CHAPTER XX
THE WITCH JUDGE
THE WITCH JUDGE sat high; beside him his circuit fellow who was anonentity; a step or two lower a row of local magistrates. The hallwas large and high,—time-darkened, powdered with amber sunshineentering through narrow windows. The commission that had so zealouslydischarged its duties had a place of honour. The bishop was seated ashigh as the judge, around him those of the clergy who did not sit withthe commission. The earl was away from the castle, but at an earlymoment in the proceedings there came in his kinsman, Sir Richard. Oneof the justices whispered to the nonentity-judge, who whispered to theWitch Judge. The Witch Judge stopped short in a foaming and thunderousspeech and waited until the earl’s kinsman should be seated. His airrecognized the importance of the entrance; he slightly inclined hisenormous, grizzled head, then returned to his hurtling thunders.
The jury sat in its place. Farmers and tradesmen, it sat a stolidtwelve, and believed implicitly that one who said that there wastruth in the Bible, and also that which was not truth must be hangedor burned. What else was there to do with him? It had as firm anassurance that your misbeliever was always your necromancer. Indeed,you exhibited and proved the wickedness of his unbelieving by thenauseous ill of his conduct. That was why examiners and commissionssought always until they found the thread that led to Satan’s visibleownership. As for the Hawthorn witches—the jury saw them hanging in arow, and purposed buying the ballads that would certainly be made.
The hall was crowded. It was the most exciting kind of trial that couldhappen—barring only, perhaps, an occasional case of _lèse majesté_.But this was also _lèse majesté_. They all saw God as a King with agold crown and throne and court; and Satan as a derision-covered rebel,and his imps and servants very ugly—when they were not at times verybeautiful—and doom like a Traitor’s Gate, and hell a Tower from whichthere was never any coming forth.... And it was good to feel suchloyal subjects, and to marvel and cry out, “Eh, sirs! To think of anythinking that!”... The hall was crowded, hot, and jostling. Young andold were here, full means and narrow means, lettered and unlettered,town and country,—for many walked each day from Hawthorn,—birth andthe commonalty, they who held with the Episcopacy, and they who wereturning Puritan, zealots and future sectaries, shepherds and sheep! Andthe neighbours of the accused—as many as could get here—and those whohad sat with them in Hawthorn Church—and the witnesses and sufferers,fresh numbers of these being continually discovered. Now the hall heldits breath while a witness was being questioned, or the counsel forthe Crown spoke, or the Witch Judge thundered, and now it buzzed andhummed like the bees that they said were bewitched. Heat, many bodiesin contact and a mist of breaths, an old, old contagion of opinion oldas savagery....
The Witch Judge was to most a fearful delight. No silent, listening,seldom-speaking judge was he! He had a voice like rolling thunder andan animus against just those wrongs judgement upon which had swelledhis reputation. He overbore; he thundered in where Jove would haveleft matters to lesser divinities; he questioned, answered, tried, andjudged. He loved to hear his own voice and took and made occasions. Norwould he hasten to the end, but preferred to draw matters out in longreverberations. He was prepared to give a week, if need be, to thistrial which was concluded ere he took his seat. In all, in the Hawthornmatter, there were eight folk to be tried. Destroy one, destroy all,principal and accessories, the whole hung together! But he was preparedwith devices and flourishes, and for each soul on trial specificattention and cat-and-mouse play, for the Witch Judge loved to show hisvariousness.... The practice of the age was everywhere elastic enough,but in no trials so licensed as in such as this. What need for scrupleswhen you dealt with Satan?... No counsel was allowed the prisoners. Ifever there was floating in the air a notion that the judge should becounsel for prisoners, guarding them from injustice and oppression, ithad made no lodgement in this judge’s ear.
The writ _de hæretico comburendo_! The Witch Judge thundered forth thetext of it, then preached his sermon. This wretched man, this wickedleech, this miscreant, blasphemer, and infidel had made confessionof his crime of apostasy—the most enormous under heaven—confessingit without tears, shame, or penitence! Confessing! nay, avowing,upholding—The Witch Judge glowed fuliginous; his voice of horrorseemed to come from the caverns of the earth. “He denieth the actualityof the Holy Trinity—he saith that the world was not made in sixdays and is not composed and constructed as set forth in the HolyScriptures—he refuseth to believe in the remission of sins by theshedding of blood—No language nor tongues,” cried the Witch Judge,“can set forth the enormity of his error, sin, and crime! Let him burn,as God saith he will burn, through eternity and back again!” The phrasecaught the fancy of the throng. It came back in a deep and satisfiedmurmur. _Through eternity and back again._
On crackled and roared the Witch Judge’s thunder. Convict by manifoldtestimony and impeccable witnesses, and wholly and terminably convictby his own confession without violence, it remained—the authority ofHoly Religion and the Ecclesiastical Court being present in the personof my Lord Bishop—it remained but to give judgement and pass sentenceupon the apostate! In regard to his apostasy. But this wicked leechrested also under a charge of sorcery—sorcery of the blackest—sorcerywhich he obdurately denied! Let him, then, before judgement given, betried for his sorcery—he with these wretched others, for Satan huntethnot with one beagle, but with many!
The Witch Judge half rose, puffed himself forth, became more than evera bolt-darting Jupiter. Trials for heresy, apostasy, blasphemy were notin themselves wholly his element. But let them darken and lower—asindeed, they almost always did darken and lower—into questions ofactual physical contact and trade dealings with the Hereditary Foe,then he was in his element!... Wizards and witches! The Witch Judgeshook his hand above the prisoners. “And let not any think Witchcraftto be other or less than Apostasy, Idolatry, and Blasphemy! If Apostasyis the Devil’s right hand, Witchcraft makes his left—his left? Nay,his right and most powerful, for here is your apostate in action—hereis your unbeliever upon his Lord Satan’s business!” Witchcraft!Witchcraft! The Witch Judge paced around, threw lurid lights upon thecrime he battened on. His tribute of huge words rolled beneath thegroined roof and shook the hearts of the fearful. There came back fromthe crowd a sighing and muttering, half-ecstatic, half-terrified, lowsound. The word of God—the command of the Most High, taken from hisown lips—the plainest order of the King of Kings.—_Thou shall notsuffer a witch to live_.... Statute of the first year of our presentGracious Sovereign, our lord, King James—_All persons invoking anyevil spirit, or consulting, covenanting with, entertaining, employing,feeding, or rewarding any evil spirit, or taking up dead bodiesfrom their graves to be used in any witchcraft, sorcery, charm, orenchantment, or killing or otherwise hurting any person by suchinfernal arts, are declared guilty of felony without benefit of clergyand shall suffer death._ He had a way of uttering “death” that made theword a distillation of all the suffering man could make for man.
Preliminary thunders from the Witch Judge ceased. Counsel for the Crowncame afterwards like a whistling wind. The long Hawthorn Witch Trialbegan, and stretched from midsummer day to day. To many it afforded anexciting, day-by-day renewed entertainment; to some it was a fearfuldream; to a very few, perhaps, it seemed a long, dull, painful watchby mortality’s fever bed. Once Aderhold caught the gaze of the earl’skinsman upon him. The eyes of the two met and agreed as to what waspassing, then Aderhold looked away.
The prisoners had their appointed space. At times they were all broughttogether here; at times the greater number were withdrawn, leaving oneor two to be examined separately or together. The heat and the lightstruck against them, and the waves of sound; from one side came thebooming of the judge’s voice or the dry shrilling of the king’s lawyer;from the other the whisper of the crowd that meant to have witch blood.There were Aderhold, the youth to whom he had given books, the boy ofsixteen, old Dorothy’s nephew, Dorothy hersel
f, a halfwitted woman froma hut between the Grange and the North-End Farm, Grace Maybank, MotherSpuraway, and Joan Heron—eight in all.
Mother Spuraway—Now torture was not allowed in England, though on theContinent and in Scotland it flared in witch trials to its fullestheight. Mother Spuraway, therefore, had not been tortured—no more thanAderhold, no more than Joan, no more than others. But it was allowable,where confession did not come easily, to hasten it with fasting frombread, water, and sleep—all these being withholdings, not inflictings.There might be, too, insistent, long-continued questionings and threatsand a multitude of small gins and snares. Mother Spuraway had beenlong weeks in gaol, and she was old and her faculties, once good, wereperhaps not now hard to break down. At any rate, she had a ghastly lookand a broken. Since she trembled so that she could not stand, they puther into a chair.
“Now answer strictly the questions asked you, if you have any hope ofmercy!”
Mother Spuraway put her two trembling hands to her head. “Mercy? Yes,sirs, that is what I want. Mercy.”
“Very well, then! Look on this man and tell us what you know of him.”
The clerks’ pens began to scratch.
Mother Spuraway’s gaze was so wandering that while it came acrossAderhold, it went on at once to a cobweb above the judge’s chair. “Heis the Devil,” she said.
“You mean the Devil’s servant.”
“Yes—oh, yes! Devil’s servant. I mean just what Your Honours want.”
The Witch Judge thundered at her. “Woman! it is not what _we_ want. Youare to speak the truth. Truth-speaking is what we want.”
Mother Spuraway’s head nodded, her eyes fallen now from the cobweb tothe judge’s robe. “Yes, sirs—yes, sirs. You shall have what you want.Oh, yes, sirs!”
“She asserts,” said the counsel for the Crown, “that she tells thetruth.—You were used to going to sabbats with this man?”
“Yes, sirs,—sabbats, sabbats, sabbats, sabbats—”
“Give her wine,” said the Witch Judge. “She is old. Let her rallyherself. Give her wine.”
A gaoler set a cup to her lips and she drank. “Now,” said the Crown,“tell us of these sabbats—circumstantially.”
Mother Spuraway, revived by the wine, looked from floor to roof androof to floor and at the commission and the Witch Judge and the bishop,and at the motes in a broken shaft of light. “We danced about theburned cot—all taking hands—so! Sometimes of dark nights we went_widdershins_ around Hawthorn Church—sometimes it was around the fairyoak at the Oak Grange. Sometimes we danced and sometimes we flew. Werode in the air. I had an oaken horse—and Grace had an elmen horse andDorothy had a willow horse, and Elspeth No-Wit had a beechen horse, andMarget Primrose had a horse of yew—”
There was a movement among the commission. “Marget Primrose,” exclaimedSquire Carthew, “died years ago!”
“She came back. Marget had a yew horse—and I had an oaken horse—andthere were other horses, but I never learned their names. And therewere green men—”
“Was this man in green?”
“No, no! He had on a doctor’s cloak. Sometimes he fiddled for us whenSatan grew tired.”
“Then he was a chief among you?”
“Yes, yes, a chief among us.—Sometimes we changed to bats and mice andharmless green frogs and hares and owls and other creatures—”
“You did that when you were about to go to folk’s houses or fields toinjure them?”
“Yes, sirs, yes, yes—about to injure them. Then I was a dog, and Gracea little brown hare, and Dorothy a great frog, and Elspeth No-Wit abat, and Marget Primrose—And we brewed poisons and charms in a greatcauldron inside the burned cot, but at the fairy oak we made littlefigures out of river clay and stuck them full of pins. And there we hada feast—”
“And this man?”
“He sat on the green hillock beside Satan, and Satan had a black book.He gave it to him to read in while we were dancing and eating anddaffing with the green men—and then the cock crew and we all flewhome.”
“There were many sabbats?”
“Oh, yes, many!”
“And this man was always among you?”
“Yes, always among us.”
“You say he read in a black book. But he likewise danced and wantonedas did the green men?”
“Yes, yes! The pretty green men.”
“Be careful now. With whom especially did he work this iniquity? Whomdid he single out at each sabbat?”
“Whom?—I do not know whom.... Sabbats? There are no such things.Who would leave home at night to wander round oak trees and burnedcots?—Oh, home, home! Oh, my hut! I want to see my hut!” criedMother Spuraway. “Oh, good gentlemen! Oh, Your Worships! Oh, SquireCarthew—Master Clement!—Won’t you let me go home? A poor old womanthat never harmed a soul—”
The Witch Judge’s voice came thundering down. “Her mind iswandering!—Thou wretched woman! Dost wish to be taken back to thyprison, and urged anew to confess?”
But apparently Mother Spuraway did not wish that. She put up her twohands and said, “No, no!”—then, shrunken and shuddering, begged formore wine. They gave it to her.... “Now, whom did this sorcerer take inhis arms? Was it the _maiden_ of your company?”
“Yes, oh, yes! The maiden.”
“The maiden of your company was Joan Heron?”
“Yes, Joan Heron.”
* * * * *
The shafts of light were shortening, the earth wheeling toward sunset.Without clanged the bells of the great church—it was late afternoon.The people who had far to walk, though loath for the entertainment tocease, yet approved when the court rose for that day. Morning wouldnot be long, and they purposed returning most early in order thatgood places might be got. The hall and the square without seethed andsounded with the dispersing crowd.
Near at hand was the prison, its black mass facing the great square,the pillory in its shadow; beyond, slanting down to the river, thefield where they raised the gallows. The prisoners when they wereremoved were taken, guarded, along by the wall, into the dark, gapingprison mouth.
Joan walked beside Mother Spuraway. In the last three or four days thehand of withholding had been lifted from the prisoners so that theymight get their strength.... Joan walked with a colourless, thin cheekand shadowed eyes, but walked steadily. But Mother Spuraway could notdrag her limbs across the stones; a gaoler held her roughly up with aforce that drew a moan. Presently, his grasp relaxing, she stumbledagain and fell. Joan stooped and raised her, then with her arm abouther bore her on. “Thank’ee, my pretty maid,” said Mother Spuraway.“I’ll do as much for you when you are old!”
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