historical and political thought in the seventeenth - RePub - Erasmus ...

Chapter 7. The mistress of life
place, and most obviously, they prosecuted adherents of the true faith, while
spreading fear and enhancing superstition in the process. Boxhorn particularly
singles out for attack the inquisitory courts’s methods of interrogation:
they were cruel and could in no manner be justified on Biblical grounds. 101
Boxhorn’s second point of criticism concerns the judicial procedures of the
inquisitory courts. Or, to put it more precise, the breaking of these judicial
procedures by the inquisitory courts. Boxhorn’s discussion of the persecutions
of witches in the town of Arras in the second half of the fifteenth century
merits special attention in this case. 102
Trouble started in the year 1459 during the trial of a man named Robinet
de Vaulx from the town of Langres. During his trial he accused a woman of
Douay, who goes by the name of Denisette, to be a ‘vaudois’. 103 The inquisitor
of Arras, the Jacobin Pierre le Breuffart, got wind of this accusation. He travelled
to Douay and arrested Denisette. After being read the laws of Douay
Denisette was brought to Arras, where she, under torture, confessed her sins.
Her confession started an avalanche of accusations that soon enclosed every
social strata of Arras, and in the end even targeted the duke of Burgundy.
The consequences of the witch trials proved to be disastrous. Soon the entire
town of Arras was in the grips of fear. In their zeal, the inquisitors breached
the laws: property was illegally confiscated ‘not contrary to the privilege that
those [citizens] of Arras have of old, with which they hold, that the property
of a citizen of Arras may not be confiscated by the count of Artois. A privilege
that they still daily honour’. 104 Another consequence was that ‘the town
of Arras acquired such an evil reputation … that its merchants were refused
lodging or credit out fear that, on the next day, they might be accused of witchcraft
and lose all their possessions to confiscation’. 105 This insecurity, brought
forward by the clergy’s reign of terror over the town, lasted until 1491, when
101 The trial by water, for example, whereby the innocence of the defendant was tested by throwing
the defendant in a river or lake with a heavy stone rapped to his body, originated from the old Germans,
who were accustomed to throw bastard children in the Rhine. Here, Boxhorn explicitly links the inquisitory
courts’s methods to pagan practice in order to blacken the Roman Church. It also shows Boxhorn’s
interest in, and knowledge of, ancient customs and beliefs. Boxhorn, Nederlantsche historie, pp. 25-29.
102 Boxhorn attributes about fifty pages, almost one-fourth of the total amount of pages in the Nederlantsche
historie, to this specific case. His primary source is the report of Jacques du Clercq (1424-c.1475),
squire of Lord Beauvoir in Ternys, who lived in Arras at the time.
103 Originally, ‘vaudois’ was the French word for an adherent of the teachings of Peter Waldo. In
the fifteenth century it had become the common French word for magic or witchcraft. Johan Huizinga,
The Autumn of the Middle Ages. Translated by R.J. Payton and Ulrich Mammitzsch (The University of
Chicago Press; Chicago, 1996), pp. 288-90.
104 Boxhorn, Nederlantsche historie, p. 73. ‘… niet tegenstaende het voordeel dat van outs die van
Atrecht hebben, met welck sij staende houden dat eens burgers van Atrecht goet niet geconfisqueert
mach werden door den Graeff van Artoys; Welck voordeel sij noch gelijck daegelijckx onderhouden.’
105 Ibidem, pp. 58-59. Quoted from Huizinga, The Autumn of the Middle Ages, p. 289.
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