Daughters of the Inquisition

by Christina Crawford

  Germany is the classic land of witchcraft, thanks to its political organization, which permitted every lord having jurisdiction, every parson and every magistrate to burn to his hearts’ content, and thanks to religious division which stimulated the persecution of heresy. Large proportion of the sufferers were the victims of greed – destroyed in order to seize their possessions. As a rule the seigneur took two-thirds of the confiscations, one-third being divided between the judges, priests, accusers and officials. In many places the prince received twelve dollars for each witch, the judge four or five and the executioner about one … Geiss had been charging excessively for every act (of burning).537

  Hungary

  The Inquisition of the early Middle Ages did not come to Hungary.

  But at the close of the Medieval period the conception of witchcraft was altered in Hungary as in all other Catholic lands. The Church identified heresy with witchcraft and under the name of the latter persecuted opposition to its institutions. The bull Summis desiderantes in 1484 gave an impetus to the hitherto irregular persecution and the Malleus brought the whole matter into a system.538

  Laws enacted between 1244 and 1421 prescribe that sorcerers and witches on their first offense are required to stand in a public place all day, “wearing a Jew’s hat on which angels are painted, and then abjure their errors. For relapse, however, they are to be burnt like heretics.” Later a national council at Buda in 1279, chaired by the papal legate, issued a long decree on the issues of morals, lives and discipline of the clergy and lay population with particular regard to employing concubines, strumpets, engaging in adultery but without any allusion to witchcraft or sorcery.”539

  There are records of persecutions in the fifteenth century and a few in the sixteenth. Possibly the two religions were more preoccupied with fighting each other for power and used the issue to gain dominance one over the other. However, the criminal code of Ferdinand III in the seventeenth century changed the tide, and Emperor Joseph I issued his decree in July 1707 bringing the Malleus into his realm. As a consequence, trials against women continued in 1739, 1741, 1743 through 1745. Maria Theresa (1717–1780), archduchess of Austria, Queen of Hungary and Bohemia and mother of Marie Antoinette, Joseph II and Leopold II, issued legislation intended as a deterrent to the burnings, but the trials continued to be recorded in 1756,1766, and as late as 1775 under her rule.540

  In Transylvania as late as 1752, an old midwife was tried for “performing all the feats ascribed to witches except that there was no mention of the Sabbat. She was sentenced to the water ordeal, then to torture to reveal accomplices and to be at once burnt, which was duly executed.”541 Unfortunately, sporadic trials against women persisted into the next century with a rather notorious one in the hot, dry summer of 1874 during peasant unrest when four old women were accused and taken to the river for the ordeal, i.e. drowning.

  When we turn to a native Hungarian source, a woman with an eight-hundred year old family tree, the picture of persecutions in Hungary is different. In her Holy Book of Women’s Mysteries Zsuzsanna Budapest tells of her mother Masika who kept what she called her book of sorrows, which were details of the trials and burnings of family members and others in the region. According to these recollections, as early as 1175 King Kalman declared a cessation of the persecution, trial and torture of women accused as witches, but the Christian churches disregarded him, holding burnings with no interference from the monarch. Inquisitional church records number 10,000 women burned at the stake in Hungary, but as in other areas, records are often missing, incomplete or misleading, indicating the possibility that there were many deaths in addition to those contained in the official documents. In Hungary the victims are “anyone performing any pagan act; carriers of herbal lore and cures; midwives; priestesses and prophets; any person with a witches paraphernalia such as a chalice or wand in the home; any woman pointed out by a man who claimed he was hexed by her.”542 The executioner began negotiations with family members of the accused, offering their loved one a fast death-dealing blow in exchange for money, goods or property in advance. Often the family was stripped of everything they owned, living afterwards in an empty house.

  Author Budapest offers three short biographies of women accused. The first is from 1550 in Transylvania involving a noblewoman named Anna Apor whose father had been beheaded and his property confiscated because he was supposed to be a Turkish sympathizer. Then the King began making treaties with the Turks, at which time some feared that Anna might have her inherited lands returned rightfully to her. It was only then that the rumors began to circulate accusing Anna of being a witch. She was formally accused and imprisoned. Her fingernails were torn out. She was stripped naked, and her hair cut off. Because she refused to admit to any charges except that she knew the power of trees and herbs, she was tied around the waist with heavy chains and put into the Tizsa river. Initially she sank, and the judges declared her innocent, believing as they did that witches always float. But Anna could swim and surfaced downstream where she was immediately found guilty and sentenced to burning. An uprising occurred at the same time, so her ultimate fate is unrecorded. Did she starve to death in prison or was she rescued by her people?543

  The second case is a woman named Erzsebet Galanti who was tried in 1761. Under torture by having hot water poured into her mouth while the inquisitors ate their lunch in the same room, she confessed and was sentenced to death, but not by burning. Erzsebet was forced to dig her own grave. She was put into a casket with one end cut off. “When they placed her in the casket, her face was looking through the hole into the ground … buried alive. The men poked at Erzsebet’s face with hot irons. They chopped up her skull so that she could not rise by night to haunt them.”544

  Possibly the last woman to be burned in Hungary was 30 year old Margit Salka who was a practicing herbalist having learned her skills from her mother. She lived on a small island in the Tizsa river. “In 1869 she was accused of poisoning a man from the town and, although there was no evidence against her, she was burned to death.”545 In Hungary as elsewhere, greed was a motivating factor. “Whoever pointed a finger at a witch, resulting in her conviction and execution, was rewarded with ten percent of the murdered woman’s goods. The (Catholic) Church received the rest.”546

  France

  Throughout the late Middle Ages, various councils had decrees which called for punishment of sorcerers, seen as males, which indicate that these initial edits were actually to be used against the male clerics who were necromancers. There is scant reference to female witches from 1287 until the Council of Tours in 1583 which cites “malefici” but does not specifically mention witchcraft or women. But Charles VIII, king of France from 1483 to 1498, decrees in October, 1490, that “all enchanters, diviners, invokers of evil spirits and practitioners of other evil arts are to be arrested, turned over to the Church, their property sequestered.”547 Officials who neglected their duty would be removed from office and fined. Three years later the penalties were applied to anyone who either consulted with or employed these people, including (in 1493) necromancers and those who practiced prohibited sciences. By 1582 there were trials of women in Avignon and mass trials of sorcerers and women in Landes in 1609 which numbered more than 600 burnt. One witness says that “there are 30,000 souls in the Pays de Labourt and among them very few families untouched by sorcery, so that some heads of families, officials and people of quality preferred the discomfort caused by the sorcerers to seeing such a mass of gibbets (gallows with an arm by which the dead are hung on public display), and stakes at which their kindred were burnt. On our coming they fled by caravans, some putting out to sea and others fleeing to Spain under pretense of pilgrimage.”548 French writer Pierre de Lancre, writing from Paris in 1613, told how the Parliament of Bordeaux

  Condemned to death an infinite number of others. When the fishermen came home from Newfoundland to the number of 5,000 to 6,000 (accused women) and found what … was being done … it was impossible to keep order
at the executions; they (fishermen) surged around the condemned, demanding their retraction of their testimony against their mothers, wives and sisters, sometimes holding daggers at their throats. The officials were powerless and it was difficult to make them perform their duties in the face of these howling mobs.549

  Lancre states that it was actually “the priests and cures of Labourt and of the neighboring districts of Navarre who are for the most part the sorcerers. They are so respected that no one is scandalized by their habits, frequenting the taverns, the dances, the ball games, with swords by their side and half-pikes (weapons) in their hands, or going on pilgrimages in company with three or four pretty girls. Their privileges are such that at first no one dared to accuse them.”550 But one old priest was accused and did confess abundantly before being executed. This opened a flood-gate after which numbers of priest-sorcerers and necromancers were executed. After this denunciation by the old man, participation at the Sabbat ceremony was sufficient proof for execution, even without harm to others proven.

  In 1577 the Parliament of Toulouse put to death more women accused of witchcraft than it did of all other crimes in two years. More than 400 women were executed by burning or by hanging between 1577 and 1579.551 The chronicler of Treves reported that in the year 1586 the city burned 7,000 women, and the entire female population of two outlying villages was executed by inquisitors, leaving only one woman per village to care for orphans.552 In February, 1745, five priests out of a group of twenty-nine were burned alive for the crime of sorcery in Lyons. Five were sent to the ships, three to exile, and four fined for celebration of sacrilegious masses. This was only forty-five years before the French Revolution, which overthrew the Bourbon monarchy in 1789 and brought Napoleon to power in 1799, and just thirty years prior to the American Revolution of 1775–83 in the New World.

  England and New England

  In England between 1542 and 1736 there were 30,000 women executed, accused of being witches.553 According to historian Lea

  one reason why witch craft assumed larger proportions in Great Britain after the Reformation than the comparatively mild persecutions previous was the fact that exorcism, the magical or miraculous ejection of devils by certain consecrated forms of abjuration, remained the only recognized supernatural privilege to their clergy and so acquired a proportionate value.554

  In 1534 Henry VIII (1491–1547) broke with the Church of Rome after his excommunication by the Pope and founded the Church of England based on many common principles but no longer associated with the papacy. Prior to this break, in 1541 the king issued the following edict: “It shall be a felony to practice or cause to be practiced conjuration, enchantment, witchcraft or sorcery, to get money or to consume any person in his body, members or goods, or to provoke any person to unlawful love.”555 Before 1542 witchcraft was left to the ecclesiastical courts and canon law associated with the Church of Rome. Now the crime was in secular domain. Henry’s successor, Edward VI repealed the statute which once again put the crime under canon law.

  Into this time came a controversy over the New Testament spawned by various reform movements. In 1538 Thomas Cromwell, advisor to the king, issued a royal decree in the name of the king which would require parish churches to provide one public copy of the entire bible in English and encourage everyone to read it. This was followed extensively and sometimes the passages were read aloud even during services. A year later, in 1539, responding to different reform voices, the king issued a proclamation forbidding the English Bible to be read aloud in church! Four years after that, Parliament was swayed by a movement against free access and said that “no laboring men or women should read to themselves or to others, publicly or privately, any part of the Bible, under pain of imprisonment.” Only the educated elite were now permitted to read scripture (Holy Bible, New King James version, pg 1220–21). Three years later, no one was allowed to read the New Testament, consequently both the Tyndale and the Cloverdale translations were burned at St. Pauls Cross. Then Mary Tudor (1516–1558) daughter of Henry VIII and wife of Phillip II of Spain took the throne after young Edward VI died, still a teenager. The Spanish Inquisition was in full force and undoubtedly influenced the wife of the King of Spain. This Roman Catholic Queen was known as “bloody Mary” during her short reign of five years. But during her reign, hundreds of Protestant men such as Thomas Cramer, Archbishop of Canterbury, and thousands of women were burned at the stake.

  The next monarch was Elizabeth I (1508–1603) daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Bolyn and Queen of England who in 1562 provided for penalties of convocation or invocation of wicked spirits and included witchcraft, enchantment, charms or sorcery. During her reign the Geneva Bible was once again made available. Seventy editions were released and in 1575 one edition was printed in England. Once this occurred, this edition became known as the “people’s Book” and was used at home by commoners, becoming the backbone of the newly evolving Puritanism. This movement was motivated to simplify or purify the liturgy, vestments and government of the Church of England. Some Puritan shopkeepers even kept an open copy of the Geneva Bible on their counters (King James pg 1221). Inevitably this led to the Church of England determining that they required their own bible, all the while fearing attempts to return to the Church of Rome and the Papal aristocracy. But after the execution of bloody Mary and the defeat of the mighty ships of the Spanish Armada in 1588, those fears diminished.

  “In the last quarter of the sixteenth century, the issue was no longer whether one was Catholic or Protestant. Increasingly the question became: what kind of Protestant? Church of England traditionalist or a reform-minded Puritan?” (King James pg 1222). In 1593 Parliament branded as “disloyal persons” all who worshipped outside the Church of England. Those who continued such practices were ordered to leave England or suffer death (King James, pg 1222). Elizabeth I died on March 24, 1603, ending the first Elizabethan Age. Her successor was to be a Presbyterian Scottish King, James VI. In that same year the plague struck London again, and 30,000 people, one-fifth of the population, died as a result. The new king withdrew to Hampton Court Palace in the countryside where he was entertained by hunting, dancing, feasting but took time to convene a council to write what was to become the King James version of the modern English Bible. Puritans were included as decision-makers, and a new translation of the biblical text was made by the men of the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge and Westminster.

  Then England suffered a civil war in 1642 which was called the Great Rebellion or Puritan revolution. The main issue was one of religion. The Puritans believed that the people, not the bishops, should have the majority voice in church laws and governance. When this war actually broke out along religious lines, bible printing ceased, imported books were used which Parliament labeled corrupt and dangerous. James son Charles I was beheaded in 1649 on the charge of treason which opened the way for a Puritan commoner named Oliver Cromwell to assume leadership as Lord Protector while England was without a monarch. This strife of politics commingled with religious fervor set the stage for viciousness toward women that erupted with renewed vigor.

  Reginald Scott writing in his Discovery of Witchcraft in 1665 cites executions of women in 1580 in Essex and alludes to a foolish pamphlet dedicated to Lord Darcy in 1582 urging the use of torture and blaming the judges (in the women’s trials) for only hanging witches, when they deserve a hundred times greater punishment than murderers and thieves. In 1604 the infamous and celebrated Witch Act was passed which was similar to that enacted by Elizabeth I who had died just the year before. It was “an act against conjuration, witchcraft and dealing with evil and wicked spirits.”556 This act had the force of law for nearly one hundred and fifty years and was not repealed until the reign of George II who ruled from 1727 to 1760 and was well known to colonists in the New England territories.

  The witches of Huntington were on trial in 1646. In this case their names are all on record as being Elizabeth Weld, John Winnick, Frances Moore, Elizabeth Chandler, Ellen
Shepherd, Anne Desborough, Jane Wallis. “All were confessed, tried and executed.” For the region of Kent, in 1684 Sir Robert Filmer writes of the late execution of witches which was part of a “grand Inquest.”557

  The methods of torture long used on the continent in the European Inquisition were not permitted in England. Nevertheless, a man named Hopkins the Witch Finder invented methods more prolonged. “One was placing the accused (woman) on a table cross-legged, tying her legs and keeping her in that posture without food or sleep for 24 hours, an intolerable torture which in most cases led to confessions of whatever was wanted. Then there was the sleeplessness torture, walking the accused up and down between two men for as long as was needed.”558

  In 1593 the witches of Warboyse were tried: Agnes and her daughter Alice were accused of sending demons to torment the Throckmorton children. The women were executed along with Samuel, husband to Agnes and father of Alice. The Lancaster witches were condemned and executed in 1612. Women named Susan Edwards, Mary Trembles, and Temperance Lloyd were hanged in 1682, and Alice Molland was executed in Exeter in 1685. These names conclude those recorded and researched by Lea.559

  Beginning in 1618 the Thirty Years War tore apart the European continent as battles between Protestants and Catholics raged, and the trials against women escalated. Only two years after the onset of this religious war, English settlers reach Cape Cod in North America and found Plymouth Colony in 1620. In 1626 the Dutch create New Amsterdam, which will become New York. Meanwhile, French colonists settle in Canada. All are escaping the dreadful reign of destruction in the Old World, hoping to find freedom from this lethal religious conflict in the new one. As early as 1664 England wins New York from the Dutch and controls New England in North America, which they establish formally in 1686 as the Dominion of New England.560

  The first wave of desperate refugees from the politico/religious wars of Europe who fled to New England unfortunately brought with them the negative image of women which had been the primary propaganda throughout five hundred years of Inquisitional rhetoric. No one, neither Catholic nor Protestant, had been spared this institutionalized diatribe on the evils of womanhood. It had been going on for such a long time that it was now impossible for men to believe that what began as the propaganda of the Inquisition was not, in fact, the intrinsic nature of all women. And women had been so marginalized, so terrorized, so denuded of dignity and self-respect that they probably had internalized the negative images of the accusers, because there were no alternative voices speaking up for them in defense.