It was even laid down as a principle that doubtful points must be decided ‘in favour of the faith’—in other words, against the accused. ‘If a sorcerer retracts his denunciations at the stake, it is not void, for he may have been corrupted by friends of the accused. Also when witnesses vary, as they often do, the positive assertion is always to be believed,’ says Bishop Covarivias, a prominent member of the Council of Trent. In which he is supported by the jurist Menochius of Padua, ‘ne tam horrendum crimen occultum sit’.
Anything might start a witch-hunting, and once started it increased like an avalanche. If an old woman happened to be out of doors in a thunder-storm; if the winter was prolonged; if there was a more than usual number of flies and caterpillars; if a woman had a spite against her neighbour, some one might be denounced and forced in turn to denounce others. The prolonged winter of 1586 in Savoy, for instance, resulted in the burning of 113 women and two men, who confessed, after torture, that it was due to their incantations.
It is thus not difficult to understand how, in the diocese of Como, witches were burnt for many years at an average rate of 100 per annum; how in that of Strassburg 5,000 were burnt in twenty years, 1615–35; how in the small diocese of Neisse 1,000 suffered between 1640–50, insomuch that they gave up the stake and pile as being too costly, and roasted them in a specially prepared oven; and how the Protestant jurist Benedict Carpzov could boast not only of having read the Bible through fifty-three times, but also of having passed 20,000 death sentences, chiefly on witches and sorcerers.[301]
One of Carpzov’s victims is specially interesting to medical men, the Saxon physician, Dr. Veit Pratzel, who on one occasion (1660) produced twenty mice by sleight of hand in a public-house, probably for the sake of advertisement. He was denounced as a sorcerer, tortured and burnt, while his children were bled to death in a warm bath by the executioner, lest they should acquire similar diabolical powers.[302]
A like fate befell the servant of a travelling dentist at Schwersenz in Poland. The dentist, John Plan, left his assistant in the town to attract attention by conjuring tricks, while he went to sell his infallible toothache tinctures in the neighbouring villages. On his return next evening, he was horrified to see the body of the unfortunate man hanging on the town gallows, and was told on inquiry that he was an evident sorcerer who had made eggs, birds, and plants before everybody in the market-place. He had therefore been arrested, scourged, put on the rack, and otherwise tortured till he confessed he was in league with the devil. Whereupon the town council, ‘out of special grace and to save expense’, had, instead of burning him, mercifully condemned him to be hanged. The dentist fled in terror to Breslau.[303]
But it was by no means necessary to be so foolhardy as this to fall into the hands of the witch-hunters. A woman at Lindheim was noticed to run into her barn as the inquisitorial officials came down the street. She had never been accused or even suspected of witchcraft, but was nevertheless immediately arrested, and brought more dead than alive to the chief inquisitor, Geiss,[304] who declared her flight justified the strongest suspicion. Exposed to the most extreme torture, she confessed nothing, but at length, at the question whether she had made a compact with the devil, one of the inquisitors declared he saw her nod her head. This was enough; she was burnt; probably a happy fate under the circumstances, for she thus escaped being forced by further tortures to give details of her imaginary crime and to denounce her neighbours.
Once in the clutches of the witch-hunters, the unfortunate victim was confronted by a series of dilemmas from which few escaped. A favourite beginning was to ask whether he believed in witchcraft. If he said ‘Yes’, he evidently knew more of the subject; if ‘No’, he was ipso facto a heretic and slanderer of the inquisition; if in confusion he tried to distinguish, he was varius in confessionibus,[305] and a fit subject for immediate torture. If he confessed under torture, the matter was, of course, settled; if he endured manfully, it was evident that the devil must be aiding him. If a mark could be found on his body which was insensible and did not bleed when pricked, it was the devil’s seal and a sure sign of guilt; but if there was none, his case was no better, for it was held that the devil only marked those whose fidelity he doubted, so that a suspected person who had no such mark was in all probability a specially eminent sorcerer.[306]
Then came the water test, of which there is no better account than the report sent by W. A. Scribonius, Professor of Philosophy at Marburg, to the town council of Lemgo in 1583:
‘When I came to you, most prudent and learned consules, 26th September, there were, two days later on St. Michael’s eve, three witches burnt alive for divers and horrible crimes. The same day three others, denounced by those aforesaid, were arrested, and on the following day about 2 p.m. for further proving of the truth were thrown into water to see whether they would swim or not. Their clothes were removed and they were bound by the right thumb to the left big toe and vice versa, so that they could not move in the least. They were then cast three times into the water in the presence of some thousands of spectators, and floated like logs of wood, nor did one of them sink. And it is also remarkable that almost at the moment they touched the water a shower of rain then falling ceased, and the sun shone, but when they were taken out it started raining as before.’