Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 3.djvu/521

 IRREFRAGABLE EVIDENCE. 505 able to bewitch people and to raise tempests of hail and rain. In Swabiaacase occurred of one who, at the age of eight, innocently revealed her power to her father, in consequence of which her mother, who had thus dedicated her, was burned. The witch midwives were so numerous that there was scarce a hamlet with- out them.* There was apparently no limit to the evil wrought by Satan through the instrumentality of those who had thus surrendered themselves to him. Sprenger relates that one of his colleagues on a tour of duty reached a town almost depopulated on account of pestilence. Hearing a report that a woman lately buried was swallowing her winding-sheet, and that the mortality would not cease until she had accomplished the deglutition, he caused the grave to be opened and the sheet was found half swallowed. The mayor of the town drew his sword and cut off the head of the corpse and threw it out of the grave, when the pest ceased at once. An inquisition was held and the woman was found to have long been a witch. Sprenger might well deplore the threatened devas- tation of Christendom arising from the neglect of the authorities to suppress these crimes with due severity. f To understand the credulity which accepted these marvels as the most portentous and dreadful of realities, it must be borne in mind that they were not the wild inventions of the demonologists, but were facts substantiated by evidence irrefragable according to the system of jurisprudence. Torture by this time had long been used universally in criminal trials when necessary ; no jurist con- ceived that the truth could be elicited in doubtful cases without it. The criminal whom endless repetition of torment had reduced to stolid despair naturally sought to make his confession square with the requirements of his judge ; the confession once made he was doomed, and knew that retraction, in place of saving him, would only bring a renewal and prolongation of his sufferings. He there- fore adhered to his confession, and when it was read to him in public at his condemnation he admitted its truth.} In many cases, t Mall. Malef. P. i. Q. xii., xv. I In England, where torture was illegal, the growth of witchcraft was much slower. When the craze came an efficient substitute for torture was found in
 * Mall. Malef. P. n. Q. i. c. 13; P. in. Q. xxxiv.