Europe's inner demons

It is true that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries a vast, international body of literature would be produced, arguing for and against the reality of the sabbat, the nocturnal flight, the association of human beings and demons. But that is another matter. The origin of the new stereotype of the witch lay elsewhere — not in literature but in the evidence extracted during the trials themselves. The grain of truth in the evidence lay in the tact that some people really believed themselves to fly at night, and that some women believed themselves to copulate at night with incubi. The rest came from the imagination of certain inquisitors, bishops and magistrates, who used and abused the inquisitorial procedure to obtain all the confirmation they needed.

The trials we have considered cannot be explained in terms of the tensions of village life, nor do they centre on accusations of maleficium. Adeline was no peasant but an eminent ecclesiastic, and he was supposed to have attended the sabbat in the hope that the Devil would protect him from a knight who wanted to harm him. In the Arras affair the accused are mostly townsfolk, some of them very rich: and

maleficium is barely mentioned. In both trials the very act of attending the sabbat, and the apostasy that that implies, provide the centre of the accusation. On the other hand recent scholarship — particularly recent British scholarship — has shown that interpersonal hatreds and resentments amongst the peasantry did indeed, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, express themselves in formal accusations of maleficium, which in turn provided the starting-point for many witch-trials.

That aspect of the matter has also to be considered.

— 3 —

It was no novelty for peasants to suspect certain of their neighbours of harming them by occult means. As we have seen in an earlier chapter, peasant fear of maleficium had sometimes expressed itself in violence and killing even when official sanction was altogether lacking. From the fifteenth century onwards, first in one region and then in another, that sanction became available: peasant fears could now find expression in formal accusations. As the authorities became more concerned with new concepts of witchcraft, so they became more willing to lend an ear to popular complaints about

maleficium. The problem is to disentangle what was in the minds of the peasants from what was in the minds of the authorities; for in most regions where witches were tried at all, they were tried by judges who were convinced in advance that any witch must belong to a Satanic conspiracy against Christendom.

Fortunately the impasse is not total. The Swiss Confederation in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, possessed legal systems which permitted the common people to bring charges of maleficium before the courts. Many of the depositions have been preserved in their original form, uncontaminated by any demonological interpretations which may have preoccupied the judges. There exists, for instance, a collection of depositions made in the Canton of Lucerne between the mid-fifteenth and the mid-sixteenth century, consisting of accusations brought by some 130 villagers against thirty-two witches;⁽³¹⁾

not one of these depositions so much as mentions the Devil, but every deposition without exception mentions maleficia. These documents do indeed convey something of the atmosphere in which, at village level, such suspicions and accusations flourished.

It is worthwhile to examine a typical deposition in detail. In the year 1502 men from the villages of Schötz, Ettisweil and Albersweil complained to the village mayor of the Willisau district concerning the maleficia of Dichtlin (i.e. Benedicta), wife of Flans in der Gasse, and her daughter Anna.⁽³²⁾ It is clear that the women had already been arrested once on charges of sorcery, and had been released. Now their neighbours were returning to the offensive; and this, translated from the Swiss-German dialect of the early sixteenth century, is what they had to say: