Europe's inner demons

The whole affair makes sense only if it is seen as one episode in a struggle between, on the one side, Lady Alice’s kinsfolk and allies and, on the other side, her stepsons and stepdaughters. Financial considerations seem to have played a part on both sides. It is known that the lord chancellor, Roger Outlaw, was heavily in debt to the bishop; while Lady Alice’s accusers must certainly have found allies amongst the various nobles who were in debt to her or to her son. Ever since the early middle ages, the rich and powerful had been prone to use maleficium and accusations of

maleficium as weapons in the struggle for wealth and power. This was one more instance — but with a difference: the demonic bulks far larger here than it had done in earlier centuries. For this Bishop Ledrede must surely be held responsible. So far as we can tell, Robin, son of Art, did not figure in the accusations brought against Lady Alice by her husbands’ heirs; but he bulks large in Petronilla’s confession, which was extracted by the bishop’s men. And everything we know of Ledrede’s previous and subsequent career shows him to have been preoccupied with notions of heresy and demon-worship in a way which was far more familiar in France than in England, let alone in Ireland.⁽⁵⁰⁾

A Franciscan of English origin, Ledrede had in fact visited France and the papal court at a time when the trials of the Templars and Pope Boniface and Bishop Guichard were still fresh in everyone’s memory. He was appointed to the see of Ossory by Pope John XII and consecrated at Avignon in 1317; and already in 1320 — four years before the Kyteler affair — he held a synod of his chapter and clergy, where he made legislation against such persons in the diocese as might be tainted with unorthodoxy. Later, after the affair was over, he ruthlessly pursued Lady Alice’s ally, the seneschal of Kilkenny Arnold le Poer, as a heretic; never resting until he had him excommunicated and imprisoned in Dublin castle, where after some years the man died — unabsolved, and accordingly deprived of the last rites and even of burial. Later still, Ledrede himself was summoned before the court of the archbishop of Dublin, as well as before secular tribunals, for various crimes, including the instigation of murder. He took refuge at Avignon, where he was able to persuade the pope, Benedict XII, that Ireland was full of demon-worshipping heretics, whom he alone opposed.

He was absent from Ireland — in effect exiled — for nine years; and when he was allowed to return and resume his functions, he found that his superior, the archbishop of Dublin, was keeping an inconveniently close watch on the diocese of Ossory. This started a new dispute; once more Ledrede turned to the reigning pope, this time Clement VI, and managed to convince him that the archbishop was protecting heretics. This was in 1347, almost a quarter of a century after the Kyteler affair. Whether or not there was any connection between the two episodes, the bishop certainly showed the same mentality in both. For him, as for King Philip the Fair, it was automatic to denounce an opponent as a heretic or a protector of heretics; perhaps even to regard him as such.

Once such a man was persuaded that Lady Alice was guilty of maleficium

he was practically bound, given his background, to assume that she must also be an out-and-out heretic. Indeed, all his actions were based on that conviction. When he first wrote to the lord chancellor, demanding the arrest of the lady and her associates, he referred to them as heretics; and he appended a copy of the recently published papal decretal De haereticis. When he had the king’s officers assembled at Kilkenny, he regaled them by reading the same decretal aloud, expounding it in the vernacular, and adding an excursus of his own on the penalties appropriate to heretics and their protectors.⁽⁵¹⁾ But he went further. The notion of the incubus or copulating demon, which had already been used against Bishop Guichard of Troyes through his mother, had a more obvious application when the accused was herself a woman. The bishop of Ossory applied it. For the first time in European history (so far as is known), a woman was accused of having acquired the power of sorcery through having sexual intercourse with a demon — and not a young woman either, but one who must have been well over sixty.^† In the proceedings against Lady Alice Kyteler, as conducted by Richard de Ledrede, a new image of the witch begins to emerge.