Europe's inner demons

The first trial opened on 30 July 1390. A former lover of Marion la Droiturière had jilted her and married another woman; and Marion was accused of having employed one Margot de la Barre to make the man impotent with his young wife. All that Margot admitted before torture was that she knew how to perform magical cures, including cures of impotence. The provost’s court, on the other hand, was intent on unearthing weightier offences than simple, traditional magic, whether benign or maleficent. With the agreement of the parlement (to which the women appealed in vain), it used torture mercilessly, and ended by extracting confessions which accorded with its own preconceptions. The women confessed that they had operated by means of chaplets of herbs which the Devil, at their request, endowed with magical powers. Invoked three times in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, the Devil appeared physically — looking, the women said, very much as he did in the mystery plays; took the chaplets, and departed through the window, with a noise like a whirlwind. For this imaginary exercise of ritual magic, both women were burned.

The second trial, which with appeals to the parlement lasted some ten months, was likewise concerned with a mixture of traditional maleficium

and ritual magic, in the context of a sexual relationship. A woman called Macete was accused of employing Jehanne de Brigue to use magic to induce one Hennequin de Ruilly to marry her. This was duly done, but Hennequin proved a brutal husband; and the two women collaborated a second time, to bring illness on the man by means of sorceries with toads and wax figures. Under torture Jehanne confessed that all this had been achieved with the help of a demon called Haussibut. Indeed, already as a child she had been taught by her godmother how to conjure up Haussibut: the method was to call on the Trinity to compel the demon to appear. It is true that when advised to offer the demon a sacrifice of flesh, in the form of her own arm, she demurred. Still, once again the case, as manipulated by the provost’s court, had become a case of ritual magic; and it ended as such cases commonly did, in the burning of both the accused.

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The trials we have just considered were all heresy trials, where the accused was charged, above all, with having personal dealings with a demon. In some of them maleficium also bulks large; and the combination of these two kinds of accusation, in the context of a trial conducted under the inquisitorial procedure, does mark a step in the direction of the great witch-hunt. Yet in itself it is only a small step. The accused in these trials were all charged as individual offenders, not as members of a sect. On the other hand, at the times and places where the witch-hunt reached its greatest intensity, witches certainly were thought of as constituting a sect — the most pernicious sect of all. The transition can be observed in two trials held in the fourteenth century. In both, the accusations are still formulated in terms of ritual magic, but the accused are thought of as an organized sect.

The earlier of the two trials was that of Lady Alice Kyteler and her associates; it was held at Kilkenny, in Ireland, in I324-5.⁽³⁹⁾

Lady Alice was a rich woman, descended from an Anglo-Norman family which had been settled in Kilkenny for some generations. Robert le Kyteler, of Kilkenny, was engaged in trade with Flanders towards the close of the thirteenth century; and Lady Alice added to the family wealth by marrying William Utlagh, or Outlaw, a rich banker and moneylender, also of Kilkenny. Later she married three more husbands: Adam le Blund, of Callan; Richard de Valle; and Sir John le Poer.⁽⁴⁰⁾ She and her son by her first marriage, William Outlaw, attracted much hatred. Like his father, William Outlaw was a banker and money-lender; and there are documents to show that many of the local nobles were heavily in debt to him. The reputation of mother and son is mirrored in a tale preserved in the Annals of Ireland. Lady Alice was believed to be in the habit of raking filth from the streets towards her son’s door, muttering under her breath:

“Unto the house of William my sonneHie all the wealth of Kilkennie town.”⁽⁴¹⁾