proceedings—at which they would
incur no little danger. But they would speak unheeded, and have to linger
around the gallows till the final act, when something swayed and dangled
from a cord.
But somehow good Master Matthew began to be unpopular, and many
reasons might account for it. Perhaps he had been unwise in the selection of
his “subjects”—it looks like it, for one was an old clergyman—and lived to
find out that some of them had not been quite so friendless as he may have
counted on. Perhaps the supply of lonely or defenceless folk had given out,
or that in pushing his profession so far afield he could not estimate the new

material. “Discoveries,” of course, had to be made to keep up his reputation
and his income, and as he pursued his way through a wide area it may be
that quite a large number of people began to feel themselves open to
accusation, and so were ready to consider it suspicious that he alone had
such an eye for witches. And then a whispering rose up amongst them, until
it reached the persecutor’s ears: For sure this man is aided by the Devil, or
else he would not ferret out so many. And he may well have started when he
saw the anger-light in the fierce eyes around him, and when he felt at last
the frightful superstitions, which he had kindled and well thriven on, were
out of hand, turned hard against himself. So he produced a little book which
bears the date of 1647, printed, he tells us, “For the benefit of the whole
Kingdome.” It has upon the title-page the somewhat troublesome quotation,
“Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,” Exodus xxii. 18. We cannot do better
than glance through its pages and at the “Certain queries answered which
have been and which are likely to be objected against Matthew Hopkins, in
his way of finding out witches.”

Querie I.—That he must needs be the greatest witch, sorcerer, and
wizzard himself, else hee could not doe it.
Answer.—If Satan’s Kingdome be divided against itself how shall it
stand?

The next paragraph is interesting as once more emphasising the crude
and absolutely material notions conceived of the spiritual world.

Querie II.—If he never went so farre as is before stated, yet for certaine
he met with the devill and cheated him of his booke, wherein were written
all the witches’ names in England, and if he looks at any witch he can tell
by her countenance what she is; so by this his helpe is from the devill.
Answer.—If he had been too hard for the devill and got his booke it had
been to his great commendation and no disgrace at all.

It will be noticed that he does not exactly deny even this report, or appear
to consider it at all unusual to meet the devil walking about casually. “We
must needs argue,” he continues later, “he is of long standing, above 6000
years, then he must needs be the best scholar in all knowledge of Arts and
tongues, and so have the best skill in Physicke, etc.” Mr. Hopkins’ own
skill, he pleads, was really forced on him. “This discoverer never travelled
for it,” he writes in reply to Querie V., “but in March 1644 he had some
seven or eight of that horrible sect of witches living in the towne where he
lived ... who every six weeks, in the night (being always on a Friday night),
had their meetings[517] close by his house, and had their severall solemne
sacrifices there offered to the devill, one of which this discoverer heard
speaking to her imps one night and bid them go to another witch, who was
thereupon apprehended and searched by women who had for many years
known the devill’s marks, and found to have three teats about her, which
honest women have not. So upon command from the Justice they were to
keep her from sleep two or three nights, expecting in that time to see her
familiars, which the fourth night she called by their severall names,[518] and
told them in what shape a quarter of an hour before they came in, there
being ten of us in the roome.[519]
“The first she called was (1) Holt, who came in like a white Kitling. (2)
Jamara, who came in like a fat Spaniel without any legs at all.... (3) Vinegar
Tom, who was like a long legged grey hound with a head like an Oxe with a
long taile and broad eyes, who, when this discoverer spoke to and bade him
go to the place provided for him and his angels, immediately transformed
himself into the shape of a child foure years old without a head and gave
half a dozen turns about the house and vanished at the doore. (4) Sacke and
Sugar, like a black rabbet. (5) Newes, like a Polcat. All these vanished away
in a little while. Immediately after this witch confessed severall other
witches from whom she had her imps and named to diverse women where
their marks were ... and imps’ names such as Elimanzer Pyewacket, Peck-
in-the-crown, Grizzell Greedigut, etc.; which no mortall could invent....
Twenty-nine were condemned at once, four brought twenty-five miles to be
hanged where their discoverer lives, for sending the devill like a beare to
kill him in his garden; so by seeing diverse of the men’s papps and trying
various wayes with hundreds of them, he gained the experience.”

Although his dealings must be described as mild compared with the
ghastly inconceivable tortures in vogue with the inquisitors upon the
Continent,[520] his victims were yet baited and handled with the grossest
cruelty. They were supposed not to weep,[521] being witches, though indeed
cause enough was given them. It is remarkable in this connection that
Shelley,[522] with how much accuracy I am not aware, alludes to the “dry
fixed eyeball” of the tortured. Hutchinson[523] held this phenomenon to have
been due to prolonged deprivation of sleep and exhaustion. Doubtless the
weary length of the investigations, and often the age and senile desiccation
of the victims, might easily explain a state of tearlessness whenever it was
really prevalent.
They were supposed to possess an insensible part in their bodies,[524] and
the examiners would prick over them to try to find it out. Especially, a
witch was affirmed to have somewhere upon her person the “Devil’s mark.”
“Some bigg or place upon their body where he” (the familiar, imp, or spirit)
“sucketh them.”[525] This alleged “mark” might be almost anything or
nothing; from an abnormal, and perhaps atavic, teat, down to a birthmark,
mole, old scar, or even a tiny vein under an eyelid. They were supposed also
to float upon being “swum.”
They were, for the most part, wizen, old creatures, clad in long-used,
greasy garments.[526] Such skirts would retain much air; they might be bound
so as to favour this, or spread, as with Ophelia, widely inflated. It was quite
likely they should thus be upborne (and also, for they were mostly poor and
thin, that the heavy, sometimes chained, Bible should outweigh them in the
ordeal with scales). But ordeals are uncertain and dangerous unless they can
be carefully manipulated. Mr. Hopkins had been keen on the water test; it
was the finishing touch and proof at the end of a long series of torments and
examinations.
But a day came, it is said, on which a few brave Englishmen, who had
perhaps lost some one near and dear to them at his hands, laid hold upon the
witch-finder himself, and binding him in a sack, cast him into a pool. It was
a bold act, in those savage days, to interfere with any kind of inquisition.
Catholic or Puritan, and was no doubt attended with great risk. But only for
a moment in this case, for there before them bobbed the dread discoverer of
witches, floating upon the surface of the water; and all declared the devil
got his own. But such an end was altogether unexpected and unusual; it was

downright bad luck and misfortune, from Mr. Hopkins’ point of view. His
position appeared unassailable, and indeed probably would have been, if he
had kept to the right sort of people, and practised on the isolated or
unpopular, who could have been legitimately sacrificed. All he had done
was quite lawful and regular.
Witchcraft, like many acts against religion and morality, had always been
an ecclesiastical offence, and had been punished in the secular courts as
leading to murder and personal injury,[527] and it was made a felony in 1541.
[528]
But it was the (then) recent law of 1603 that was much in force,[529] by
which, in the quaint language of the statute, it was forbidden, upon pain of
death, to “employ, feed, or reward an evil and wicked spirit.”[530] And since
the High Court of Parliament had recognised witches,[531] it became
necessary to investigate accusations and probe for “spirits” through the
forms of law. Thus Hopkins could claim to be a moral reformer, putting in
force the statute of the realm; he could quote Scripture clearly to his
purpose, the justices and gaolers obeyed his call, assizes waited to condemn
his prisoners. And if his method seemed superstitious or barbarous, he could
perhaps cite Mr. Perkins’ way,[532] or could refer to Mr. Kincaid’s custom in
these matters,[533] and could quote standard works with precedent on his
side.[534]
So he seemed truly to have a safe task and a paying one, built up upon
the prejudices of the people. But as by their superstitions he rose, so also by
them he fell—utterly, and unpitied.[535] It was not his monstrous cruelties,
but “God’s ordeal,” which showed him up, delivered to the devil; and, in
the caustic words of Samuel Butler, as one “who after proved himself a
witch, and made a rod for his own breech.”[536]
But now, dismissing this particular parasite, we may review the course of
thought upon the question. Belief in witchcraft is so ancient and so
universal,[537] that the existing religions, and perhaps all religions
whatsoever, must have arisen in its atmosphere.
From time to time the Christian Church dealt with the question,[538] and
had elaborated quite a ritual of tests and remedies. And it was after nearly
fifteen hundred years of Christianity that Pope Innocent VIII.[539] issued a
special Bull against all supposed witches (December 5, 1484), naming one
Sprenger, a Dominican, and Krämar—whose name latinised to Institor—

inquisitors to seek and punish them; and this they did with frightful cruelty.
They wrote a text-book on their methods and discoveries about 1489, and
kept the torture chambers busy and the faggots fiercely burning.
Their book was answered by John Wier, physician to the Duke of Cleves,
in 1563.[540] He refuted many of the grosser superstitions prevailing, and
also suggested that the devil deceived people and made many confess to
impossible practices;[541] likewise, that the witches did not really occasion
the illnesses and calamities which they were accused of causing and even
admitted having brought about.[542]
At first the work awakened only controversy and condemnation—a stage
in advance, however, since the most wronged are generally undefended, and
pass to their doom in silence and with no one to speak for them.
In 1580 Bodin, a French writer, published a most furious attack on Dr.
Wier, declaring him to have been the pupil of a sorcerer and that he wrote
inspired by the devil. He reiterated all the old fantastic stories as being true,
and in the hideous procedure of investigation which he set forth, applied
such diverse and such agonising torments as could not have been surpassed
by any of the earlier inquisitors.
Bodin in turn was answered, from England, by Reginald Scot, in 1584,
who wrote a long and powerful review of the witch persecutions, in which
he quotes extensively from Sprenger, Bodin, and the Continental
tormentors. Full of wise saws and modern instances, he cast doubts on the
rationale of the witchcraft tests and trials.
But although just a century had gone by since Innocent launched his Bull
from the Papal throne, many poor people, some at that time unborn, were
destined still to suffer trial and torture. And more than another century had
to pass before the law would leave “witches” alone; before afflicted, half-
mad, or unpopular old women could throw crumbs to the sparrows upon the
snow, or keep a cat, without danger of death. King James, as a young man,
fell foul of both Scot and Wier in 1597. Speaking of them he said: “One
called Scot, an Englishman, is not ashamed in publicke print to deny that
there can be such a thing as witchcraft, and so he maintains the old error of
the Sadducees in denying spirits. The other called Wierus, a German
phisition, sets out a publick apologie for al these craftes-folkes—whereby
procuring for their impunitie he plainly betrayes himselfe to have been one

of their profession”; and six years later came his grotesque law already
alluded to, sanctioned with all the weight of Parliament.[543] The trials in
Germany were severely criticised in 1631 by Father Spee, who published
his book at first anonymously,[544] and checked the ardour and the cruelty of
the courts.
But they were defended again by Joseph Glanvil,[545] chaplain to the king,
in 1681. About this time Dr. Bekker, a clergyman, living in Holland,
compiled four lengthy volumes about witchcraft,[546] in which he contended
that neither devils nor spirits could act on mankind. In England, ten years
later, wrote Richard Baxter,[547] author of The Saints’ Rest and other
evangelical works which were widely read, supporting the weird beliefs of
the witchcraft schoolmen.
By this time the persecutions, which were waning in England, had broken
out at Salem in America; and we find Cotton Mather (like Glanvil, a divine,
and F.R.S.) writing a little book[548] to justify their existence[549] (and his own
conduct, for many were sceptical), upon that continent where, as he
quaintly says, the Pilgrim Fathers “imagined that they should leave their
posterity in a place where they should never see the inroads of Profanity or
Superstition.” The records of the nineteen executions in this neighbourhood,
of one poor creature who was pressed to death, and of the crowd of
unhappy suspects who were cast into the prison,[550] show how the frenzy of
this murderous “revival” swept like an epidemic down upon the settlement,
[551]
so that for fifteen months the air seemed charged and laden with
hysteria, and are a grim commentary. But evolution operates even on taboos
and superstitions, and this was probably the last general persecution, and
Bishop Hutchinson called his learned work An Historical Essay,[552] for it
was dealing mainly with the past. The law lagged behind, however, as it
generally does, the statute of James I. (1603) being, when Hutchinson
wrote, “now in force” in 1718.
And so it continued for eighteen years longer, until repealed in 1736.[553]
In Ireland the law lasted until 1821. Witchcraft was clearly kept alive by
theology. People who really believed in a personal devil (and even those
who questioned the witch convictions assumed the devil to be very much
alive), designing mischief and disguised everywhere, could easily accept
tales of familiar spirits.[554]

Those who received the Hebrew and Christian records as altogether
inspired, could not ignore possession and sorcery.[555] “Après que Dieu a
parlé,” says de l’Ancre, “de sa propre bouche des magiciens et sorciers, qui
est l’incrédule qui en peut justement douter?”[556] And Sir Matthew Hale
said in his summing up: “That there were such creatures as witches, he
made no doubt at all. For, first, the Scriptures had affirmed so much;
secondly, the wisdom of all nations had provided laws against such persons,
which is an argument of their confidence of such a crime.”[557]
Speaking of a particular case, Mr. H. L. Stephen[558] quotes Campbell as
follows: “... During the trial the imposture practised by the prosecutors was
detected and exposed. Hales’ motives were most laudable; but he furnished
a memorable instance of the mischief originating from superstition. He was
afraid of an acquittal or a pardon, lest countenance should be given to a
disbelief in witchcraft, which he considered tantamount to disbelief in
Christianity.” Glanvil[559] follows on the same side, arguing with great
ingenuity from the scriptural point of view (for instance, in dealing with
certain doctrines as to the fate of unbaptized children, p. 22). “The question
whether there are witches or not,” he begins in Part ii., “is not a matter of
vain speculation or of indifferent moment, but an inquiry of very great and
weighty importance. For on the resolution of it depends the authority of our
laws, and, which is more, our religion, in its main doctrines, is nearly
concerned.”
And what may be called the religious belief in witches[560]—a very
different thing from the torturing of them—outlived the penal laws
concerning them.[561] The Rev. John Brown of Haddington (1703–1791)[561]
complained of the repeal of King James’s Act,[562] and even John Wesley
(1722–1787) declared that giving up witchcraft is, in effect, giving up the
Bible.[563] On page 366 of the journal[564] which he edited we read: “With my
latest breath will I bear testimony against giving up to infidels one great
proof of the invisible world. I mean that of witchcraft and apparitions,
confirmed by the testimony of all ages”;[565] and Huxley[566] alluded to a
contemporary clergyman who had been preaching diabolical agency. Nor
did the actual persecutions cease altogether, and though the last legal trial in
England took place in 1712[567] (the last execution in Europe is given by
Lecky[568] as occurring in Switzerland in 1782; another authority mentions
Posen,[569] with date 1793), sporadic outrages continued in the country, and

persist in a modified form to the present day.[570] At Clonmel, Ireland, in
1895,[571] a poor old woman was placed upon the kitchen fire by her own
family and burned, so that she died from the effects.[572] But what were once
pious customs and duties had at length become crimes, and the chief mover
in this latest witch trial got (to the best of my recollection) twenty years’
penal servitude.
A belief so universal as that in witchcraft must clearly be founded upon
positive phenomena. It will not serve our purpose to discuss what yet
unknown supernormal powers might be attained under special conditions,
or how much more there may be to discover beyond X-rays and wireless
telegraphy. For while old ideas as to imps and devils, brooms and black
cats, were manifestly ridiculous, and although the abnormal powers,
whatever they may have been, could work no rescue in the hour of need,
there may be many things in heaven and earth undreamed of in our present
state of knowledge. But ordinary witch cases appear to have been
resolvable into the examination of—
(a) Hysterical subjects—sometimes crowds of them—who might imagine
anything and accuse anybody, including themselves. Such people were (and
are) often given to swallowing needles and other things, some of which
found their way through the body and emerged from all parts of it.[573] This
would have been considered strong evidence of diabolical agency. Many of
these would be subject to epilepsy, catalepsy—accompanied sometimes by
that strange insensibility to pain[574] which is a well-marked symptom in
hysteria, and which was remarked on by the torturers—and to obscure
nerve diseases generally.
(b) “Wise women,”[575] midwives, doctors good and bad, who may,
according to the custom of the times in which, as among savages, magic[576]
and medicine were inextricably mingled, have resorted to charms[577] (as are
still employed by old women to cure warts), and sometimes, doubtless, to
preparing and administering actual poisons;[578] and who, whenever
anything remarkable occurred, were always liable to be accused of having
in some way trafficked with the all-explaining devil.[579] They sometimes
claimed to possess the powers of witches, and tried to gain support or
protection from being feared, deceiving others and often themselves as
well.[580]

(c) Private enemies,[581] whom an accusation of witchcraft,[582] or of any of
the little group of offences[583] which were always supposed to be closely
allied with it,[584] was the readiest way to ruin.[585]
(d) People accused for the sake of gain by means of deliberate plots and
conspiracies. Feigning to be bewitched, and naming some (known to be)
innocent person as the cause of the mischief, was a mean crime that was by
no means uncommon, and many flagrant instances are given of it by early
criticisers.[586]
(e) The main body of the victims.[587] Old women who had outlived
family and friends, who were helpless and solitary,[588] ugly from age,
unclean from infirmities, eccentric in wisdom, crazy with delusions, palsied
in limbs, or wandering in mind.[589] All these, or nearly half the old folks in
the land, were always liable to accusation on account of their misfortunes.
[590]
They were the wretched scapegoats of those times, on whom was laid
whatever might befall, from epileptic fits to summer hail.[591]
It was a crime imputed with so much ease and repelled with so much
difficulty, that the powerful, whenever they wanted to ruin the weak, ... had
only to accuse them of witchcraft to secure their destruction.—C. Mackay,
Popular Delusions, p. 109. A certain G. Naudé, “late Library Keeper to
Cardinal Mazarin,” wrote a book, entitled The History of Magic, “By way
of apology for all the wise men who have unjustly been reputed magicians
from the creation to the present age.” Englished by J. Davies. London,
1657.]
(f) The people denounced by prisoners under torture. As we have seen,
accusation meant examination, and this had two objects: to extort a
“confession” from the suspected witch, and to compel her to reveal
accomplices. Some might confess at once, and did so in the hope of
execution (the kind of confession required was already well known, and the
more monstrous and elaborate it might be, the better would be the chance of
escaping torture). Others would naturally deny taking part in abominations
in which they had not engaged, and most of which were beyond possibility.
And no doubt nearly all would make a long and desperate struggle against
incriminating their unfortunate friends, who might, however innocent of
crime, be also other people’s enemies. And so the accursed ingenuity of
man was practised on these miserable victims of his ignorance and

superstition. One hideous device[592] tried by a Frankish king was to drive
sharp spikes underneath the nails;[593] this, he contended, always induced
confession from the intense anguish. Very likely it did.
Other inquisitors went their own sweet way, and used all possible
varieties of the question, that they might make out of the shrieks and
ravings the sort of story they expected and prompted,[594] and lash more
suspects down upon the rack. No wonder, then, that persecution spread;[595]
the aged and the disordered were always there, and any one of these might
be thought a witch,[596] or find herself denounced from the torture-room—
perhaps by a lifelong friend.
The readiness with which all “evidence” was acclaimed and the appalling
means by which it was got together placed any abnormal person in constant
peril, and will account for the enormous numbers of the implicated. Tens of
thousands of victims, says Lecky,[597] perished by the most agonising and
protracted torments without exciting the faintest compassion. In a single
German city they used to burn 300 witches annually.[598] In Nancy, 800 were
put to death by a judge in the course of sixteen years.[599] Zachary Gray,[600]
who edited an edition of Hudibras, claims that during the Long Parliament
500 witches were executed each year, and that he read through a list of no
less than 3000 of them.[601] The total of Great Britain has been estimated at
30,000,[602] and it has been estimated that during the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries the witch death-roll for Europe[603] reached 200,000
people.[604]
Perhaps the sidelights give a more graphic conception of what went on in
those dark days of error. Listen to this complaint of a French writer[605] who
evidently thought he was approaching the “last days.” “Was it [sorcery]
ever so much in vogue as here in this unhappy [sixteenth] century? The
benches of our courts are all blackened by them; there are not sufficient
magistrates to hear the cases. Our prisons are gorged with witches, and not
a day passes but our warrants are ensanguined with them, and we return
saddened to our homes, shocked at the ghastly and appalling things that
they confess.” And in our own land, about fifty years later, we come upon a
letter written to Sir Edmund Spencer in 1647: “Within the compass of two
years near upon 300 witches were arraigned, and the greater part executed,
in Essex and Suffolk only. Scotland swarms with them now more than ever,
and persons of good quality executed daily.”[606]

It was in Scotland, likewise, that there used to be kept a chest “locked
with three severall locks and opened every fifteenth daie,”[607] which might
receive, as did the Lion’s Mouth at Venice, denunciations slipped in
secretly; and that in 1661 the justices were ordered to attend certain towns
to hear cases of witchcraft at least once a week.[608]
The witch trials are ended. So far as they are concerned, we can look
back from the heights of history over this vast red sea of superstition which
has swallowed up such multitudes. And to think it was all so useless, so
unnecessary![609] but yet by no means hard to be explained. The underlying
and provocative phenomena had really been present in a huge number of
cases (and when they were not, were fervently conceived, and so suggested,
looked for, and enforced as to set up all kinds of hallucinations in the
accusers and sometimes in the accused), and in default of tracing out their
causes,[610] evident or recondite, clergy and jurists, and of course the
populace, gave out a false and thaumaturgical account of them. They were
correct in affirming many amazing facts and phenomena (and all these
persist, for nature has not changed.[611] There are at least as many abnormal
and half-mad people amongst us now as there ever were, only we treat the
clearer cases kindly, and are no longer afraid of mythical influences),
although these were magnified and multiplied million-fold, for Superstition
is a monster that grows by feeding. They were fantastic in their fabulous
explanations of them. The rest—in those cruel times when torture was as
common as is cross-examination—followed quite naturally. The doctors,
theological and legal, erred in their diagnosis, mistaking diseases for devils
and abnormality for magic. We shall come upon this again, crass and close
at hand. May the Future condemn the Present, as we now deplore the Past.

CHAPTER III

TREATMENT OF THE INSANE

As the abnormal and the rationally eccentric were considered witches,
and held to have been disciples of the devil, so the more obviously sense-
bereft were thought to be controlled by the fiends within them. Both
witches and lunatics were held to be beneath the sway of infernal powers,
but the former as willing agents of the devil, and the latter as involuntary
victims, who were deemed to be possessed. In ancient Egypt, by the Temple
of Saturn,[612] in classic Greece with the Asclepieia, and by the laws of
Pagan Rome,[613] the mentally afflicted were treated with humanity, and, if
without the aid of our present science, at least upon the same broad
principles which we adopt to-day.
In the warm sunlight of the Eastern lands the life of the population was
spent in the open air. As we read in the Scriptures and in books of travel, the
lunatic might dwell amidst the tombs. He could wander through the
soothing cypress groves in the moonlight or lie under shading palm in the
noontide heat. He dwelt apart, like the leper, cut off by his terrible infirmity
from the kinship of reason, but free at least in the air and sunlight, and often
allowed a quite especial licence[614] as being in the guardianship of God.[615]
But the troublesome conduct into which lunatics were ever liable to be
led[616] would frequently rouse the instinct of retaliation, and bring down
swift and heavy punishment upon them.[617]
In Europe also and in England the less-dangerous lunatics “were allowed
to wander about the country,[618] beggars and vagabonds, affording sport[619]
and mockery.” We get a vivid glimpse from Shakespeare of that “poor
Tom[620] that eats the swimming frog, the toad, the tadpole, the wall newt
and the water newt, that in the fury of his heart, when the foul fiend rages,
eats cow-dung for sallets, swallows the old rat and the ditch dog, drinks the

green mantle of the slimy pool;[621] who is whipt from tything to tything,
and stocked, punished, and imprisoned.”[622]
This was the lot of sufferers in those times, and beyond doubt a certain
number of them, unmindful or unheedful of savage laws, obeyed the
obsessing suicidal impulse which is so common among mad people; and
through this many of the most afflicted must have been taken, in the mercy
of nature, out of the world of men in which they had no part. But if the half-
witted poor were allowed to wander,[623] those of the richer class were less
fortunate. Their families were shy and ashamed of them; they were
concealed and locked in garrets and cellars, or penned apart, secured in
sheds and outhouses—fastened up anywhere about the premises.[624]
Medicines there were indeed for the insane patients, and some of them
might have added to the witches’ cauldron.[625] Among the less nauseous of
these came wolf’s and lion’s flesh,[626] and as our Saxon forefathers were
skilled herbalists, we find the clovewort, polion, and peony recommended,
[627]
also the mandrake, round which many stories were woven from its
resemblance to the human form. They said: “For witlessness, that is, for
devil sickness or demoniacal possession, take from the body of the same
wort mandrake by weight of three pennies, administer to drink in warm
water as he may find convenient; soon he will be healed.”[628]
Doubtless in all civilisations the more acutely insane would have to be a
care for the community.[629] The early Christians tended them in their
churches, in which they stood in a special part,[630] and where they were
provided with food “while they abode in the church, which, it seems, was
the chief place of their residence and habitation.”[631]
The monks to some extent looked after them in their monasteries.[632] But
whatever medicines or other remedies they may have employed, the main
idea of those days about lunacy was that it came through demoniacal
possession. The object was to drive the devils out. To accomplish this they
seem to have resorted to all sorts of incongruous “cures,” both ghostly and
physical.[633] The great spiritual weapon has always been exorcism. This was
the primal art of all religions, and it was practised also by the early
Christians.
In the third century the exorcists were formed into a special order.[634]
“When an exorcist is ordained,” we read, “he shall receive at the hands of

the bishop a book wherein the forms of exorcism are written. These forms
were certain passages together with adjurations in the name of Christ
commanding the unclean spirit to depart out of the possessed person.” This
custom has continued through the centuries,[635] forming the subject of
innumerable legends and pictures relating to saints and teachers in the
middle ages; and though the practice seems to be in abeyance,[636] the old
idea of exorcism is not dead. We must perceive this when we read,[637] for
instance, “Water and salt are exorcised by the priest, and so withdrawn from
the power of Satan, who, since the Fall, has corrupted and abused even
inanimate things.[638] But besides the weapons, mystic and spiritual,
employed by the Church, were others of a more corporeal character.
The patients were bound to venerated crosses at evening, to be released
as cured in the morning.[639] They were chained fast to stones in various
churches; they were dipped into holy wells—this custom lasted in Cornwall
to modern times; and they were sent as pilgrims to shrines,[640] at some of
which they underwent a regular course of treatment; music was often an
important element.[641] And remedies far more drastic might be provided,
which relied not so much upon the power of the saints as on the human
weakness of the devils.
Thus, scattered among the recipes for herbs and all the indescribable
filthy mixtures which were advocated for insanity,[642] we come across the
following prescription, the effects of which would prove anything but
imaginary:—“In case a man be a lunatic, take skin of a mereswine or
porpoise, work it into a whip, swinge the man well therewith, soon he will
be well. Amen.” At one monastery the lunatics in the charge of the monks
are said to have received ten lashes every day.[643]
The insane have been flogged for various reasons:—(1) Superstitiously,
to drive out the devil, and even to scare away a disease; (2) therapeutically,
because pain and shock would often subdue the ravings of the patients,
although only temporarily; (3) instinctively, as a relief to their keepers’
feelings. The medical and the brutal whippings we shall meet again later on,
long after devil-driving had been abandoned, though it prevailed through
Christendom for probably over sixteen hundred years. To understand it we
must turn aside to savages.

Primitive peoples,[644] like children, personified everything. Disease
appeared to be a sort of personal entity—like that deceitful dream[645] Zeus
sent to Agamemnon—a “thing” “to be drawn out in an invisible form, and
burnt in the fire or thrown into the water.” A foe invisible, but yet so human
in its limitations as to be stopped by thorns placed in its path.[646] And if all
manner of physical ailments were looked upon as being, or, at any rate, as
emanating from personal demons, much more would such a fearful and
mysterious affliction as insanity be held to indicate a devil’s presence and
immediate handiwork.[647] Moreover, to the primitive mind, the demons of
all sorts were much too near, too vividly conceived, too real, too
commonplace, to be regarded as spiritual beings within the modern
meaning of the word. They were conceived as obviously living and moving
about,[648] and therefore as being human in their character. Thus among
savages “the souls of the dead are thought susceptible of being beaten, hurt,
and driven like any other living creatures,”[649] and demons could be hunted
out of the houses and scared away to woods and outer darkness.[650]
The ideas of the profoundly superstitious middle ages resembled these.
Even the great opponent or accuser, Satan, who was restored by Milton to
the rôle of Ahriman,[651] was but a wretched creature, a poor devil,[652] in the
popular imagination. “He” is continually outwitted like the pantomime
policeman,[653] and nonplussed by the shallowest equivocations.[654] He beats
a man[655] and is beaten and vanquished.[656] He aims a stone at Dunstan and
misses,[657] and when seized by the nose with pincers, his bellowings are
heard for three miles round.[658] He howls when sprinkled with holy water,
[659]
and Luther hurls an inkstand at his head.[660] This man-like and material
monster of course felt pain, and when he took up his abode in a human
body he was supposed to feel the blows inflicted on the sufferer.[661] It was
the devil (or his representative) who might be driven out of man or woman;
the demons could be commanded to quit each portion of the invaded body,
member by member.[662] The fiends were supposed to writhe in anguish[663]
when the possessed cowered beneath salt water or the whip.[664] On them the
curses and the stripes were meant to descend,[665] until at last, through
unendurable torments, they fled the body by the nearest orifice.[666]
This crude and savage way of expelling “devils” was long continued;
belief in it is probably by no means dead in the minds of some countryfolk.
Hawthorne, writing of the seventeenth century Puritans,[667] makes the

gaoler say of his prisoner, “Verily she hath been like a possessed one, and
there lacks but little that I should take in hand to drive Satan out of her with
stripes.” But there were times enough when exorcism failed and flogging
proved unavailing. Then the insane would have to be restrained and
subjected to some sort of treatment[668]—to say some sort of ill-treatment
were nearer the truth. Doubtless they always aimed at quieting the more
troublesome patients, and bringing them into order, if not back to reason.
Says Andrew Boorde in his strange Regyment of Health:[669] “I do
advertyse every mā the which is mad or lunaticke or frenticke or
demoniacke, to be kept in save garde in some close house or chambre
where there is lytell lyght. And that he have a keper the which the mad man
do feare.” The same idea we see expressed by Shakespeare:[670] “We’ll have
him in a dark room and bound,” is the immediate cry towards the mad. Shut
up and bound they were, in all manner of ways and places, by relatives,
monks, and keepers. As we have seen, many were executed as witches or
malefactors, and would be thrown into gatehouses and prisons,[671] where
they might furnish horrible diversion for the other prisoners,[672] and where
they were sometimes drugged to make them silent and to cease from raving.
[673]
Sometimes they were placed in such hospitals as there were,[674] along
with fever and accident cases.[675]
In the course of time, as population spread and townships grew, the old
resorts were found to be inadequate. The number of the lunatics was
increasing, and the whole country was filling up and enclosing. Whipping
from place to place became ineffective, and there had been no public
institutions available but monasteries, gaols, and hospitals.[676] In the year
1247 was founded by Bishopsgate the Priory of St. Mary of Bethlem,[677]
and here insane people were kept and tended, at any rate from 1403.
Doubtless there came to be other places thus put to use, such as, for
instance, one St. Katherine’s by the Tower,[678] where, we are told, “they
used to keep the better sort of mad folks.” But it was not until about the
middle of the eighteenth century[679] that grim and sombre circumvallate
buildings began to be erected to intern the troublesome.[680] “They were,”
says Dr. Conolly,[681] “but prisons of the worst description. Small openings
in the walls, unglazed, or whether glazed or not, guarded with strong iron
bars, narrow corridors, dark cells, desolate courts, where no tree nor shrub
nor flower nor blade of grass grew.[682] Solitariness, or companionship so

indiscriminate as to be worse than solitude; terrible attendants armed with
whips ... and free to impose manacles and chains and stripes at their own
brutal will; uncleanness, semi-starvation, the garrotte, and unpunished
murders—these were the characteristics of such buildings throughout
Europe.” What may be called the theoretical treatment was bad enough.
Those who could not be cured must be subdued;[683] the teaching of
Boerhaave and Cullen admitted this, and the latter wrote: “Fear being the
passion that diminishes excitement, may therefore be opposed to the excess
of it, and particularly to the angry and irascible excitement of maniacs;
these being more susceptible of fear than might be expected, it appears to
me to have been commonly useful.”[684]
It was desired “to acquire some awe over them,”[685] and he declares that
“sometimes it may be necessary to acquire it even by stripes and blows.”[686]
This was the therapeutic flogging already alluded to.[687] Shock, terror,
blistering, bleeding, purging, the use of chains and all manner of
manacles[688]—these were the means employed and set down in the
textbooks to heal the disordered mechanism of the brain.[689]
In the Gentleman’s Magazine of 1765[690] we read of the private asylums
that “persons were taken forcibly to these houses without any authority,
instantly seized by a set of inhuman ruffians trained up to this barbarous
profession, stripped naked, and conveyed to a dark room.” So ignorant were
the doctors of those days as to the nature of insanity that the harsh cruelties
practised on private patients were carried out even upon the king. Of the
eighteenth-century practice Mr. Massie has written:[691] “Mental disease was
at that time a branch of art little understood, and the specific treatment of
lunatics was worthy of the barbarous age of medicine. The unhappy patient”
(King George III.) “upon whom this most terrible visitation of Heaven had
fallen, was no longer dealt with as a human being. His body was
immediately enclosed in a machine, which left it no liberty of motion. He
was sometimes chained to a staple. He was frequently beaten and starved,
and at least he was kept in subjection by menacing and violent language.”
That, like most lunatics, he was very annoying is certain; he once talked for
nineteen hours unceasing. But all his troubles were intensified by ill-
treatment;[692] they left him to be knocked about by a German servant,[693]
and the first doctors kept him even from his own children, at which the poor
old man complained “very heavily.”[694] Such, then, was the orthodox

treatment applied against the highest in the land. But the worst deeds were
done behind thick walls. “Sane people,” says Beach,[695] writing of private
establishments, “were frequently confined in these asylums, for persons
frequently availed themselves of the facilities[696] then in use in order to get
rid of a troublesome relative or to obtain some selfish object.”
And what of the really mad?[697]—irritable, violent, irrational, helpless,
often with as little control over the functions of the body as on the workings
of the mind. We can imagine what their state became when left in the hands
of ignorant practitioners and brutal attendants, with chains and instruments
of restraint convenient and ready. Screened off from all kith and kin they
writhed with sores and rotted in ordure.[698] Sometimes—mostly on Monday
mornings after the Sabbath rest and accumulations—they might be carried
out into a yard[698] to be mopped and soused from pails in the coldest
weather.[699]
The condition of the living rooms and wards[700] was often such that
visitors grew physically sick from going into them;[701] but they were rare
within those private prisons,[702] strangers are never welcome behind the
walls. At York Asylum[703]—an especial plague spot opened in 1777 and
burnt,[704] it is said, to avoid disclosures that might hang its keepers,[705] in
1814—a rule was adopted in 1813 “that no person[706] shall be allowed to
visit any of the patients without a special written order signed by the
physitian.” Official visitors were generally harmless.[707] At York the worst
rooms were not shown them.[708] For most of the small asylums there were
none at all.[709]
Even the larger public asylums during the eighteenth, and also far into
the nineteenth century, were horrible monuments of cruelty and neglect.
The miserable patients lay upon straw in cells,[710] or upon wooden shelves
to which they were fastened. Many were naked or decked over with one
blanket.[711] In the wards they were frequently chained to the wall by wrist
or ankle,[712] and occasionally by both. One patient at Bethlem,[713] a fierce,
powerful man whose name was Norris, after a fracas with a drunken keeper,
had his arms and shoulders encased in a frame of iron obtained from
Newgate.[714] This instrument[715] was attached by a twelve-inch chain to a
collar round his neck, from a ring round a vertical iron bar which had been
built into the wall by the head of his bed.[716] His right leg was secured to the
frame upon which he lay. The effect was that the patient could move up and

down as far as the ring and short chain round the upright bar permitted, but
he could not stir one foot from the wall, and could only rest lying upon his
back. “In this thraldom,” says Dr. Conolly,[717] “he had lived for twelve
years. During much of this time he is reported to have been rational in his
conversation. At length relief came, which he only lived about a year to
enjoy. It is painful to add that this long-continued punishment had the
recorded approbation of all the authorities of the hospital. Nothing can more
forcibly illustrate the hardening effect of being habitual witnesses of
cruelty, and the process which the heart of man undergoes when allowed to
exercise irresponsible power.”
The medical men were poorly paid and proportionately neglectful. At the
time of which we are speaking—the end of the eighteenth and the
beginning of the nineteenth century—the physician at Bedlam got only
£100 a year.[718] However, he kept a private asylum, and sometimes left the
public institution for months together.[719] One of the surgeons is described
as having been “generally insane and mostly drunk,” in spite of which he
was retained there for ten years.[720]
With such shameful neglect and callousness on the part of the doctors—
there appear to have been no chaplains in those days[721]—it is not to be
wondered that the unhappy patients fell entirely into the hands of their
keepers and immediate attendants, and most of these were quite ignorant
people, rendered impatient and brutal by the exasperating ways of the
demented inmates, and by their boundless power over them. Instinctive and
retaliative floggings (the third kind, alluded to on p. 149), assaults, and
possibly even murders, were not uncommon, as well as the distressing and
unlimited restraints already referred to.[722] One doctor invented and
introduced a special instrument to prize open the patients’ mouths at
compulsory feeding. He mentions that, by the usual process, teeth were apt
to be broken, and some were left “without a front tooth in either jaw.”[723]
In the eighteenth century[724]—up to 1770—and in some places,
doubtless, even to later times, the mad people were reckoned among the
“sights.”[725] The public paid[726] to go round the asylums, as they do now to
gaze upon wild beasts.[727] The baser and more mischievous among them
would irritate and purposely enrage the secured patients, as their
descendants tease caged animals to this day;[728] and thus reproduced for
their ghastly diversion “exhibitions of madness which are no longer to be

found, because they were not the simple product of malady, but of malady
aggravated by mismanagement.”
Such conduct appears to have been general in those times.[729] At
Geneva[730] some lunatics would be given grass and horrible things to eat to
amuse visitors. This also happened at the Bicêtre,[731] in certain parts of
Germany, etc.[732] “Les Fous de Charenton” became, for a time, notorious
for their plays,[733] which were presented with much sound and fury,
attracting spectators from very grotesqueness. They were forbidden in 1811.
High walls kept things dark for years, but the light stole through in the
end, as it always will.[734] In 1793 Pinel removed the chains from patients in
the Bicêtre. At home, the York Asylum, already alluded to, began to bear an
evil reputation. In 1788 it incurred the Animadversions[735] of the Rev.
William Mason.[736] In the year 1791 some friends of a female patient
desired to visit her, but were not allowed, upon the plea that she was not in
a suitable condition to be seen by strangers (she probably was not!) A few
weeks after this she was reported dead.[737] The woman belonged to the
Society of Friends, and the suspicious circumstances of her incarceration
caused much resentment among the Quakers. Soon after, William Tuke
resolved that they should have a hospital of their own. The Retreat was
started in the year 1792, and its humane and enlightened methods were soon
contrasted with the barbarous and secret administration prevailing at the
older institution. But the years rolled by while patients languished and died.
It was in 1813 that Samuel Tuke—a grandson of the founder of the Retreat
—brought out a little work[738] describing the system there. It “excited
universal interest, and, in fact, achieved what all the talents and public spirit
of Mason and his friends had failed to accomplish. It had still better effects.
A very inoffensive passage in this book roused, it seems, the animosity of
the physician to York Lunatic Asylum, and a letter which this gentleman
published in one of the York newspapers[739] became the origin of a
controversy among the governors of that establishment, which terminated in
August 1814, after a struggle of nearly two years, in the complete
overthrow of the old system, and the dismission of every officer of the
asylum, except the physician himself.”[740]
The conflict was taken up by others and carried on. Towards the close of
that same year (1813), a case of alleged misconduct was brought forward by
Mr. Godfrey Higgins, a magistrate for the West Riding. “Mr. Higgins’

statement was read” (before twenty-seven governors), “after which the
accused servants of the house were called in and sworn. They denied upon
oath the truth of the charges. No other evidence was called for; nor was any
minute committed to writing of what had been sworn by the servants. The
following resolution was passed:—The governors having taken into
consideration the statements published in the York and other newspapers
respecting the treatment of William Vicars, lately a patient in this asylum, ...
are unanimously of opinion that ... he was treated with all possible care,
attention, and humanity.”[741] It was of no avail; thirteen gentlemen of the
county came forward with donations, in virtue of which they qualified as
governors. These new men brought their votes to bear to force on an
inquiry, and though the old gang of scoundrels never got their deserts, and,
to conceal their guilt, are said to have set the premises on fire, yet they were
driven out of their situations, and soon investigation became national.
In 1814 Mr. George Rose brought in a Bill to regulate asylums, which
passed the House of Commons. But the authorities at Bedlam opposed the
measure,[742] spending over £600 in so doing. They had good cause, as we
shall see presently. The York Asylum governors—nineteen of them,
including the archbishop—sent in a petition against it; and the intrepid Mr.
Higgins sent one in its favour, signed by himself.[743] The Bill was thrown
out by the House of Lords,[744] but a committee of the House of Commons
was then appointed, and collected the inconceivable and horrible evidence
from which we have quoted. Its report was presented by Mr. Rose in 1815,
[745]
and though the committee at Bedlam formally exonerated its officials
for all things they had done and neglected to do, including even the dreadful
instrument placed round Norris,[746] the unofficial mind of the public had
been roused to indignation, and many of the worst abuses were presently
remedied.
Mr. Rose died in 1818, but in the following year Mr. Wynn brought
forward another Bill, which was, however, opposed by Lord Eldon, who
observed[747] that “there could not be a more false humanity than over-
humanity with regard to persons afflicted with insanity,” a line of argument
which we shall come on again. That Bill shared the fate of its predecessor. It
was not until nine years afterwards that Mr. Gordon secured the passing of
an Act[748] to improve the asylums, in the year 1828. Though abuses
continued into the middle of the nineteenth century,[749] and many Acts of

Parliament were subsequently brought in,[750] the monstrous evils of which
we have spoken continued as crimes where previously they had been
customs, and took place on a much diminished scale.
At Lincoln Asylum,[751] about 1838, Dr. Gardner Hill removed
mechanical restraints, and Dr. Conolly[752] followed at Hanwell in the
succeeding year. In this they were, of course, opposed in the Profession,[753]
but new ideas and new conceptions were coming, which are still working in
the treatment of insanity. All along, heretofore, the Mind and the Body had
been conceived as two separate things. People had ceased to believe in the
interference of devils, but they spoke vaguely of “a mind diseased.” There
being often no physical injury that could be detected, “the common opinion
seemed to be confirmed that it” (mental disorder) “was an
incomprehensible, and consequently an incurable, malady of the mind.”[754]
A medical writer[755] of the early nineteenth century could allude to
lectures he had attended, at which the doctor had declared that treatment
and physic were useless in a case of furor uterinus, because it was a disease
of the mind, not of the body. No doubt there loomed the fear of Free Will
and Theology. “... Many very able men,” says Dr. Halliday,[756] “led away by
what appeared to be the general opinion of mankind, shrank from a strict
investigation of a subject that seemed to lead to a doubt of the immateriality
of mind, a truth so evident to their own feelings and so expressly
established by divine revelation.” It is not for us to turn aside into
labyrinths, or to attempt to settle what “mind” may mean. But we know
that, to our present power of comprehension, the mind can only function
through the body. How it first formed, and if it can yet rekindle, are vital
questions which may never be answered; at any rate they lie beyond our
range.
Gradually metaphysics and moral concepts were left behind as experts
examined facts. “... Derangement,” says a nineteenth-century writer,[757] “is
no longer considered a disease of the understanding, but of the centre of the
nervous system, upon the unimpaired condition of which the exercise of the
understanding depends. The brain is at fault and not the mind.”
“The old notion,” says Dr. Wynter,[758] “that derangement of mind may
happen without any lesion of the instrument of thought being the cause or
consequence, has long been exploded.”

The physical origin of insanity “became gradually accepted. Its mental
phenomena were more carefully observed, and its relation was established
to other mental conditions which had not hitherto been regarded as insane
in the proper sense of the word.... Hitherto the criteria of insanity had been
very rude, and the evidence was generally of a loose and popular character;
but whenever it was fully recognised that insanity was a disease with which
physicians who had studied the subject were peculiarly conversant, expert
evidence obtained increased importance, and from that time became
prominent in every case. The new medical views of insanity were thus
brought into contact with the old narrow conceptions of the law courts, and
a controversy arose in the field of criminal law, which, in England at least,
is not yet settled.”[759]
The instinct of retaliation was not readily restrained by reasoning or
proofs of irresponsibility. In postulating freedom of choice under all
physical conditions; in assuming plenary responsibility in men and women
under all circumstances; in refusing to recognise any abnormal state unless
it were so extreme and obvious as to render the person before the court
unconscious of his actions and surroundings, the judges were defending
their own position. Thus the new theories[760] were disputed and sneered at,
and arbitrary standards as to sanity were set up at variance with all facts and
expert evidence.[761]
Some contended that the more subtle and amazing forms of madness or
abnormality perceived by the specialists were but new names for old
perversities.[762] Others averred that nothing physical ought to exculpate.
Smollett wished that all lunatics guilty of grave offences might be subjected
“to the common penalties of the law.” Upon this Mr. Tuke observes in
comment that “The entire inability to distinguish between voluntary and
involuntary acts, ... between motives and consequences, is singularly well
shown. Unfortunately it was not peculiar to Smollett.”[763]
And I might add that this instinctive feeling continued—as everything
instinctive generally does. Turning to the work of a writer still living (in
1908), we come upon the following: “Of late years a certain school of
thinkers[764] ... have started some theories respecting the responsibility or
irresponsibility of many dangerous criminals and murderers, which have
very properly been objected to by more practical observers.” And the writer
continues with all the sweet simplicity of ignorance: “Even the inmates of

lunatic asylums know well the distinction between right and wrong. And it
is precisely upon this knowledge that the government and discipline of such
establishments are based. Hence no theories of criminal irresponsibility
should be permitted to relax the security and strictness of the detention of
dangerous offenders, whether sane, or partially insane, or wholly mad. And
it is important to observe that the treatment and condition even of mad
murderers should not be made attractive to others outside.” But the hard
scientific facts persisted. Injustice and cruelty, practised upon the weak and
helpless, do not, alas! and pace good Mrs. Stowe, bring down upon nations
the visible wrath of God; but the manifest falseness of the old assumptions,
and the continued failure of the mediæval methods, could not be hidden
through unending years. Slowly the light of science began to penetrate into
the dark places of punishment. The entirely mad were first rescued and
treated as patients, and these now, happily, no longer concern us; their case
belongs to Medicine, not to Criminology. With regard to the half-mad we
are in a state of slow change and transition. Their wrongs, long known to
the alienists, are being brought before the law-makers. “Crime,” says the
Report of Mr. Secretary Gladstone’s Committee,[765] “its causes and
treatment, has been the subject of much profound and scientific inquiry.
Many of the problems it presents are practically at the present time
insoluble. It may be true that some criminals are irreclaimable, just as some
diseases are incurable, and in such cases it is not unreasonable to acquiesce
in the theory that criminality is a disease and the result of physical
imperfection. But criminal anthropology as a science is in an embryo
stage....” With regard to the abnormal we are only on the threshold of
justice; a multitude of causes, theological and instinctive, prevent the facts
from being faced and known.
We may take comfort in the course of evolution; in that the violently mad
(employing the word in a wide and general sense) are no longer exorcised
and tormented; in that the eccentrically mad are no longer burned and
tortured for what was imagined against them; in that the weak-minded and
the partially deranged are being considered, with a view to their segregation
in special places apart from healthy offenders; in that innate and absolute
abnormality of emotions has been established by the specialists upon
overwhelming evidence; and that the knowledge of this is quietly spreading,
and being recognised and admitted among educated people, throughout the
civilised world.

THE END

Printed by R. & R. Clark, Limited, Edinburgh.

FOOTNOTES FOR ALL CHAPTERS

1. “In the early cuneiform writing ... the symbol for a prison is a combination of the symbols for
‘house’ and ‘darkness.’”—Isaac Taylor, History of the Alphabet, p. 21. London, 1899.

2. It has been said that imprisonment is not mentioned in Anglo-Saxon laws as a punishment; it
is, however, referred to in the laws of Æthelstan thus: “For murder let a man forfeit his life, if
he will deny it and appear guilty at the threefold ordeal let him be 120 nights in prison;
afterwards let his relations take him out and pay the king 120 shillings and to his relatives the
price of his blood....” See J. Johnson, Ecclesiastical Laws. London, 1720. The same king
ordained that “If a thief be brought into prison that he be 40 days in prison and then let him be
released thereout with cxx. shillings and let his kindred enter into borh for him that he will ever
more desist.”—B. Thorpe, Ancient Laws and Institutions of England, fol. ed. p. 85. London,
1840.

3. “In the reign of Henry III. imprisonment for a definite period was an unknown punishment.”—
G. J. Turner, Select Pleas of the Forest, p. lxv. London, 1901.

4. “Imprisonment occurs in the Anglo-Saxon Laws only as a means of temporary security.”—
Pollock and Maitland, Hist. Eng. Law, vol. i. p. 26. Cambridge, 1895.

5. “In the nature of the Saxons in the most ancient times there existed neither a knowledge of the
most high and heavenly King ... nor any dignity of honour of any earthly king....”—W. Stubbs,
Const. Hist. p. 49. Oxford, 1880.

6. Ibid. p. 75.

7. “Nihil neque publicae neque privatae rei nisi armati agunt.”—Tac. Germ. xiii.

8. Among the Jutes, etc., see J. M. Lappenberg, Hist. of Eng. under the Anglo-Saxon Kings, i. p.
97. London, 1845. The Anglo-Saxon lad came of age at twelve; see work just quoted, p. 173,
and J. Thrupp, The Anglo-Saxon Home, p. 108. London, 1862.

9. The exceptions to this wise though primitive rule are to be found where occasionally “God”
and even “Nature” would be cited as injured third parties, upon theological grounds. See, for
instance, N. Marshall, Penitential Discipline of the Primitive Church, pp. 49, 190, Oxford,
1844; and the thirteenth-century Mirror of Justice, chap. xiv.

10. “To keep the peace is the legislator’s first object, and it is not easy. To force the injured man or
the slain man’s kinsfolk to accept a money compensation instead of resorting to reprisals is the
main aim of the law-giver.”—F. W. Maitland, Constitutional History of England, p. 4.
Cambridge, 1908.

11. Thus in the Laws of the XII. Tables the manifest thief would be killed if a slave, or if free
become the bondman of the person robbed; if, however, he were captured later, he had to
refund double the value of what he had taken. By the Germanic codes a thief might be instantly
chased and then hanged or decapitated, but fines for homicide would be imposed if he were
slain after an interval. Henry Maine, Ancient Law, ed. of 1906, pp. 387, 388.

12. For instance, Exodus xxi. 23, 24, 25.

13. See E. Westermarck, Moral Ideas, vol. i. p. 178. London, 1906.

14. At first it was not always necessary to accept the blood-fine. See E. W. Robertson, Scotland
under her Early Kings, p. 287, Edinburgh, 1862, on this point; and as to the treatment of
female relatives, see J. Thrupp, Anglo-Saxon Home, p. 151.

15. In the seventh century a law of Ine ordained that “If any one takes revenge before he demands
justice, let him give up what he has taken to himself and pay the damage done and make bōt
with xxx. shillings.”—Thorpe, Ancient Laws and Institutions, fol. ed. p. 48.

16. “The penal law of ancient communities is not a law of crimes; it is a law of wrongs, or, to use
the English technical word, of torts. The person injured proceeds against the wrongdoer by an
ordinary civil action, and recovers compensation in the shape of money damages if he
succeeds.”—Maine, Ancient Law, p. 379.

17. “It is curious to observe how little the men of primitive times were troubled with these scruples
(as to the degree of moral guilt to be ascribed to the wrongdoer), how completely they were
persuaded that the impulses of the wronged person were the proper measure of the vengeance
he was entitled to exact, and how literally they imitated the rise and fall of his passions in
fixing their scale of punishment.”—Maine, Ancient Law, p. 389.

18. “Every man’s life had its value, and according to that valuation the value of his oath in a court
of justice varied, and offences against his person and protection were atoned for.”—Stubbs,
Const. Hist. i. p. 188.

19. A front tooth usually cost six shillings; in Alfred’s time, eight.

20. Laws of Æthelbert. If a freeman rob the king let him pay a forfeiture ninefold. If a freeman rob
a freeman let him make threefold satisfaction.—J. Johnson, Ecc. Laws.

21. For a collection of the various codes and for examples of their amazing minuteness as to all
possible injuries, see F. Lindenbrog, Codex legum antiquarum, pp. 474, 498, etc. Frankfort,
1613.

22. The Mercian pound was equal to 60 scillings, the Wessex to 48; see H. A. Grueber, Handbook
of the Coins, p. ix. London, 1899.

23. Stubbs, Const. Hist. i. p. 109.

24. Thorpe, fol. ed. p. 80.

25. W. S. Holdsworth, History of English Law, p. 13. London, 1903.

26. J. M. Kemble, The Saxons in England, i. p. 149. London, 1876.

27. R. Ruding, Annals of the Coinage, p. 110. London, 1840.

28. F. W. Maitland, Domesday Book, p. 44. Cambridge, 1897.

29. “It was at least theoretically possible down to the middle of the tenth century for a man-slayer
to elect to bear the feud of the kindred. His own kindred, however, might avoid any share in the
feud by disclaiming him; any of them who maintained him after this, as well as any of the
avenging kinsfolk who meddled with any but the actual wrongdoer, was deemed a foe to the
king.”—Pollock and Maitland, Hist. ed. of 1898, i. 48.

30. When a ceorl had been frequently accused, if afterwards he were apprehended he might lose a
hand or a foot.—Laws of Ine. R Schmidt, Gesetze, p. 29. Leipzig, 1858.

31. See Laws of Ine, sect. 12. Thorpe, fol. ed. p. 49.

32. Pollock and Maitland, Hist. i. 476 and ii. 451, ed. of 1898.

33. J. Thrupp, Anglo-Saxon Home, p. 145.

34. G. G. Coulton, Chaucer and His England, p. 293. London, 1908.

35. Pollock and Maitland, i. 478, ii. 450.

36. And see Early Assize Rolls for the County of Northumberland, pp. xviii., xix., etc. Durham,
Surtees Society, 1891.

37. Stubbs, Const. Hist. p. 89.

38. Dooms of Alfred, sect. 24. “If any one steal another’s ox and slay or sell it, let him give two for
it, and four sheep for one. If he have not what he may give be he himself sold for the cattle.”—
Thorpe, Laws, fol. ed. p. 23. Compare Exodus xxii. 3; Pollock and Maitland, Hist., ed. 1895,
vol. ii. 514.

39. Pollock and Maitland, ii. p. 11.

40. The intertribal wars at one time “filled the foreign markets with English slaves,” says J. R.
Green, relating the well-known story of Pope Gregory.—Hist. Eng. People, i. 37. London,
1881.

41. Hovenden. H. T. Riley’s ed. i. p. 143. London, 1853.

42. A vigorous slave trade was carried on just prior to the Conquest.—Thrupp, Anglo-Saxon
Home, p. 130.

43. Pollock and Maitland, Hist. i. p. 12. Cambridge, 1895.

44. Law of Ine, seventh century. “If any one sell his countryman bound or free, though he be
guilty, over sea, let him pay for him according to his wer.”—Stubbs, Charters, p. 61. Oxford,
1884.
Law of Æthelred. “Christian men and condemned persons are not to be sold out of the country,
at least not into heathen nations.”—Thorpe, fol. ed. p. 135.

A law of William I. was to the same effect.—R. Schmidt, Gesetze, p. 347.

45. F. W. Maitland, Domesday Book, p. 31.

46. Æthelbert. “If any one slay a ceorl’s hlf-æta, let him make bōt with vi. shillings.”—Thorpe, fol.
ed. p. 3.

47. Thorpe, 8vo ed. i. p. 626.

48. Thrupp, Anglo-Saxon Home, p. 127.

49. See Theodori liber poenitentialis. Thorpe, fol. ed. p. 288. Poenitentiale Ecberti, lib. ii. 3.
Thorpe, p. 368.

50. Compare Exodus xxi. 20, 21; “And if a man smite his servant, or his maid, with a rod, and he
die under his hand; he shall be surely punished.
“Notwithstanding, if he continue a day or two, he shall not be punished: for he is his money.”

51. Stubbs, Const. Hist. p. 89.

52. Omne damnum quod servus fecerit, dominus emendet.—Thorpe, fol. ed. p. 11.

53. Maitland, Domesday Book, p. 32.

54. Or he might be scourged thrice, temp. Æthelstan. See Thorpe, fol. ed. p. 88.

55. Laws of Æthelred. D. Wilkins, Leges Anglo-Saxonicae, p. 103. London, 1721.

56. By Alfred’s Dooms rape on a ceorl’s female slave was punished by a five-shilling bōt to the
ceorl; if a theow committed the offence, he might be emasculated.—Thorpe, fol. ed. p. 35.

57. Stubbs, Const. Hist. i. p. 25.

58. Thrupp, Anglo-Saxon Home, p. 131.

59. William Andrews, Old-Time Punishments, p. 146. Hull, 1890.

60. Thrupp, Anglo-Saxon Home, p. 144.

61. E. W. Robertson, Scotland, ii. p. 450.

62. Pollock and Maitland, Hist. ed. 1898, ii. p. 450.

63. See Thorpe, 8vo ed. vol. i. p. 579: “Si quis dominum suum occidet,” etc.

64. F. Lindenbrog, Codex legum antiquarum, p. 498.

65. For similar laws in ancient Wales and eighteenth-century America, etc., see Westermarck,
Moral Ideas, i. p. 518.

66. “Imprisonment,” say Pollock and Maitland, “would have been regarded in those old times as a
useless punishment; it does not” (as it was then employed and understood) “satisfy revenge, it

keeps the criminal idle, and do what we may it is costly.”—Hist. Eng. Law, ed. of 1895, vol. ii.
p. 514.

67. Grant Allen, Anglo-Saxon Britain, p. 47.

68. E. W. Robertson, Scotland, p. 295.

69. Laws of Ine. To fight in the king’s house rendered the offender liable to be put to death.—J.
Johnson.
Laws of Alfred. To fight in the presence of an archbishop meant a fine of 150 shillings.—
Thorpe, p. 32.
To fight in the house of a common man meant a mulct of thirty shillings, and six shillings to
the ceorl.—J. Johnson.

70. Thrupp, Anglo-Saxon Home, p. 148.

71. See example, temp. Cnut. Thorpe, fol. ed. p. 174.

72. J. Johnson, Ecc. Laws.

73. Thorpe, fol. ed. p. 174.

74. J. Johnson, Ecc. Laws.

75. Thorpe, Laws of Cnut, fol. ed. p. 169.

76. Ibid. p 213.

77. See Saxon Chronicle, J. Ingram’s ed. p. 295. London, 1823.

78. Stubbs, Const. Hist. i. p. 204.

79. Maitland, Domesday Book, p. 33.

80. Often of death for serious offences, but the prisoner’s goods were forfeited for felony; hence it
was to the profit of the government to have many felonies. See F. W. Maitland, Const. Hist.
Eng. p. 111, and J. Britton, Nichols’ ed. p. 35. Oxford, 1855.

81. “To them” (the subject people) “a new tribunal seemed only a new torment.”—L. O. Pike, Hist.
Crime, i. 134. London, 1873.

82. The hundreds were liable to be fined for undetected murders—as villages now are in India—
and also officers for neglect of duty; see T. Madox, History and Antiquities of the Exchequer,
chap. xiv. p. 539, etc. London, 1769. J. Britton, F. M. Nichols’ ed. p. 138. This liability was
abolished in the reign of Edward III.; see W. S. Holdsworth, Hist. p. 8.

83. T. Madox, Hist. Exch. i. p. 425, etc.

84. Maitland, Domesday Book, p. 52.

85. Infangthef, the right to hang a thief, “hand having and back bearing.” Utfangthef, the right to
punish a thief beyond the particular boundary.

86. Holdsworth, Hist. p. ii.; and see Stubbs, Const. Hist. i. 452, 453, etc.

87. “The lord exercised ... jurisdiction in civil and criminal suits which, with all the profits—for in
early times the pecuniary interests of justice formed no small part of the advantages of judicial
power—was conferred on him by the original gift.”—Stubbs, Const. Hist. i. p. 102, and
Holdsworth, 13, 14.

88. See Maitland, Domesday Book, p. 33.

89. Ibid. p. 83.

90. “So intimate is the connection of judicature with finance under the Norman kings, that we
scarcely need the comment of the historian to guide us to the conclusion that it was mainly for
the sake of the profits that justice was administered at all.”—Stubbs, Const. Hist. i. p. 438.

91. After Henry II. “a crime is no longer regarded as a matter merely between the criminal and
those who have directly suffered by his crime; it is a wrong against the nation.”—Maitland,
Const. Hist. p. 109, ed. of 1898.

92. L. O. Pike, History of Crime in England, i. p. 130.

93. In the period of the Civil War, however, the barons had made their castles robbers’ caves, from
which they raided the unhappy English. Vide The Saxon Chronicle for the year 1137.

94. See Stubbs, Charters, p. 143.

95. The expenses for gaols at Canterbury, Rochester, Huntingdon, Cambridge, Salisbury,
Malmesbury, Aylesbury, and Oxford are detailed in the Roll of 1166.

96. See John Lingard, Hist. Eng. ii. p. 619. London, 1849.

97. Pike, Hist. i. p. 130.

98. “Carcer ad continendos et non ad puniendos habere debeat.”—De Legibus, lib. iii. cap. vi. f.
105.

99. F. M. Nichols’ ed. p. 44.

100. And see 5 Hen. IV. c. 10.

101. In 1295 a law was passed by which a man should no longer suffer death or mutilation for
prison-breaking alone, unless his crime would have been so punished upon conviction. See
statute, De Fragentibus Prisonam, 23 Edward I., Record Commission. Statutes of the Realm,
vol. i. London, 1810.

102. W. J. Whittaker’s ed. p. 52.

103. In the reign of Henry III. the judges set forth every seven years.—Pike, Hist. Crime, p. 135;
and see G. J. Turner, Pleas of the Forest, p. xv. By 13 Ed. I. assizes were to be held three times
a year at most. In the early part of the nineteenth century the gaols in the provinces were
delivered only twice a year. See Blackstone, Commentaries, bk. iv. chap. xix.; J. Stewart’s ed.

p. 352. London, 1854. W. Crawford’s remarks in his Penitentiaries of the United States, p. 37.
London, printed for the House of Commons, 1834.

104. The gaol was his pledge or security that could find (or was allowed) none.—Glanville, J.
Beames’ ed. pp. 346, 348. London, 1812. For details as to who were or who were not
replevisable in the thirteenth century, see 3 Ed. I. c. 15 and 27 Ed. I. c. 3.

105. F. M. Nichols’ ed. p. 46.

106. Fourpence is mentioned as the gaoler’s fee in the Liber Albus (early fifteenth century), H. T.
Riley’s ed. p. 448. London, 1861.

107. On this point see F. A. Gasquet, Henry VIII. and the English Monasteries, p. 4. London, 1906.

108. Lib. iii. f. 137.

109. Nichols’ ed. p. 35.

110. See illustration given in Besant, Mediæval London, p. 349. 1906.

111. “If, however, they refused to plead, they would be pinioned down on the bare ground and fed
upon bread and dirty water; but they were not to eat on the day they drank, or drink on the day
they ate, etc.”—Nichols’ ed. p. 26.

112. “Vix permittitur heredibus quod vivant.”—De Legibus, lib. iii. f. 118.

113. Temp. Henry I., see W. Dugdale, Origines Juridiciales. London, 1680.
Richard, see J. F. Stephen, Hist. Crim. Law, i. p. 458. London, 1883.
Henry III., see W. Page, Early Assize Rolls, p. xviii. etc.

114. By the Assize of Northampton. See Stubbs, Const. Hist. i. p. 545.

115. 2 Hen. III., Carta de Foresta; and also 9 Hen. III. c. 10: “No man henceforth shall lose either
life or member for killing our deer.”

116. Sax. Chron., Ingram’s ed. p. 266.
Ibid. p. 295.
Mirror of Justice, Whittaker’s ed. p. 141.

117. J. C. Robertson, Materials for the History of Thomas Becket, vol. i. p. 156. London, 1875.
Referred to by Stephen, Hist. Crim. Law, i. p. 79.

118. Hist. Eng. Law, ii. p. 515.

119. Ibid. ii. p. 516.

120. For example, a fine of one mark (13s. 4d.) for rape.

121. See Mirror of Justice, Whittaker’s ed., Introduction, pp. xxiv., xxxv., and 1st ed. iii. c. 7.
Holdsworth, Hist. Eng. Law, p. 39.

W. Page, Early Assize Rolls, p. xx.

122. Of robbery by the judges, see Lingard, Hist. ii. p. 217.

123. For instance, at Northampton in 1323; see Coulton, Chaucer and his England, p. 284.

124. Pike, Hist. Crime, i. p. 288.

125. Riley’s ed. p. 448.

126. See Pike, Hist. Crime, i. p. 427.

127. Maitland, Const. Hist. p. 221, ed. 1908.

128. 22 Hen. VIII. c. 9.

129. W. Besant, Tudors, p. 380. London, 1904; and see 25 Hen. VIII. c. 14.

130. J. F. Stephen, Hist. Crim. Law, p. 477.

131. A man was boiled to death in 1531; a woman was burnt in 1571, and in 1575.—Holinshed,
Chron. pp. 926, 1226, 1262.

132. Besant, Tudors, p. 379.

133. J. F. Stephen, Hist. Crim. Law, p. 468.

134. Besant, Tudors, p. 380.

135. W. Andrews, Old-Time Punishments, p. 92.

136. Henry Brinklow’s Complaynt of Roderwyck Mors, J. M. Cowper’s ed. London, E. E. T.
Society, 1874.

137. See Holinshed, Chronicles, pp. 1081, 1082.
J. Wilkes, Enc. Londinensis, iii. p. 891. London, 1810.
E. C. S. Gibson, Life of John Howard, p. 47. London, 1901.

138. See Besant, Tudors, p. 387.

139. 39 Eliz. 4 and 5.

140. 7 Jac. I. c. 4.

141. Departmental Committee on Prisons. Minutes of Evidence, Appendix ii. p. 457. London, 1895.

142. As very early in the sixteenth century; see 19 Hen. VII. c. 10.

143. See John Brown, John Bunyan, His Life and Times, pp. 169, 182, etc.

144. The West answering the North: Relation of the Sufferings of George Fox, Edw. Pyot, and
William Salt, p. 34. Printed 1657.

145. As to the pits and dungeons of an old English prison, see Charles Creighton, History of the
Epidemics in Britain, p. 386. Cambridge, 1891.

146. 19 Car. II. c. 4.

147. The State of the Prisons, pp. 8 and 9. Warrington, 1780.

148. Many prisons had no yards or courts of any kind. See J. B. Bailey, The Condition of the Gaols
as described by John Howard, chap. ii. London, 1884.

149. Ibid. p. 16.

150. See E. F. Du Cane, Punishment and Prevention of Crime, chap. iii. p. 43, etc. London, 1885.

151. Hall’s Chronicle, p. 632, ed. of 1809.

152. P. 353. London, 1730.

153. Creighton, Epidemics, chap. vii. p. 383.

154. Vol. ii. p. 48. London, 1827.

155. State of the Prisons, p. 10, ed. of 1780.

156. Ibid. p. 13.

157. Ibid. p. 12.

158. There were always a few poor creatures who, although sentenced to transportation, were left
behind to remain in prison, a fate worse than exile and perhaps worse than death. See Dept.
Com., 1895, Appendix, p. 459.

159. “... Of the 160 offences referred to by Blackstone as punishable by death, four-fifths had been
made so during the reigns of the first three Georges.”—J. A. M. Irvine, Chambers’s
Encyclopædia, ii. p. 743, art. “Capital Punishment.” London, 1888.

160. James Mackintosh, Miscellaneous Works, p. 718. Speech on the state of the Criminal Law,
House of Commons, 2nd March 1819. London, 1851.

161. “The anecdotes which I have heard of this shameful and injurious facility I am almost ashamed
to repeat. Mr. Burke once told me that on a certain occasion when he was leaving the House
one of the messengers called him back, and, on his saying that he was going on urgent
business, replied: ‘Oh, it will not keep you a single moment; it is only a capital felony without
benefit of clergy.’”—Mackintosh, Miscellaneous Works, p. 718.

162. Mackintosh, Miscellaneous Works, p. 718.

163. There grew up, as an eminent judge of those days has declared, “a general confederacy of
prosecutors, witnesses, counsel, juries, judges, and the advisers of the Crown, to prevent the
execution of the criminal law.”—Sir William Grant, quoted by Mackintosh, p. 719.

164. Irvine in Chambers’s Encyclopædia, ii. p. 743.

165. Mackintosh, p. 718.

166. Reprinted in the Times, 18th January 1901.

167. Du Cane, Crime, pp. 35, 36.

168. Howard, State of the Prisons, p. 22.

169. See 8 & 9 Will. III. c. 27, A.D. 1697.

170. See, for instance, the removal of Governor Bambridge by 2 Geo. II. c. 32.
T. Bird, Letters from the Shades. London, 1729.
Re Governor Huggins, etc., see Report of a Committee of the House of Commons, pp. 25, 26,
27. London, 1729.

171. Gaol fees were abolished in 1774 by 14 Geo. III. c. 20.

172. J. M. D. Meiklejohn, Hist. Eng. ii. p. 276. London, 1890.

173. See The Tryal of William Acton, Deputy-Keeper of the Marshalsea Prison, p. 4, etc. London,
1729.
And also Cases in Parliament, 1684–1737. British Museum, 515, l. 5 (39), re Bambridge, etc.

174. Howard, p. 17.

175. Tryal of Acton, p. 5.

176. See Murray, English Dictionary, under “Bull,” iv. B.

177. See Report of the Committee of 1729, p. 9. Brit. Mus. Cat. 522, m. 9 (28).

178. There were seven trials for murder in 1730.—Du Cane, p. 36.

179. The old-time prisoners depended mainly upon their friends and upon outside charity for their
sustenance (vide Britton; Bracton, lib. iii., etc.). After the reign of Elizabeth they were
supposed to receive 1d. or 2d. a day, or seven to eight ounces of bread. (Du Cane, p. 40.)
From 1759, by 32 Geo. II. c. 28, each debtor was ordered to receive 2s. 4d. a week from his
detaining creditor, but Howard found (p. 6) that, in practice, they could not get it, and numbers
actually starved.

180. By an Act passed in 1784 (24 Geo. III. c. 54) the gaolers were to receive payment as
compensation for the loss of their former profits made out of alcohol, which they were thereby
forbidden to sell to prisoners from the year 1785.

181. Howard, p. 16.

182. Report of the Committee of 1729, p. 2.

183. Howard, p. 5.

184. Mayhew and Binny, “Criminal Prisons of London” (quoting from the Fifth Annual Report of
the Prison Discipline Society), p. 97. London, 1862.

185. Du Cane, p. 43.

186. London prisons (British Museum Catalogue, 6056, b. 74), bound pamphlets, p. x. London,
1789.

187. Du Cane, p. 41, etc.

188. E. B. Tylor in Ency. Brit. ninth ed. art. “Ordeal.”

189. For account of the elaborate ritual, see W. Besant, Mediæval London, vol. ii. chap. vi.
W. Dugdale, Origines Juridiciales, chap. xxix.

190. Stubbs, Charters, p. 71.

191. Besant, Mediæval London, ii. p. 193.

192. Thorpe, fol. ed. p. 517.

193. Glanville, J. Beames’ ed. p. 350, note.

194. Maitland, Const. Hist. p. 128.

195. Reeves, Hist. Eng. Law, i. p. 234. London, 1860.

196. Pike, Hist. Crime, p. 131.

197. Madox, Hist. Exchequer, i. p. 546.

198. Ency. Brit. art. “Ordeal,” p. 820, ninth ed.

199. E. A. Freeman, History of the Reign of William Rufus, i. pp. 156, 157. London, 1882.

200. P. Labbé, Sacrorum Conciliorum, tom. xxii. p. 1007. Venice, 1778.

201. Stubbs, Charters, p. 25.

202. Stubbs, Const. Hist. i. 314.

203. Unless he went to the ordeal, or, in a later period, to a jury. See W. Forsyth, History of Trial by
Jury, p. 202. London, 1852. Twiss’s Bracton, ii. 403.

204. Peers, on account of their position, and citizens of London, on account of their supposably
peaceful avocations and by charter, were exempt from having to accept a challenge.—
Blackstone, Commentaries, lib. iv.

205. The loss of certain teeth was looked upon as a handicap—the peasant fighters made a horrible
use of them. Vide H. C. Lea, Superstition and Force, p. 131. Philadelphia, 1878.

206. Lingard, Hist. Eng. ii. p. 224.

207. Reeves, Hist. i. p. 61.

208. Lingard, ii. p. 222.

209. Besant, Mediæval London, ii. p. 198.

210. Ibid. p. 196.

211. Twiss’s Bracton, ii. p. 405. London, 1879.

212. Lingard, ii. p. 223.

213. Lingard, Hist. p. 224.

214. Blackstone, bk. iv., Sharswood’s ed. ii. p. 348. Philadelphia, 1878.

215. Bracton, Twiss’s ed. p. 405.

216. It grew to be condemned by the Church. See, for instance, C. Valentinum, iii. c. 12, held A.D.
855.

217. Unhappily to be succeeded by a dreadful revival of torture all over Europe, where it was in full
blast in the fourteenth century, and in England from 1468. Having abandoned supernatural
means of extracting men’s secrets, Church and State made ruthless and pitiless use of more
material methods. The Inquisition took up torture, and the custom spread to the lay courts
towards the end of the thirteenth century. Consult, for instances, Lea, Superstition and Force,
pp. 421, 458; Maitland, Const. Hist. p. 221; Lea, History of the Inquisition in the Middle Ages,
i. p. 423, etc. New York, 1906.

218. Barnewall and Alderson, Report of Cases, i, pp. 405, 426, etc. London, 1818.

219. 59 Geo. III. c. 46.

220. See, for instance, Westermarck, Moral Ideas, ii. 628 seq.

221. J. Bingham, Antiquities of the Christian Church, iii. p. 203. Oxford, 1855.

222. Ibid. p. 204.

223. Ibid. pp. 205, 217.

224. Ibid. p. 213.

225. H. H. Milman, History of Latin Christianity, ii. p. 59. London, 1864.

226. Bingham, iii. pp. 209, 211.

227. By the Dooms of Alfred there was but a three days’ sanctuary in a mynster-ham. A fugitive was
not to be dragged from a church for seven days, though none were to bring him any food the
while.—Thorpe, fol. ed. pp. 27, 28, 29. If he delivered up his weapons, however, it appears he
might dwell in safety for thirty days, while his relations were got together to ransom him.—
Thorpe, p. 29; Reeves, i. p. 32. On this thirty days’ refuge allowed in the early Church, see

Bingham, iii. p. 207. A deliberate murderer might be plucked from the altar, just as by Hebrew
law.—Thorpe, p. 27.

228. Concilium Aurelianse, Labbé, tom. viii. p. 350.

229. J. L. Mosheim, Ecc. Hist. i. p. 461. London, 1863.

230. Migne, Patrologiae, tom. 216; “Regni Carraclae,” p. 1255.

231. Bingham, iii. p. 214.

232. A. Friedberg (Decretal Gregor. IX. lib. iii. tit. xlix. cap. vi.), Decretalium Collectiones, ii. pp.
655, 656. Leipzig, 1881.

233. John Johnson, Ecc. Laws, quoting Spelman, ii. p. 305.

234. The Statute 9 Ed. II. c. 10 (1315) is also to this effect.

235. Besant, Mediæval London, p. 201.

236. Besant, Mediæval London, p. 212.

237. Frequently Dover, where numbers congregated awaiting shipment. See Pike, Hist. Crime, i. p.
232.

238. Britton, lib. i. ch. xvii.

239. And see 9 Ed. II. c. 10: “They that abjure the realm shall be in Peace so long as they be in
Church or Highway.”

240. Blackstone, Commentaries, bk. iv., Sharswood’s ed. ii. p. 332. Philadelphia, 1878.

241. 22 Hen. VIII. c. 14.

242. As to branding, vide 21 Hen. VIII. c. 2.

243. A. P. Stanley, Westminster Abbey, p. 346. London, 1882.

244. Besant, Mediæval London, p. 202.

245. Ibid. p. 206.

246. Bingham, iii. p. 215.

247. Besant, p. 208.

248. Stanley, p. 346.

249. Besant, Mediæval London, p. 212.

250. 26 Hen. VIII. c. 13.

251. 27 Hen. VIII. c. 19.

252. 32 Hen. VIII. c. 12.

253. Stanley, p. 352.

254. 1 Jac. I. c. 25, s. 34.

255. 21 Jac. I. c. 28, s. 7.

256. 8 & 9 Will. III. c. 27, s. 15.

257. 9 Geo. I. c. 28.

258. 11 Geo. I. c. 22.

259. Ency. Brit. art. “Wager of Law.”

260. Lea, Superstition and Force, p. 23.

261. Ibid. p. 21.

262. C. Valentinum, iii. c. xi., A.D. 855.

263. Forsyth, p. 76.

264. Reeves, Hist. i. p. 33.

265. Holdsworth, Hist. i. p. 138.

266. Reeves, p. 33.

267. Holdsworth, p. 139.

268. Lea, Superstition, pp. 66, 81.

269. Holdsworth, Hist. i. p. 138.

270. Lea, p. 35.

271. Ibid. p. 33.

272. Ibid. p. 64.

273. 3 & 4 Will. IV. c. 42, s. 13.

274. S. Cheetham, History of the Christian Church during the First Six Centuries, p. 171. London,
1894.

275. Stubbs, Const. Hist. i. p. 267.

276. 1 Corinthians vi.

277. In A.D. 341 by the eleventh and twelfth Canons of the Council of Antioch; in 397 by the ninth
Canon of the Third Council of Carthage; and in 451 by the ninth Canon of the Council of

Chalcedon.

278. Lingard, Hist. ii. p. 120.

279. Cheetham, p. 171.

280. H. C. Lea, History of the Inquisition in the Middle Ages, i. p. 309. New York, 1906.

281. Canons of Councils, Papal Decrees, and the many Collections.

282. See Lingard, ii. 126.
After the appearance of the Collection of Ivo of Chartres (b. 1035, d. 1115),[283] and still more
upon the compilation of Gratian’s Decretals (A.D. 1151), they began to rival, if not surpass, the
Secular Courts in reputation and influence.[284] The Courts Christian were the defenders of
dogma; in those times, without right believing nothing else profited. The Church Courts also
enforced Christian morality. “The bishops,” says Archdeacon Cheetham,[285] “took cognizance,
as was natural, of matters which were rather offences against the moral law than against the
State, and sometimes succeeded in overawing even high-placed offenders.” “The doctrine of
penance,” says Mr. Thrupp, “dealt with a series of immoralities which the laws
disregarded.”[286]
J. Johnson, Laws and Canons, ii. p. 189, note F., ed. 1851.
N. Marshall, Penitential Discipline, p. 136.

283. Stubbs, Charters, p. 136.

284. Lingard, Hist. ii. p. 126.

285. History of the Christian Church, p. 171.

286. Anglo-Saxon Home, p. 254.

287. Lea, Inquisition in the Middle Ages, i. p. 312.

288. They would be brought before the Court by its apparitors, of whom there were many; citations
were not to be made through the vicars, rectors, or parish priests, lest the secrecy of the
confessional should become mistrusted and the people cease to confess their sins.—Vide
Archbishop Stratford, A.D. 1342, C. Lond. Can. 8. J. Johnson, Laws and Canons, ii. p. 371.
Chaucer has given us a specimen of one of those “moral” agents in his account of the
sumptnour or summoner.

289. As usual, blackmailing was not infrequently resorted to. Vide H. W. C. Davis, England under
Normans and Angevins, p. 209. London, 1909.

290. See S. Pegge, Life of Bishop Grosseteste, p. 183.

291. S. Pegge, Life of Bishop Grosseteste, p. 46.

292. Some years later Archbishop Boniface, in his Constitutions, declared (17) that the State must
not interfere with moral inquisitions. Vide J. Johnson, Laws and Canons, ii. p. 205, ed. 1851;
and observe “Note on Anselm’s Canons,” p. 28 of the same volume.

293. The visitations of the archdeacons were highly unpopular, creating any number of spies and
informers; see Ecclesiastical Courts Commission, p. xxiv. London, 1883.

294. 1 Cor. vi. 3.

295. Ibid. 2.

296. Rufinus, Hist. Ecc. lib. i. cap. ii. p. 184, ed. of Basel. 1611.

297. On the packing and intimidating of juries until, as Wolsey observed, “they would find Abel
guilty for the murder of Cain,” see W. Eden (Lord Auckland), Principles of Penal Law, p. 176.
London, 1771.

298. H. C. Lea, Studies in Church History, p. 171. Philadelphia, 1869.

299. C. Agathense, c. 32.

300. C. Epaonense, c. 11.

301. The same was also referred to by the eighteenth Canon of the Council of Verneuil about 755.

302. C. Matisconense, i. c. 7.

303. C. Matisconense, i. c. 8.

304. C. Aurelian, iii. c. 32.

305. C. Parisiense, v. c. 4.

306. Gregor. I. lib. vi. Epis. xi.

307. Haddan and Stubbs, Councils and Ecclesiastical Documents, i. p. 133. Canones Wallici, c. 40
(37). Oxford, 1869.

308. Lea, Studies, p. 178.

309. Lea, Studies, p. 179.

310. Ibid. p. 182.

311. Epis. xcvii. 70. Migne, Patrologiae, tom. 119, p. 1006.

312. C. Ravennense, c. 4.

313. For instance, by Charlemagne in 789 and at the Synod of Bamberg A.D. 1491; vide Lea,
Studies, pp. 178, 192, 196.

314. Privilegia Clericorum, Constitutio Frederici Imperitoris, p. iii. B. M. Cat. i. a. 6515,
Constitutio Caroli, 1498.

315. G. H. Pertz, Monumenta Germaniae Legum, tom. ii. p. 244. Hanover, 1837.
Lea, Studies, pp. 191, 196.

316. Ibid. pp. 191, 192.

317. P. F. Lecourayer, Histoire du Concile de Trente, tom. ii. p. 658; and see p. 585, etc. 1736.

318. For post-Tridentine claims, vide Lea, Studies, p. 216, etc.

319. Holdsworth, Hist. Eng. Law, iii. p. 253.

320. Even insidiatores viarum et depopulatores agrorum were ultimately allowed clergy by 4 Hen.
IV. c. 2, A.D. 1402.

321. Matthew Hale, Pleas of the Crown, ii. p. 333. London, 1800.

322. Lingard, Hist. ii. p. 192, etc.

323. Holdsworth, i. p. 382.

324. Lea, Studies, pp. 213, 218.

325. Lingard, ii. p. 127.

326. D. Rock, The Church of Our Fathers, i. p. 144. London, 1903.

327. J. F. Stephen, Hist. Crim. Law, i. p. 461.

328. A. S. Green, Henry II., p. 85. London, 1903.

329. Lea, Studies, pp. 178, 203.

330. Johnson, Laws and Canons, ii. p. 194.

331. 25 Ed. III. c. 4.

332. J. F. Stephen, Hist. Crim. Law, i. p. 461.

333. Meiklejohn, Hist. Eng. vol. i. p. 165. London, 1895.

334. Lord Auckland, Principles, p. 173.

335. Thomas Smith, De Republica Anglorum, Alston’s ed. p. 103. Cambridge, 1906.

336. D. Barrington, Observations on the More Ancient Statutes, p. 443.

337. Hale, Pleas of the Crown, ii. p. 372.

338. J. F. Stephen, Hist. Crim. Law, i. p. 460.

339. Pollock and Maitland, Hist. Eng. Law, i. p. 426.

340. W. Stanford, Plees de Coron., lib. ii. cap. 48. London, 1560.

341. Holdsworth, Hist. Eng. Law, i. p. 382.

342. J. F. Stephen, Hist. Crim. Law, i. p. 461.

343. See Bingham, Antiquities of the Christian Church, v. p. 459.

344. Concilium Tarragonense, c. 4, A.D. 516.
C. Autissiodorense, c. 34, A.D. 578.
C. Toletanum, xi. c. 6, A.D. 675.

345. Excerptiones Ecgberti, Arch. Ebor. 156.

346. Johnson, Laws and Canons, ii. p. 60.

347. C. Lat. iv. c. 18.

348. C. Toletanum, iv. c. 31, A.D. 633.

349. C. Autissiodorense, c. 33, A.D. 578.

350. As, for instance, Theodosius, fourth century; Emperor Henry IV., eleventh century; Henry II.,
twelfth century.

351. Thrupp, Anglo-Saxon Home, p. 238.

352. Ibid. p. 243.

353. King Æthelwulf, in the ninth century, obtained an ordinance from the Pope that no Englishman
was to be condemned to make a pilgrimage in irons outside his own country.—Lappenburg,
Saxon Kings, ii. 26. A pilgrim from Canterbury would be recognised by his carrying back a
bottle or a bell; a shell if he had arrived from Santiago de Compostela (Spain), and a palm from
the Eastern Land.—R. F. Littledale, Ency. Brit.

354. Thrupp, Anglo-Saxon Home, p. 256.

355. See W. J. Thoms, Early English Prose Romances, i. p. 31, etc. London, 1858.

356. Johnson, Laws and Canons, ii. p. 449.

357. So much would depend upon the view taken by the penitentiary. See, for instance, Charles
Reade’s historical story, The Cloister and the Hearth.

358. Usually for half the time, and often for three days in a week for the second half. Vide Pen.
Ecgberti, Arch. Ebor. etc.

359. Lea, Studies in Church History, p. 245.

360. Thorpe, fol. ed. pp. 280, 315.

361. See the Penitential of Archbishop Theodore of Canterbury (A.D. 673), Thorpe, p. 278.
In the year 1139 a Council of Lateran condemned murderers of the clergy to excommunication,
removable by the Pope alone (Labbé, tom. xxi. p. 530). Nevertheless we find Archbishop
Richard complaining of want of protection (Petrus Blesensis, Opera, Epistola 73, Giles’s ed. i.

p. 217, Oxford, 1847; also Hook, Lives of the Archbishops of Canterbury, ii. p. 577, London,
1862); and Henry II. provided lay penalties (Reeves, Hist. Eng. Law, i. p. 133; Lingard, Hist.
ii. p. 193; Carte, Hist. i. p. 689; C. H. Pearson, History of England during the Early and Middle
Ages, p. 511. London, 1867).

362. Vide Penitential of Theodore, De Temperantia Poenitentium, etc.

363. Penitential of Ecgberht, Archbishop of York (eighth century), Thorpe, p. 377.
“The common penance for murder” (ninth century) was seven to ten years.

364. J. Johnson, Laws and Canons, note E, ii. p. 11.

365. C. Ancyranum, c. 5, A.D. 314.
C. Nicaeni, c. 12, A.D. 325.
C. Chalcedonense, c. 16, A.D. 451.
C. Ilerdense, c. 5, A.D. 524.

366. For England, see Thorpe, i. p. 278; Johnson, Laws and Canons, ii. pp. 10, 11, note D.

367. Johnson, p. 446.

368. Marshall, Penitential Discipline, pp. 109, 110.

369. The king’s familiar friends and associates were to be received into the communion of the
Church and were not to be cast out, decreed a Council of Toledo.—C. Toletanum, xii. c. 3, A.D.
681; Labbé, tom. xi. p. 1030; Marshall, Penitential Discipline, p. 126.

370. C. Clovenhonense, cc. 26, 27, A.D. 747.

371. Maitland, Domesday Book, p. 281.

372. St. Ambrose, De Elia et Jejunio, c. xx.; Migne, Patrologiae, tom. xiv. p. 724.

373. See J. Johnson and B. Thorpe; also Lea, Middle Ages, i. pp. 464, 473.

374. Carte, Hist. i. p. 581. I think it was Herbert Spencer who remarked how completely mere
outward material performance or conformity could generally satisfy the mediæval claims.

375. 5 Rich. II. c. 5, A.D. 1382.
2 Hen. IV. c. 15, A.D. 1400.
2 Hen. V. c. 7, A.D. 1414.

376. C. Triburiense, c. 3, A.D. 895.
Lea, Studies, p. 384.
Stubbs, in Appendix II. Ecc. Courts Comm., 1883, pp. 55, 56.

377. He might even be proceeded against on suspicion of heresy if he continued contumelious. See
twenty-fifth session of the Council of Trent, Lecourayer, tom. ii. pp. 648, 653.

378. Stubbs, Const. Hist. iii. p. 374.

379. Chaucer, John Saunders’ ed. p. 83. London, 1889.
“Significavit is a Writ which issues out of the Chancery pon a Certificate given by the Ordinary
of a man that stands obstinately excommunicate by the space of forty days, for the laying him
up in prison without Bail or Mainprice, until he submit himself to the Authority of the
Church.” “And it is so called because Significavit is an emphatical word in the Writ.”—T.
Blount, Law Dictionary. London, 1717.

380. See A. Abram, Social England in the Fifteenth Century, p. 111 (London, 1909); also Chancery
Warrants for Issue, The Patent Rolls, etc.; J. Johnson, Laws and Canons, ii. p. 192, De
Excommunicato Capiendo, and p. 399; Holdsworth, Hist. i. pp. 358, 433.

381. Henry II. of England was severely scourged by eighty ecclesiastics; the bishops present gave
each five strokes, and every monk gave three. The king’s penance brought on illness.—Lea,
Middle Ages, p. 464; Meiklejohn, Hist. i. p. 102.

382. Bingham, Antiquities of the Christian Church, vi. p. 172.

383. Bingham, ii. p. 128.
I once saw a cell belonging to a Spanish prelate at Majorca; it was a little dark lock-up and was
untenanted.

384. For instance, Tinmouth Priory was employed as a prison by the abbots of St. Albans. See W.
Dugdale, Monasticum Anglicanum, iii. p. 309. London, 1846.
Bingham, vii. p. 43.
Ingulph’s Chronicle of the Abbey of Croyland. Riley’s ed. p. 98.

385. Lea, Middle Ages, i. p. 488.

386. Ibid. p. 490.
Charles Molinier, L’Inquisition au XIIIe et au XIVe siècle, pp. 435, 440, etc. Paris, 1880.
Concilium Albiense, c. 24, A.D. 1254.
Lea, Superstition and Force, p. 426.
Findings of the Commission of Cardinals sent by Pope Clement V. in 1306; see Molinier, p.
450, and B. Hauréau, Bernard Delicieux, p. 134, etc. Paris, 1877.

387. C. Tolosani, c. 11.

388. Lea, Middle Ages, i. p. 491.

389. C. Biterrense, c. 23, et C. Biterrense, A.D. 1233; De Custodia Claustria, Labbé, tom. xxiii. p.
275.

390. Lea, Middle Ages, i. p. 487.

391. Lea, Middle Ages, p. 486.

392. In 1234 a Council of Albi decreed that the holders of confiscated property of heretics should
make provision for the imprisonment and maintenance of its former owners.

393. For instance, in A.D. 1300 we find certain prisoners at Albi condemned “Ad perpetuum
carcerem stricti muri ubi panis doloris in cibum et aqua tribulationis in potum, in vinculis et
cathenis ferreis solummodo ministrentur.”—Molinier, p. 94, quoting Doat, tom. xxxv.

394. “We do with special injunction ordain that every bishop have one or two prisons in his
bishopric; he is to take care of the sufficient largeness and security thereof for the safe keeping
of clerks according to canonical customs that are flagitious, that is, caught in a crime or
convicted thereof. And if any clerk be so incorrigibly wicked that he must have suffered capital
punishment if he had been a layman, we adjure such an one to perpetual imprisonment....”—J.
Johnson, ii. pp. 207, 208; Constitutions of Archbishop Boniface, A.D. 1261.

395. Dugdale, Monasticum Anglicanum, vi. p. 238.

396. Lea, Middle Ages, p. 487.

397. James Stephen, Studies in Ecclesiastical Biography, p. 38. London, 1907.

398. J. W. Willis Bund, Episcopal Registers, ii. p. 182. Oxford, 1902.

399. H. T. Riley, Gesta Abbatum Monasterii Sancti Albani, i. p. 266. London, 1867.

400. History of the Inquisition in the Middle Ages, i. p. 487 and note; and see H. R. Luard, Annales
Monastici, t. ii. p. 296, t. iii. p. 76; F. W. Maitland, Law Quarterly Review, ii. p. 159.

401. Bund, Epis. Registers of the Diocese of Worcester, ii. p. 189.

402. Bingham, Antiquities of the Christian Church, vii. p. 18.

403. Ibid. p. 12.

404. Addis and Arnold, Cath. Dict. p. 276.

405. S. Lugio, Cath. Ency. iv. p. 678. New York, 1908.

406. Coulton, Chaucer and His England, p. 288.
Lea, Studies in Church History, p. 189.
“Degradation was a penalty rarely inflicted, since the Church was reluctant to admit that the
sacred office once conferred could be taken away for any offence short of heresy.”—Davis,
Normans and Angevins, p. 207.

407. Degraded clerks were forbidden to live in the world as laymen by a Council of Rouen.—C.
Rothomagense, c. 12, A.D. 1074.
Those who threw off their habit were not to be admitted into the army or into any convent of
clerks, but were to be esteemed excommunicate.—Lanfranc’s Canons, c. 12, A.D. 1071; J. J. ii.
9.

408. Lecourayer, Concile du Trente, tom. i. p. 543.

409. Stubbs, Ecc. Courts Comm., 1883, Appendix ii. p. 57.

410. A lay officer was supposed to be present to take over the fallen cleric into his custody.—Cath.
Ency. iv. p. 678.

411. C. Remense, A.D. 1157.

412. C. Oxoniense, A.D. 1166.

413. C. Turonense, A.D. 1163.

414. 2 Hen. IV. c. 15.

415. Lea, Hist. Inq. Middle Ages, i. p. 222.
A deacon was burned at Oxford in 1222, having been tried before Archbishop Langton for
embracing Judaism in order to marry a Jewess.[418] From that time until 1400 no one is said to
have been burned to death for heresy in England.—Maitland, Law Quarterly Review, ii. p. 153.
London, 1886.

416. Professor E. P. Evans throws an interesting side-light on this offence. “It seems rather odd,” he
observes, “that the Christian lawgivers should have adopted the Jewish code against sexual
intercourse with beasts, and then enlarged it so as to include the Jews themselves. The question
was gravely discussed by jurists whether cohabitation of a Christian with a Jewess, or vice
versa, constitutes sodomy. Damhouder (Prax. rer. crim. c. 96, n. 48) is of the opinion that it
does, and Nicolaus Boër (Decis, 136, n. 5) cites the case of a certain Johannes Alardus or Jean
Alard who kept a Jewess in his house in Paris and had several children by her; he was
convicted of sodomy on account of this relation and burned, together with his paramour, ‘since
coition with a Jewess is precisely the same as if a man should copulate with a dog’ (Döpl.
Theat. ii. p. 157). Damhouder includes Turks and Saracens in the same category.”—The
Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals, p. 152. London, 1906.

417. Lea, Middle Ages, i. pp. 220, 221, etc.

418. A pious old lady left a bequest to the city of London to defray the expenses of incinerating
misbelievers.—Meiklejohn, Hist. i. 223.

419. W. Stubbs, Charters, p. 136.

420. G. B. Adams, Political History, p. 270. London, 1905.

421. It was represented to him that in the nine years through which he had reigned innumerable
offences and one hundred murders had been committed by clerks who had escaped all
punishments save the light sentences of fine and imprisonment inflicted by their own courts.—
W. R. W. Stephens, The English Church, p. 165. London, 1901. William of Newburgh, lib. ii. p.
130, H. C. Hamilton’s ed. London, 1856.

422. In the thirteenth century there were, for instance, twelve clerks in the village of Rougham.—
Augustus Jessopp, Coming of the Friars, p. 84. London, 1889. See also J. E. Thorold Rogers,
Six Centuries of Work and Wages, i. pp. 24, 160, 161.

423. Carte, Hist. i. p. 581.

424. Eirikr Magnusson, Thomas’ Saga Erkibyskup, i. p. 144, note.

425. William FitzStephen; J. C. Robertson’s Materials for the History of Thomas Becket, iii. p. 45.
London, 1881.
David Hume, Hist. Eng. i. p. 391. London, 1818.

426. See Herbertus de Boseham; Robertson, Materials, iii. pp. 264, 265.

427. Magnusson, Thomas’ Saga Erkibyskup, i. p. 145.

428. William of Canterbury; Robertson’s Materials, i. pp. 12, 13.
Edward Grim; Robertson, ii. p. 375.
Anonymous; Robertson, iv. p. 24.
K. Norgate, England under the Angevin Kings, ii. p. 21. London, 1887.

429. R. de Diceto, Works, Stubbs’s ed. i. p. 313. London, 1876.

430. F. W. Maitland, Eng. Hist. Rev. vii. p. 226. London, 1892.

431. Stephens, Hist. Eng. Church, p. 166.

432. Nahum, i. 9.

433. Norgate, Angevin Kings, ii. p. 23.

434. Stephens, Hist. Eng. Church, p. 166.

435. Holdsworth, Hist. i. p. 382.

436. Pollock and Maitland, Hist. i. p. 442, and note 2, ed. of 1898.

437. James Gairdner, The English Church, p. 42. London, 1902.

438. Reeves, Hist. Eng. Law, iii. p. 41.

439. If a clerk were accused, the Crown got his goods till he had completed purgation, after which
they were usually returned (Hale, Pleas of the Crown, ii. p. 384). If, however, he was delivered
over absque purgatione, or if he had first pleaded guilty, the king retained them, and had the
produce of his lands for the prisoner’s life.—A. T. Carter, History of English Legal Institutions,
p. 255. London, 1906.

440. Johnson, Laws and Canons, ii. p. 208.

441. 2 Ed. I. c. 2.

442. 4 Ed. I. c. 5.

443. Following a Canon of the Council of Lyons, A.D. 1274. C. Lugd. c. 6.

444. For other instances of the dislike to remarriage, see Westermarck, Moral Ideas, ii. pp. 450, 451;
and E. S. Hartland, Primitive Paternity, i. p. 134.

445. Johnson, Laws and Canons, ii. p. 267.

446. 25 Ed. III. c. 4.

447. See, for instance, a law passed in 1378 (1 Ric. II. c. 15) against arresting priests during divine
service.

448. Archbishop Islip’s Constitutions, A.D. 1351. Johnson, Laws and Canons, ii. p. 414, etc.

449. See, for instance, F. C. Hingeston-Randolph, Register of John de Grandisson, Bishop of Exeter,
Part ii. p. 1118. London, 1897.

450. For instance, they could not be accused by disreputable persons; vide C. Carthag. A.D. 390;
Labbé, tom. iii. pp. 694, 870; C. Chalced. c. 21, A.D. 451; Labbé, tom. vi. p. 1229; C. Trident.
Ses. 13, c. 7, A.D. 1551. It was complained that the clergy could not be accused by the laity and
would not accuse each other.—Lea, Studies in Church History, pp. 208, 211.

451. For instance, Simon Fish in his Supplicacyon of Beggars, written about 1529, J. M. Couper’s
ed. p. 12. London, 1871.
Shakespeare, writing of the fifteenth century, refers to the matter:

... You know our king
Is prisoner to the bishop here, at whose hands
He hath good usage and great liberty.

Third Part of King Henry VI. iv. 5.

See also Hook, Archbishops of Canterbury, ii. p. 398.

452. J. C. Robertson, Materials, iv. p. 49; Epist. Nicolaus de Monte.

453. Coulton, Chaucer, p. 288.

454. Lea, Studies in Church History, p. 196.

455. Hale, Pleas of the Crown, ii. p. 384.

456. Pollock and Maitland, p. 444, ed. 1898.
Ibid. pp. 427, ed. 1895.

457. Riley, Chronica Monasterii S. Albani, iii. p. 48. See also Britton, Nichols’ ed. p. 27.

458. 4 Hen. IV. c. 3.

459. 1 Hen. VII. c. 4.

460. 4 Hen. VII. c. 13.

461. J. F. Stephen, Hist. Crim. Law, i. p. 463.

462. Holdsworth, Hist. i. p. 382.

463. 12 Hen. VII. c. 7.

464. 4 Hen. VIII. c. 2, A.D. 1512.

465. T. Rymer, Foedera, tom. xiv. p. 239. London, 1712.

466. Lea, Studies in Church History, p. 189.

467. 23 Hen. VIII. c. 11.

468. 25 Hen. VIII. c. 3.

469. 28 Hen. VIII. c. 1, s. 7.

470. “In 1533 unnatural offences, in 1541 witchcraft, were made felonies. In 1603 bigamy was
made a felony.”—Holdsworth, Hist. i. p. 388.

471. 18 Eliz. c. 7.

472. Special, and moral, prosecutions were carried out through the Court of Star Chamber (3 Hen.
VII. c. 1) (vide Lingard, Hist. vii. p. 377; Carter, Outlines of English Legal History, p. 101;
Hudson, Treatise on the Star Chamber) and by the hated Court of High Commission (1 Eliz. c.
1) (see Hale, Precedents and Proceedings in Criminal Cases, p. 1., and Ecc. Courts Comm.,
1883, p. xxxviii.), which imposed some enormous fines and inflicted various painful penalties,
till they, with the ecclesiastical courts, were overthrown in the year 1640 (16 Car. I. c. 10 and
11).

473. Blackstone, iv. p. 28.

474. Women received certain allowances by 21 Jac. I. c. 6 in 1623.

475. 10 & 11 Will. III. c. 23.

476. 5 Anne c. 6.

477. Carter, Hist. Eng. Legal Inst. p. 247, ed. 1902.

478. J. F. Stephen, Hist. Crim. Law, i. 463.

479. 4 Geo. I. c. 11.

480. Holdsworth, Hist. p. 383.

481. J. F. Stephen, Hist. Crim. Law, p. 463.

482. 19 Geo. III. c. 74, s. 3.

483. 7 & 8 Geo. IV. c. 28, s. 6, A.D. 1827.

484. Yet as Professor Menger expressed it, “Nothing can be so unequal as the equal treatment of
unequals.”

485. J. F. Stephen, Hist. Crim. Law, iii. p. 27.

486. William Andrews, Old-Time Punishments, p. 153.

487. Dictionary of National Biography. There was an Act of Henry VIII. which has been called the
whip with six strings, which may have some reference to the hangman’s usual weapon.

488. On the old convict ship Success.

489. See Murray, Dictionary, vol. iv.

490. “Hangman, I charge you to pay particular attention to this lady. Scourge her soundly, man;
scourge her till the blood runs down. It is Christmas—a cold time for madam to strip. See that
you warm her shoulders thoroughly.”—Mr. Justice Jeffreys, quoted in Andrews, Old-Time
Punishments, p. 154.

491. 57 Geo. III. c. 75.

492. See Statute of Labourers, 25 Ed. III. c. 2.

493. L. Jewitt, “The Pillory and who they put in it,” The Reliquary, i. p. 210, April 1861.

494. Besant, Tudors, p. 381.

495. Andrews, Old-Time Punishments, p. 68.

496. Jewitt, p. 213.

497. Ibid. p. 221.

498. 56 Geo. III. c. 138.

499. 7 Will. IV. and 1 Vict. c. 23.

500. Besant, Mediæval London, p. 354.

501. J. A. Rees, The Grocery Trade, p. 57. London, 1910.

502. W. Hudson, Treatise on the Court of Star Chamber, ii. p. 225.

503. Lea, Hist. Inq. Middle Ages, i. p. 441.

504. Hudson, Treatise on the Court of Star Chamber, p. 225.

505. James Gairdner, English Church, p. 53.

506. Pike, Hist. i. p. 237.

507. Barrington, Ancient Statutes, p. 422.

508. Andrews, Old-Time Punishments, p. 152.

509. Ibid. p. 140.

510. Jewitt, “Scolds and how they cured them,” Reliquary, October 1860.

511. Andrews, Old-Time Punishments, p. 45.

512. See Jewitt, “A few Notes on Ducking Stools,” Reliquary, January 1861.

513. Andrews, Old-Time Punishments, etc., etc.

514. Holdsworth, Hist. ii. p. 327.

515. At some of the American lynchings the injured woman applies a match to the wood upon
which the offending negro is to be burned to death.

516. “They died alone and unpitied,” says Lecky; “... their very kinsmen shrank from them as
tainted and accursed.”—History of Rationalism, p. 149. London, 1865.

517. Meetings of a more or less bacchanalian character really took place in Europe through the
middle ages, survivals of old rites and nature-worship. See Professor Karl Pearson’s long and
learned account of these in The Chances of Death. London, 1897.

518. These were often domestic pets or animals about the yard. Even feeding the sparrows on the
winter snow would have been dangerous for a suspected person. See kind of evidence sought
for by R. Bernard in his Guide to Grand Jurymen, p. 235. London, 1627, etc. The miserable
witches, in the agony of sleeplessness and torment, ultimately doing or saying anything that
was already expected of them. See, for instance, F. Hutchinson, An Historical Essay
concerning Witchcraft, pp. 37, 57. London, 1718.

519. On the power of suggestion and imagination, see, for instance, G. le Bon, Revue scientifique,
March 26 and April 2, 1910.

520. The whole hideous and devilish procedure is given by J. Sprenger and H. Institor in their
Malleus Malificarum, about 1485–89. Frankfort ed., 1580.
Paulus Grillandus, De sortilegiis, lib. 4, De questionibus et tortura. Lyons, 1533.
J. Bodin, De la démonomanie des sorciers. Paris, 1580.
R. Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft. London, 1584. B. Nicholson’s edition. London, 1886.
H. Boguet, Discours des sorciers. Lyons, 1608.

521. Esquirol gives this as a symptom in some forms of insanity. See E. K. Hunt’s translation of
Mental Maladies, p. 245. Philadelphia, 1845.
R. Scot, Descoverie Booke, ii. chaps, v.–viii.
Bodin, Démonomanie, p. 170.
James I., Daemonologie, p. 81.
H. Boguet, chap. xlvi.

522. The Cenci.

523. Historical Essay, p. 139.

524. See J. P. Migne, Encyclopédie théologique, vol. xlix. tome second, p. 72. Paris, 1848.
Charles Mackay has observed: “It was no unusual thing then, nor is it now, that in aged persons
there should be some spot on the body totally devoid of feeling,” p. 137. In Scotland there were

a number of witch-finders who were known as “common prickers,” p. 146.—Popular
Delusions, London, 1869.

525. Michael Dalton, The Countrey Justice, p. 242. London, 1618.
James I., Daemonologie, p. 80.
Matthew Hopkins quoted, p. 33, ante.
Sinistrari of Ameno Demoniality, p. 27. J. Liseux, trans. Paris, 1879.
D. Neal, History of New England, p. 137. London, 1747.

526. Hutchinson, Essay, p. 138.

527. T. Wright, Dame Alice Kyteler, London, Camden Society, vol. xxiv., 1843.

528. H. L. Stephen, State Trials, vol. i. p. 211. London, 1899.

529. Hutchinson, p. 34.

530. See long and interesting essay on witchcraft in the Ency. Brit. ninth ed.

531. The Act is quoted at length in R. Royston’s Advertisement to Jurymen of England, in which he
criticises del Rio’s and Perkins’ “proofs.”

532. Alluded to by Cotton Mather, The Wonders of the Invisible World. Boston, 1693.

533. James Williams, Ency. Brit. ninth ed. vol. xxiv. p. 622. Kincaid was one of the “common
prickers” or professional finders, who in those superstitious times were numerous.

534. For instance, Michael Dalton, The Countrey Justice, p. 242; Richard Bernard, A Guide to
Grand Jurymen, p. 240.

535. Whether the story of his immersion is true or not, he undoubtedly died despised and
discredited.

536. Hudibras, Part iii. chap. iii.

537. Coming down, may be, from the prehistoric mother cult. See Karl Pearson, Woman as Witch in
his Chances of Death.

538. Exorcism, etc. Paul Regnard, Les Maladies épidémiques de l’esprit, is full of engravings of old
pictures illustrating the point. Paris, 1887.

539. Although the Popes, such as John XXII., Innocent VIII., Julius II., and Adrian VI., legislated
on witches, the Protestants were quite as vindictive. See, for instance, J. Michelet, Life of
Luther, bk. v. chap. vi.: “The crazed, the halt, the blind, and the dumb are all possessed with
demons. Physicians who treat these infirmities as arising from natural causes are fools who
know not the power of the devil.” We shall deal later with the works of Puritan divines in
England and America.

540. Chapters xi., xiv., etc.; French edition of 1579.

541. This theory was advanced by George Gifford in A discourse of the subtill practices of Devilles
by witches and sorcerers, etc. London, 1587.

542. A dialogue concerning witches and witchcraft. In which is laid open how craftily the Devill
deceiveth not only the witches but many others. London, 1603. And by John Webster, who was
sceptical of the miraculous in his Displaying of supposed Witchcraft, 1677.

543. In 1609 a terrible commission scourged the regions round Bordeaux and Labourt in Western
France. See P. de l’Ancre, Tableau de l’inconstance den Mauvais Anges, 1612. Under Louis
XIV. the lurid Chambre Ardente was set up in 1679, and lasted till 1682. La Reynie, the
Lieutenant-General of Police, was an active inquisitor. See F. Funck-Brentano, Princes and
Poisoners; G. Maidment, trans. London, 1901.

544. Cautio Criminalis, 1631.

545. Saducisimis Triumphatus, 1681.

546. In Dutch, 1681; French translation, Le Monde enchanté. Amsterdam, 1684.

547. The Certainty of the World of Spirits. London, 1691.

548. The Wonders of the Invisible World: Observations upon the Nature, the Number, and the
Operations of the Devils.

549. R. Calef, More Wonders of the Invisible World. London, 1700.

550. D. Neal, History of New England.—“The prisons were hardly able to hold the number of the
accused.”

551. As it did as late as 1861, round the little village of Morzines in Savoy; see A Constans, Une
Relation sur une épidémie d’hystério-démonopathie. Paris, 1863.
Dr. R. Madden gives a long account of various historical outbreaks in his Phantasmata, chap.
x. “Maniacal Epidemics, etc.” London, 1857.
E. Pronier, Étude sur la contagion de la Folie. Lausanne, 1892.
L. F. Calmeil, De la Folie. Paris, 1845.

552. An Historical Essay concerning Witchcraft.

553. Lecky, History of Rationalism.

554. One mediæval writer was said to have estimated the exact number of the various devils, which
he stated as 7,405,926; see Jules Garinet, Histoire de la Magie, p. xxviii. Paris, 1818. Another
declared that there were six principal genera of demons; R. Madden, Phantasmata, p. 293.
Another author puts the devils at 2,665,866,746,664; see P. Carus, History of the Devil, p. 346.
London, 1900.

555. “Quae quidam nefandissima opera si non vere fierent, sed delusoria, vane contra ea fuissent
promulgatae leges et in legum ipsarum auctores, etiā in ipsum Deum, ista retorqueretur vanitas;
quod extrema blasphemia est.”—B. de Spina, Quaestio de strigibus, p. 8. Rome, 1576.

556. Sortilège, p. 599. Paris, 1622.

557. A Tryall of Witches, 10th March 1664, Sir Matthew Hale, Kt. Appendix by C. Clark, p. 20.
London, 1838.

558. State Trials, i.

559. Saducismus Triumphatus.

560. The Roman Catholic view of sorcery and evil spirits is treated at length by R. R. Madden,
Phantasmata, chap. ix.

561. A. Chalmers, Biographical Dict. art. “Cotton Mather.” London, 1815.

562. “We cannot help lamenting that a sect among us looks upon the abolition of the penal statute
against witchcraft not only as an evil but as a sin.... The Seceders published an Act ... in 1743
(reprinted at Glasgow, 1766). In this Act is contained the annual confession of sins.... Among
the sins national and personal there confessed are ... (that) the penal statutes against witchcraft
have been repealed by Parliament, contrary to the express law of God.”—H. Arnot, Criminal
Trials in Scotland, p. 370. Edinburgh, 1785.

563. Lecky, History of Rationalism, p. 134.

564. Arminian Magazine, v. p. 366. London, 1782.

565. Dr. H. More employed the same argument in his Antidote against Atheism, lib. iii. chap. ii.
London, 1653.

566. Lay Sermons. London, 1870.

567. H. L. Stephen, State Trials.

568. History of Rationalism, chap. i.

569. J. Williams, Ency. Brit., ninth ed. art. “Witchcraft.”

570. Mackay, Delusions, pp. 184, 187, etc.

571. History of Rationalism, p. 4, etc.

572. See article on the case by E. F. Benson, Nineteenth Century, vol. xxxvii. June 1895. A
somewhat similar case occurred at Tarbes in 1850.—History of Rationalism, p. 4.

573. “What sort of distemper ’tis shall stick the body full of pins?”—Quoted by Calef, More
Wonders, p. 5.

574. Scot quotes a ghastly passage from Grillandus, who writeth “that when witches sleepe and feel
no paine upon the torture, Domine labia mea aperies should be said, and so, saith he, both the
torment will be felt and the truth will be uttered.—Discoverie of Witchcraft, p. 17. And we find
in del Rio: “Narravit mihi ... anno 1599 captam puellulam strigatricem, quae nec pedum
ustulationem saevissimam, nec flagra validissima sentiebat; donec Sacerdos cujusdam monitu
illi Agni benedicti ceream imaginem in collum injecere, tum enim vi sacra amuleti daemonis
praestigiosa ludibria depulsa et illa vim doloris coepit persentiscere.”—Disquisitionum

magicarum, p. 184. Venice, 1616. See also E. Gurney, Phantasms of the Living, p. 181, who
considers the insensibility to pain may have been due sometimes to auto-hynotism.

575. Mentioned, for instance, in Twelfth Night.

576. Les sorcières furent les sages-femmes et les sorciers les médecins du moyen âge.—P. Christian,
Histoire de la magie, p. 400. Paris, ? 1871.

577. E. Gurney, Phantasms of the Living, p. 183.

578. Lecky, History of Rationalism, p. 77.

579. R. Calef, the opponent of Cotton Mather, quotes an instance of this kind. One Margaret Rule,
having been seized with fits, “... some of the neighbours were forward enough to suspect the
rise of the mischief in a house hard by, where lived a Miserable Woman who had been formerly
imprisoned on the suspicion of witchcraft, who had frequently cured very painful hurts by
muttering over them certain charms which I [? C. M.] shall not endanger the Poysoning of my
Reader by repeating.”—More Wonders of the Invisible World, p. 3. Boston, 1700.

580. See O. M. Hueffer, The Book of Witches. London, 1908.

581. See action of Richard III.

582. The full indictment against Lord Hungerford, who was beheaded on Tower Hill along with
Thomas Cromwell, by Henry VIII.

583. P. de l’Ancre, Seconde Considération. As to the kind of offences “qui se trouvent enveloppés
dans le sortilège,” Tableau de l’inconstance des Mauvais Anges. Paris, 1612.

584. J. Bodin, Démonologie, p. 60. Paris, 1580.

585. Shamanism, etc. See, for instance, Elie Reclus, Primitive Folk, pp. 68, 70. London, 1889.

586. The most tainted or prejudiced evidence was received in these kinds of cases. See Concilium
Biterrense of A.D. 1246, c. 12. Labbé, tom. xxiii. p. 718.

587. Scot, Discoverie, bk. i. chap. iii.

588. Mostly poor, miserable old women, Glanvil admits.—Saducismus, p. 29.

589. “None ever talked to themselves who were not witches,” asserted one of the common prickers.
—Mackay, Delusions, p. 147.

590. Especially as they often pretended, or really believed in, powers and curses, and, being quite
helpless on the material side, invoked the aid of supernatural terrors to get assistance and be
looked upon with fear.

591. Various persons accused of witchcraft, says Boguet, “ont confessé qu’ils faisoient la gresle en
Sabbat afin de gaster les fruicts de la terre.”—Discours des sorciers, p. 144. Storms were
supposed to be occasioned by the devils. “Telle est l’origine de l’habitude de sonner les cloches
pendant les orages.”—L. F. A. Maury, La Magie, p. 102. Paris, 1860.

592. Bodin, Démonologie, p. 171.

593. Scot, Discoverie, p. 17. And this was also practised on a prisoner accused of sorcery before
James I.—Lecky, History of Rationalism, p. 114.

594. One of the early inquirers as to the witch trials took a friend in with him to witness a torturing.
As an experiment, he asked the prisoner if his companion, an entire stranger, had not been one
of her accomplices, and the poor creature moaned out that he had.

595. “Le diable est si bon maistre que nous n’en pouvons envoyer si grand nombre au feu, que de
leurs cendres il n’en renaisse de nouveau d’autres.”—Florimonde de Raemond, Antichrist, p.
103. Lyons, 1597.

596. It became a common prayer with women of the humbler class that they might not live to be
old. It was sufficient to be aged, poor, or half-crazed to ensure death at the stake or on the
scaffold.—Mackay, Delusions, p. 116.

597. History of Rationalism, p. 3.

598. Mackay, Delusions, p. 159.

599. Lecky, History of Rationalism, p. 4.

600. Quoted by W. B. Gerish, A Hertfordshire Witch. London, 1906.

601. Mackay, Delusions, p. 139.

602. H. C. Lea, History of the Inquisition in Spain. New York, 1907.

603. W. F. Poole, Salem Witchcraft. Boston, 1869.

604. 300,000 women are said to have been slaughtered since Innocent’s Bull of 1484. See an
important article in Chamber’s Encyclopædia, x. p. 698, ed. of 1901.

605. F. de Raemond, L’Antichrist, p. 102.
One writer estimated the number of sorcerers living in Europe at 1,800,000. See Calmeil, tom.
i. p. 217.

606. James Howell, Familiar Letters, 1688.

607. Scot, Discoverie, p. 16.

608. Ency. Brit. ninth ed. vol. xxiv. p. 622.

609. “On the enactment of the statute to repeal the law, vanished all those imaginary powers so
absurdly attributed to old women oppressed with age and poverty.”—H. Arnot, Criminal
Trials, p. 369.

610. The late Mr. Gurney, of the Psychical Research Society, found, after a most extensive
investigation, “a total absence of respectable evidence, and an almost total absence of any first-
hand evidence at all, for those phenomena of magic and witchcraft which cannot be accounted

for as the results of diseased imagination, hysteria, hypnotism, and occasionally, perhaps,
telepathy.”—Phantasms of the Living, i. p. 172.

611. See E. B. Tylor, Primitive Culture, ii. p. 130.

612. J. B. Tuke in the Ency. Brit.

613. E. Westermarck, The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas, i. p. 269.

614. Westermarck, Moral Ideas, i. p. 270.

615. E. B. Tylor, Primitive Culture, ii. p. 117.

616. See, for instance, the story called “The Sleeper Awakened” in the Arabian Nights.

617. The severities to which the insane were subjected by various tribes are mentioned by
Westermarck in Moral Ideas, i. p. 271.

618. John Conolly, Treatment of the Insane, p. 4. London, 1856.

619. F. Beach, Psychology in John Hunter’s Time; “they served as a sport to visitors at assizes, fairs,
and other times,” p. 4. Hunterian Oration. London, 1891.

620. For an account of these wandering Tom o’ Bedlams, see Isaac D’Israeli, Curiosities of
Literature, ii. p. 343. London, 1849.

621. “Come, march to wakes and fairs and market-town. Poor Tom, thy horn is dry.”—Lear, iii. 6.

622. Lear, iii. 4.

623. Walter Besant, London in the Eighteenth Century, p. 378. London, 1902.

624. This lasted right into the nineteenth century; see D. H. Tuke, Chapters in the History of the
Insane, p. 128. London, 1882.

625. See, for instance, W. Besant, London in the Time of the Stuarts, p. 236. London, 1903. And for
a particularly filthy mixture advised “For a man haunted by apparitions,” Cockayne, i. p. 365.

626. Oswald Cockayne, Leechdoms, Wort Gunning, and Starcraft, pp. 361, 365. London, 1864.

627. Cockayne, pp. 101, 161, 169.

628. Cockayne, i. p. 249.

629. Tylor, Primitive Culture, ii. p. 127.

630. Joseph Bingham, Antiquities of the Christian Church, i. p. 322.

631. Bingham, p. 323.

632. F. A. Gasquet, Henry VIII. and the English Monasteries, p. 463.

633. There were, says Maury, “de véritables litanies d’anathèmes contre Satan.”—La Magie, p. 319.

634. J. Bingham, Antiquities of the Christian Church, i. p. 321. See also Paul Verdun, Le Diable
dans la vie des saints, p. 2; Ency. Brit. ninth ed. vol. viii. p. 806.

635. “The so-called Fourth Council of Carthage (anno 396) prescribes a form for the ordination of
exorcists the same in substance as that given in the Roman Pontifical, and used at this day.”—
Addis and Arnold, Catholic Dictionary, art. “Exorcism.” London, 1903.
A man who was said to have been possessed by seven devils was exorcised by seven
clergymen at the Temple Church, Bristol, in 1788.—Tylor, Primitive Culture, ii. p. 128. See
also L. A. Maury, La Magie, p. 331.

636. Already in the fifth century Pope Innocent I. forbade the exorcists from exercising their
ministry without the express permission of the bishop, and that order is in force. See also Louis
Duchesne, Christian Worship, M. L. Maclure’s trans. p. 349. London, 1904.

637. Addis and Arnold, Cath. Dict. p. 444.

638. Or this prayer of Pope Leo XIII.; “S. Michel Archange ... repoussez en enfer par la vertu divine
Satan, et les autres esprits mauvais, qui errent dans le monde cherchant des âmes à perdre.”
Quoted by P. Verdun, ii. p. 314.

639. D. H. Tuke, Hist. Insane, p. 14.

640. F. Beach, Psychology in John Hunter’s Time, p. 2.

641. L. A. Maury, La Magie, p. 329.

642. Cockayne, Leechdoms, ii. bk. iii. p. 335.

643. W. A. F. Browne, What Asylums were, are, and ought to be, p. 101. Edinburgh, 1837.

644. See Tylor, Primitive Culture, i. p. 258.
R. Routledge, Hist. Science, p. 5. London, 1881.
Edward Carpenter, The Art of Creation, p. 36. London, 1904.

645. It may be interesting to compare 1 Kings xxii. 20.
John Lubbock (Lord Avebury), Origin of Civilisation, p. 32. London, 1889.

646. Certain savages mentioned by Tylor endeavoured to stay the progress of small-pox germs after
this fashion.—Primitive Culture, ii. p. 115.

647. See, for instance, Abbot Richalmus, Liber revelationum de insidiis et versutiis daemonum
inversus homines.

648. “... but as I knew it was the Devil,” wrote Luther, “I paid no attention to him and went to
sleep.”

649. Primitive Culture, i. p. 409.

650. E. B. Tylor, Ency. Brit. ninth ed. vol. vii. p. 63, etc.

651. Cheyne and Black, Ency. Bib. art. “Satan,” by Gray and Massie.

F. T. Hall, The Pedigree of the Devil. London, 1883.
J. Tulloch in Ency. Brit. ninth ed. art. “Devil.”

652. Satan, said Tertullian, is God’s ape. He was indeed supposed to possess a tail; this might be
severed, but it would grow again.

653. A. Reville, The Devil, pp. 40, 42. London, 1871.

654. L. W. Cushman, The Devil and the Vice. London, 1897.

655. Tylor, Primitive Culture, p. 77.

656. P. Verdun, Le Diable dans la vie des saints, p. 97.

657. S. Baring Gould, Lives of the Saints, v. p. 278. London, 1897.

658. P. Carus, The History of the Devil, pp. 255, 256. London, 1900.

659. John Ashton, The Devil in Britain and America, p. 87. London, 1896.

660. Carus, The History of the Devil, p. 343.

661. R. Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, Pt. i. sec. ii. p. 57, ed. 1806.

662. Maury, La Magie, p. 310.

663. The same idea is found among many savages. In a certain tribe referred to by Dr. Tylor, “The
dancing of women by demoniacal possession is treated ... by the doctor thrashing them soundly
with a stick, the demon, and not the patient, being considered to feel the blows.”—Primitive
Culture, ii. p. 124.

664. See, for instance. Abbot Richalmus, capud xxvi. De efficacia salis et aquae.

665. D. H. Tuke, History of the Insane, p. 21.

666. In many ancient drawings they are depicted blown from the mouth, little black monsters
mingled in a cloud; there were other manners of egress.

667. The Scarlet Letter, chap. iv.

668. The people even of those early days, say Maury, “bien qu’attribuant la folie à une cause
imaginaire n’en avaient pas moins connu que c’était une véritable maladie.”—La Magie, p.
309.

669. Chap. xxxvii. London, 1542.

670. Twelfth Night, Act iii. Sc. 4.

671. W. Besant, London in the Eighteenth Century, p. 536.

672. W. E. H. Lecky, History of England in the Eighteenth Century, vi. p. 257. London, 1887.

673. Andrew Halliday, Lunatic Asylums, p. 10. London, 1828.

674. W. A. F. Browne, What Asylums were, p. 105.

675. J. Conolly, Treatment of the Insane, p. 7.

676. See M. Esquirol, Mémoire sur la Maison Royale de Charenton, p. 10.

677. D. H. Tuke, Hist. p. 52.

678. W. Besant, London in the Time of the Stuarts, p. 237.

679. J. B. Tuke, art. “Insanity,” Ency. Brit. ninth ed.

680. Many asylums were built under the Act of 1808, but before that the pauper patients had been
“crowded into the damp dungeons of our public workhouses, or shut up in houses of detention
and ill-regulated prisons.”—A. Halliday, Lunatic Asylums, p. 10.

681. Treatment of the Insane.

682. Oscar Wilde, Ballad of Reading Gaol, p. 24.

683. Robert Jones, An Inquiry into the Nature of Nervous Fevers. London, 1785.

684. W. Cullen, First Lines of the Practice of Physic, iv. p. 153. Edinburgh, 1789.

685. Cullen, p. 171.

686. Ibid. p. 164.
See also R. Mead, Monita et praecepta medica, p. 67; he says, however, that fast binding is
sufficient. London, 1751.

687. Page 149, ante. Dr. Haslam flogged lunatics at stated periods to avert outbreaks.—Conolly, p.
12.

688. D. H. Tuke, Hist. p. 107.
F. Beach, Psychological Medicine. He also alludes to John Wesley’s Prescriptions, p. 6, etc.
Andrew Wynter, The Borderland of Insanity, J. M. Granville’s ed. p. 70. London, 1877.

689. “The vagrant action of the limbs was suppressed, but the source of irritation in the brain was
left out of consideration.”—Conolly.

690. Quoted by Beach, Hunterian Oration, 1891.

691. W. Massie, A History of England during the Reign of George III., iii. p. 207. London, 1865.
See also J. M. D. Meiklejohn, Hist. Eng. Pt. ii. p. 330.

692. Massie, Hist. p. 208.

693. Wynter, Insanity, p. 80.

694. J. H. Jesse, Memoirs of the Life of George III., iii. pp. 95 and 274. Later on he was placed in
the better care of Dr. Willis, a clergyman who was much celebrated for his management of mad
people; see Jesse, iii. p. 90, etc.

695. Hunterian Oration, p. 5.

696. Besant, London in the Eighteenth Century, p. 377. See also Charles Reade’s book, Hard Cash.

697. See Conolly’s description of the old-time reception of a private patient.—Treatment of the
Insane, p. 138.

698. D. H. Tuke, Hist. p. 171.

699. R. Gardner Hill, Lunacy; its Past and its Present, p. 7. London, 1870.

700. R. Gardner Hill, p. 6.

701. J. B. Sharpe, Report and Minutes of Evidence on the Madhouses of England; evidence of G.
Higgins, pp. 12 and 13; of R. Fowler, p. 308; and of H. Alabaster, p. 326. London, 1815.

702. Edinburgh Review, xxviii. p. 445. Edinburgh, 1817.

703. Jonathan Gray, History of York Asylum, p. 12. York, 1815.

704. See Conolly’s amazing denunciation in his Treatment of the Insane.

705. A female patient was got with child by the head keeper; he was subsequently given a piece of
plate, and kept a private madhouse of his own; see Sharpe, Report and Min. of Ev. p. 14.

706. Gray, chap. iv.; ibid. p. 26; Beach, p. 4.

707. S. W. Nicoll, An Enquiry into the Present State and Visitation of Asylums, p. 10, etc. London,
1828.

708. Sharpe, p. 12; Gray, p. 23.

709. Sharpe, Report and Min. of Ev. pp. 277, 290, 297.

710. Ibid. p. 46.

711. For instance, at Bethnal Green Asylum.—Beach, p. 12.

712. As late as 1837.—Tuke, Hist. p. 81.

713. Sharpe, p. 46.

714. Ibid. p. 85.

715. Ibid. p. 48.

716. See Besant, London in the Eighteenth Century, where a print is given of this prisoner in his cell
at p. 375.

717. Treatment of the Insane, p. 28.

718. Sharpe, Report and Min. of Ev. p. 120.

719. Ibid. p. 59.

720. Tuke, Hist. p. 153.

721. Sharpe, Report and Min. of Ev. p. 68.

722. For an account of some of these, especially as used in Portugal into later times, see G. A.
Tucker, Lunacy in Many Lands, pp. 16, 1346, etc. Sydney, 1887.

723. John Haslam, Observations on Madness, p. 317. London, 1809.

724. Besant, London in the Eighteenth Century, p. 377. There is also a reproduction of Hogarth’s
“Scene in Bedlam” from the “Rake’s Progress.”

725. R. Gardner Hill, A Concise History of the Non-Restraint System, p. 139. London, 1857.

726. W. A. F. Browne, p. 119.

727. One large asylum is said to have made £400 a year from exhibiting lunatics, but this would
probably not include the keepers’ tips; see Tuke, Hist. p. 73.

728. Conolly, p. 33. See also P. Pinel, Traité Médico-philosophique sur l’Aliénation Mentale, p. 65.
Paris, An IX.
J. B. Tuke, Ency. Brit. ninth ed. vol. xiii. p. 111.

729. See E. Westermarck, Moral Ideas, i. p. 274.

730. H. W. Carter, Principal Hospitals, p. 42. London, 1819.

731. P. Pinel, Traité, p. 64.

732. A. Halliday, Lunatic Asylums, p. 76.

733. M. Esquirol, Mémoires de Charenton, pp. 46, 48.

734. F. Beach, p. 11.
J. Conolly, p. 10.
R. Gardner Hill, Concise Hist. p. 141.

735. Animadversions on the Present Government of York Asylum. York, 1788. It deals mainly with
the question of finance.
Edinburgh Review, vol. xxviii. p. 433.
These produced A Letter from a Subscriber to the York Lunatic Asylum. York, 1788, etc.

736. He died in 1797, and an inscription was erected to him in Westminster Abbey. See Dict. Nat.
Biog., and Jonathan Gray, History of York Asylum, p. 18.

737. Samuel Tuke, Description of the Retreat, p. 22. York, 1813.

738. The Description of the Retreat near York, already alluded to.

739. To the York Herald, dated September 23, 1813. It was signed merely “Evigilator,” but had been
written by Dr. Best, the head of the York Asylum.
See J. Gray, Hist. p. 28; also D. H. Tuke, Hist. pp. 129, 148.

740. Edinburgh Review, vol. xxviii. p. 433. Edinburgh, 1817.

741. S. W. Nicoll, An Enquiry, p. 11; and see Jonathan Gray, Hist. p. 31.

742. D. H. Tuke, Hist. p. 79.

743. J. Gray, Hist. chap. vi.

744. D. H. Tuke, p. 161.

745. D. H. Tuke, p. 157.

746. Nicoll, p. 21.

747. D. H. Tuke, Hist. p. 162.

748. Ibid. p. 173.

749. J. B. Tuke, Ency. Brit. ninth ed.; D. H. Tuke, Hist. p. 85; R. Gardner Hill, Lunacy, p. 5.

750. See, for instance, Hunterian Oration, 1891, etc.

751. R. Gardner Hill, Lunacy, p. 42.

752. Andrew Wynter, p. 100.

753. Hill, pp. 87, 88.

754. Halliday, Lunatic Asylums, p. 2.

755. F. Willis, A Treatise on Mental Derangement, p. 6. London, 1823.

756. Lunatic Asylums, p. 2.

757. W. A. F. Browne, p. 4.

758. Borderland of Insanity, p. 11.

759. Alexander Gibson, in Ency. Brit. ninth ed. art. “Insanity (Law).”

760. “That” (kleptomania) “is one of the diseases I was sent here to cure,” a certain judge is said to
have observed; but he did not cure it.

761. One of these legal tests had been a knowledge of the multiplication table. W. A. F. Browne, p.
3.

762. The “robust” attitude has been shown by Dickens. “That young Pitcher’s had a fever.” “No!”
exclaimed Mr. Squeers. “Damn that boy, he’s always at something of that sort.” “Never was
such a boy, I do believe,” said Mrs. Squeers; “whatever he has is always catching too. I say it’s
obstinacy, and nothing shall ever convince me that it isn’t. I’d beat it out of him.”—Nicholas
Nickleby, chap. vii.

763. D. H. Tuke, Hist. p. 96.

764. W. Tallack, Penological and Preventive Principles, pp. 249, 250. London, 1896.

765. Departmental Committee on Prisons Report, p. 8. London, 1895.

Transcriber’s Notes:
Missing or obscured punctuation was silently
corrected.
Typographical errors were silently corrected.
Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation were made
consistent only when a predominant form was found
in this book.

*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PENAL METHODS
OF THE MIDDLE AGES: CRIMINALS, WITCHES, LUNATICS ***

Updated editions will replace the previous one—the old editions will
be renamed.

Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright
law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works,
so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United
States without permission and without paying copyright royalties.
Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license,
apply to copying and distributing Project Gutenberg™ electronic
works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG™ concept and
trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not
be used if you charge for an eBook, except by following the terms of
the trademark license, including paying royalties for use of the Project
Gutenberg trademark. If you do not charge anything for copies of this
eBook, complying with the trademark license is very easy. You may
use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as creation of derivative
works, reports, performances and research. Project Gutenberg eBooks
may be modified and printed and given away—you may do practically
ANYTHING in the United States with eBooks not protected by U.S.
copyright law. Redistribution is subject to the trademark license,
especially commercial redistribution.

START: FULL LICENSE

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG™ LICENSE
PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK

To protect the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting the free
distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work (or
any other work associated in any way with the phrase “Project
Gutenberg”), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
Gutenberg License available with this file or online at
www.gutenberg.org/license.

Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing
Project Gutenberg electronic works

1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg electronic
work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to and accept
all the terms of this license and intellectual property
(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all
the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
all copies of Project Gutenberg electronic works in your possession. If
you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project Gutenberg
electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the terms of this
agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or entity to whom
you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.

1.B. “Project Gutenberg” is a registered trademark. It may only be
used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people
who agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few
things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg electronic works
even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See
paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project
Gutenberg electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg electronic
works. See paragraph 1.E below.

1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation (“the
Foundation” or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the

collection of Project Gutenberg electronic works. Nearly all the
individual works in the collection are in the public domain in the
United States. If an individual work is unprotected by copyright law in
the United States and you are located in the United States, we do not
claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing, performing,
displaying or creating derivative works based on the work as long as
all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope
that you will support the Project Gutenberg mission of promoting free
access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg works
in compliance with the terms of this agreement for keeping the Project
Gutenberg name associated with the work. You can easily comply with
the terms of this agreement by keeping this work in the same format
with its attached full Project Gutenberg License when you share it
without charge with others.

1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are
in a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States,
check the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this
agreement before downloading, copying, displaying, performing,
distributing or creating derivative works based on this work or any
other Project Gutenberg work. The Foundation makes no
representations concerning the copyright status of any work in any
country other than the United States.

1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:

1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
access to, the full Project Gutenberg License must appear prominently
whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg work (any work on which
the phrase “Project Gutenberg” appears, or with which the phrase
“Project Gutenberg” is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed,
viewed, copied or distributed:

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States
and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it
under the terms of the Project Gutenberg™ License included with

this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located
in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the
country where you are located before using this eBook.

1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg electronic work is derived
from texts not protected by U.S. copyright law (does not contain a
notice indicating that it is posted with permission of the copyright
holder), the work can be copied and distributed to anyone in the United
States without paying any fees or charges. If you are redistributing or
providing access to a work with the phrase “Project Gutenberg”
associated with or appearing on the work, you must comply either with
the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 or obtain
permission for the use of the work and the Project Gutenberg
trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.

1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg electronic work is posted
with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any
additional terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms
will be linked to the Project Gutenberg License for all works posted
with the permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of
this work.

1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg
License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg.

1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
Gutenberg License.

1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including
any word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide
access to or distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg work in a format
other than “Plain Vanilla ASCII” or other format used in the official

version posted on the official Project Gutenberg website
(www.gutenberg.org), you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense
to the user, provide a copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of
obtaining a copy upon request, of the work in its original “Plain
Vanilla ASCII” or other form. Any alternate format must include the
full Project Gutenberg License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.

1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg works
unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.

1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
access to or distributing Project Gutenberg electronic works provided
that:

• You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from the
use of Project Gutenberg works calculated using the method you
already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is owed to the
owner of the Project Gutenberg trademark, but he has agreed to donate
royalties under this paragraph to the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation. Royalty payments must be paid within 60 days
following each date on which you prepare (or are legally required to
prepare) your periodic tax returns. Royalty payments should be clearly
marked as such and sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
Foundation at the address specified in Section 4, “Information about
donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.”

• You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he does
not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg™ License. You
must require such a user to return or destroy all copies of the works
possessed in a physical medium and discontinue all use of and all
access to other copies of Project Gutenberg™ works.

• You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days of
receipt of the work.

• You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free distribution
of Project Gutenberg™ works.

1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg™
electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set forth
in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from the
Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the manager of the
Project Gutenberg™ trademark. Contact the Foundation as set forth in
Section 3 below.

1.F.

1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend
considerable effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and
proofread works not protected by U.S. copyright law in creating the
Project Gutenberg™ collection. Despite these efforts, Project
Gutenberg™ electronic works, and the medium on which they may be
stored, may contain “Defects,” such as, but not limited to, incomplete,
inaccurate or corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or
other medium, a computer virus, or computer codes that damage or
cannot be read by your equipment.

1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES -
Except for the “Right of Replacement or Refund” described in
paragraph 1.F.3, the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation,
the owner of the Project Gutenberg™ trademark, and any other party
distributing a Project Gutenberg™ electronic work under this
agreement, disclaim all liability to you for damages, costs and
expenses, including legal fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO
REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT LIABILITY, BREACH
OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3. YOU AGREE THAT THE
FOUNDATION, THE TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY
DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT,
CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES

EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
DAMAGE.

1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you
discover a defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it,
you can receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by
sending a written explanation to the person you received the work
from. If you received the work on a physical medium, you must return
the medium with your written explanation. The person or entity that
provided you with the defective work may elect to provide a
replacement copy in lieu of a refund. If you received the work
electronically, the person or entity providing it to you may choose to
give you a second opportunity to receive the work electronically in lieu
of a refund. If the second copy is also defective, you may demand a
refund in writing without further opportunities to fix the problem.

1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth in
paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you ‘AS-IS’, WITH NO
OTHER WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED,
INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF
MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.

1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages. If
any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the law
of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
the applicable state law. The invalidity or unenforceability of any
provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.

1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the
Foundation, the trademark owner, any agent or employee of the
Foundation, anyone providing copies of Project Gutenberg™
electronic works in accordance with this agreement, and any
volunteers associated with the production, promotion and distribution
of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works, harmless from all liability,
costs and expenses, including legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly
from any of the following which you do or cause to occur: (a)

distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg work, (b) alteration,
modification, or additions or deletions to any Project Gutenberg work,
and (c) any Defect you cause.

Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project
Gutenberg

Project Gutenberg is synonymous with the free distribution of
electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of
computers including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It
exists because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations
from people in all walks of life.

Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg’s goals
and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg collection will remain freely
available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure and
permanent future for Project Gutenberg and future generations. To
learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4 and
the Foundation information page at www.gutenberg.org.

Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation

The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non-profit
501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the state
of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal Revenue
Service. The Foundation’s EIN or federal tax identification number is
64-6221541. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent permitted by U.S.
federal laws and your state’s laws.

The Foundation’s business office is located at 41 Watchung Plaza
#516, Montclair NJ 07042, USA, +1 (862) 621-9288. Email contact

links and up to date contact information can be found at the
Foundation’s website and official page at www.gutenberg.org/contact

Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation

Project Gutenberg™ depends upon and cannot survive without
widespread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
freely distributed in machine-readable form accessible by the widest
array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small
donations ($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax
exempt status with the IRS.

The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United States.
Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a considerable
effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up with these
requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations where we have
not received written confirmation of compliance. To SEND
DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any particular
state visit www.gutenberg.org/donate.

While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
approach us with offers to donate.

International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.

Please check the Project Gutenberg web pages for current donation
methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other
ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations. To
donate, please visit: www.gutenberg.org/donate.

Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg
electronic works

Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project Gutenberg
concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
with anyone. For forty years, he produced and distributed Project
Gutenberg eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.

Project Gutenberg eBooks are often created from several printed
editions, all of which are confirmed as not protected by copyright in
the U.S. unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not
necessarily keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper
edition.

Most people start at our website which has the main PG search facility:
www.gutenberg.org.

This website includes information about Project Gutenberg, including
how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.