Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 3.djvu/425

 TOLERATION OF SORCERY. 409 other sorcerers — a piece of practical justice which we are told met with general popular applause.* Such were the beliefs and practices of the races with which the Church had to do in its efforts to obliterate paganism and sor- cery. There was little difference between the provinces which had belonged to the empire and the regions over which Christianity began for the first time to spread, for in the former the conquerors and the conquered were imbued, as we have just seen, with super- stitions nearly akin. The exchange of imperial for barbarian rule worked the same result as to sorcery as that related in a former chapter with regard to the persecution of heresy, though it must be borne in mind that, while heresy almost disappeared in the in- tellectual hebetude of the times, sorcery grew ever more vigorous. Its suppression was practically abandoned. As mentioned above, the earliest text of the Salic law provides no general penalty for it. In subsequent recensions, besides the fine imposed for canni- balism, some MSS. have clauses imposing fines for bewitching with ligatures and killing men with incantations — in the latter case, with the alternative of burning alive — but even these disappear in the Lex Emendata of Charlemagne, possibly in consequence of the legislation of the Capitularies described below. The Ripuarian code only treats murder by sorcery like any other homicide, to be compounded for by the ordinary wer-gild, or blood-money, and for injuries thus inflicted it provides a fine of one hundred sols, to be avoided by compurgation with six conjurators. The other codes are absolutely silent on the subject.f As under the Frankish rule laws were personal and not terri- torial, the Gallo-Roman population was still governed by the Eo- man law, but evidently there was no attempt made to enforce it. Gregory of Tours relates for us several miracles to prove the supe- riority of the Christian magic of relics and invocation of saints over the popular magic of the conjurer, which indicate that the lxiv.— Blackwell's Mallet, Bolin's Ed. p. 524.— Keyser, op. cit. pp. 266-7.— Har- ald Harfaager's Saga, 25, 36 (Laing's Heimskringla). t L. Salic. Text. Herold. Tit. xxii. ; MS. Guelferbit. Tit. xix.— L. Ripuar. Tit. lxxxiii.
 * L. Salic. First Text, Tit. lxiv. § 2 ; Text. Herold. Tit. lxvii. ; Third Text, Tit.