Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 3.djvu/444

 423 SORCERY AND OCCULT ARTS. pears that their sorcery may bring death on man or woman, while if there is no danger of this, it imprisons them until they recant. Thus sorcery is heresy cognizable by the Church only, and punish- able when abjured only by penitence ; yet, when the obstinate sorcer- er is handed over to the secular arm, in place of being burned like a Waldensian refusing to swear, the character of his heresy is weighed by the secular court, and if its intent be not homicide he is simply imprisoned until he recants, showing that sorcery was treated as the least dangerous form of heresy. Beaumanoirs assertion of ecclesiastical jurisdiction is confirmed by a contemporaneous de- cision of the Parlement of Paris in 12S2, in the case of some women arrested as sorceresses in Senlis and tried by the maire and jurats. The Bishop of Senlis claimed them, as their offence pertained to his court ; the magistrates asserted their jurisdiction, especially as there had been cutting of skin and effusion of blood, and the Parlement, after due deliberation, ordered the women de- livered to the spiritual court. Yet, though this was the law at the time, it did not long remain so. Under the ancestral systems of criminal practice, when conviction or acquittal in doubtful cases depended on the ordeal or the judicial duel or on compurgation,' the secular courts were poorly equipped for determining guilt in a crime so obscure, and they naturally abandoned it to the en- croachments of the spiritual tribunals. As the use of torture, how- ever, gradually spread, the lay officials became quite as competent as the ecclesiastical to wring confession and conviction from the accused, and they speedily arrogated to themselves the cognizance of such cases. At the South, where the Inquisition had familiarized them with the use of torture at an earlier period, we already, in 1271 and 1275, hear of an inquest held and of wizards and witches put to death by the royal officials in Toulouse. In the Xorth, the trials of the Templars accustomed the public mind to the use of torture, and demonstrated its efficiency, so that the lay courts speedily came to have no hesitation in exercising jurisdiction over sorcery. In 1314 Petronille de Valette was executed in Paris as a sorceress. She had implicated Pierre, a merchant of Poitiers, and his nephew Perrot. They were forthwith put to the ban and Summula exigendi Confess. (Harduin VII. 1126). — Myrror of Justice c. i. § 4; c. ii. § 22; c. m. § 14.— Regiara Majest. Scoriae, Edinburgi, 1609, fol. 163-7.