Volume I Part 93 (1/2)

Even the widely extolled Pilgrim Fathers brought this belief with them when they stepped ash.o.r.e at Plymouth Rock. With the ”Ducking-Stool”

and the ”Scarlet Letter” of shame for woman, while her companion in sin went free, they also brought with them a belief in witches.

Richard Baxter, the ”greatest of the Puritans,” condemned those who disbelieved in witchcraft as ”wicked Sadducees,” his work against it adding intensity to the persecution. Cotton Mather was active in fomenting a belief in this doctrine.

So convinced were those in power of the tendency of woman to diabolism that the learned Sir Matthew Hale condemned two women without even summing up the evidence. Old women, for no other reason than that they were old, were held as most susceptible to the a.s.saults of the devil, and most especially endowed with supernatural powers for evil, to doubt which was equivalent to doubting the Bible. We see a reason for this hatred of old women, in the fact that woman was chiefly viewed from a sensual stand-point, and when by reason of age or debility, she no longer attracted the physical admiration of man, he looked upon her as of no farther use to the world, and as possessing no right to life.

At one period it was very unusual for an old woman in the north of Europe to die peaceably in her bed. The persecution against them raged with special virulence in Scotland, where upon the act of the British Parliament in 17--, abolis.h.i.+ng the burning and hanging of witches, the a.s.sembly of the Calvinistic Church of Scotland ”confessed” this act of Parliament ”as a great national sin.” Looked upon as a sin rather than a crime, the Church sought its control, and when coming under its power, witchcraft was punished with much greater severity than when falling under lay tribunals. It proved a source of great emolument to the Church, which was even accused of fostering it for purposes of gain. A system of ”witch finders” or ”witch persecutors” arose.

Cardan, a famous Italian physician, said of them: ”In order to obtain forfeit property, the same persons acted as accusers and judges, and invented a thousand stories as proof.”

Witchcraft was as a sin almost confined to woman; a wizard was rare, one writer saying: to every 100 witches, we find but one wizard. In the time of Louis XIII. this proportion was greatly increased; ”to one wizard, 10,000 witches,” another person declared there were 100,000 witches in France alone. Sprenger, the great Inquisitor, author of ”The Witch Hammer,”[194] through whose persecutions many countries were flooded with victims, said, ”Heresy of witches, not of wizards, must we call it, for these latter are of very small account.” No cla.s.s or condition escaped Sprenger; we read of witches of fifteen years, and two ”infernally beautiful”[195] of seventeen years.

The Parliament of Toulouse burned 400 witches at one time. Four hundred women at one hour on the public square, dying the horrid death of fire, for a crime which never existed save in the imagination of those persecutors, and which grew in their imagination from a false belief in woman's extraordinary wickedness, based upon a false theory as to original sin. Not a Christian country but was full of the horrors of witch persecution and violent death. Remy, Judge of Nancy, acknowledged to having himself burnt 800 in sixteen years. Many women were driven to suicide in fear of the torture in store for them. In 1595 sixteen of those accused by Remy, destroyed themselves rather than fall into his terrible hands. Six hundred were burnt in one small bishopric in one year; 900 during the same period in another. Seven thousand lost their lives at Treves; 1,000 in the province of Como in Italy in a single year; 500 were executed at Geneva in a single month.

Under the reign of Francis I. more than 100,000 witches are said to have been put to death, and for hundreds of years this superst.i.tion controlled the Church. In Scotland the most atrocious tortures were invented, and women died ”shrieking to heaven for that mercy denied them by Christian men.” One writer casually mentions seeing nine burning in a single day's journey.

When for ”witches” we read ”women,” we shall gain a more direct idea of the cruelties inflicted by the Church upon woman. Friends were encouraged to cast accusations upon friends, and rewards were offered for conviction. From the pulpit people were exhorted to bring the witch to justice. Husbands who had ceased to care for their wives, or in any way found them a burden, or who for any reason wished to dissolve the marriage tie, now found an easy method. They had but to accuse them of witchcraft, and the marriage was dissolved by the death of the wife at the stake. Mention is made of wives dragged by their husbands before the arch-Inquisitor, Sprenger, by ropes around their necks. In Protestant, as in Catholic countries, the person accused was virtually dead. She was excommunicated from humanity; designated and denounced as one whom all must shun, with whom none must buy or sell, to whom no one must give food or lodging or speech or shelter; life was not worth the living.

Besides those committing suicide, others brought to trial, tired of life amid so many horrors, falsely accused themselves, preferring a death by the torture of fire to a life of endless isolation and persecution. An English woman on her way to the stake, with a greatness of soul all must admire, freed her judges from responsibility by saying to the people, ”Do not blame my judges, I wished to put an end to my own self. My parents kept aloof from me; my husband had denied me. I could not live on without disgrace. I longed for death, and so I told a lie.”

Of Sir George Mackenzie, the eminent Scotch advocate, it was said:

He went to examine some women who had confessed,[196] and one of them told him ”under secrecie” that she had not confessed because she was guilty, but being a poor wretch who wrought for her meat, and being defined for a witch, she knew she would starve, for no person thereafter would give her either meat or lodging, and that all men would beat her and hound dogs at her, and therefore she desired to be out of the world, whereupon she wept most bitterly, and upon her knees called upon G.o.d to witness what she said.

The death these poor women chose to suffer rather than accept a chance of life with the name of witch clinging to them,[197] was one of the most painful of which we can conceive,[198] although in the diversity of torture inflicted upon ”the witch,” it is scarcely possible to say which was the least agonizing.

Not only was the persecution for witchcraft brought to New England by the Puritans, but it has been considered and treated as a capital offense by the laws of both Pennsylvania and New York. Trials took place in both colonies not long before the Salem tragedy; the peaceful Quaker, William Penn, presiding upon the bench at the time of the trial of two Swedish women accused of witchcraft. The Grand Jury acting under instruction given in a charge delivered by him, found bills against them, and his skirts were only saved from the guilt of their blood by some technical irregularity in the indictment.

Marriage with devils was long one of the most ordinary accusations in witch trials. The knowledge of witches was admitted, as is shown in the widely extended belief of their ability to work miracles. A large part of the women termed witches were in reality the profoundest thinkers, the most advanced scientists of those ages. For many hundred years the knowledge of medicine, and its practice among the poorer cla.s.ses was almost entirely in their hands, and many discoveries in this science are due to them; but an acquaintance with herbs soothing to pain, or healing in their qualities, was then looked upon as having been acquired through diabolical agency. Even those persons cured through the instrumentality of some woman were ready when the hour came to a.s.sert their belief in her indebtedness to the devil for that knowledge. Not only were the common people themselves ignorant of all science, but their brains were filled with superst.i.tious fears, and the belief that knowledge had been first introduced to the world through woman's obedience to the devil. Thus the persecution which for ages raged against witches, was in reality an attack upon science at the hands of the Church.

The entire subordination of the common law to ecclesiasticism, dates in England to the reign of Stephen, who ascended the throne in 1135.

Its new growth of power must be ascribed to avarice, as it then began to take cognizance of crimes, establis.h.i.+ng an equivalent in money for every species of wrong-doing. The Church not only remitted penalties for crimes already perpetrated, but sold indulgences for the commission of new ones. Its touch upon property soon extended to all the relations of life. Marriages within the seventh degree were forbidden by the Church as incestuous, but those who could buy indulgence were enabled to get a dispensation. No crime so great that it could not be condoned for money.

Canon law gained its greatest power in the family relation in its control over wills, the guardians.h.i.+p of orphans, marriage and divorce.

Under ecclesiastical law, marriage was held as a sacrament, was performed at the church door, the wife being required to give up her name, her person, her property, her own sacred individuality, and to promise obedience to her husband in all things. Certain hours of the day were even set aside as canonical after which no marriage could be celebrated.[199] Wherever it became the basis of legislation, the laws of succession and inheritance, and those in regard to children, constantly sacrificed the interests of wives and daughters to those of husbands and sons. Ecclesiastical law ultimately secured such a hold upon family property and became so grasping in its demands, that the civil law interfered, not, however, in the interests of wives and children, but in the interests of creditors. Canon law had its largest growth through the pious fictions of woman's created inferiority.

To the credit of humanity it must be said that the laity did not readily yield to priestly power, but made many efforts to wrest their temporal concerns from ecclesiastical control. But in the general paucity of education, together with the abnegation of the will, sedulously taught by the Church, which brought all its dread power to bear in threats of excommunication and future eternal torment, the rights of the people were gradually lost. The control of the priesthood over all things of a temporal, as well as of a spiritual nature, tended to make them a distinct body from the laity, and rights were divided into those pertaining to persons and things, the rights of persons belonging to the priesthood alone; but inasmuch as every man, whatever his condition, could become a priest, and no woman, however learned or pious or high in station, could, the whole tendency of ecclesiastical law was to separate man and woman into a holy or divine s.e.x, and an unholy or impious s.e.x, creating an antagonism between those whose interests are by nature the same. Thus canon law, bearing upon the business of ordinary life between man and man, fell with its greatest weight upon woman; it not only corrupted the common law in England, but perverted the civil law of other countries. The denial under common law of the right of woman to make a contract, grew out of the denial of her right of owners.h.i.+p. Not possessing control over her own property or her future actions, she was held as legally unable to make a binding contract.

Property is a delicate test of the condition of a nation. It is a singular fact of history that the rights of property have everywhere been recognized before the rights of persons, and wherever the rights of any cla.s.s to property are attacked, it is a most subtle and dangerous a.s.sault upon personal rights. The chief restrictive element of slavery was the denial to the slave of the proceeds of his own labor. As soon as a slave was allowed to hire his time, the door of freedom began to open to him. The enslavement of woman has been much increased from the denial of the rights of property to her, not merely to the fruits of her own labor, but to the right of inheritance.

The great school of German jurists[200] teach that owners.h.i.+p increases both physical and moral capacity, and that as owner, actual or possible, man is a more capable and worthy being than he would otherwise be. Inasmuch as under canon law woman was debarred from giving testimony in courts of law, sisters were prohibited from taking an inheritance with brothers, and wives were deprived of property rights, it is entirely justifiable to say ecclesiastical law injured civilization by its destruction of the property rights of women.[201]

The worst features of canon law, as Blackstone frankly admits, are those touching upon the rights of woman. These features have been made permanent to this day by the power the Church gained over common law,[202] between the tenth and sixteenth centuries, since which period the complete inferiority and subordination of the female s.e.x has been as fully maintained by the State as by the Church. The influence of canon law upon the criminal codes of England and America has but recently attracted the attention of legal minds. Wharton, whose ”Criminal Law” has for years been a standard work, did not examine their relation until his seventh edition, in which he gave a copious array of authors, English, German, and Latin, from whom he deduced proof that the criminal codes of these two countries are pre-eminently based upon ecclesiastical law.

Canon law gave to the husband the power of compelling the wife's return if, for any cause, she left him. She was then at once in the position of an outlaw, branded as a run-away who had left her master's service, a wife who had left ”bed and board” without consent, and whom all persons were forbidden ”to harbor” or shelter ”under penalty of the law.” The absconding wife was in the position of an excommunicate from the Catholic Church, or of a woman condemned as a witch. Any person befriending her was held accessory to the wife's theft of herself from her husband, and rendered liable to fine and other punishment for having helped to rob the husband (master) of his wife (slave).

The present formula of advertising a wife, which so frequently disgraces the press, is due to this belief in wife-owners.h.i.+p.

Whereon my wife ... has left my bed and board without just cause or provocation, I hereby forbid all persons from harboring or trusting her on my account.

By old English law, in case the wife was in danger of peris.h.i.+ng in a storm, it was allowable ”to harbor” and shelter her.