THE SECRET TRIBUNALS OF WESTPHALIA[110].
Chapter I.
Introduction—The Original Westphalia—Conquest of the Saxons by Charlemagne—His Regulations—Dukes of Saxony—State of Germany—Henry the Lion—His Outlawry—Consequences of it—Origin of German Towns—Origin of the Fehm-gerichte, or Secret Tribunals—Theories of their Origin—Origin of their Name—Synonymous Terms.
We are now arrived at an association remarkable in itself, but which has been, by the magic arts of romancers, especially of the great archimage of the north, enveloped in darkness, mystery, and awe, far beyond the degree in which such a poetical investiture can be bestowed upon it by the calm inquirer after truth. The gloom of midnight will rise to the mind of many a reader at the name of the Secret Tribunals of Westphalia: a dimly lighted cavern beneath the walls of some castle, or peradventure Swiss hostelrie, wherein sit black-robed judges in solemn silence, will be present to his imagination, and he is prepared with breathless anxiety to peruse the details of deeds without a name[111].
We fear that we cannot promise the full gratification of these high-wrought expectations. Extraordinary as the Secret Tribunals really were, we can only view them as an instance of that compensating principle which may be discerned in the moral as well as in the natural empire of the Deity; for, during the most turbulent and lawless period of the history of Germany, almost the sole check on crime, in a large portion of that country, was the salutary terror of these Fehm-Gerichte, or Secret Tribunals. And those readers who have taken their notions of them only from works of fiction will learn with surprise that no courts of justice at the time exceeded, or perhaps we might say equalled, them in the equity of their proceedings.
Unfortunately their history is involved in much obscurity, and we cannot, as in the case of the two preceding societies, clearly trace this association from its first formation to the time when it became evanescent and faded from the view. While it flourished, the dread and the fear of it weighed too heavily on the minds of men to allow them to venture to pry into its mysteries. Certain and instantaneous death was the portion of the stranger who was seen at any place where a tribunal was sitting, or who dared so much as to look into the books which contained the laws and ordinances of the society. Death was also the portion of any member of the society who revealed its secrets; and so strongly did this terror, or a principle of honour, operate, that, as Æneas Sylvius (afterwards Pope Pius II.), the secretary of the Emperor Frederick III., assures us, though the number of the members usually exceeded 100,000, no motive had ever induced a single one to be faithless to his trust. Still, however, sufficient materials are to be found for satisfying all reasonable curiosity on the subject.
To ascertain the exact and legal sphere of the operation of this formidable jurisdiction, and to point out its most probable origin, are necessary preliminaries to an account of its constitution and its proceedings. We shall therefore commence with the consideration of these points.
Westphalia, then, was the birth-place of this institution, and over Westphalia alone did it exercise authority. But the Westphalia of the middle ages did not exactly correspond with that of the later times. In a general sense it comprehended the country between the Rhine and the Weser; its southern boundary was the mountains of Hesse; its northern, the district of Friesland, which at that time extended from Holland to Sleswig. In the records and law-books of the middle ages, this land bears the mystic appellation of the red earth, a name derived, as one writer thinks, from the gules, or red, which was the colour of the field in the ducal shield of Saxony; another regards it as synonymous with the bloody earth; and a third hints that it may owe its origin to the red colour of the soil in some districts of Westphalia.