Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 2.djvu/515

Rh universities corroborated the accusations. His replies were sharp and ready, but were drowned in the roar of fresh charges, mingled with shouts of "Burn him! Burn him!" Thence he was carried to a dungeon in the Cemetery of St. Paul, where he was chained hand and foot to a bench too high for him to sit on, and for two days he was fed on bread and water, until his friends ascertained his place of imprisonment and made interest with the jailer to give him better food. He soon fell dangerously sick and asked for a confessor, after which he was less rigorously fettered, but he never left the prison except for audience and execution.

Stephen Palecz, Michael de Causis, and the rest were ready with their accusations, nor could there be difficulty in accumulating a mass of testimony sufficient to convict twenty such men as Jerome. His trial proceeded according to the regular inquisitorial process, the commissioners finding him much more learned and skilful than Huss; but, brilliant as was his defence when under examination, his nervous temperament unfitted him to bear, like Huss, the long-protracted agony. Sometimes with dialectic subtlety he turned his examiners to ridicule, at others he vacillated between obduracy and submission. Finally he weakened under the strain, while the rebellious attitude of the Bohemians doubtless led the council to increase the pressure. On September 11 he was brought before the assembly, where he read a long and elaborate recantation. Huss's sweetness of temper, he said, had attracted him, and his earnest exposition of Scripture truths had led him to believe that such a man could not teach heresy. He could not believe that the thirty articles condemned by the council were really Huss's, until he had obtained a book in Huss's own handwriting, and on comparing them article by article he found them to be so. He therefore spontaneously and of free will condemned them, some of them as heretical, others as erroneous, others as scandalous. He also condemned the forty-five articles of Wickliff; he submitted himself wholly to the council, he condemned whatever it condemned, and he asked for fitting penance to be assigned him. He did not even shrink from a deeper degradation. He wrote to Bohemia that Huss had been justly executed, that he