Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 3.djvu/546

 530 WITCHCRAFT. dragged on with the interminable delays for which the Parlement was notorious, enhanced on this occasion by the political vicis- situdes of the period, and the final decision was not rendered until 1491, thirty years after its commencement, when all the sufferers had passed off the scene except the indomitable Huguet Aubry, who was still alive to enjoy a rehabilitation celebrated in a manner as imposing as possible. On July 18 the decree was published from a scaffold erected on the spot where the sentences had been pronounced. The magistrates had been ordered to pro- claim a holiday, and to offer prizes for the best folie moralisee and jpurefolie, and to send notice to all the neighboring towns, so that a crowd of eight or nine thousand persons was collected. After a sermon of two hours and a half, preached by the celebrated Geoff roi Broussart, subsequently chancellor of the University, the decree was read, condemning the Duke of Burgundy to pay the costs, and the processes and sentences to be torn and destroyed as unjust and abusive; ordering the accused and condemned to be restored to their good name and fame, all confiscations and pay- ments to be refunded, while the vicars were to pay twelve hun- dred livres each, Gilles Flameng one thousand, de Saveuse five hundred, and others smaller sums, amounting in all to six thou- sand five hundred; out of which fifteen hundred were to be ap- plied to founding a daily mass for the souls of those executed, and erecting a cross on the spot where they had been burned. The cruel and unusual tortures made use of in the trials were, more- over, prohibited for the future in all secular and ecclesiastical tribunals. It was probably the only case on record in which an inquisitor stood as a defendant in a lay court to answer for his official action. One cannot help reflecting that, if the Council of Yienne had done its duty as fearlessly as the Parlement, the affair of the Templars, so similar in many of its features, might have had a similar termination ; and the contrast between this and the rehabilitation proceedings in the case of Joan of Arc shows how the Inquisition had fallen during the interval.* moires de Jacques du Clercq, Livre rv., witb the decree of Parlement in the appendix. Mathieu de Coussy (Chrouique ch. 129) and Cornelius Zantfliet (Martene, Ampl. Coll. V. 501) also give brief accounts. Some details omitted by
 * The details of this case have, fortunately, been preserved for us in the M&-