He was absent from Ireland — in effect exiled — for nine years; and when he was allowed to return and resume his functions, he found that his superior, the archbishop of Dublin, was keeping an inconveniently close watch on the diocese of Ossory. This started a new dispute; once more Ledrede turned to the reigning pope, this time Clement VI, and managed to convince him that the archbishop was protecting heretics. This was in 1347, almost a quarter of a century after the Kyteler affair. Whether or not there was any connection between the two episodes, the bishop certainly showed the same mentality in both. For him, as for King Philip the Fair, it was automatic to denounce an opponent as a heretic or a protector of heretics; perhaps even to regard him as such.
Once such a man was persuaded that Lady Alice was guilty of maleficium he was practically bound, given his background, to assume that she must also be an out-and-out heretic. Indeed, all his actions were based on that conviction. When he first wrote to the lord chancellor, demanding the arrest of the lady and her associates, he referred to them as heretics; and he appended a copy of the recently published papal decretal De haereticis. When he had the king’s officers assembled at Kilkenny, he regaled them by reading the same decretal aloud, expounding it in the vernacular, and adding an excursus of his own on the penalties appropriate to heretics and their protectors.(51) But he went further. The notion of the incubus or copulating demon, which had already been used against Bishop Guichard of Troyes through his mother, had a more obvious application when the accused was herself a woman. The bishop of Ossory applied it. For the first time in European history (so far as is known), a woman was accused of having acquired the power of sorcery through having sexual intercourse with a demon — and not a young woman either, but one who must have been well over sixty.† In the proceedings against Lady Alice Kyteler, as conducted by Richard de Ledrede, a new image of the witch begins to emerge.
Yet the Kyteler case is not a typical witch-hunt, of the kind that was to become so common at the time of the great witch-hunt. That much has often been noted, but it has not proved easy to explain, or even to define, its peculiarities. It becomes perfectly easy when it is realized that the frame of reference was still provided by ritual magic. Then everything makes sense. Petronilla of Meath referred to her mistress as the most practised mistress of the art in the realm, indeed in the whole world: such a description fits one of those magicians who were lords of demons rather than one of the later witches, who were their abject servants. Lighted candles were used in the ceremonies: the Solomonic books have much to say about that. Animals were torn limb from limb at country cross-roads, as sacrifices: this was a stock feature of ritual magic. One of Petronilla’s achievements was, by incantations, to make some women take on the appearance of horned goats: such tricks belong exclusively to the world of ritual magic. Above all, Lady Alice’s demon, though he has certain features in common with the demon-seducers of the later witch-trials, is only fully understandable when viewed in terms of Solomonic lore. He claims to be one of the lesser demons of hell, and iron bars form part of his equipment — and in the Key of Solomon spirits of the lowest order were described as being “like soldiers, armed with spears”. Even his name, which has caused so much puzzlement, ceases to be a riddle. In calling him Robin, Petronilla of Meath was no doubt uttering the name of the first local wood-spirit that occurred to her — as countless other women, under torture, were to do in later centuries. But in adding a patronymic she was surely— probably at Ledrede’s instigation — indicating a connection with ritual magic. In ritual magic the magician was often called the Master of the Art, the animal whose skin provided the parchment for the magic formulae was called the Victim of the Art. What, then, could be more fitting than that this early demonic familiar should be called filius Artis — meaning not that he was the son of another demon, called Art (in any case a theological impossibility) but that he was a son of the magic art?
The second trial in which a sect of witches figures was held three quarters of a century later, some time between 1397 and 1406; and still the frame of reference was supplied by ritual magic. This was a Swiss trial, held at Boltigen in the Simmerthal — a region which had recently been conquered by the city of Bern; and it was conducted by a secular judge, Peter of Greyerz (Gruyères), who represented the authority of Bern.††
The chief accused was one Stedelen. Under torture, this man confessed to a variety of maleficia. He had afflicted a whole farmstead with sterility, causing the farmer’s wife no less than seven miscarriages and making all the cattle infertile; this had been done by burying a lizard under the threshold. He also knew how to produce hail-storms and devastate the crops; how to make children fall into the water and drown before their parents’ eyes; how to kill people with thunderbolts; how to harm his neighbours in their belongings and their bodies — in fact, how to perform all the traditional forms of maleficium. In answer to the judge’s questions, accompanied by repeated torture, he explained how storms were made. It appeared that a group of malifici and maleficae came together in a field and begged the prince of all demons to send them one of his demonic subjects, whom they designated by name. A black cock was sacrificed at a cross-roads, its flesh being thrown high in the air, where the lesser demon snatched it up. After which the demon would make hail-storms and cast thunderbolts — though not, Stedelen added, always at the places suggested.
In the confession which Peter of Greyerz extracted from Stedelen the world of maleficium and the world of ritual magic come together more clearly even than in the Kyteler affair. And in other confessions extracted by the same judge — and by the same methods — the whole is fused with that stereotype of the heretical sect which had been developed over the preceding three centuries. Here we learn that the “sect” of malefici around Bern(were accustomed not only to kill babies by magical means but to use the infant corpses for concocting potions which, in turn, possessed magical power. A candidate for membership of the sect was taken by the masters into a church on a Sunday morning, before the blessing of the holy water. There he was required to renounce Christ and Christianity and to do homage to a demon, known as “the little master”, who manifested himself in human form. Next he drank from the potion — whereupon the “images of the art” were revealed to him. It is the age-old fantasy, adapted to include ritual magic.
†
It seems that her son William was already adult in 1302, i.e. twenty-two years before the trial; see T. Wright,
††
Peter of Greyerz told the story of the trial to the Dominican Johannes Nider, who included it in his book