felt in the domain of superstition. On the subject of sorcery, doubt and rationalistic interpretations alternate with the blindest credulity. We can never tell precisely to what degree this belief was sincere. Philippe de Mézières, in the Songe du Vieil Pelerin, tells that he himself learned the magic arts from a Spaniard. During more than ten years he did not succeed in forgetting his infamous knowledge. “As a volenté ne povoit pas bien extirper de son cuer les dessusdits signes et l’effect d’iceulx contre Dieu.”[1] At last, “through the grace of God, by dint of confessing and resisting, he was delivered from this great folly, which is an enemy to the Christian soul.”
During the horrible campaign of persecution against sorcerers in 1461, known as the “Vauderie d’Arras,” both the people and the magistrates gravely doubted the reality of the alleged crimes. Outside the town of Arras, says Jacques du Clercq, “not one person in a thousand believed that it was true that they practised the aforesaid sorcery. Such things were never before heard of happening in these countries.” Nevertheless, the town suffered severely in consequence: people would no longer shelter its merchants or give them credit, for fear that, accused of witchcraft, on the morrow, perhaps, they might lose all their possessions by confiscation. One of the inquisitors, who claimed to be able to discover the guilty at sight, and went so far as to declare that it was impossible for a man to be wrongly accused of sorcery, afterwards went mad. A poem full of hatred accused the persecutors of having got up the whole affair out of covetousness, and the bishop himself called the persecution “a thing intended by some evil persons.” Philip the Good, having asked the advice of the Faculty of Louvain, several of its members declared that the sorcery was not real. Upon which the duke, who, in spite of the archaic turn of his mind, was not superstitious, sent the king-at-arms of the Golden Fleece to Arras. Then the executions and the imprisonments ceased. Later on, all the processes were annulled, which fact the town celebrated by a joyful feast with representations of edifying “moralities.”
- ↑ He could not voluntarily extirpate from his mind the aforesaid signs and their effect against God.
