Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 3.djvu/424

 408 SORCERY AND OCCULT ARTS. The trolla-thing, or nocturnal gathering of witches, where they danced and sang and prepared their unholy brewage in the caldron, was a customary observance of these wise-women, especially on the first of May (St. "Walpurgis' JS"ight), which was the great festi- val of pagandom.* We shall see hereafter the portentous growth of this, which developed into the TTitches' Sabbat. It is a feature common to the superstition of many races, the origin of which cannot be definitely assigned to any. That the practice of this impious sorcery was deemed infamous is clear from the provision of the Salic law, already alluded to, im- posing a fine of eighty-nine sols for calling a free woman a witch without being able to prove it. Yet the mere addiction to it in pagan times was not a penal offence, and penalties were only in- flicted for injuries thus committed on person or property. In ex- treme cases, where death was encompassed, there seems to have been a popular punishment of lapidation, which was the fate in- curred, after due sentence, by three noted sorcerers, Katla and Kotkel and Grima. The codified laws of the barbarians, however, never prescribed the death penalty, fines being the universal retri- bution for crime, and in a later text of the Salic law two hundred sols is designated for the witch who eats a man. Yet individual cases can be found of persecution, such as that by Harald Harfaager, whose early experience had inspired him with intense hatred of the art. One of his sons, Kognvald Eettilbein, received from him the government of Hadeland, where he learned sorcery and be- came a great adept; so when Yitgeir, a noted wizard of Horde- land, was ordered by Harald to abandon his evil ways he retorted : " The danger surely is not great, From wizard born of mean estate, When Harald's son in Hadeland, King Rognvald, to the art lays hand." Kognvald's wrong-doing being thus betrayed, Harald lost no time in despatching Eric Blood-Axe, his son by another wife, who promptly burned his half-brother in a house, along with eighty Saxonise ann. 794, c. vi. — Olaf Haraldsson's Saga, 151 (Laing's Heimskringla). Cf. Horace (Ars Poet.), " Neil pransae Lamiae vivum puerum extrahat alvo."
 * Grimm, op. cit. III. 1044, 1050-1.