WISE MEN—AND OTHERS
THE ALCHEMISTS
The cyclic tendency so obvious in Nature is not least notable in the domain of knowledge. The discovery of one era is lost in the next, only to reappear at a later day, welcomed as a triumph of modern ingenuity or science. In maps of three centuries ago the Nile is shown rising from great lakes, but in the atlases that our fathers used the lakes have vanished and a range of imaginary mountains lies like a little woolly caterpillar in the heart of Africa as the source of the Nile, only to be replaced once more in our own days by the great lakes. Dragons, after being commonplaces of ancient time, fell into undeserved contempt, their very existence denied by a sceptical generation, and have only been rescued and rehabilitated in recent years by men of science, who, ashamed to admit that they have found the fabulous monsters of faery, have disguised them in polysyllabic nomenclature of ‘saurus.’ The ‘travellers’ tales’ of old Herodotus, scoffed at by the superior minds of the unimaginative Victorian era, are daily gaining acceptance; King Chedorlaomer and other worthies, who, after centuries of blameless biblical existence, were conclusively demolished by the High German Critics, have reappeared on contemporary tablets of imperishable clay unkindly disinterred by archÆological explorers; and, in more mundane matters, the very latest developments of sanitary science prove to have been anticipated by a trifle of sixty centuries in the palaces of Crete.
So with Alchemy. The transmutation of the base into the noble, above all of the baser metals into gold, was accepted as feasible from the earliest historic times until the seventeenth century. Then the spread of printing enabled so many votaries of the science to publish their ideas and theories that all belief in Alchemy was swept away by the flood of mystical nonsense, but now science is back on the threshold of the knowledge of transmutation. The old alchemists seem to have based their theories on the belief that all metals, and indeed all matter, contained one common element, of which the purest and most perfect form on this earth was gold. This theory was knocked on the head when scientists discovered the Atomic Theory. Proof positive was adduced that certain substances, such as gold and silver, were elements, and that elements consisted simply and solely of agglomerations of indivisible atoms, each of which possessed the characteristics of its particular element. In other words, Gold was Gold and Silver was Silver, and there was an end to it. But now the indivisible atoms are beginning to fly in pieces before the skilful and remorseless attack of modern scientists, and it will be no surprising thing if we live to see the ‘elements’ of our schooldays reduced to combinations of two or three Primary Elements, even if the Primordial Element, the great First Cause, is not weighed, measured, and photographed. If, then, gold and silver can be split into the same constituents it might well be possible to recombine those constituents in such manner that the silver should become gold and the gold silver. To the scientific mind the two transmutations would be of equal value, but to the philosopher aiming ever at perfection, and to the sordid speculator, aiming ever at profit, the production of gold from the baser metal has always been the goal.
We naturally hear little of mediÆval alchemists in the legal records. Their proceedings were inoffensive and little calculated to bring them within the jurisdiction of any court, except possibly that of bankruptcy. One of the scarce exceptions of this rule of silence occurred in 1463, when Edward IV. granted to Sir Henry Grey of Codnor in Derbyshire, authority to labour by the cunning of philosophy for the transmutation of metals, with all things requisite to the same, at his own cost, provided he answer to the King if any profit grow therefrom. The terms of the grant can scarcely be called liberal. Two years later the King decided that Sir Henry had had sufficient time for his experiments and called upon him to render an account of his gains. The philosopher, who had probably very little to account for, did not appear and his case was postponed from term to term for five years. At last a date was fixed for him to appear in court in the middle of October 1470, ‘but before that date the Lord King, certain necessary and urgent causes moving him, made a journey from his realm of England to foreign parts, leaving no regent or guardian in the same realm, wherefore the Barons of the Exchequer did not come to hear pleas.’ Reading the courtly sentence it is hard to realise that on the 3rd of October King Edward had, in the words of Speed, ‘fled from his host besides Nottingham, passing the Washes towards Lynne, with greater difficulties than was befitting a Prince to adventure, and thus without any order taken for his Realme, in two Hulkes of Holland and one English ship, destitute of all necessary provisions, set sail towards Burgundy, and in the way was encountered by the Easterlings, England’s great enemies, having much adoe to clear himself of their surprize.’ The politer version of the legal roll has been written over an entry which, although completely erased, we may be sure set out how Henry VI. had recovered the realm from Edward, ‘king in fact but not in right.’ The alchemy of the pen, by which the roseate Lancastrian version faded to the colourless statement of the Yorkists, was more successful, we may well believe, than was ever the alchemy of Sir Henry Grey.
But in spite of the ill-success of Sir Henry Grey the King in 1476 licensed David Beaupee and John Merchaunt to practise for four years ‘the natural science of the generation of gold and silver from mercury.’ Alchemy, indeed, was clearly flourishing in the fifteenth century. In 1468 Richard Carter received authority to practise the art, while under Henry VI. several such licences were granted. Thus in 1444 Edward Cobbe was authorised ‘to transmute the imperfect metals from their own kind by the art of Philosophy and to transubstantiate them into gold or silver’; two years later Sir Edmund Trafford and Sir Thomas Ashton were empowered to transmute metals, and in 1446 John Fauceby, John Kirkeby, and John Rayny received the royal permission to search for the philosopher’s stone or the elixir of life and to transmute metals. Presumably the need for royal licence in all these cases was based on the royal claim to all mines, and therefore to all other sources, of precious metals. Covetous eyes had been cast upon Alchemy as a possible source of revenue at least as early as 1330, when Thomas Cary was ordered to bring before King Edward III. John le Rous and Master William de Dalby, who were said to be able to make silver by alchemy, with the instruments and other things needful to their craft. But of all these scientists and philosophers no more is heard, and, although I have not searched the accounts of bullion purchased for the Mint, it may safely be asserted that the revenue profited little by all their science and philosophy.
Alchemy, like so many other branches of knowledge, found a home in the monasteries, and there is a story of an abbot in one of the Western Counties who, at the time of the Dissolution, hid his books and manuscripts of the hermetic art in a wall, and returning thither to fetch them found them not, and for grief at his loss lost also his wits. Thomas Ellis, again, prior of Leighs in Essex, took more loss than gain from dabbling in the art. Rumours of his skill in manipulating metals caused him to be suspected of coining, and he had to give an account of himself. His interest in the theory of Alchemy, which he had derived from reading books, had been stimulated by ‘commynyng with Crawthorne, a goldsmyth in Lumbardstrete, that sayd ther was a prest callyd Sir George that made himselfe cunning in suche matters.’ This priest in turn introduced the prior to one Thomas Peter, a clothworker of London, ‘that sayd he had the syens of alkemy as well as eny man in Yngland.’ The prior took him at his own valuation and promised to pay him £20 for lessons in the art, and gave him 20 nobles in advance. Master Peter then gave his pupil some silver and quicksilver with instructions how to treat them. These metals Prior Ellis sealed hermetically in a glass vessel, which he then placed in an earthen pot full of water, and this he kept hot for some ten weeks or more, employing a young novice of the priory, Edmund Freke, a boy of twelve, to keep up a continual fire. Master Peter came from time to time to see how matters were progressing, and no doubt reported favourably, but after a while the prior ‘perceyved yt was but a falce crafte,’ broke the glass vessel, sold the silver for what it would fetch and refused to pay his instructor the remaining 20 marks. Peter, however, who was better skilled in making money out of men than gold out of silver, threatened an action for debt, and as it chanced that an offer of 20 marks was made at this time to the prior for the lease of a rectory he handed the money over to Master Peter. ‘And thus I never medelyd with hym syne, nor with the crafte nor never wyll, God wyllyng.’
‘A young novice of the priory.’
WHITE MAGIC
Before the days of Sherlock Holmes and the scientific pursuit of clues the ways of tracing lost or stolen property were devious and varied. In recent times the aid of St. Anthony of Padua has often been invoked. Why that good Saint should have taken up this branch of detective work I know not; possibly he was confused with his namesake the hermit, whose pig might well have been trained to search for lost articles as less holy pigs to hunt for truffles, or possibly, as was said of the man who married five wives, ‘it was his hobby.’ However this may be, I have known excellent results obtained by the promise of a candle or the repetition of a paternoster in honour of St. Anthony; the prayer is the more popular offering, being cheaper for the petitioner and more certain for the saint—the candle is apt to be withheld when the property has been recovered, and candles have even been known to go astray and blaze before the altar of the other St. Anthony, who was probably too busy in pre-Reformation days looking after the cattle of his devotees to trouble about lost property. The man, therefore, who would have supernatural assistance in the recovery of his strayed goods had perforce to seek the aid of sorcerers and their familiar but often incompetent spirits. Unfortunately for the modern inquirer no unsolicited testimonials bearing witness to the efficacy of these magicians appear to have survived, and it is only their failures that brought them into unpleasant and enduring prominence.
London was naturally a great centre of these occult detectives, and they seem to have been well patronised. In 1390 when two silver dishes were stolen from the Duke of York’s house, application was made to one John Berkyng, a renegade Jew, who performed certain incantations, and as a result accused one of the Duke’s servants, William Shadewater. In the same way, when Lady Despenser’s fur-lined scarlet mantle was stolen, about the same time, Berkyng had no hesitation in denouncing Robert Trysdene and John Geyte. His repute was no doubt considerable, but these two cases proved disastrous; the parties accused had him arrested, and he was found guilty of deceit and defamation, stood in the pillory for an hour, and was then banished from the city.
In this case nothing is said as to the means of divination employed, but in two cases that occurred in London in 1382 particulars are given. When Simon Gardiner lost his mazer bowl he employed a German, Henry Pot by name, to trace it. He made thirty-two balls of white clay, and after appropriate incantations named Nicholas Freman and Cristine, his wife, as the thieves. Here again the mistake brought the magician to the pillory, and the same fate befell Robert Berewold. In this case also it was a mazer that had been stolen; Maud of Eye was its owner, but a friend of hers, one Alan, a water carrier, who had evidently a high opinion of Robert’s power, called him in. Robert then took a loaf and fixed in the top of it a round peg of wood and four knives at the four sides of the same, in the shape of a cross; his further proceedings are vaguely described as ‘art magic,’ and resulted first in the accusation of Joan Wolsey and eventually in the appearance of Robert Berewold in the pillory with the loaf hanging round his neck.
The connection between mazers and magic is not obvious, but in 1501 when John Richardson, a parish clerk, lost a mazer worth 26s. he at once sought the assistance of Nicholas Hanwode, ‘bringing with him divers young children for to behold in a looking-glass.’ The record is damaged, but is sufficiently legible to show that the victim was arrested and imprisoned by the mayor and could only invoke the intervention of the Court of Chancery against his accusers. In this last case we have clearly an instance of divination by the glass, crystal, or similar medium—a pool of ink was used, if I remember right, by the Indians in The Moonstone. The loaf and knives seem vaguely familiar to me as instruments of divination, though I should be puzzled to give the correct ceremonial, but the thirty-two clay balls are more difficult to place, unless possibly they were used for the construction of some kind of geomantic figure.
Robert Berewold in the pillory.
So far we have been dealing with genuine, if inaccurate, magicians, but a case that occurred in London in 1382 shows that there were impostors even in that learned profession. Mistress Alice Trig having lost her Paris kerchief suspected Alice Byntham of having stolen it, and apparently not without good reason. The two women seem to have been fairly intimate, and Alice Byntham went to a cobbler, William Northamptone, and gave him information of certain very private matters concerning the other Alice. William then went round to Mistress Trig and posed as a wise man, which he may have been, skilled in magic, which he was not, and revealed to her his knowledge of her private affairs. She, being duly impressed, asked him who had stolen her kerchief, to which he replied, whoever it was it certainly was not Alice Byntham, and launching out rashly into prophecy told his questioner that she would be drowned within a month. The dismal prospect almost terrified her into an early grave, but in the end she survived to see William standing in the pillory.
A case that is recorded in Lincolnshire in the sixteenth century is interesting as showing the more than local reputation enjoyed by some of these cunning men. The church of Holbeach having been robbed, the parishioners consulted their fellow-townsman John Lamkyn, a man known to have ‘resonable knowledg in the sciens of gramer,’ which he taught to the children of the neighbourhood, and said to have a knowledge not so reasonable of such arts as enchantment, witchcraft, and sorcery. He, at the request of the churchwardens, went off to consult Edmund Nash, a wheeler, famed as ‘an expert man in the knowleg of thynges stolen,’ who lived at ‘Cicestre,’ which may have been either Chichester or Cirencester, as it is called in one place ‘Chechestre’ and in another ‘Circetter,’ but was in any case a very long way off. Lamkyn took with him a pair of leather gloves found in the vestry after the robbery, and Nash made certain deductions therefrom, which caused suspicion to fall upon John Partridge, who complained that he had lost friends and reputation and been ‘brought into infamy and slander and owte of credenz.’ Lamkyn’s version of the story made out Nash to be merely a private detective following up clues without recourse to magic, and also hinted that Partridge’s reputation was no great loss. There is as little reason to believe one as the other.
Probably the most popular method of ascertaining the whereabouts of lost property and the identity of the thief was by the use of astrology. Some years ago, when I was in one of those bookshops in which at that time I spent much of my spare time and all of my spare money, I was offered a manuscript volume, formerly the property of William Lilly, in which that famous but shifty astrologer had recorded some scores of investigations made by him for clients and mostly concerned with the recovery of stolen goods. The figures were neatly drawn up, and the interpretation written below, but, if my memory serves me, there was nothing to show in how many cases the investigations led to any practical result. There are, I believe, two similar volumes in the Bodleian, but what became of this particular copy I do not know; whether it was due to the unfair incidence of taxation under the budget of that year or to more permanent causes, my funds did not permit of its acquisition, and I left it sorrowfully in company with a much-desired Augsburg Missal and Pine’s edition of Horace—the rare edition of the ‘post est’ blunder. I did, however, secure Fludd’s Macrocosm, by aid of which I might myself, if time and my mastery of the movements of the whirling spheres permitted, open a branch of the heavenly Scotland Yard.
‘... sware “gret othes” and took himself by the hair.’
The early astrologers, thanks to the cautious vagueness of their statements, seem to have avoided the clutches of the law, into which other magicians fell. The stars reveal no names, recording only, by an anticipation of the Bertillon procedure, the measurements and physical peculiarities of the thieves. If from these particulars the querent jumps to a false conclusion and accuses the wrong man, so much the worse for him—the stars and their interpreters are not to blame. No one said hard words of the London astrologers whom Robert Cooke consulted. Cooke was a carrier from Kendale who came south in 1528 with £30 in money, much of it belonging to other men, in a ‘bogett,’ and put up at John Balenger’s house in St. Ives. During the course of the day he opened his packs, bought and sold and drank with his customers, allowing a number of people in quite a casual way to feel the weight of his ‘bogett,’ but not opening it. It was late that night before they got to bed at John Balenger’s, for ‘it was ten of the clok or they went to soper, for as much as every man pakked up his wares or they sooped,’ and when they went up to their rooms the house was apparently pretty full, as Cooke shared a bed with John Foster, a draper, and there were others in the same chamber. Next morning, as they were putting their packs on their horses, Cooke suddenly noticed that one of his packs was fastened with a different kind of knot from that which he used. Thereupon he suddenly exclaimed, ‘My pak is wrong knyt, by the passhion of God, sith yesternight,’ and opening it took out the precious ‘bogett’ and found it full of stones. So he sware ‘gret othes’ and took himself by the hair and altogether carried on mightily, and finally ‘made his advow that he would never ete fisshe ne fleissh until he had been at Saint Rynyons in Scotland if he might here of his goodes.’ Then, with his bed-companion of the previous night, he rode over to Cambridge ‘to make calculacion for the said goodes,’ but at that seat of learning ‘they coude find noo clerk or other person that wold take on hand to calcle for the said money.’ However, when Robert Cooke got to London he had no difficulty in finding astrologers, who expressed the utmost confidence in their ability to ‘calcle,’ and told him that ‘he shulde by the crafte of astronomye, if he wold, have hys eye or arme or other joynte of hys body thatt hadd robbed hym, att hys pleasure.’ This ferocious promise, it may be pointed out, merely meant that the astronomer could give a description of any particular physical traits necessary to indentify the robber. In this particular instance the description was that of a fair man with large eyes, hair neither curly nor straight, and a large nose, of medium height, good looking, with a bright expression, and having one or more black teeth. This elaborate account the astronomer, with becoming modesty, had submitted to the judgment of others more learned and experienced than himself, and they guaranteed its accuracy. It was found to correspond with the appearance of John Balenger the younger, son of Cooke’s host, except that the latter ‘hath no blak toth in his hed as yt apperith iff ony lust to serch therfor,’ and in order to prove this ‘the said John Balenger was caused to sytte down and in large wyse to gape and open his jowes to be duely seen ... and after due serch therin made yt appeared that the said John had alle his teth whyte and in good maner proporconed.’ Adding to this the fact that he was ‘callid a good young man and wele ruled, not slaundered neither with dicyng, carding ne other misrule,’ and the rather suspicious circumstance that the biggest stone found in Cooke’s ‘bogett’ after the supposed robbery was a piece of ironstone of a kind not found within forty miles of St. Ives but very plentiful in Kendale, it is not surprising that the magistrates should have dismissed the case against the younger John Balenger. After all, a black tooth is like a finger-tip print—damning evidence if present but powerful for acquittal if absent, and who is a Justice of the Peace that he should contradict Jupiter?
‘... caused to sytte down and in large wyse to gape.’
BLACK MAGIC
Considering how large a part magic and the supernatural played in the life of the people in the Middle Ages it is curious that there should be so few references thereto in the English judicial records prior to the Reformation. The ancient chroniclers and historians enlivened many a dull page with the most astonishing tales of sin and mystery, vouched for on the testimony of their own eyes or of unimpeachable witnesses, but the chains of legal evidence are as powerless to bind these legendary sorcerers as were the triple chains of iron to bind the famous Witch of Berkeley. With the exception of general vague accusations of witchcraft levelled against the Lollards and kindred heretics, references to magic are casual and rare in the records of our courts.
With the reign of Elizabeth this ceases to be true, and from the middle of the sixteenth century to the end of the seventeenth the Black Arts attracted their full share of judicial and magisterial attention. Probably twenty instances of legal proceedings taken in connection with these ‘ungodly practices’ could be produced after the Reformation for every one prior to that date, and while this is in part due to the fact that local records of the later periods have survived in far greater number than their predecessors, there is a possibility that post hoc is in the case also propter hoc. It is arguable that the Reformation having abolished, for all practical purposes, belief in the miracles of God and His saints, the natural craving of the unscientific man for a supernatural explanation of the abnormal could only be satisfied by a belief in the miracles of the Devil and his sinners. Be that as it may, the fact remains that after the Reformation witches and warlocks became as common as holy nuns and anchorities had once been—the marvels reported of the one class are about as unsatisfactory from a scientific point of view as those of the other. It is, however, with a few chance references of earlier date that I am concerned.
Suitably enough it is from the land of ‘Cunning Murrell’ that my earliest instance comes. The Sheriff of Essex in 1169 made a note of having expended 5s. 3d. on ‘a woman accused of sorcery.’ The record is brief and unsatisfactory, telling neither the details of the offence, the method of trial, nor the result. These two last items we get in another case which occurred in Norfolk in 1208, when Agnes, wife of Odo the merchant, appealed a certain Galiena for sorcery, and Galiena successfully cleared herself by the ordeal of the hot iron. For a century after this any magical offenders who may have been brought to trial have eluded my search. Then in 1308 began the proceedings against the Knights Templars, based very largely on accusations of practising Black Magic. In England, however, nothing of the kind was even held to have been proved against the knights, although not only ‘what the sailor said’ was considered to be evidence, but also what the clerk thought the priest said the soldier heard the sailor say.
‘... thrust a leaden bodkin into
the head of that image.’
It is rather remarkable that the year 1324, in which the great Irish trial of the Lady Alice Kyteler took place, was the date of the fullest and in many ways the most interesting of the early English trials for sorcery. In that year Robert Marshall of Leicester, under arrest for a variety of offences, endeavoured to save his own neck by turning King’s evidence and accusing his former master, John Notingham, and a number of Coventry citizens of conspiring to kill the King, the two Despensers, and the Prior and two other officials of Coventry by magical arts. Marshall’s tale was to the effect that the accused citizens came to John Notingham, as a man skilled in ‘nigromancy,’ and bargained with him for the death of the persons named, paying a certain sum down and giving him seven pounds of wax. With the wax Notingham and Marshall made six images of the proposed victims and a seventh of Richard de Sowe, the corpus vile selected for experimental purposes. The work was done in secret in an old deserted house not far from Coventry, and when the images were ready the magician bade his assistant thrust a leaden bodkin into the head of that image which represented Richard de Sowe, and next day sent him to the house of the said Richard, whom he found raving mad. Master John then removed the bodkin from the head of the image and thrust it into the heart, and within three days Richard died. And at that point Robert Marshall’s story comes to a lame and impotent conclusion. Not a word of explanation does he give as to why, when the preliminary experiment had proved so successful, they did not go on with their fell design. The unfortunate ‘nigromancer’ died in prison before the case had been thrashed out and reported upon by a jury, and the case against the citizens was allowed to fall through. Even if the trial had followed its normal course it is not probable that we should have had more than a plain and enlightening verdict of ‘not guilty,’ for Robert Marshall was a liar of inventive genius. He accused two men of assisting him in the robbery and murder of a merchant from Chester ‘in Erlestrete, Coventry, near the white cellar,’ with a profusion of ‘corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative,’ which proved, as he afterwards admitted, utterly false. One or two other wild accusations also came to nothing, and Robert was duly hanged. But while we cannot say that the procedure he described was actually used in this case, we know it was quite in accord with the orthodox methods of magicians. That the story was believed at the time we may conclude, as the younger Despenser wrote this year to the Pope complaining that he was threatened by magical and secret dealings. The Pope, with much good sense, recommended him to turn to God with his whole heart and to make a good confession and such satisfaction as should be enjoined upon him; adding that no other remedies were needful.
Passing again over a century we find in 1426 William, Lord Botreaux, complaining that Sir Ralph Botreaux, William Langkelly, and others, ‘unmindful of the salvation of their souls and not having God before their eyes,’ had procured John Alwode of Trottokeshull, Hugh Bower of Kilmington, chaplain, and John Newport, who were said to practise soothsaying, necromancy, and art magic, ‘to weaken, subtly consume, and destroy by the said arts,’ the complainant’s body. Commissioners were appointed to inquire into the matter, but any further proceedings that there may have been have vanished, or at best are lying hid in some unsuspected corner of the Record Office.Another instance of the use of magical ceremonies with evil intent is alluded to fifty years later, when John Knight, chaplain, complained that he had been arrested and committed to the Marshalsea for going with the servants of ‘the Lord Straunge’ to search the house of Alice, wife of John Huntley, ‘which of long tyme hath used and exercised the feetes of wychecraft and sorcery,’ in Southwark. They went into ‘an house called the lasour loke in Suthwerk in Kenstrete’ (a hospital founded originally for lepers, but by this time used more as an almshouse or infirmary) ‘and there found dyvers mamettes for wychecraft and enchauntements with other stuff beryed and deeply hydd under the erthe.’ The circumstances are very similar to those related in the case of an old woman turned out of the almshouses at Rye in 1560 for using magical ceremonies, including the burial of pieces of raw beef, to the intent that as the beef decayed away so might the bodies of her enemies, though it is possible that in the case of Alice Huntley the objects had only been buried for secrecy. Five-and-twenty years later, in 1502, a still clearer case of the use of ‘mamettes’ or images occurred in Wales. The bishop of St. Davids, having vainly remonstrated with Thomas Wyriott and Tanglost William for living ‘in advoutre,’ imprisoned the woman Tanglost and afterwards banished her from the diocese. She went to Bristol, and hired one Margaret Hackett, ‘which was practized in wychecraft,’ to destroy the bishop. Tanglost and Margaret then went back to Wyriott’s house, and in a room called, most unsuitably, Paradise Chamber, made two images of wax, and then, possibly thinking that a bishop would take more bewitchment than an ordinary mortal, sent for another woman, ‘which they thought cowde and hadde more cunning and experiens than they,’ and she made a third image. The bishop was not a penny the worse for this ‘inordinat delying,’ but ordered the arrest of Tanglost for heresy; Wyriott intervened by getting her imprisoned through a trumped-up action for debt, in order to keep her out of the bishop’s clutches, and the bishop had to invoke the assistance of the Court of Chancery.
Three cases of magic occurred in 1432. On May 7 of that year an order was issued for the arrest of Thomas Northfelde, D.D., a Dominican friar of Worcester, and the seizure of all his books treating of sorcery or wickedness, and two days later Brother John Ashwell of the Crutched Friars, London, John Virley, priest, and Margery Jourdemain, who had been imprisoned at Windsor for sorcery, were released. In these cases it is very likely that the sorcery consisted in an uncanny and suspicious addiction to unusual branches of learning, combined possibly with experiments in chemistry or heretical tendencies, both alike dangerous in the eyes of the orthodox, but the third case was clearly a matter of bewitchment—in the opinion of the victim. The facts are quite simple. John Duram of York had a field with a pond in it, and having in some way incurred the enmity of Thomas Mell, a farmer, the latter, ‘per divers artes erroneous et countre la foy catholice cest assavoir sorcery,’ withdrew the water from John’s pond, to the great injury of his cattle, besides certain other unnamed injuries wrought by his ‘malveys ymaginacion et sotell labour.’ Mell being under the patronage of men of influence because of his magical abilities, Duran did not dare to bring an action against him in the ordinary court, and therefore sought the intervention of the Court of Chancery, with what success I do not know.
So far my magicians, it must be admitted, have been rather commonplace people, proceeding on the usual lines of their craft and displaying little originality, but my final instance is, so far as I know, unique. In an eighteenth-century manuscript in my possession, formerly in the Phillipps collection, amongst a mass of extracts from all kinds of records is an entry said to be taken from the court rolls of the manor of Hatfield in Yorkshire. According to this, at a court held in 1336 Robert of Rotheram brought an action against John de Ithen for breach of contract, alleging that on a certain day, at Thorne, John agreed to sell him for threepence-halfpenny ‘the Devil bound with a certain bond’ (Diabolum ligatum in quodam ligamine), and Robert thereupon gave him ‘arles-penny,’ or earnest-money (quoddam obolum earles), ‘by which possession of the said Devil remained with the said Robert, to receive delivery of the said Devil within four days,’ but when he came to John the latter refused to hand over the Devil, wherefore Robert claimed 60s. damages. John appeared in court and did not deny the contract, but the steward, holding that ‘such a plea does not lie between Christians,’ ‘adjourned the parties to Hell for the hearing of the case,’ and amerced both parties.
The first question is, is this a genuine extract from the rolls? The critic who is inclined to think that he smells a rat may be confuted by Camden, according to whom no rats have ever been known in the town of Hatfield. The extremely solid nature of all the other extracts in my volume is almost a guarantee of good faith so far as the eighteenth century copyist is concerned, and the probability that he took it from the original is strengthened by his having in one place misread unde as vide and subsequently corrected the error. But allowing that it occurred on the rolls, was it a genuine transaction or was it a facetious invention of the manor clerk? I incline to believe that it was genuine. A man who invented such a case to fill up a blank space on the roll would have been almost certain to have elaborated it further, while, on the other hand, having noted the adjournment of the case to ‘another place,’ to use parliamentary language, he would not have been likely to add that both parties were fined. Granting that the action was actually brought, we are left in doubt whether Robert was a simple gull with whom John had been amusing himself, or whether the defendant really believed that he could fulfil his contract. Again, what was that contract? Latin, though admirably clear in many respects, suffers from the absence of the definite article, and it is difficult to be certain whether it was a question of ‘the Devil’ or ‘a devil’; judging by the price, the latter seems more probable, as threepence-halfpenny for the Prince of Darkness seems absurdly little, and I believe that Diabolus ligatus was sometimes applied to a divining spirit imprisoned by magic arts in a bottle or crystal. However that may be, it is not probable that a law court has ever before or since been asked to decide the question of proprietary rights in the devil or his imps.
‘Diabolus ligatus.’
