All these things were done in a truly heretical spirit. It was said that, to ensure the success of their sorceries, the members of the group became apostates from Christianity — though on a curiously temporary and provisional basis. According as their aims were more or less ambitious, they denied the faith of Christ and of the Church either for a month or for a whole year; during which time they would not attend mass or take the Eucharist, nor go to church, nor believe anything that the Church believed. By magical means they sought the counsel of demons, and they also sacrificed animals to demons; Lady Alice had three times offered up the blood and limbs of cocks to her private demon, just as Pope Boniface was supposed to have done.(43)
There is nothing manifestly impossible in all this, but the charges include a further item, and one which must give us pause. It concerns that private demon of Lady Alice’s, who appeared sometimes in the guise of a cat, sometimes in the guise of a shaggy black dog, sometimes in the guise of a Negro. Lady Alice received him as her incubus and allowed him to copulate with her. In return, he gave her wealth — all her considerable possessions had been acquired with his help. Moreover, the demon was known to other members of the group. He even gave them his name, which was the Son of Art, or Robin, son of Art; and he also explained that he belonged to the poorer demons in hell.(44)
Now, in the contemporary account of the proceedings against Lady Alice — which is the sole source for these matters — all the charges are listed together, as though they were interdependent; so if one charge is manifestly false, the rest must also be suspect. Moreover the charges are listed twice over — and the second time they appear in the context of a confession extracted under torture. An associate of Lady Alice called Petronilla of Meath was flogged six times, on the bishop’s orders; after which she produced “publicly, in the presence of the assembled clergy and people”, all the above particulars — both those relating to concoctions and maleficia and cursings and those relating to Robin, son of Art.(45) Indeed, Petronilla admitted that she herself had acted as go-between (mediatrix) for Lady Alice and her demon lover; and she provided details. With her own eyes, in full daylight, she had seen Robin materialize in the form of three Negroes bearing iron rods in their hands, and in this strange guise have intercourse with the lady. She had even dried the place after their departure, using the bed-cover.(46) Unless one is prepared to accept all this, there are no grounds for believing any of the charges against Lady Alice.
All the charges, in fact, are designed to serve one and the same purpose: to show that Lady Alice had no right to her wealth, that it had been wrested from its rightful owners by truly diabolic means, that it was tainted at the source. Maleficia had been practised, poisons had been concocted, anathemas had been pronounced, men had been murdered, to secure this wealth. Worse still, all this had been done with the help of a demon who had not only received, as his fee, worship and animal sacrifice — like Pope Boniface’s demon — but also had mated with Lady Alice.
Armed with this information, Bishop de Ledrede wrote to the lord chancellor, Roger Outlaw, prior of Kilmainham, demanding that the accused parties be immediately imprisoned. But Roger Outlaw, who was Lady Alice’s brother-in-law and William Outlaw’s uncle, declined to act; so the bishop had to proceed as best he could, without the help of the secular arm. He cited Lady Alice to appear before him on a certain day; but when the day came it was found that she had fled the town. Next the bishop cited William Outlaw, on charges of heresy and of aiding and protecting heretics; but nothing came of that either, for the seneschal of Kilkenny intervened.
The seneschal was a powerful nobleman called Sir Arnold le Poer, a distant relative of Lady Alice’s fourth husband, Sir John le Poer. Whether out of friendship, or out of self-interest, or simply because he thought the whole business nonsense, he sided with William Outlaw. Together with Outlaw he went to see the bishop and asked him most earnestly to withdraw the indictment; and when this failed, loaded him with reproaches and threats. Next day he went further; he sent a band of armed men to arrest the bishop and lodge him in Kilkenny jail, where he kept him until the day for which William Outlaw had been cited had passed. And when, on his release, the bishop again cited Outlaw to appear before him, and appealed to the seneschal for help, he met with a sharp rebuff.(47)
Ledrede excommunicated Lady Alice; whereupon the lady indicted the bishop for defamation of character, and her allies, Sir Arnold le Poer at their head, had him cited to appear before the parliament in Dublin. But the bishop had never been lacking in self-confidence, and now he defended his conduct and argued his case with such vigour that the assembly was won over. At last he was able to proceed with the arrest of Lady Alice’s associates. They were thrown into prison at Kilkenny; and soon Ledrede had the gratification of reciting the charges against them in the presence of the king’s justiciar, the lord chancellor, the treasurer, and the king’s council, all assembled for the purpose in his own episcopal city. All the accused were found guilty and were sentenced to various punishments. Some, including Petronilla of Meath, were burned alive; others were whipped through the streets of Kilkenny; others were banished and declared excommunicate; others were sentenced to the penance of wearing crosses sewn on their garments.(48) William Outlaw, after a period in prison, was permitted to recant, to do penance, and to be reconciled with the Church — though he did have to use some of his great wealth in providing a leaden roof for the bishop’s cathedral. As for Lady Alice, who was cast as the chief culprit, she escaped burning only because her powerful kinsfolk got her out of Ireland and into England.(49)
The whole affair makes sense only if it is seen as one episode in a struggle between, on the one side, Lady Alice’s kinsfolk and allies and, on the other side, her stepsons and stepdaughters. Financial considerations seem to have played a part on both sides. It is known that the lord chancellor, Roger Outlaw, was heavily in debt to the bishop; while Lady Alice’s accusers must certainly have found allies amongst the various nobles who were in debt to her or to her son. Ever since the early middle ages, the rich and powerful had been prone to use maleficium and accusations of maleficium as weapons in the struggle for wealth and power. This was one more instance — but with a difference: the demonic bulks far larger here than it had done in earlier centuries. For this Bishop Ledrede must surely be held responsible. So far as we can tell, Robin, son of Art, did not figure in the accusations brought against Lady Alice by her husbands’ heirs; but he bulks large in Petronilla’s confession, which was extracted by the bishop’s men. And everything we know of Ledrede’s previous and subsequent career shows him to have been preoccupied with notions of heresy and demon-worship in a way which was far more familiar in France than in England, let alone in Ireland.(50)
A Franciscan of English origin, Ledrede had in fact visited France and the papal court at a time when the trials of the Templars and Pope Boniface and Bishop Guichard were still fresh in everyone’s memory. He was appointed to the see of Ossory by Pope John XII and consecrated at Avignon in 1317; and already in 1320 — four years before the Kyteler affair — he held a synod of his chapter and clergy, where he made legislation against such persons in the diocese as might be tainted with unorthodoxy. Later, after the affair was over, he ruthlessly pursued Lady Alice’s ally, the seneschal of Kilkenny Arnold le Poer, as a heretic; never resting until he had him excommunicated and imprisoned in Dublin castle, where after some years the man died — unabsolved, and accordingly deprived of the last rites and even of burial. Later still, Ledrede himself was summoned before the court of the archbishop of Dublin, as well as before secular tribunals, for various crimes, including the instigation of murder. He took refuge at Avignon, where he was able to persuade the pope, Benedict XII, that Ireland was full of demon-worshipping heretics, whom he alone opposed.