Europe's inner demons

And indeed it seems that after the Carolingian epoch the secular authorities were not asked to concern themselves with maleficium as a religious transgression for some four centuries. The Church of course continued to combat the practice of maleficium, as it did other magical practices; but its methods were not blood-thirsty. For one thing, certain forms of witchcraft were treated as sheer superstition. Much that had been taken seriously by Augustine was now treated with scepticism. People were discouraged from taking seriously the very types of

maleficium that were most mysterious and uncanny. Precisely because the clergy were concerned to root out the vestiges of paganism that still survived in popular imagination, they minimized the occult power of witches — it was not permissible, for instance, to believe that witches could devour people from inside, or that they could kill people by a glance.⁽⁵²⁾ Other kinds of maleficium

were accepted as effective by everyone, including the clergy; and here the practitioner was encouraged to confess, to do penance and to receive absolution. Thus the vernacular penitential of pseudo-Ecbert (c. 935) mentions that ancient and ever-popular technique, maltreating a model or puppet. If the intended victim survives, the penance is a year on bread and water, and two further years on bread and water for three days a week; if he dies, double that amount.⁽⁵³⁾ A severe penalty, certainly — but mild enough when compared with the torments which were visited upon supposed witches at the time of the great witch-hunt.

In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the Church became more and more preoccupied with rooting out heresy, and it cannot be asserted dogmatically that during those centuries no persistent sorcerer was ever handed over by a bishop to the secular authorities, to be burned as a relapsed heretic. A passage in Walter Map suggests that such executions may not have been wholly unknown by, say, 1200.⁽⁵⁴⁾ On the other hand the silence of the chronicles suggests that they must have been very rare. All in all, it seems certain that there were very few trials for

maleficium, whether as a secular or as a religious offence, between 1000 and 1300. It remains to find out why.

— 3 —

The greater interest in the common people which has characterized recent historiography has given rise to new interpretations of the great witch-hunt. Two British historians in particular, Mr Keith Thomas and Dr Alan Macfarlane, have concerned themselves with the question of why, in England, there were practically no witch-trials during the Middle Ages, and hundreds of such trials during the period 1560–1680; and they have sought the answer in increased tensions in village life.⁽⁵⁵⁾

This is not the place to consider how far their hypotheses are relevant to the great European witch-hunt as a whole; but one specific issue does call for comment. Mr Thomas has summarized it with admirable clarity in a couple of sentences in his monumental work:

“Why, if popular witch-beliefs were much the same as they had been in the Middle Ages, was it only during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that legal action against witchcraft attained such dimensions? To this question there are only two possible answers. Either the demand for the prosecution of witches suddenly grew, or the facilities for such prosecution had not previously existed.”⁽⁵⁶⁾

Thomas regards the first of these answers as by far the most plausible. The legal machinery for prosecuting the authors of maleficia existed in earlier centuries; if it was hardly ever used, that indicates that there was no widespread desire to prosecute witches or sorcerers. The argument sounds cogent enough. It becomes less so when one examines how, in such cases, medieval legal machinery actually worked.

Almost throughout the Middle Ages — very generally until the thirteenth century, in some parts of Europe even to the fifteenth century— the accusatory form of criminal procedure obtained. That is to say, the legal battle was fought out not between society and the accused, but between the accused and a private person who accused him. In this respect there was no difference between a civil and a criminal case; in the latter as in the former the individual complainant was responsible for finding and producing proofs such as would convince the judge.

The accusatory procedure was derived from Roman law, and it retained all those features which had characterized it under the later Empire. By and large it favoured the accused rather than the accuser. The accuser was obliged to conduct the case himself, without the assistance of prosecuting counsel. Moreover, if he failed to convince the judge he was likely to suffer as heavy a penalty as would have been visited upon the accused if he had been convicted. This was known as the talion.⁽⁵⁷⁾