Whether these were legal executions or lynchings, they are enough to show that maleficium was a matter of public concern. And in some cases popular fury can be seen unmistakably at work. In the ninth century Bishop Agobard tells how he saw four strangers — three men and a woman — seized by peasants who took them for tempestarii, fallen out of a cloud-ship; but for Agobard’s intervention, they would have been stoned to death.(33) In 1074 the burghers of Cologne rebelled against their lord, the archbishop, and tried to kill him. The archbishop escaped from the city; but during the ensuing riots the mob found a woman who was suspected of having driven men mad by means of maleficia, and hurled her to death from the town walls.(34) The chronicler specifically states that this was done without any regard for the due process of law; and the same is true of a killing which took place at Freising in Bavaria in 1090.Three indigent women were rumoured to be “poisoners” and “destroyers of people and crops”. They were seized by the mob and subjected to the ordeal of immersion in water; next, though the ordeal gave negative results, they were repeatedly flogged to make them confess; finally, though they did not confess, they were burned alive on the banks of the river Isar. All this was done without the collaboration or approval of the authorities — indeed it was done in an area where authority had temporarily broken down: owing to a dispute between rival candidates, the see of Freising had no bishop. The clergy clearly disapproved. The monk who tells the story speaks of the injustice of the accusations, the “devilish fury” of the mob, the “martyrdom” of the victims. Indeed, after the mob had done its work a priest and two monks actually removed the charred bodies and buried them in consecrated ground.(35) In 1279 a similar incident took place at Ruffach in Alsace, save that this time the clergy intervened in time. A nun was suspected of using a wax puppet for purposes of maleficium, and would have been burned by the peasants; but the local monks saved her.(36)
Doubtless there were many more such incidents: since the chroniclers were not generally much interested in the activities of the common people, one can probably assume that the recorded cases represent only the tip of the iceberg. In any case it is clear that medieval peasants and burghers could at times feel very strongly about witches. Long before, and quite independently of the great witch-hunt, there existed a fund of popular suspicion, a readiness to perceive witchcraft at work and to identify witches. On occasion those feelings expressed themselves, illegally, in torture and killing. The day was to come when they would be able to do so legally.
The clergy had their own particular view of maleficium. The early Church, already, regarded all magical practices as manifestations of paganism; and paganism was identified with the worship of demons.(37) It was almost irrelevant whether the intention behind the magical practices was maleficent, harmless or beneficent — in the eyes of the Church all such practices were damnable, because they all depended on the co-operation of those demons, the pagan gods. Like almost all their contemporaries, the Fathers accepted without question that magic worked, that it really could produce miracles — but these were pernicious miracles, evil devices by which the demons tricked human beings into opposing God. That was the view of Justin Martyr early in the second century; and it was still the view of the greatest and most influential of all the Latin Fathers, Augustine, at the beginning of the fifth century.
According to Augustine, by God’s decree two realms have existed from the beginning of the world, and all history has consisted in the struggle between them. There is the City of God, which includes the angels and all good people, and there is the City of the Devil, which includes not only the demons but the pagan world with its cult of demons. The Church, as the latter-day embodiment of the City of God, is now at last victorious; but the City of the Devil still survives and is still formidable. And one way in which the City of the Devil deploys its power is through magic: by their command of magical resources the demons seduce people into accepting and worshipping them as gods. Augustine does not doubt that, with the help of demons, people can perform maleficia which are otherwise beyond human capacity. If the ungodly can abduct their neighbour’s harvest; if they can harm people by casting an evil eye on them; if they can even change them into beasts of burden — this is because the demons have lent them supernatural powers in return for adoration.(38) But the same applies to all forms of magic, however harmless they may appear. The wearing of amulets, the casting of horoscopes, even the healing of sickness by means of spoken or written charms — all such things are to be eschewed, as pagan and therefore diabolic aberrations.
In essentials the teaching of the Church continued to follow these lines throughout the thousand years which comprise the history of medieval Europe. In 314 the synod of Ancyra had decreed a five-year penance for fortune-telling and for the curing of sickness by occult means,(39) and in 375 the synod of Laodicaea had forbidden the wearing of amulets on pain of excommunication.(40) Around 500 both of these local provisions were incorporated by the monk Dionysius Exiguus in his code of canon law, and so acquired validity throughout the area of western Christendom. During the sixth and seventh centuries they were reaffirmed and reinforced by various provincial synods. In 506 a Visigothic synod at Agde in Languedoc prescribed excommunication for clerics or laymen who concerned themselves with divining the future;(41) while Frankish synods held at Orléans and Auxerre in 511, 533, 541, 573 and 603 prescribed the same penalty for fortune-tellers. These forms of magic had of course nothing to do with maleficia, and the objections to them were purely religious. The synods which condemned divination and fortune-telling, the wearing of amulets and the magical treatment of the sick, were moved by precisely the same concern as the synods of Arles, Vannes, Auxerre, Narbonne, Rheims and Rouen which at intervals during the fifth, sixth and seventh centuries condemned the worship of trees and rocks and river-sources. In the eyes of the bishops it was all part of the campaign against paganism, and paganism was still equated with demonolatry.
The official attitude of the Church gradually influenced the secular authorities; and from the sixth century onwards the laws of the Germanic peoples were revised to take account of the Christian interpretation of magic. The old pagan laws had taken cognizance of magic only in the form of maleficium, and even then had judged it solely in terms of the harm supposedly done to life, health or property. Now, under the influence of the Church, there was a tendency to treat all magic as a criminal offence.(42) This was already the case when Visigothic law was codified, around 550. The law which decreed 200 lashes for tempestarii(43) decreed the same penalty for “those who invoke demons to trouble men’s spirits, or who offer nocturnal sacrifices to the demons, or wickedly invoke them with impious prayers”.(44) At that time the Visigothic monarchs still adhered to the Arian heresy. When, in 589, the royal house turned to the Church of Rome, the ecclesiastical and secular authorities entered into an alliance to stamp out all forms of magic. A synod at Toledo, in 693, dealt with fortune-telling. Members of the upper classes who practised it were to be heavily fined, humbler folk were to get a hundred lashes. Significantly, the same penalties were decreed for worshipping stones, trees or river-sources,(45) and judges as well as bishops were held responsible for seeing that the regulation was observed. Magic as demon-worship, demon-worship as an offence which concerned State as well as Church: the basic pattern is discernible already at that early stage.