Free Daily Life During The Reformation by James M. Anderson Page A

be the devil himself. For protection against a cat’s
evil powers, one had to maim it such as breaking its legs. A maimed feline could
not attend the Sabbat or cast spells.
    Every year, cats were killed by the thousands in France
into the seventeenth century.
    Beliefs related to cats varied from place to place. In
Brittany, if a cat crossed the path of a fisherman, his catch was doomed. In
Anjou, the bread would not rise if a cat entered a bakery.
    These animals also figured into folk medicine. To suck the
blood from a freshly amputated tomcat’s tail would help cure bodily wounds
incurred by a fall. For pneumonia, it was beneficial to drink the blood from a
cat’s ear mixed with wine.
    Cats were victims in other ways. In London during the
Reformation, a Protestant crowd shaved a cat to resemble a priest after which
they dressed it in priestly vestments, and then hanged it on the gallows at Cheapside.
     
     
    MINERS AND GHOSTS
     
    Like almost everyone else, miners’ lives were replete with
superstition and magical stories. They were afraid of spirits who lived in the
dark shafts, and tales were abundant of unattached hands carrying candles,
strange voices in the dark warning of cave-ins, and ghostly black dogs
indicating disaster was imminent. Underground, in the flickering candle light,
shadowy apparitions could easily play on the imagination of people raised on
such beliefs.
     
     
    THE PEASANTS OF LORRAINE
     
    Workers on isolated farms out in the countryside were
particularly prone to terrors of the night in the form of supernatural beings
as well as from ordinary brigands.
    In Lorraine, in eastern France, an area lying astride
important crossroads between France and Germany, the people suffered, perhaps
more than most from invading armies, battles, pillage, devastation, and robber
bands of unemployed soldiers. Afflicted by poverty and starvation, they were
also terrorized by their belief in sorcery and evil demons. In addition, they
lived in fear of the Catholic Inquisition whose severe judges were determined
at any cost to root out the causes of evil perpetrated by the devil. Anyone
could be tortured if denounced as a participant in satanic rites.
    A magistrate in the town of Nancy, charged with clearing
evil-doers out of the region, boasted to the Cardinal of Lorraine that he had
sent 800 sorcerers to the stake to be burned. Arrogantly, he claimed that his
justice was so effective that 16 people had killed themselves rather than face
him.
    In 1602 a judge, M. Boguet, commissioned to destroy nests
of devils said to be in the Jura mountains, repudiated the use of torture to
which he believed the true disciples of the devil would be immune. He studied
carefully the rites of the Sabbat and came to the conclusion that in the Jura,
the devil himself appeared as an enormous black sheep, a candle between his
horns, to preside over the orgies. The sorcerers approached one by one and lit
their candle that burst into long bluish flames. They knelt down and kissed
Satan’s derriere . Then came the time of public
confession when the sorcerers told the prince of the underworld of their
exploits since their last meeting together. Those who caused the most wicked
abominations such as having people and their livestock die, the most illnesses,
or the most fruit spoiled were the ones most favored by Satan.
    Boguet was greatly struck by the frenetic dances that
sometimes caused women to abort as well as tales that the old men were the most
agile. The judge spared the accused from torture and took care to soften the
inevitable death penalty by recommending that they be strangled before the
flames engulfed them. This judge’s book on sorcery ( Discours des Sorciers ) was studied by many and became
a manual for members of parliament. He decimated the population of the Jura,
and if his own death had not intervened, he may have exterminated the entire
region.
     
     
     
    5 - SPREAD OF THE REFORMATION
     
    Religious
reformers made