On an autumn day in 1324, Petronilla de Meath was publicly burned in the Irish town of Kilkenny. This execution ended the persecution by Richard Ledrede, Bishop of Ossori, of Lady Alice Kiteler, a wealthy lady whose servant Petronilla was.
It was one of the first episodes in the infamous witch hunt that lasted several centuries in Europe and took the lives of tens of thousands of people.
What happened in 1324 at Kilkenny? What chain of events led to the death of the unfortunate woman and who participated in these events? Could this episode explain what witchcraft processes are and why they later became so widespread?
Dame Alice Kiteler was the daughter of a wealthy Flemish merchant. At the time of the events described, she was about 60 years old, she was three times a widow and married for the fourth time. Alice first married in 1280 to William Outlaw, a wealthy moneylender. The couple soon had a son, also named William. About 1300 William Sr. passed away and Alice married Adam le Blund, also a usurer.
This is where the interesting begins: Alice (along with her second husband and a certain Rose Outlaw, apparently a relative) becomes the object of interest of the local judicial authorities - she is accused of the death of William Outlaw and embezzlement of three thousand pounds, which were transferred to him for safekeeping. The investigation found the money buried in the basement of the house, there was no evidence against Alice and her second husband, and the case was closed.
Just a few years later, in 1307, Adam le Blund transferred his estate to his stepson, William Outlaw, and died thereafter. In 1309, Alice remarried, this time not to the usurer, but to the landowner Richard de Walle. He died around 1316, leaving his fortune to young children from a previous marriage, whom Alice was appointed guardian.
Already an elderly lady, she married for the fourth time to John le Poeur, a member of a distinguished noble family in Kilkenny, who also had children from a previous marriage. So passed several years, unremarkable for the historian, and now we are approaching the denouement of all these private events that would not have aroused interest and would not have remained in history if not for the intervention of outside forces, about which below.
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So, in 1323, John le Poer fell ill with some unusual disease (sources say that his hair and nails fell out and he became incapacitated). At that moment, his grown children began to claim a part of Alice Kiteler's solid capital, inherited and accumulated over her long life. By this time she lived in a house by the sea, and bought a house in Kilkenny for her eldest son, William.
In the summer of 1323, the sons of her sick husband came to Alice, threatening to accuse her of the death of three previous husbands and of sending damage to their father. At this difficult moment for the elderly lady, let us leave her and move on to another line of this story, connected with Richard Ledrede, Franciscan, Bishop of Ossori.
The second protagonist of the events described was an Englishman who joined the Order of St. Francis of Assisi. For a long time, Richard Ledrede lived in France. In the first years of the "Avignon captivity" of Pope Clement V, he spent some time near the curia.
There is no doubt that the theme of heresies and witchcraft as an alliance with the devil was familiar to him. About 1317, being a middle-aged man, about 50-55 years old, Richard Ledrede was appointed head of Ossori, one of the dioceses in Ireland. The new broom was trying to sweep out all the litter.
Outraged by the local customs, Ledredé wrote denunciations to Avignon and London, where he accused both the clergy of his diocese and the secular people of drunkenness, fornication, violation of church statutes and civil laws.
At the intersection of these two lines - a property claim against Alice Kiteler by her stepchildren and Bishop Ossori's focus on finding and exposing local atrocities - a witchcraft process arose, one of the first in Europe and rather atypical for the history of Ireland, where the concept of witchcraft was not included in the legal field.
Le Poer's sons brought the greedy stepmother's case to the Kilkenny court, but it did not get a move - it is believed because Alice Kiteler had influential patrons. However, the case caught the attention of Richard Ledrede. He finally saw an excellent opportunity to resort to the accusation of witchcraft, a crime par excellence that would highlight the full extent of the decline of Irish morals.
What happened next is narrated by an anonymous Latin text attributed to Richard Ledreda himself, discovered in the library of the British Museum and published in the middle of the 19th century under the title "A Modern Narrative of the Case Against Lady Alice Kiteler, Accused of Witchcraft in 1324 by Richard Ledreda, Bishop Ossori ".
The trial initiated by the bishop led to the following result: in the city of Kilkenny there is a group (coven) of witches and heretics, led by Alice Kiteler.
They were charged with: renunciation of the Christian faith; the sacrifice of animals and birds to demons; turning to the devil and demons for advice in witchcraft; desecration of churches at night; making witchcraft potions from various "abominations" (worms, entrails of sacrificial roosters, nails of the dead, parts of the bodies of unbaptized babies, etc., which were mixed and boiled in vessels from the skulls of executed criminals) for a love spell, lapel, harm to human health, as well as for moving through the air on brooms.
In addition, Alice Kiteler was personally accused of two more crimes: in an intimate relationship with the incubus Robert Artisson ("a demon of one of the lower classes of hell") and the fact that by magic she forced her husbands to transfer property to William Outlaw and with witchcraft sent illness to John le Poer.
As you can see, against the background of all these accusations, the initial premise of Alice's persecution - the premeditated murder of her husbands in order to appropriate their property - looked faded.
Alice's son William Outlaw and her maids (12 people in total) were detained on charges, and she herself, as a person of too high status to be arrested without a special order, went at that time to Dublin, where, thanks to the patronage of Seneschal Kilkenny Arnold le Poer, her husband's brother John, obtained an appeal. Despite this, the arrested were subjected to further investigation. One of the maids, Petronilla de Meat, under flogging, confessed everything that the meticulous bishop had accused her and her mistress.
The outcome was predictable: Petronilla was deprived of the rights of the estate, excommunicated and publicly executed on November 3, 1324. The rest of the "coven members" were whipped in the market square. William Outlaw was convicted as a heretic and spent two months in prison, then he was sent on a pilgrimage to Canterbury, to the tomb of St. Thomas.
In addition, he had to pay a certain amount to repair the roof of the cathedral in Kilkenny, attend mass regularly and give alms to the beggars. Alice Kiteler herself, convicted in absentia, fled (as the 16th century source says, she flew to England "with a fair wind") and never returned. Her land holdings in Ireland were confiscated.
This was one of the earliest Vedic processes in Europe at the end of the Middle Ages. Down and Out trouble started. Over time, the frequency of such processes steadily increased until it turned into a real hunt for alleged witches.
The reasons for the persecution are already clear in the case of Alice Kiteler: the accusations are based on conflicts and negative feelings (hatred, fear, envy of other people's wealth, success in business, beauty), mythologically formed and legally grounded.
Such accusations of witchcraft are typical for almost all peoples, with the exception of some hunter-gatherers (pygmies, Bushmen, Eskimos, etc.) - they live in groups too small to allow themselves intra-group enmity, their misfortunes are attributed not to sorcerers, but to evil spirits, or the souls of the ancestors.
In larger but still smaller communities, where competition, jealousy, and hostility are not mitigated by concern for survival, evil is often personified by a member of the community - not like everyone else, either too weak or too strong.
When there are no state institutions, belief in witchcraft turns out to be a means of public administration, the establishment of moral values, the rallying of the group, and the punishment of violators.
Thinking and acting in terms of witchcraft is a way to deal with adversity: accusations crystallize and thereby ease anxiety, and exorcism of personified evil resolves conflict, asserts the boundaries and inner cohesion of the community. Anthropologists believe that from this point of view, belief in witchcraft is a perfectly rational strategy for solving problems.
With its help, you can explain the misfortune differently than by chance or your own mistake. The threat of accusations of witchcraft keeps potential troublemakers under control, makes them preserve their reputation, do not say too much, do not violate social norms. Even the fear of witchcraft plays a useful role - it makes you be more careful and attentive with others.
However, the anthropological theory of witchcraft is not very well suited to explain the official witchcraft processes in Christian Europe - here they were not a social institution that performed important functions, but rather an indicator of the breakdown of the social system.
Strange as it may seem, there have always been witches in Europe - more precisely, those whom the peasants and townspeople considered witches. People with disabilities, lonely, unsociable, grumpy, disregarding moral standards or suddenly rich, not only women, but also men - these are those who risked acquiring a corresponding reputation. We got along with them and even tried to be as polite as possible so as not to incur their wrath.
But as soon as something happened, the witch was threatened, forced to take back the damage, even beaten and scratched to the point of blood (it was believed that this could remove the spell). Not a connection with the devil, not night flights, but precisely the malicious actions of a witch, witchcraft spoilage frightened the peasants, and the nobles too.
Do magic - but don't harm us personally. There was nowhere without magic at that time, village healers and healers were the only source of medical care, they were also turned to in case of other misfortunes and failures in the household, family life, in love, etc.
Memorial plaque in Kilkenny.
I must say that the Catholic priests were calm about the healers: the church put up with the existence of those whom it considered the servants of the devil, thus adapting pre-Christian ideas.
And there was a lot of magic in Catholicism itself; clergy and monasteries offered parishioners and pilgrims various means for miraculous healings and protection from witches. The church sentenced witches to be burned not for magic, but for heresy - an agreement with the devil and service to him. Outside this legal space, witchcraft was not a crime.
Why did the persecution become widespread and, like plague epidemics, claimed the lives of tens of thousands of people? Historians have been trying to answer this question for a long time, but none of the explanations can be considered exhaustive.
According to one version, witches were persecuted as a kind of phantom internal enemy on a par with other outcasts, primarily Jews and lepers. Indeed, as early as the 11th century, the first ghettos for Jews appeared in Germany and their massacres began in Spain.
At the end of the 12th century, Jews were expelled from France and at the same time (in 1179) a law was issued against lepers and homosexuals. The 14th century dates back to the massacres of lepers in France. However, the massive witch hunt unfolded much later than all these events, therefore, there must be some other reasons.
According to another point of view, the official witch-hunt became a continuation of the practice of eradicating heresies. XII-XIII centuries - the heyday of the heretical movements of the Bogomils, Albigensians and Waldens, and Pope Gregory IX to fight them in 1231 established a special body - the Holy Department of Investigation of Heretical Sinfulness, or the Holy Inquisition. However, the Inquisition persecuted suspected witchcraft only if they belonged to heretical sects; at the same time, the percentage of acquittals was high.
The third version says that changes in secular legislation became the reason for the transformation of single processes into massive ones. Under the influence of the papal bulls of the XIV-XV centuries, articles on punishment for witchcraft and investigative methods of the Inquisition fall into the secular criminal-judicial codes.
Witchcraft was recognized as an exceptional crime, crimen exeptum, which meant unrestricted use of torture, as well as the fact that denunciations and testimonies of witnesses were sufficient for a verdict. The torture gave rise to the effect of a snowball - the accused betrayed more and more accomplices, whom they allegedly met at the Sabbaths, and the number of convicts grew exponentially.
Michael Heer. Sabbat on Bald Mountain on Walpurgis Night. Engraving. 1626 g.
The transfer of cases of witchcraft from church courts to secular ones made the hunt directly dependent on the moods and ambitions of local rulers. And if some of them did not allow the rampant processes, others encouraged them and even themselves acted among the zealous witch hunters. The epicenter of the mass Vedic processes was either in the remote provinces of large states, or where the central government was weak.
The witchcraft processes were especially intense in the territories affected by the Reformation. Perceiving the demonological constructions of their political opponents, the papists, as a dogma, the Protestant mentors began to fight the “messengers of hell” on their own. And soon the Lutheran and Calvinist states had their own more severe laws on witchcraft.
However, political factors by themselves would hardly have played a decisive role if not for the accompanying circumstances. Lawsuits against witches spread in waves closely associated with crisis phenomena - crop failures, warriors, epidemics, which generated despair and panic and increased the tendency of people to look for the secret cause of misfortune.
According to historians, at the end of the 16th century, the number of processes increased sharply due to the demographic and economic crises. Population growth and long-term climate deterioration during this century, along with an influx of silver from the American colonies, led to a price revolution, famine and increased social tensions.
According to the next version, the witch hunt was a consequence of mass psychosis caused both by the already mentioned epidemics, wars, hunger, and more specific reasons, including poisoning with ergot (mold that appears on rye in rainy years) or atropines (belladonna and others animal and plant poisons). However, this version is hindered by the length of the era of persecution of witches and the obvious routine of processes.
In addition, then it will be necessary to admit that it was not the peasants who were tormented by stress that suffered from the disorder of consciousness, but demonologists and judges: historians have proved that the stories about flights to the Sabbath and other incredible things were not a fantasy of the accused, but just answers to the questions of investigators who sought with the help of torture to confirm their own ideas about what and how witches should do.
Here we turn to another version, according to which the spread of witchcraft insanity was facilitated by interest in demonology among Catholic priests and secular scientists and, as a result, the emergence of learned demonological treatises - instructions for finding and eradicating witches. One of these early demonologists was our hero, Richard Ledrede.
The inhabitants of modern Kilkenny do not remember him, but the lawsuit he started is important for them in its own way: in one of the houses on Kieran Street (they say that this is the house of Alice Kiteler's father) there is a restaurant "Kyteler's Inn" (founded, as the inscription says, in 1324).
Its owners are actively exploiting the witchcraft reputation of our heroine, and at the entrance, visitors are greeted by the lady Alice herself - in the form of a wax figure near a vat for making witchcraft potions …
Olga Khristoforova. Historical magazine "Diletant"