Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 3.djvu/431

 EXTRA-JUDICIAL SUPPRESSION. 415 the Manichaean dualistic theory, which placed the visible world under the control of Satan, but which it finally accepted as ortho- dox, and Thomas Aquinas proved that, with the permission of God, demons could bring about perturbations of the air. Agobard tells us that the belief in his province was universal, among all ranks, that there was a region named Magonia, whence ships came in the clouds and carried back thither the harvests destroyed by hail, the Tempestarii, as these sorcerers were called, being paid by the Ma- gonians for bringing on the storms. Whenever the rumbling of thunder was heard it was a customary remark that a sorcerer's wind was coming. These Tempestarii carried on their nefarious trade in secrecy, but there was a recognized class of practitioners who professed to be able to neutralize them, and were regularly paid for doing so with a portion of the crops, which came to be known as the "canonical portion," and men who paid no tithes and gave nothing in charity were regular in contributing to these impostors. On one occasion three men and a woman were seized, charged with being Magonians who had fallen from one of their aerial ships. A meeting of the people was summoned, before whom the prisoners were brought in chains, and they were promptly condemned to be stoned to death, when Agobard himself came to the rescue, and after prolonged argument succeeded in procur- ing their liberation. A similar instance of extra-judicial action was seen when a destructive murrain invaded the herds, and the story spread that it was caused by Grimoald, Duke of Benevento, who, out of enmity to Charlemagne, sent emissaries to scatter a magic powder on the mountains and fields and streams. As Agobard says, every inhabitant of Benevento, with three wagons apiece, could not have sprinkled a territory so extensive as that affected, but nevertheless large numbers of wretches were captured and put to death on the charge of being concerned in the matter. When he adds that it was marvellous that these persons confessed their pretended crime, and could not be prevented from bearing false witness against themselves, either by scourging, torture, or the fear of death, we learn the means adopted to secure convic- tion ; and in this early and irregular instance of the use of torture we see a foreshadowing of the time when all the extravagant absurdities of the Witches' Sabbat were, by the same efficacious methods, eagerly confessed, and the confessions persisted in to the