Page:Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921).djvu/23

well worshipings, and necromancies, and divinations, and enchantments, and man worshipings, and the vain practices which are carried on with various spells, and with "frith-splots",^[1] and with elders, and also with various other trees, and with stones, and with many various delusions, with which men do much of what they should not.—And we enjoin, that every Christian man zealously accustom his children to Christianity, and teach them the Paternoster and the Creed. And we enjoin, that on feast days heathen songs and devil's games be abstained from.'

Laws of King Ethelred,^[2] 978-1016.
'Let every Christian man do as is needful to him; let him strictly keep his Christianity.... Let us zealously venerate right Christianity, and totally despise every heathenism.'

11th cent. Laws of King Cnut,^[3] 1017-1035.
'We earnestly forbid every heathenism: heathenism is, that men worship idols; that is, that they worship heathen gods, and the sun or the moon, fire or rivers, water-wells or stones, or forest trees of any kind; or love witchcraft, or promote morth-work in any wise.'

13th cent. Witchcraft made into a sect and heresy by the Church. The priest of Inverkeithing presented before the bishop in 1282 for leading a fertility dance at Easter round the phallic figure of a god; he was allowed to retain his benefice.^[4]

14th cent. In 1303 the Bishop of Coventry was accused before the Pope for doing homage to the Devil.^[5]

Trial of Dame Alice Kyteler, 1324.
Tried for both operative and ritual witchcraft, and found guilty.

Nider's Formicarius, 1337.
A detailed account of witches and their proceedings in Berne, which had been infested by them for more than sixty years.

1. Frith = brushwood, splot = plot of ground; sometimes used for 'splotch, splash'.
2. Thorpe, i, pp. 311, 323, 351.
3. Id., i, p. 379.
4. Chronicles of Lanercost, p. 109, ed. Stevenson.
5. Rymer, ii, 934.