Summary and “Poetic” Punishments
Since the poor human body has always been sensitive, so at the promptings of the revenge instinct it has always been assailable and most readily beaten. Naturally enough the Duke of Gloster exclaims—in that most subtle second act of Henry VI.—“Have you not beadles in your town and things called whips?” Of course they had. The serf, the varlet, the vagabond, the lunatic, and the petty offender were all whipped with uncertain severity;[[485]] most likely until the victim was bloody and until the operator was tired and felt he had earned his fee. Doubtless the whips were of all sorts and sizes. They are frequently represented as having three thongs;[[486]] Titus Oates was flogged with a whip of six.[[487]] I have seen and handled a lash of transportation times, which had a thick leather thong bound with wire.[[488]] The cat-o’-nine-tails is alluded to in the eighteenth century.[[489]]
Both men and women[[490]] (the latter up to 1817[[491]]) were flagellated in public, being either tied up to a post, or fastened behind a cart and so thrashed along the road. Perhaps the most obvious thing to do, next to flogging an offender, was to exhibit him to the populace. The country was immeasurably more parochial than it is now in these times of travel, and to be rendered infamous in one’s village or neighbourhood was no trifling penalty; and so we find the stocks set up in the towns and hamlets,[[492]] and, for more serious misdemeanours, there was the lofty pillory or neck-catcher (the heals-fang).
This well-known instrument[[493]] was made of all shapes and sizes, and varied from a forked post or a slit pillar[[494]] to what must have looked like a penal dovecote made to hold several prisoners.[[495]] The convicted were sometimes drawn thither on hurdles, and might be accompanied by minstrels on the way.[[496]] The hair of the head and beard was shaved off, and sometimes the victims were secured by being nailed through the ears to the framework, and might also be branded.[[497]] With faces protruding through the strong beams, and with hands through two holes, secured and helpless, they were made to stand defenceless before the crowd as targets for any missiles that might be thrown. To those who were hated this was a serious ordeal, for they would be so pelted and knocked about by the mob as to be badly wounded, if not actually done to death. At length those who had stood their time were released, and those who had had their ears nailed would be cut free, and then they might slink away from the scene of shame, or be carried back to prison to endure additional punishment. The pillory was abolished for all offences except perjury and subornation in 1816,[[498]] and altogether in the year 1837.[[499]]
Before leaving the middle ages we must examine what I have classed as the poetic punishments. These were the spontaneous reprisals with which the community strove to repay the criminals in kind, and by which, if strict taliation were seldom attainable, our ancestors succeeded in contriving many chastisements that were, at any rate, associable equivalents. Of these a few examples may be given. For instance, a baker who sold loaves which were short of weight was shown with the bread tied round his neck.[[500]] A fishmonger who had been selling bad fish was paraded with a collar of stinking smelts slung over his shoulders.[[501]] A grocer who had been selling much-adulterated spices was placed in the pillory and had the powders burned beneath his nose (A.D. 1395).[[502]] A heretic who had advocated strict Judaism was sentenced to prison and to be fed entirely upon pork.[[503]] The Inquisition attached two pieces of red cloth in the shape of tongues to the breast, and two more upon the shoulders of a false witness, which were to be worn for life.[[504]] Indeed, badges and crosses were often imposed, and were in these times a dreadful mark of Cain.[[505]] In 1505 two men were sentenced by the archbishop to wear a faggot (or a badge representing one) upon the left shoulder, to show that they stood in danger of the flames.[[506]] It would seem they did, for they were burned alive in 1511.
Louis IX. ordered that those who had spoken indecently should have their tongues pierced and their upper lips cut away.[[507]] Pope Innocent IV. remonstrated with the king against this barbarity. The mutilation of the tongue was a punishment known and inflicted in England for blasphemy. In 1656 one James Nayler, “the mad Quaker,” had his tongue pierced with a hot iron for claiming to be the Messiah.[[508]] He was also whipped at the cart’s tail, and kept in prison for two years. A drunkard was sometimes walked about in a barrel, his head protruding from the top and his hands from two holes made in its sides.[[509]]
For the village scold[[510]] they kept the brank or bridle of iron, which contained a flat (and for the unfortunate witches[[511]] occasionally a spiked and painful) gag that went into the mouth and pressed down the tongue. They might also be placed in the local ducking chair[[512]] and immersed in water. A remarkable illustration[[513]] of the intensely individual and personal aspect of primitive penalties[[514]] is furnished where—as it sometimes happened—the prosecutor had himself to execute his convict assailant, “or dwelle in prison with the felon unto the time that he wyll do that office or else find a hangman.”[[515]]
CHAPTER II
THE WITCH TRIALS
Towards the middle of the seventeenth century there lived at Manningtree a certain Matthew Hopkins, whose name deserves perhaps to be recorded. Not that he stands by any means apart, a veritable Lucifer among the devils. Sprenger in Germany, Torquemada in Spain, Grillandus in Italy, de l’Ancre in France, and other persecutors over Christendom, were better known and had killed more people. But Hopkins went to work on English ground. The people were then professing the same creed that the majority do now. Shakespeare had been in his grave more than a generation, and trees may have been standing as bushes in the fields and lanes of Essex which will yet renew leaves and branches at the kiss of coming spring. Hopkins reveals the spirit of his time, for it has been wisely observed that every society has the criminals it deserves. His kind remain with us still as spies and blackmailers, traitors and “friendly natives” of the tribe of Judas generally. But they derive their power to harm from the community in which they live. Parasites need a proper “host” to flourish in. A dark and superstitious age it must have been to countenance this man; for he was a professional “discoverer,” or, as he was sometimes called and styled, Witch-Finder General. He began with the destruction of some half-dozen persons in his native hamlet. We cannot determine what had marked them down—perhaps they were his private enemies—moral reform has always been a ready pretext to work vengeance with, and has been much employed in these latter days. They may have been old, eccentric, isolated, or insane; in any case, once seized they had to die, and in their torments implicated others, most likely any names conveniently suggested to them. The fame of the new discoverer spread far and wide. Towns and hundreds in the eastern county, and even places far outside its boundaries, sent to this fell apostle, saying, “Come over and help us,” and on the track of blood the monster went. It was his wont to ride upon these expeditions accompanied by another man, and by a female searcher, whose services would be required in the minute personal examinations which were carried out, especially on women. He made an open charge of twenty shillings for each village visited, but no doubt in this nefarious calling there were other and more profitable ways of extorting money. Can we not well imagine what sums may have been paid to him (as they are to the “sex” blackmailers of to-day) to avoid accusation? How many may have yielded their little all to save some one who was dear to them from common ill-usage, probable death, and certain disgrace, which such a charge involved? Who knows how extorted gold might influence the ordeals enforced? Who shall say what may have come by stealth to the witch-finders to bring ruin upon some enemy, perhaps upon some rival? Who, indeed? From place to place swooped this bird of prey, descending on peaceful homesteads and capturing whom he chose. Woe to the man, and still more to the woman, who lived alone, who kept a black cat, or who was found to carry birthmarks on her body, or to be the least out of the normal in physical structure! Woe to the person who was eccentric, subject to fits or trances, or who might be in any way deranged or of weak intellect! Woe, in fact, to the unhappy creature who by any means came in for accusation! The Pishogue mark would thenceforth be upon them; relations would drop away as from contamination with the plague[[516]]; and the most brutal rabble of that time would jostle round, intent upon the chase, with their fierce lust for blood not the less keen from the idea that there was something Christian in their cruelty. The victim would then be seized and carried off to further interrogation, ill-treatment, and torture. Parents and children, comrades and lovers, might weep in secret, and the boldest might even venture to denounce the senseless iniquity of the proceedings—at which they would incur no little danger. But they would speak unheeded, and have to linger around the gallows till the final act, when something swayed and dangled from a cord.
But somehow good Master Matthew began to be unpopular, and many reasons might account for it. Perhaps he had been unwise in the selection of his “subjects”—it looks like it, for one was an old clergyman—and lived to find out that some of them had not been quite so friendless as he may have counted on. Perhaps the supply of lonely or defenceless folk had given out, or that in pushing his profession so far afield he could not estimate the new material. “Discoveries,” of course, had to be made to keep up his reputation and his income, and as he pursued his way through a wide area it may be that quite a large number of people began to feel themselves open to accusation, and so were ready to consider it suspicious that he alone had such an eye for witches. And then a whispering rose up amongst them, until it reached the persecutor’s ears: For sure this man is aided by the Devil, or else he would not ferret out so many. And he may well have started when he saw the anger-light in the fierce eyes around him, and when he felt at last the frightful superstitions, which he had kindled and well thriven on, were out of hand, turned hard against himself. So he produced a little book which bears the date of 1647, printed, he tells us, “For the benefit of the whole Kingdome.” It has upon the title-page the somewhat troublesome quotation, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,” Exodus xxii. 18. We cannot do better than glance through its pages and at the “Certain queries answered which have been and which are likely to be objected against Matthew Hopkins, in his way of finding out witches.”
Querie I.—That he must needs be the greatest witch, sorcerer, and wizzard himself, else hee could not doe it.
Answer.—If Satan’s Kingdome be divided against itself how shall it stand?
The next paragraph is interesting as once more emphasising the crude and absolutely material notions conceived of the spiritual world.
Querie II.—If he never went so farre as is before stated, yet for certaine he met with the devill and cheated him of his booke, wherein were written all the witches’ names in England, and if he looks at any witch he can tell by her countenance what she is; so by this his helpe is from the devill.
Answer.—If he had been too hard for the devill and got his booke it had been to his great commendation and no disgrace at all.
It will be noticed that he does not exactly deny even this report, or appear to consider it at all unusual to meet the devil walking about casually. “We must needs argue,” he continues later, “he is of long standing, above 6000 years, then he must needs be the best scholar in all knowledge of Arts and tongues, and so have the best skill in Physicke, etc.” Mr. Hopkins’ own skill, he pleads, was really forced on him. “This discoverer never travelled for it,” he writes in reply to Querie V., “but in March 1644 he had some seven or eight of that horrible sect of witches living in the towne where he lived ... who every six weeks, in the night (being always on a Friday night), had their meetings[[517]] close by his house, and had their severall solemne sacrifices there offered to the devill, one of which this discoverer heard speaking to her imps one night and bid them go to another witch, who was thereupon apprehended and searched by women who had for many years known the devill’s marks, and found to have three teats about her, which honest women have not. So upon command from the Justice they were to keep her from sleep two or three nights, expecting in that time to see her familiars, which the fourth night she called by their severall names,[[518]] and told them in what shape a quarter of an hour before they came in, there being ten of us in the roome.[[519]]
“The first she called was (1) Holt, who came in like a white Kitling. (2) Jamara, who came in like a fat Spaniel without any legs at all.... (3) Vinegar Tom, who was like a long legged grey hound with a head like an Oxe with a long taile and broad eyes, who, when this discoverer spoke to and bade him go to the place provided for him and his angels, immediately transformed himself into the shape of a child foure years old without a head and gave half a dozen turns about the house and vanished at the doore. (4) Sacke and Sugar, like a black rabbet. (5) Newes, like a Polcat. All these vanished away in a little while. Immediately after this witch confessed severall other witches from whom she had her imps and named to diverse women where their marks were ... and imps’ names such as Elimanzer Pyewacket, Peck-in-the-crown, Grizzell Greedigut, etc.; which no mortall could invent.... Twenty-nine were condemned at once, four brought twenty-five miles to be hanged where their discoverer lives, for sending the devill like a beare to kill him in his garden; so by seeing diverse of the men’s papps and trying various wayes with hundreds of them, he gained the experience.”
Although his dealings must be described as mild compared with the ghastly inconceivable tortures in vogue with the inquisitors upon the Continent,[[520]] his victims were yet baited and handled with the grossest cruelty. They were supposed not to weep,[[521]] being witches, though indeed cause enough was given them. It is remarkable in this connection that Shelley,[[522]] with how much accuracy I am not aware, alludes to the “dry fixed eyeball” of the tortured. Hutchinson[[523]] held this phenomenon to have been due to prolonged deprivation of sleep and exhaustion. Doubtless the weary length of the investigations, and often the age and senile desiccation of the victims, might easily explain a state of tearlessness whenever it was really prevalent.
They were supposed to possess an insensible part in their bodies,[[524]] and the examiners would prick over them to try to find it out. Especially, a witch was affirmed to have somewhere upon her person the “Devil’s mark.” “Some bigg or place upon their body where he” (the familiar, imp, or spirit) “sucketh them.”[[525]] This alleged “mark” might be almost anything or nothing; from an abnormal, and perhaps atavic, teat, down to a birthmark, mole, old scar, or even a tiny vein under an eyelid. They were supposed also to float upon being “swum.”
They were, for the most part, wizen, old creatures, clad in long-used, greasy garments.[[526]] Such skirts would retain much air; they might be bound so as to favour this, or spread, as with Ophelia, widely inflated. It was quite likely they should thus be upborne (and also, for they were mostly poor and thin, that the heavy, sometimes chained, Bible should outweigh them in the ordeal with scales). But ordeals are uncertain and dangerous unless they can be carefully manipulated. Mr. Hopkins had been keen on the water test; it was the finishing touch and proof at the end of a long series of torments and examinations.
But a day came, it is said, on which a few brave Englishmen, who had perhaps lost some one near and dear to them at his hands, laid hold upon the witch-finder himself, and binding him in a sack, cast him into a pool. It was a bold act, in those savage days, to interfere with any kind of inquisition. Catholic or Puritan, and was no doubt attended with great risk. But only for a moment in this case, for there before them bobbed the dread discoverer of witches, floating upon the surface of the water; and all declared the devil got his own. But such an end was altogether unexpected and unusual; it was downright bad luck and misfortune, from Mr. Hopkins’ point of view. His position appeared unassailable, and indeed probably would have been, if he had kept to the right sort of people, and practised on the isolated or unpopular, who could have been legitimately sacrificed. All he had done was quite lawful and regular.
Witchcraft, like many acts against religion and morality, had always been an ecclesiastical offence, and had been punished in the secular courts as leading to murder and personal injury,[[527]] and it was made a felony in 1541.[[528]] But it was the (then) recent law of 1603 that was much in force,[[529]] by which, in the quaint language of the statute, it was forbidden, upon pain of death, to “employ, feed, or reward an evil and wicked spirit.”[[530]] And since the High Court of Parliament had recognised witches,[[531]] it became necessary to investigate accusations and probe for “spirits” through the forms of law. Thus Hopkins could claim to be a moral reformer, putting in force the statute of the realm; he could quote Scripture clearly to his purpose, the justices and gaolers obeyed his call, assizes waited to condemn his prisoners. And if his method seemed superstitious or barbarous, he could perhaps cite Mr. Perkins’ way,[[532]] or could refer to Mr. Kincaid’s custom in these matters,[[533]] and could quote standard works with precedent on his side.[[534]]
So he seemed truly to have a safe task and a paying one, built up upon the prejudices of the people. But as by their superstitions he rose, so also by them he fell—utterly, and unpitied.[[535]] It was not his monstrous cruelties, but “God’s ordeal,” which showed him up, delivered to the devil; and, in the caustic words of Samuel Butler, as one “who after proved himself a witch, and made a rod for his own breech.”[[536]]
But now, dismissing this particular parasite, we may review the course of thought upon the question. Belief in witchcraft is so ancient and so universal,[[537]] that the existing religions, and perhaps all religions whatsoever, must have arisen in its atmosphere.
From time to time the Christian Church dealt with the question,[[538]] and had elaborated quite a ritual of tests and remedies. And it was after nearly fifteen hundred years of Christianity that Pope Innocent VIII.[[539]] issued a special Bull against all supposed witches (December 5, 1484), naming one Sprenger, a Dominican, and Krämar—whose name latinised to Institor—inquisitors to seek and punish them; and this they did with frightful cruelty. They wrote a text-book on their methods and discoveries about 1489, and kept the torture chambers busy and the faggots fiercely burning.
Their book was answered by John Wier, physician to the Duke of Cleves, in 1563.[[540]] He refuted many of the grosser superstitions prevailing, and also suggested that the devil deceived people and made many confess to impossible practices;[[541]] likewise, that the witches did not really occasion the illnesses and calamities which they were accused of causing and even admitted having brought about.[[542]]
At first the work awakened only controversy and condemnation—a stage in advance, however, since the most wronged are generally undefended, and pass to their doom in silence and with no one to speak for them.
In 1580 Bodin, a French writer, published a most furious attack on Dr. Wier, declaring him to have been the pupil of a sorcerer and that he wrote inspired by the devil. He reiterated all the old fantastic stories as being true, and in the hideous procedure of investigation which he set forth, applied such diverse and such agonising torments as could not have been surpassed by any of the earlier inquisitors.
Bodin in turn was answered, from England, by Reginald Scot, in 1584, who wrote a long and powerful review of the witch persecutions, in which he quotes extensively from Sprenger, Bodin, and the Continental tormentors. Full of wise saws and modern instances, he cast doubts on the rationale of the witchcraft tests and trials.
But although just a century had gone by since Innocent launched his Bull from the Papal throne, many poor people, some at that time unborn, were destined still to suffer trial and torture. And more than another century had to pass before the law would leave “witches” alone; before afflicted, half-mad, or unpopular old women could throw crumbs to the sparrows upon the snow, or keep a cat, without danger of death. King James, as a young man, fell foul of both Scot and Wier in 1597. Speaking of them he said: “One called Scot, an Englishman, is not ashamed in publicke print to deny that there can be such a thing as witchcraft, and so he maintains the old error of the Sadducees in denying spirits. The other called Wierus, a German phisition, sets out a publick apologie for al these craftes-folkes—whereby procuring for their impunitie he plainly betrayes himselfe to have been one of their profession”; and six years later came his grotesque law already alluded to, sanctioned with all the weight of Parliament.[[543]] The trials in Germany were severely criticised in 1631 by Father Spee, who published his book at first anonymously,[[544]] and checked the ardour and the cruelty of the courts.
But they were defended again by Joseph Glanvil,[[545]] chaplain to the king, in 1681. About this time Dr. Bekker, a clergyman, living in Holland, compiled four lengthy volumes about witchcraft,[[546]] in which he contended that neither devils nor spirits could act on mankind. In England, ten years later, wrote Richard Baxter,[[547]] author of The Saints’ Rest and other evangelical works which were widely read, supporting the weird beliefs of the witchcraft schoolmen.
By this time the persecutions, which were waning in England, had broken out at Salem in America; and we find Cotton Mather (like Glanvil, a divine, and F.R.S.) writing a little book[[548]] to justify their existence[[549]] (and his own conduct, for many were sceptical), upon that continent where, as he quaintly says, the Pilgrim Fathers “imagined that they should leave their posterity in a place where they should never see the inroads of Profanity or Superstition.” The records of the nineteen executions in this neighbourhood, of one poor creature who was pressed to death, and of the crowd of unhappy suspects who were cast into the prison,[[550]] show how the frenzy of this murderous “revival” swept like an epidemic down upon the settlement,[[551]] so that for fifteen months the air seemed charged and laden with hysteria, and are a grim commentary. But evolution operates even on taboos and superstitions, and this was probably the last general persecution, and Bishop Hutchinson called his learned work An Historical Essay,[[552]] for it was dealing mainly with the past. The law lagged behind, however, as it generally does, the statute of James I. (1603) being, when Hutchinson wrote, “now in force” in 1718.
And so it continued for eighteen years longer, until repealed in 1736.[[553]] In Ireland the law lasted until 1821. Witchcraft was clearly kept alive by theology. People who really believed in a personal devil (and even those who questioned the witch convictions assumed the devil to be very much alive), designing mischief and disguised everywhere, could easily accept tales of familiar spirits.[[554]]
Those who received the Hebrew and Christian records as altogether inspired, could not ignore possession and sorcery.[[555]] “Après que Dieu a parlé,” says de l’Ancre, “de sa propre bouche des magiciens et sorciers, qui est l’incrédule qui en peut justement douter?”[[556]] And Sir Matthew Hale said in his summing up: “That there were such creatures as witches, he made no doubt at all. For, first, the Scriptures had affirmed so much; secondly, the wisdom of all nations had provided laws against such persons, which is an argument of their confidence of such a crime.”[[557]]
Speaking of a particular case, Mr. H. L. Stephen[[558]] quotes Campbell as follows: “... During the trial the imposture practised by the prosecutors was detected and exposed. Hales’ motives were most laudable; but he furnished a memorable instance of the mischief originating from superstition. He was afraid of an acquittal or a pardon, lest countenance should be given to a disbelief in witchcraft, which he considered tantamount to disbelief in Christianity.” Glanvil[[559]] follows on the same side, arguing with great ingenuity from the scriptural point of view (for instance, in dealing with certain doctrines as to the fate of unbaptized children, p. 22). “The question whether there are witches or not,” he begins in Part ii., “is not a matter of vain speculation or of indifferent moment, but an inquiry of very great and weighty importance. For on the resolution of it depends the authority of our laws, and, which is more, our religion, in its main doctrines, is nearly concerned.”
And what may be called the religious belief in witches[[560]]—a very different thing from the torturing of them—outlived the penal laws concerning them.[[561]] The Rev. John Brown of Haddington (1703–1791)[[561]] complained of the repeal of King James’s Act,[[562]] and even John Wesley (1722–1787) declared that giving up witchcraft is, in effect, giving up the Bible.[[563]] On page 366 of the journal[[564]] which he edited we read: “With my latest breath will I bear testimony against giving up to infidels one great proof of the invisible world. I mean that of witchcraft and apparitions, confirmed by the testimony of all ages”;[[565]] and Huxley[[566]] alluded to a contemporary clergyman who had been preaching diabolical agency. Nor did the actual persecutions cease altogether, and though the last legal trial in England took place in 1712[[567]] (the last execution in Europe is given by Lecky[[568]] as occurring in Switzerland in 1782; another authority mentions Posen,[[569]] with date 1793), sporadic outrages continued in the country, and persist in a modified form to the present day.[[570]] At Clonmel, Ireland, in 1895,[[571]] a poor old woman was placed upon the kitchen fire by her own family and burned, so that she died from the effects.[[572]] But what were once pious customs and duties had at length become crimes, and the chief mover in this latest witch trial got (to the best of my recollection) twenty years’ penal servitude.
A belief so universal as that in witchcraft must clearly be founded upon positive phenomena. It will not serve our purpose to discuss what yet unknown supernormal powers might be attained under special conditions, or how much more there may be to discover beyond X-rays and wireless telegraphy. For while old ideas as to imps and devils, brooms and black cats, were manifestly ridiculous, and although the abnormal powers, whatever they may have been, could work no rescue in the hour of need, there may be many things in heaven and earth undreamed of in our present state of knowledge. But ordinary witch cases appear to have been resolvable into the examination of—
(a) Hysterical subjects—sometimes crowds of them—who might imagine anything and accuse anybody, including themselves. Such people were (and are) often given to swallowing needles and other things, some of which found their way through the body and emerged from all parts of it.[[573]] This would have been considered strong evidence of diabolical agency. Many of these would be subject to epilepsy, catalepsy—accompanied sometimes by that strange insensibility to pain[[574]] which is a well-marked symptom in hysteria, and which was remarked on by the torturers—and to obscure nerve diseases generally.
(b) “Wise women,”[[575]] midwives, doctors good and bad, who may, according to the custom of the times in which, as among savages, magic[[576]] and medicine were inextricably mingled, have resorted to charms[[577]] (as are still employed by old women to cure warts), and sometimes, doubtless, to preparing and administering actual poisons;[[578]] and who, whenever anything remarkable occurred, were always liable to be accused of having in some way trafficked with the all-explaining devil.[[579]] They sometimes claimed to possess the powers of witches, and tried to gain support or protection from being feared, deceiving others and often themselves as well.[[580]]
(c) Private enemies,[[581]] whom an accusation of witchcraft,[[582]] or of any of the little group of offences[[583]] which were always supposed to be closely allied with it,[[584]] was the readiest way to ruin.[[585]]
(d) People accused for the sake of gain by means of deliberate plots and conspiracies. Feigning to be bewitched, and naming some (known to be) innocent person as the cause of the mischief, was a mean crime that was by no means uncommon, and many flagrant instances are given of it by early criticisers.[[586]]
(e) The main body of the victims.[[587]] Old women who had outlived family and friends, who were helpless and solitary,[[588]] ugly from age, unclean from infirmities, eccentric in wisdom, crazy with delusions, palsied in limbs, or wandering in mind.[[589]] All these, or nearly half the old folks in the land, were always liable to accusation on account of their misfortunes.[[590]] They were the wretched scapegoats of those times, on whom was laid whatever might befall, from epileptic fits to summer hail.[[591]]
It was a crime imputed with so much ease and repelled with so much difficulty, that the powerful, whenever they wanted to ruin the weak, ... had only to accuse them of witchcraft to secure their destruction.—C. Mackay, Popular Delusions, p. 109. A certain G. Naudé, “late Library Keeper to Cardinal Mazarin,” wrote a book, entitled The History of Magic, “By way of apology for all the wise men who have unjustly been reputed magicians from the creation to the present age.” Englished by J. Davies. London, 1657.]
(f) The people denounced by prisoners under torture. As we have seen, accusation meant examination, and this had two objects: to extort a “confession” from the suspected witch, and to compel her to reveal accomplices. Some might confess at once, and did so in the hope of execution (the kind of confession required was already well known, and the more monstrous and elaborate it might be, the better would be the chance of escaping torture). Others would naturally deny taking part in abominations in which they had not engaged, and most of which were beyond possibility. And no doubt nearly all would make a long and desperate struggle against incriminating their unfortunate friends, who might, however innocent of crime, be also other people’s enemies. And so the accursed ingenuity of man was practised on these miserable victims of his ignorance and superstition. One hideous device[[592]] tried by a Frankish king was to drive sharp spikes underneath the nails;[[593]] this, he contended, always induced confession from the intense anguish. Very likely it did.
Other inquisitors went their own sweet way, and used all possible varieties of the question, that they might make out of the shrieks and ravings the sort of story they expected and prompted,[[594]] and lash more suspects down upon the rack. No wonder, then, that persecution spread;[[595]] the aged and the disordered were always there, and any one of these might be thought a witch,[[596]] or find herself denounced from the torture-room—perhaps by a lifelong friend.
The readiness with which all “evidence” was acclaimed and the appalling means by which it was got together placed any abnormal person in constant peril, and will account for the enormous numbers of the implicated. Tens of thousands of victims, says Lecky,[[597]] perished by the most agonising and protracted torments without exciting the faintest compassion. In a single German city they used to burn 300 witches annually.[[598]] In Nancy, 800 were put to death by a judge in the course of sixteen years.[[599]] Zachary Gray,[[600]] who edited an edition of Hudibras, claims that during the Long Parliament 500 witches were executed each year, and that he read through a list of no less than 3000 of them.[[601]] The total of Great Britain has been estimated at 30,000,[[602]] and it has been estimated that during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the witch death-roll for Europe[[603]] reached 200,000 people.[[604]]
Perhaps the sidelights give a more graphic conception of what went on in those dark days of error. Listen to this complaint of a French writer[[605]] who evidently thought he was approaching the “last days.” “Was it [sorcery] ever so much in vogue as here in this unhappy [sixteenth] century? The benches of our courts are all blackened by them; there are not sufficient magistrates to hear the cases. Our prisons are gorged with witches, and not a day passes but our warrants are ensanguined with them, and we return saddened to our homes, shocked at the ghastly and appalling things that they confess.” And in our own land, about fifty years later, we come upon a letter written to Sir Edmund Spencer in 1647: “Within the compass of two years near upon 300 witches were arraigned, and the greater part executed, in Essex and Suffolk only. Scotland swarms with them now more than ever, and persons of good quality executed daily.”[[606]]
It was in Scotland, likewise, that there used to be kept a chest “locked with three severall locks and opened every fifteenth daie,”[[607]] which might receive, as did the Lion’s Mouth at Venice, denunciations slipped in secretly; and that in 1661 the justices were ordered to attend certain towns to hear cases of witchcraft at least once a week.[[608]]
The witch trials are ended. So far as they are concerned, we can look back from the heights of history over this vast red sea of superstition which has swallowed up such multitudes. And to think it was all so useless, so unnecessary![[609]] but yet by no means hard to be explained. The underlying and provocative phenomena had really been present in a huge number of cases (and when they were not, were fervently conceived, and so suggested, looked for, and enforced as to set up all kinds of hallucinations in the accusers and sometimes in the accused), and in default of tracing out their causes,[[610]] evident or recondite, clergy and jurists, and of course the populace, gave out a false and thaumaturgical account of them. They were correct in affirming many amazing facts and phenomena (and all these persist, for nature has not changed.[[611]] There are at least as many abnormal and half-mad people amongst us now as there ever were, only we treat the clearer cases kindly, and are no longer afraid of mythical influences), although these were magnified and multiplied million-fold, for Superstition is a monster that grows by feeding. They were fantastic in their fabulous explanations of them. The rest—in those cruel times when torture was as common as is cross-examination—followed quite naturally. The doctors, theological and legal, erred in their diagnosis, mistaking diseases for devils and abnormality for magic. We shall come upon this again, crass and close at hand. May the Future condemn the Present, as we now deplore the Past.
CHAPTER III
TREATMENT OF THE INSANE
As the abnormal and the rationally eccentric were considered witches, and held to have been disciples of the devil, so the more obviously sense-bereft were thought to be controlled by the fiends within them. Both witches and lunatics were held to be beneath the sway of infernal powers, but the former as willing agents of the devil, and the latter as involuntary victims, who were deemed to be possessed. In ancient Egypt, by the Temple of Saturn,[[612]] in classic Greece with the Asclepieia, and by the laws of Pagan Rome,[[613]] the mentally afflicted were treated with humanity, and, if without the aid of our present science, at least upon the same broad principles which we adopt to-day.
In the warm sunlight of the Eastern lands the life of the population was spent in the open air. As we read in the Scriptures and in books of travel, the lunatic might dwell amidst the tombs. He could wander through the soothing cypress groves in the moonlight or lie under shading palm in the noontide heat. He dwelt apart, like the leper, cut off by his terrible infirmity from the kinship of reason, but free at least in the air and sunlight, and often allowed a quite especial licence[[614]] as being in the guardianship of God.[[615]] But the troublesome conduct into which lunatics were ever liable to be led[[616]] would frequently rouse the instinct of retaliation, and bring down swift and heavy punishment upon them.[[617]]
In Europe also and in England the less-dangerous lunatics “were allowed to wander about the country,[[618]] beggars and vagabonds, affording sport[[619]] and mockery.” We get a vivid glimpse from Shakespeare of that “poor Tom[[620]] that eats the swimming frog, the toad, the tadpole, the wall newt and the water newt, that in the fury of his heart, when the foul fiend rages, eats cow-dung for sallets, swallows the old rat and the ditch dog, drinks the green mantle of the slimy pool;[[621]] who is whipt from tything to tything, and stocked, punished, and imprisoned.”[[622]]
This was the lot of sufferers in those times, and beyond doubt a certain number of them, unmindful or unheedful of savage laws, obeyed the obsessing suicidal impulse which is so common among mad people; and through this many of the most afflicted must have been taken, in the mercy of nature, out of the world of men in which they had no part. But if the half-witted poor were allowed to wander,[[623]] those of the richer class were less fortunate. Their families were shy and ashamed of them; they were concealed and locked in garrets and cellars, or penned apart, secured in sheds and outhouses—fastened up anywhere about the premises.[[624]]
Medicines there were indeed for the insane patients, and some of them might have added to the witches’ cauldron.[[625]] Among the less nauseous of these came wolf’s and lion’s flesh,[[626]] and as our Saxon forefathers were skilled herbalists, we find the clovewort, polion, and peony recommended,[[627]] also the mandrake, round which many stories were woven from its resemblance to the human form. They said: “For witlessness, that is, for devil sickness or demoniacal possession, take from the body of the same wort mandrake by weight of three pennies, administer to drink in warm water as he may find convenient; soon he will be healed.”[[628]]
Doubtless in all civilisations the more acutely insane would have to be a care for the community.[[629]] The early Christians tended them in their churches, in which they stood in a special part,[[630]] and where they were provided with food “while they abode in the church, which, it seems, was the chief place of their residence and habitation.”[[631]]
The monks to some extent looked after them in their monasteries.[[632]] But whatever medicines or other remedies they may have employed, the main idea of those days about lunacy was that it came through demoniacal possession. The object was to drive the devils out. To accomplish this they seem to have resorted to all sorts of incongruous “cures,” both ghostly and physical.[[633]] The great spiritual weapon has always been exorcism. This was the primal art of all religions, and it was practised also by the early Christians.
In the third century the exorcists were formed into a special order.[[634]] “When an exorcist is ordained,” we read, “he shall receive at the hands of the bishop a book wherein the forms of exorcism are written. These forms were certain passages together with adjurations in the name of Christ commanding the unclean spirit to depart out of the possessed person.” This custom has continued through the centuries,[[635]] forming the subject of innumerable legends and pictures relating to saints and teachers in the middle ages; and though the practice seems to be in abeyance,[[636]] the old idea of exorcism is not dead. We must perceive this when we read,[[637]] for instance, “Water and salt are exorcised by the priest, and so withdrawn from the power of Satan, who, since the Fall, has corrupted and abused even inanimate things.[[638]] But besides the weapons, mystic and spiritual, employed by the Church, were others of a more corporeal character.
The patients were bound to venerated crosses at evening, to be released as cured in the morning.[[639]] They were chained fast to stones in various churches; they were dipped into holy wells—this custom lasted in Cornwall to modern times; and they were sent as pilgrims to shrines,[[640]] at some of which they underwent a regular course of treatment; music was often an important element.[[641]] And remedies far more drastic might be provided, which relied not so much upon the power of the saints as on the human weakness of the devils.
Thus, scattered among the recipes for herbs and all the indescribable filthy mixtures which were advocated for insanity,[[642]] we come across the following prescription, the effects of which would prove anything but imaginary:—“In case a man be a lunatic, take skin of a mereswine or porpoise, work it into a whip, swinge the man well therewith, soon he will be well. Amen.” At one monastery the lunatics in the charge of the monks are said to have received ten lashes every day.[[643]]
The insane have been flogged for various reasons:—(1) Superstitiously, to drive out the devil, and even to scare away a disease; (2) therapeutically, because pain and shock would often subdue the ravings of the patients, although only temporarily; (3) instinctively, as a relief to their keepers’ feelings. The medical and the brutal whippings we shall meet again later on, long after devil-driving had been abandoned, though it prevailed through Christendom for probably over sixteen hundred years. To understand it we must turn aside to savages.
Primitive peoples,[[644]] like children, personified everything. Disease appeared to be a sort of personal entity—like that deceitful dream[[645]] Zeus sent to Agamemnon—a “thing” “to be drawn out in an invisible form, and burnt in the fire or thrown into the water.” A foe invisible, but yet so human in its limitations as to be stopped by thorns placed in its path.[[646]] And if all manner of physical ailments were looked upon as being, or, at any rate, as emanating from personal demons, much more would such a fearful and mysterious affliction as insanity be held to indicate a devil’s presence and immediate handiwork.[[647]] Moreover, to the primitive mind, the demons of all sorts were much too near, too vividly conceived, too real, too commonplace, to be regarded as spiritual beings within the modern meaning of the word. They were conceived as obviously living and moving about,[[648]] and therefore as being human in their character. Thus among savages “the souls of the dead are thought susceptible of being beaten, hurt, and driven like any other living creatures,”[[649]] and demons could be hunted out of the houses and scared away to woods and outer darkness.[[650]]
The ideas of the profoundly superstitious middle ages resembled these. Even the great opponent or accuser, Satan, who was restored by Milton to the rôle of Ahriman,[[651]] was but a wretched creature, a poor devil,[[652]] in the popular imagination. “He” is continually outwitted like the pantomime policeman,[[653]] and nonplussed by the shallowest equivocations.[[654]] He beats a man[[655]] and is beaten and vanquished.[[656]] He aims a stone at Dunstan and misses,[[657]] and when seized by the nose with pincers, his bellowings are heard for three miles round.[[658]] He howls when sprinkled with holy water,[[659]] and Luther hurls an inkstand at his head.[[660]] This man-like and material monster of course felt pain, and when he took up his abode in a human body he was supposed to feel the blows inflicted on the sufferer.[[661]] It was the devil (or his representative) who might be driven out of man or woman; the demons could be commanded to quit each portion of the invaded body, member by member.[[662]] The fiends were supposed to writhe in anguish[[663]] when the possessed cowered beneath salt water or the whip.[[664]] On them the curses and the stripes were meant to descend,[[665]] until at last, through unendurable torments, they fled the body by the nearest orifice.[[666]]
This crude and savage way of expelling “devils” was long continued; belief in it is probably by no means dead in the minds of some countryfolk. Hawthorne, writing of the seventeenth century Puritans,[[667]] makes the gaoler say of his prisoner, “Verily she hath been like a possessed one, and there lacks but little that I should take in hand to drive Satan out of her with stripes.” But there were times enough when exorcism failed and flogging proved unavailing. Then the insane would have to be restrained and subjected to some sort of treatment[[668]]—to say some sort of ill-treatment were nearer the truth. Doubtless they always aimed at quieting the more troublesome patients, and bringing them into order, if not back to reason.
Says Andrew Boorde in his strange Regyment of Health:[[669]] “I do advertyse every mā the which is mad or lunaticke or frenticke or demoniacke, to be kept in save garde in some close house or chambre where there is lytell lyght. And that he have a keper the which the mad man do feare.” The same idea we see expressed by Shakespeare:[[670]] “We’ll have him in a dark room and bound,” is the immediate cry towards the mad. Shut up and bound they were, in all manner of ways and places, by relatives, monks, and keepers. As we have seen, many were executed as witches or malefactors, and would be thrown into gatehouses and prisons,[[671]] where they might furnish horrible diversion for the other prisoners,[[672]] and where they were sometimes drugged to make them silent and to cease from raving.[[673]] Sometimes they were placed in such hospitals as there were,[[674]] along with fever and accident cases.[[675]]
In the course of time, as population spread and townships grew, the old resorts were found to be inadequate. The number of the lunatics was increasing, and the whole country was filling up and enclosing. Whipping from place to place became ineffective, and there had been no public institutions available but monasteries, gaols, and hospitals.[[676]] In the year 1247 was founded by Bishopsgate the Priory of St. Mary of Bethlem,[[677]] and here insane people were kept and tended, at any rate from 1403. Doubtless there came to be other places thus put to use, such as, for instance, one St. Katherine’s by the Tower,[[678]] where, we are told, “they used to keep the better sort of mad folks.” But it was not until about the middle of the eighteenth century[[679]] that grim and sombre circumvallate buildings began to be erected to intern the troublesome.[[680]] “They were,” says Dr. Conolly,[[681]] “but prisons of the worst description. Small openings in the walls, unglazed, or whether glazed or not, guarded with strong iron bars, narrow corridors, dark cells, desolate courts, where no tree nor shrub nor flower nor blade of grass grew.[[682]] Solitariness, or companionship so indiscriminate as to be worse than solitude; terrible attendants armed with whips ... and free to impose manacles and chains and stripes at their own brutal will; uncleanness, semi-starvation, the garrotte, and unpunished murders—these were the characteristics of such buildings throughout Europe.” What may be called the theoretical treatment was bad enough. Those who could not be cured must be subdued;[[683]] the teaching of Boerhaave and Cullen admitted this, and the latter wrote: “Fear being the passion that diminishes excitement, may therefore be opposed to the excess of it, and particularly to the angry and irascible excitement of maniacs; these being more susceptible of fear than might be expected, it appears to me to have been commonly useful.”[[684]]
It was desired “to acquire some awe over them,”[[685]] and he declares that “sometimes it may be necessary to acquire it even by stripes and blows.”[[686]] This was the therapeutic flogging already alluded to.[[687]] Shock, terror, blistering, bleeding, purging, the use of chains and all manner of manacles[[688]]—these were the means employed and set down in the textbooks to heal the disordered mechanism of the brain.[[689]]
In the Gentleman’s Magazine of 1765[[690]] we read of the private asylums that “persons were taken forcibly to these houses without any authority, instantly seized by a set of inhuman ruffians trained up to this barbarous profession, stripped naked, and conveyed to a dark room.” So ignorant were the doctors of those days as to the nature of insanity that the harsh cruelties practised on private patients were carried out even upon the king. Of the eighteenth-century practice Mr. Massie has written:[[691]] “Mental disease was at that time a branch of art little understood, and the specific treatment of lunatics was worthy of the barbarous age of medicine. The unhappy patient” (King George III.) “upon whom this most terrible visitation of Heaven had fallen, was no longer dealt with as a human being. His body was immediately enclosed in a machine, which left it no liberty of motion. He was sometimes chained to a staple. He was frequently beaten and starved, and at least he was kept in subjection by menacing and violent language.” That, like most lunatics, he was very annoying is certain; he once talked for nineteen hours unceasing. But all his troubles were intensified by ill-treatment;[[692]] they left him to be knocked about by a German servant,[[693]] and the first doctors kept him even from his own children, at which the poor old man complained “very heavily.”[[694]] Such, then, was the orthodox treatment applied against the highest in the land. But the worst deeds were done behind thick walls. “Sane people,” says Beach,[[695]] writing of private establishments, “were frequently confined in these asylums, for persons frequently availed themselves of the facilities[[696]] then in use in order to get rid of a troublesome relative or to obtain some selfish object.”
And what of the really mad?[[697]]—irritable, violent, irrational, helpless, often with as little control over the functions of the body as on the workings of the mind. We can imagine what their state became when left in the hands of ignorant practitioners and brutal attendants, with chains and instruments of restraint convenient and ready. Screened off from all kith and kin they writhed with sores and rotted in ordure.[[698]] Sometimes—mostly on Monday mornings after the Sabbath rest and accumulations—they might be carried out into a yard[[698]] to be mopped and soused from pails in the coldest weather.[[699]]
The condition of the living rooms and wards[[700]] was often such that visitors grew physically sick from going into them;[[701]] but they were rare within those private prisons,[[702]] strangers are never welcome behind the walls. At York Asylum[[703]]—an especial plague spot opened in 1777 and burnt,[[704]] it is said, to avoid disclosures that might hang its keepers,[[705]] in 1814—a rule was adopted in 1813 “that no person[[706]] shall be allowed to visit any of the patients without a special written order signed by the physitian.” Official visitors were generally harmless.[[707]] At York the worst rooms were not shown them.[[708]] For most of the small asylums there were none at all.[[709]]
Even the larger public asylums during the eighteenth, and also far into the nineteenth century, were horrible monuments of cruelty and neglect. The miserable patients lay upon straw in cells,[[710]] or upon wooden shelves to which they were fastened. Many were naked or decked over with one blanket.[[711]] In the wards they were frequently chained to the wall by wrist or ankle,[[712]] and occasionally by both. One patient at Bethlem,[[713]] a fierce, powerful man whose name was Norris, after a fracas with a drunken keeper, had his arms and shoulders encased in a frame of iron obtained from Newgate.[[714]] This instrument[[715]] was attached by a twelve-inch chain to a collar round his neck, from a ring round a vertical iron bar which had been built into the wall by the head of his bed.[[716]] His right leg was secured to the frame upon which he lay. The effect was that the patient could move up and down as far as the ring and short chain round the upright bar permitted, but he could not stir one foot from the wall, and could only rest lying upon his back. “In this thraldom,” says Dr. Conolly,[[717]] “he had lived for twelve years. During much of this time he is reported to have been rational in his conversation. At length relief came, which he only lived about a year to enjoy. It is painful to add that this long-continued punishment had the recorded approbation of all the authorities of the hospital. Nothing can more forcibly illustrate the hardening effect of being habitual witnesses of cruelty, and the process which the heart of man undergoes when allowed to exercise irresponsible power.”
The medical men were poorly paid and proportionately neglectful. At the time of which we are speaking—the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century—the physician at Bedlam got only £100 a year.[[718]] However, he kept a private asylum, and sometimes left the public institution for months together.[[719]] One of the surgeons is described as having been “generally insane and mostly drunk,” in spite of which he was retained there for ten years.[[720]]
With such shameful neglect and callousness on the part of the doctors—there appear to have been no chaplains in those days[[721]]—it is not to be wondered that the unhappy patients fell entirely into the hands of their keepers and immediate attendants, and most of these were quite ignorant people, rendered impatient and brutal by the exasperating ways of the demented inmates, and by their boundless power over them. Instinctive and retaliative floggings (the third kind, alluded to on p. 149), assaults, and possibly even murders, were not uncommon, as well as the distressing and unlimited restraints already referred to.[[722]] One doctor invented and introduced a special instrument to prize open the patients’ mouths at compulsory feeding. He mentions that, by the usual process, teeth were apt to be broken, and some were left “without a front tooth in either jaw.”[[723]]
In the eighteenth century[[724]]—up to 1770—and in some places, doubtless, even to later times, the mad people were reckoned among the “sights.”[[725]] The public paid[[726]] to go round the asylums, as they do now to gaze upon wild beasts.[[727]] The baser and more mischievous among them would irritate and purposely enrage the secured patients, as their descendants tease caged animals to this day;[[728]] and thus reproduced for their ghastly diversion “exhibitions of madness which are no longer to be found, because they were not the simple product of malady, but of malady aggravated by mismanagement.”
Such conduct appears to have been general in those times.[[729]] At Geneva[[730]] some lunatics would be given grass and horrible things to eat to amuse visitors. This also happened at the Bicêtre,[[731]] in certain parts of Germany, etc.[[732]] “Les Fous de Charenton” became, for a time, notorious for their plays,[[733]] which were presented with much sound and fury, attracting spectators from very grotesqueness. They were forbidden in 1811.
High walls kept things dark for years, but the light stole through in the end, as it always will.[[734]] In 1793 Pinel removed the chains from patients in the Bicêtre. At home, the York Asylum, already alluded to, began to bear an evil reputation. In 1788 it incurred the Animadversions[[735]] of the Rev. William Mason.[[736]] In the year 1791 some friends of a female patient desired to visit her, but were not allowed, upon the plea that she was not in a suitable condition to be seen by strangers (she probably was not!) A few weeks after this she was reported dead.[[737]] The woman belonged to the Society of Friends, and the suspicious circumstances of her incarceration caused much resentment among the Quakers. Soon after, William Tuke resolved that they should have a hospital of their own. The Retreat was started in the year 1792, and its humane and enlightened methods were soon contrasted with the barbarous and secret administration prevailing at the older institution. But the years rolled by while patients languished and died. It was in 1813 that Samuel Tuke—a grandson of the founder of the Retreat—brought out a little work[[738]] describing the system there. It “excited universal interest, and, in fact, achieved what all the talents and public spirit of Mason and his friends had failed to accomplish. It had still better effects. A very inoffensive passage in this book roused, it seems, the animosity of the physician to York Lunatic Asylum, and a letter which this gentleman published in one of the York newspapers[[739]] became the origin of a controversy among the governors of that establishment, which terminated in August 1814, after a struggle of nearly two years, in the complete overthrow of the old system, and the dismission of every officer of the asylum, except the physician himself.”[[740]]
The conflict was taken up by others and carried on. Towards the close of that same year (1813), a case of alleged misconduct was brought forward by Mr. Godfrey Higgins, a magistrate for the West Riding. “Mr. Higgins’ statement was read” (before twenty-seven governors), “after which the accused servants of the house were called in and sworn. They denied upon oath the truth of the charges. No other evidence was called for; nor was any minute committed to writing of what had been sworn by the servants. The following resolution was passed:—The governors having taken into consideration the statements published in the York and other newspapers respecting the treatment of William Vicars, lately a patient in this asylum, ... are unanimously of opinion that ... he was treated with all possible care, attention, and humanity.”[[741]] It was of no avail; thirteen gentlemen of the county came forward with donations, in virtue of which they qualified as governors. These new men brought their votes to bear to force on an inquiry, and though the old gang of scoundrels never got their deserts, and, to conceal their guilt, are said to have set the premises on fire, yet they were driven out of their situations, and soon investigation became national.
In 1814 Mr. George Rose brought in a Bill to regulate asylums, which passed the House of Commons. But the authorities at Bedlam opposed the measure,[[742]] spending over £600 in so doing. They had good cause, as we shall see presently. The York Asylum governors—nineteen of them, including the archbishop—sent in a petition against it; and the intrepid Mr. Higgins sent one in its favour, signed by himself.[[743]] The Bill was thrown out by the House of Lords,[[744]] but a committee of the House of Commons was then appointed, and collected the inconceivable and horrible evidence from which we have quoted. Its report was presented by Mr. Rose in 1815,[[745]] and though the committee at Bedlam formally exonerated its officials for all things they had done and neglected to do, including even the dreadful instrument placed round Norris,[[746]] the unofficial mind of the public had been roused to indignation, and many of the worst abuses were presently remedied.
Mr. Rose died in 1818, but in the following year Mr. Wynn brought forward another Bill, which was, however, opposed by Lord Eldon, who observed[[747]] that “there could not be a more false humanity than over-humanity with regard to persons afflicted with insanity,” a line of argument which we shall come on again. That Bill shared the fate of its predecessor. It was not until nine years afterwards that Mr. Gordon secured the passing of an Act[[748]] to improve the asylums, in the year 1828. Though abuses continued into the middle of the nineteenth century,[[749]] and many Acts of Parliament were subsequently brought in,[[750]] the monstrous evils of which we have spoken continued as crimes where previously they had been customs, and took place on a much diminished scale.
At Lincoln Asylum,[[751]] about 1838, Dr. Gardner Hill removed mechanical restraints, and Dr. Conolly[[752]] followed at Hanwell in the succeeding year. In this they were, of course, opposed in the Profession,[[753]] but new ideas and new conceptions were coming, which are still working in the treatment of insanity. All along, heretofore, the Mind and the Body had been conceived as two separate things. People had ceased to believe in the interference of devils, but they spoke vaguely of “a mind diseased.” There being often no physical injury that could be detected, “the common opinion seemed to be confirmed that it” (mental disorder) “was an incomprehensible, and consequently an incurable, malady of the mind.”[[754]]
A medical writer[[755]] of the early nineteenth century could allude to lectures he had attended, at which the doctor had declared that treatment and physic were useless in a case of furor uterinus, because it was a disease of the mind, not of the body. No doubt there loomed the fear of Free Will and Theology. “... Many very able men,” says Dr. Halliday,[[756]] “led away by what appeared to be the general opinion of mankind, shrank from a strict investigation of a subject that seemed to lead to a doubt of the immateriality of mind, a truth so evident to their own feelings and so expressly established by divine revelation.” It is not for us to turn aside into labyrinths, or to attempt to settle what “mind” may mean. But we know that, to our present power of comprehension, the mind can only function through the body. How it first formed, and if it can yet rekindle, are vital questions which may never be answered; at any rate they lie beyond our range.
Gradually metaphysics and moral concepts were left behind as experts examined facts. “... Derangement,” says a nineteenth-century writer,[[757]] “is no longer considered a disease of the understanding, but of the centre of the nervous system, upon the unimpaired condition of which the exercise of the understanding depends. The brain is at fault and not the mind.”
“The old notion,” says Dr. Wynter,[[758]] “that derangement of mind may happen without any lesion of the instrument of thought being the cause or consequence, has long been exploded.”
The physical origin of insanity “became gradually accepted. Its mental phenomena were more carefully observed, and its relation was established to other mental conditions which had not hitherto been regarded as insane in the proper sense of the word.... Hitherto the criteria of insanity had been very rude, and the evidence was generally of a loose and popular character; but whenever it was fully recognised that insanity was a disease with which physicians who had studied the subject were peculiarly conversant, expert evidence obtained increased importance, and from that time became prominent in every case. The new medical views of insanity were thus brought into contact with the old narrow conceptions of the law courts, and a controversy arose in the field of criminal law, which, in England at least, is not yet settled.”[[759]]
The instinct of retaliation was not readily restrained by reasoning or proofs of irresponsibility. In postulating freedom of choice under all physical conditions; in assuming plenary responsibility in men and women under all circumstances; in refusing to recognise any abnormal state unless it were so extreme and obvious as to render the person before the court unconscious of his actions and surroundings, the judges were defending their own position. Thus the new theories[[760]] were disputed and sneered at, and arbitrary standards as to sanity were set up at variance with all facts and expert evidence.[[761]]
Some contended that the more subtle and amazing forms of madness or abnormality perceived by the specialists were but new names for old perversities.[[762]] Others averred that nothing physical ought to exculpate. Smollett wished that all lunatics guilty of grave offences might be subjected “to the common penalties of the law.” Upon this Mr. Tuke observes in comment that “The entire inability to distinguish between voluntary and involuntary acts, ... between motives and consequences, is singularly well shown. Unfortunately it was not peculiar to Smollett.”[[763]]
And I might add that this instinctive feeling continued—as everything instinctive generally does. Turning to the work of a writer still living (in 1908), we come upon the following: “Of late years a certain school of thinkers[[764]] ... have started some theories respecting the responsibility or irresponsibility of many dangerous criminals and murderers, which have very properly been objected to by more practical observers.” And the writer continues with all the sweet simplicity of ignorance: “Even the inmates of lunatic asylums know well the distinction between right and wrong. And it is precisely upon this knowledge that the government and discipline of such establishments are based. Hence no theories of criminal irresponsibility should be permitted to relax the security and strictness of the detention of dangerous offenders, whether sane, or partially insane, or wholly mad. And it is important to observe that the treatment and condition even of mad murderers should not be made attractive to others outside.” But the hard scientific facts persisted. Injustice and cruelty, practised upon the weak and helpless, do not, alas! and pace good Mrs. Stowe, bring down upon nations the visible wrath of God; but the manifest falseness of the old assumptions, and the continued failure of the mediæval methods, could not be hidden through unending years. Slowly the light of science began to penetrate into the dark places of punishment. The entirely mad were first rescued and treated as patients, and these now, happily, no longer concern us; their case belongs to Medicine, not to Criminology. With regard to the half-mad we are in a state of slow change and transition. Their wrongs, long known to the alienists, are being brought before the law-makers. “Crime,” says the Report of Mr. Secretary Gladstone’s Committee,[[765]] “its causes and treatment, has been the subject of much profound and scientific inquiry. Many of the problems it presents are practically at the present time insoluble. It may be true that some criminals are irreclaimable, just as some diseases are incurable, and in such cases it is not unreasonable to acquiesce in the theory that criminality is a disease and the result of physical imperfection. But criminal anthropology as a science is in an embryo stage....” With regard to the abnormal we are only on the threshold of justice; a multitude of causes, theological and instinctive, prevent the facts from being faced and known.
We may take comfort in the course of evolution; in that the violently mad (employing the word in a wide and general sense) are no longer exorcised and tormented; in that the eccentrically mad are no longer burned and tortured for what was imagined against them; in that the weak-minded and the partially deranged are being considered, with a view to their segregation in special places apart from healthy offenders; in that innate and absolute abnormality of emotions has been established by the specialists upon overwhelming evidence; and that the knowledge of this is quietly spreading, and being recognised and admitted among educated people, throughout the civilised world.
THE END
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