Europe's inner demons

Whether these were legal executions or lynchings, they are enough to show that maleficium was a matter of public concern. And in some cases popular fury can be seen unmistakably at work. In the ninth century Bishop Agobard tells how he saw four strangers — three men and a woman — seized by peasants who took them for tempestarii, fallen out of a cloud-ship; but for Agobard’s intervention, they would have been stoned to death.

⁽³³⁾ In 1074 the burghers of Cologne rebelled against their lord, the archbishop, and tried to kill him. The archbishop escaped from the city; but during the ensuing riots the mob found a woman who was suspected of having driven men mad by means of maleficia, and hurled her to death from the town walls.⁽³⁴⁾

The chronicler specifically states that this was done without any regard for the due process of law; and the same is true of a killing which took place at Freising in Bavaria in 1090.Three indigent women were rumoured to be “poisoners” and “destroyers of people and crops”. They were seized by the mob and subjected to the ordeal of immersion in water; next, though the ordeal gave negative results, they were repeatedly flogged to make them confess; finally, though they did not confess, they were burned alive on the banks of the river Isar. All this was done without the collaboration or approval of the authorities — indeed it was done in an area where authority had temporarily broken down: owing to a dispute between rival candidates, the see of Freising had no bishop. The clergy clearly disapproved. The monk who tells the story speaks of the injustice of the accusations, the “devilish fury” of the mob, the “martyrdom” of the victims. Indeed, after the mob had done its work a priest and two monks actually removed the charred bodies and buried them in consecrated ground.⁽³⁵⁾ In 1279 a similar incident took place at Ruffach in Alsace, save that this time the clergy intervened in time. A nun was suspected of using a wax puppet for purposes of maleficium, and would have been burned by the peasants; but the local monks saved her.

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Doubtless there were many more such incidents: since the chroniclers were not generally much interested in the activities of the common people, one can probably assume that the recorded cases represent only the tip of the iceberg. In any case it is clear that medieval peasants and burghers could at times feel very strongly about witches. Long before, and quite independently of the great witch-hunt, there existed a fund of popular suspicion, a readiness to perceive witchcraft at work and to identify witches. On occasion those feelings expressed themselves, illegally, in torture and killing. The day was to come when they would be able to do so legally.

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The clergy had their own particular view of maleficium. The early Church, already, regarded all magical practices as manifestations of paganism; and paganism was identified with the worship of demons.⁽³⁷⁾ It was almost irrelevant whether the intention behind the magical practices was maleficent, harmless or beneficent — in the eyes of the Church all such practices were damnable, because they all depended on the co-operation of those demons, the pagan gods. Like almost all their contemporaries, the Fathers accepted without question that magic worked, that it really could produce miracles — but these were pernicious miracles, evil devices by which the demons tricked human beings into opposing God. That was the view of Justin Martyr early in the second century; and it was still the view of the greatest and most influential of all the Latin Fathers, Augustine, at the beginning of the fifth century.