Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 3.djvu/449

 THE NORTHERN RACES. 433 his son, Magnus Hakonsen, in 1274, which for five hundred years remained the common law of Norway. Magic, divination, and the evocation of the dead are unpardonable crimes, punished with death and confiscation; but the accused can purge himself with twelve compurgators, according to the Jarnsida, and with six, according to the code of Gula, thus showing that the crime was subject to the secular courts.* In Sweden there is no allusion to sorcery in the laws compiled early in the thirteenth century by Andreas, Archbishop of Lun- den ; but in those issued by King Christopher in 1441, attempts on life by poison or sorcery are punished with the wheel for men and lapidation for women, and are tried by the Ndmd — a sort of permanent jury of tw T elve men selected in each district as judges. In Denmark the laws in force until the sixteenth century were singularly mild. The accused had the right of defence with se- lected compurgators ; the punishment for a first offence was in- famy and withdrawal of the sacraments ; for relapse, imprison- ment, and finally death for persistent offending. In Sleswick the ancient code of the thirteenth century makes no provision for sor- cery, nor does that of the free Frisians in the fourteenth. That this leniency was not the result of outgrowing the ancient super- stitions we learn from Olaus Magnus, who characterizes the whole Northern regions as literally the seat of Satan. f In all this con- fused and varying legislation we can trace a distinct tendency to increased severity after the thirteenth century. The slight attention paid in the thirteenth century by the Church to a crime so abhorrent as sorcery is proved by the fact p. 78). — Sachsenspiegel Lib. 11. c. 13.— Schwabenspiegel, c. cxvi. § 12 (Ed. Senckenberg) ; Cod. Uffenbach. c. cclxxi. § 6.— Lilienthal, Die Hexenprocesse der beiden Stadten Braunsberg, Konigsberg, 1861, p. 70.— Iarnsida, Mannhelge c. vi., xxv. (Ed. Hafniae, 1847, pp. 22, 46).— LI. Gulathingens. Mannhelge-Bolkr, c. iv., xxv. (Ed. Hafniae, 1817, pp. 137, 197). t Leges Scaniae Provin. Andreae Sunonis Archiep. Lunden. (Thorsen, Skanske Lov, Kjobenhavn, 1853).— Raguald. Ingeioiund. LI. Suecor. Lib. x. c. 5 (Stock- holmiee, 1614). — Canut. Episc. Vibergens. Exposit. Legum Juciae Lib. 111. c. lxix. (Hafniae, 1508).— Ancher, Farrago Legum Antiq. Daniae (Hafniae, 1776).— Leges Opstalbomicae ann. 1323 (Gaertner Saxonum Leges Tres, Lipsiae, 1730).— Olai Magni de Gent. Septentrion. Lib. 111. c. 22. III.— 28
 * Treuga Henrici, No. 21 (Bohlau, Nove Constit. Dom. Alberti, Weimar, 1858,