CHAPTER II
MEDIÆVAL AND MODERN PENOLOGY
A striking and significant indication of the remarkable change that has come over the spirit of legislation, and more especially of criminal jurisprudence, in comparatively recent times, is the fact that whereas, a few generations ago, lawgivers and courts of justice still continued to treat brutes as men responsible for their misdeeds, and to punish them capitally as malefactors, the tendency now-a-days is to regard men as brutes, acting automatically or under an insane and irresistible impulse to evil, and to plead this innate and constitutional proclivity, in prosecution for murder, as an extenuating or even wholly exculpating circumstance. Some persons even maintain, as we have already seen, that such criminals are diabolically possessed and thus account for their inveterate and otherwise incredible perversity on the theory held by the highest authorities in the Middle Ages concerning the nature of noxious animals.
Mediæval jurists and judges did not stop to solve intricate problems of psycho-pathology nor to sift the expert evidence of the psychiater. The legal maxim: Si duo faciunt idem non est idem (if two do the same thing, it is not the same) was too fine a distinction for them, even when one of the doers was a brute beast. The puzzling knots, which we seek painfully to untie and often succeed only in hopelessly tangling, they boldly cut with executioner’s sword. They dealt directly with overt acts and administered justice with a rude and retaliative hand, more accustomed and better adapted to clinch a fist and strike a blow than to weigh motives nicely in a balance, to measure gradations of culpability, or to detect delicate differences in the psychical texture and spiritual qualities of deeds. They put implicit faith in Jack Cade’s prescription of “hempen caudle” and “pap of hatchet” as radical remedies for all forms and degrees of criminal alienation and murderous aberration of mind. Phlebotomy was the catholicon of the physician and the craze of the jurist; blood-letting was regarded as the only infallible cure for all the ills that afflict the human and the social body. Doctors of physic and doctors of law vied with each other in applying this panacea. The red-streaked pole of the barber-surgeon and the reeking scaffold, symbols of venesection as a means of promoting the physical and moral health of the community, were the appropriate signs of medicine and jurisprudence. Hygeia and Justicia, instead of being represented by graceful females feeding the emblematic serpent of recuperation or holding with firm and even hand the well-poised scales of equity, would have been more fitly typified by two enormous leeches gorged with blood.
Even the dead, who should have been hanged, but escaped their due punishment, could not rest in their graves until the corpse had suffered the proper legal penalty at the hands of the public executioner. Their restless ghosts wandered about as vampires or other malicious spooks until their crimes had been expiated by digging up their bodies and suspending them from the gallows. Culprits, who died on the rack or in prison, were brought to the scaffold as though they were still alive. In 1685, a were-wolf, supposed to be the incarnation of a deceased burgomaster of Ansbach, did much harm in the neighbourhood of that city, preying upon the herds and even devouring women and children. With great difficulty the ravenous beast was finally killed; its carcass was then clad in a tight suit of flesh-coloured cere-cloth, resembling in tint the human skin, and adorned with a chestnut brown wig and a long whitish beard; the snout of the beast was cut off and a mask of the burgomaster’s features substituted for it, and the counterfeit presentment thus produced was hanged by order of the court. The pelt of the strangely transmogrified wolf was stuffed and preserved in the margrave’s cabinet of curiosities as a memorial of the marvellous event and as ocular proof of the existence of were-wolves.
In Hungary and the Slavic countries of Eastern Europe the public execution of vampires was formerly of frequent occurrence, and the superstition, which gave rise to such proceedings, still prevails among the rural population of those semi-civilized lands. In 1337, a herdsman near the town of Cadan came forth from his grave every night, visiting the villages, terrifying the inhabitants, conversing affably with some and murdering others. Every person, with whom he associated, was doomed to die within eight days and to wander as a vampire after death. In order to keep him in his grave a stake was driven through his body, but he only laughed at this clumsy attempt to impale a ghost, saying: “You have really rendered me a great service by providing me with a staff, with which to ward off the dogs when I go out to walk.” At length it was decided to give him over to two public executioners to be burned. We are informed that when the fire began to take effect, “he drew up his feet, bellowed for a while like a bull and hee-hawed like an ass, until one of the executioners stabbed him in the side, so that the blood oozed out and the evil finally ceased.”
Again in 1345, in the town of Lewin, a potter’s wife, who was reputed to be a witch, died and, owing to suspicions of her pact with Satan, was refused burial in consecrated ground and dumped into a ditch like a dog. The event proved that she was not a good Christian, for instead of remaining quietly in her grave, such as it was, she roamed about in the form of divers unclean beasts, causing much terror and slaying sundry persons. Thereupon she was exhumed and it was found that she had chewed and swallowed one half of her face-cloth, which, on being pulled out of her throat, showed stains of blood. A stake was driven through her breast, but this precautionary measure only made matters worse. She now walked abroad with the stake in her hand and killed quite a number of people with this formidable weapon. She was then taken up a second time and burned, whereupon she ceased from troubling. The efficacy of this post-mortem auto da fé was accepted as conclusive proof that her neighbours had neglected to perform their whole religious duty in not having burned her when she was alive, and were thus punished for their remissness.
Döpler cites also the case of Stephen Hübner of Trautenau, who wandered about after death as a vampire, frightening and strangling several individuals. By order of the court his body was disinterred and decapitated under the gallows-tree. When his head was struck off, a stream of blood spurted forth, although he had been already five months buried. His remains were reduced to ashes and nothing more was heard of him.
In 1573, the parliament of Dôle published a decree permitting the inhabitants of the Franche Comté to pursue and kill a were-wolf or loup-garou, which infested that province; “notwithstanding the existing laws concerning the chase,” the people were empowered to “assemble with javelins, halberds, pikes, arquebuses and clubs to hunt and pursue the said were-wolf in all places, where they could find it, and to take, bind and kill it, without incurring any fine or other penalty.” The hunt seems to have been successful, if we may judge from the fact that the same tribunal in the following year (1574) condemned to be burned a man named Gilles Garnier, who ran on all fours in the forest and fields and devoured little children “even on Friday.” The poor lycanthrope, it appears, had as slight respect for ecclesiastical fasts as the French pig already mentioned, which was not restrained by any feeling of piety from eating infants on a jour maigre.