Letter VII

Penal Laws unpopular when rigidly exercised--Prosecution of Witches placed in the hand of Special Commissioners, ad inquirendum--Prosecution for Witchcraft not frequent in the Elder Period of the Roman Empire--Nor in the Middle Ages--Some Cases took place, however--The Maid of Orleans--The Duchess of Gloucester--Richard the Third's Charge against the Relations of the Queen Dowager--But Prosecutions against Sorcerers became more common in the end of the Fourteenth Century--Usually united with the Charge of Heresy--Monstrelet's Account of the Persecution against the Waldenses, under pretext of Witchcraft--Florimond's Testimony concerning the Increase of Witches in his own Time--Bull of Pope Innocent VIII.--Various Prosecutions in Foreign Countries under this severe Law--Prosecutions in Labourt by the Inquisitor De Lancre and his Colleague--Lycanthropy--Witches in Spain--In Sweden--and particularly those Apprehended at Mohra.

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Penal laws, like those of the Middle Ages, denounced against witchcraft, may be at first hailed with unanimous acquiescence and approbation, but are uniformly found to disgust and offend at least the more sensible part of the public when the punishments become frequent and are relentlessly inflicted. Those against treason are no exception. Each reflecting government will do well to shorten that melancholy reign of terror which perhaps must necessarily follow on the discovery of a plot or the defeat of an insurrection. They ought not, either in humanity or policy, to wait till the voice of the nation calls to them, as Mecænas to Augustus, "_Surge tandem carnifex_!"

It is accordingly remarkable, in different countries, how often at some particular period of their history there occurred an epidemic of terror of witches, which, as fear is always cruel and credulous, glutted the public with seas of innocent blood; and how uniformly men loathed the gore after having swallowed it, and by a reaction natural to the human mind desired, in prudence, to take away or restrict those laws which had been the source of carnage, in order that their posterity might neither have the will nor the means to enter into similar excesses.

A short review of foreign countries, before we come to notice the British Islands and their Colonies, will prove the truth of this statement. In Catholic countries on the Continent, the various kingdoms adopted readily that part of the civil law, already mentioned, which denounces sorcerers and witches as rebels to God, and authors of sedition in the empire. But being considered as obnoxious equally to the canon and civil law, Commissions of Inquisition were especially empowered to weed out of the land the witches and those who had intercourse with familiar spirits, or in any other respect fell under the ban of the Church, as well as the heretics who promulgated or adhered to false doctrine. Special warrants were thus granted from time to time in