Lang Andrew
Cock Lane and Common-Sense
The scope of the Ragley inquiries may now be understood. It must not be forgotten that witchcraft was a topic of deep interest to these students. They solemnly quote the records of trials in which it is perfectly evident that girls and boys, either in a spirit of wicked mischief, or suffering from hysterical illusions, make grotesque charges against poor old women. The witches always prick, pinch, and torment their victims, being present to them, though invisible to the bystanders. This was called ‘spectral evidence’; and the Mathers, during the fanatical outbreaks at Salem, admit that this ‘spectral evidence,’ unsupported, is of no legal value. Indeed, taken literally, Cotton Mather’s cautions on the subject of evidence may almost be called sane and sensible. But the Protestant inquisitors always discovered evidence confirmatory. For example, a girl is screaming out against an invisible witch; a man, to please her, makes a snatch at the empty air where she points, and finds in his hand a fragment of stuff, which again is proved to be torn from the witch’s dress. It is easy to see how this trick could be played. Again, a possessed girl cries that a witch is tormenting her with an iron spindle, grasps at the spindle (visible only to her), and, lo, it is in her hand, and is the property of the witch. Here is proof positive! Again, a girl at Stoke Trister, in Somerset, is bewitched by Elizabeth Style, of Bayford, widow. The rector of the parish, the Rev. William Parsons, deposes that the girl, in a fit, pointed to different parts of her body, ‘and where she pointed, he perceived a red spot to arise, with a small black in the midst of it, like a small thorn’; and other evidence was given to the same effect. The phenomenon is akin to many which, according to medical and scientific testimony, occur to patients in the hypnotic state. The so-called stigmata of Louise Lateau, and of the shepherd boy put up by the Archbishop of Reims as a substitute for Joan of Arc, are cases in point. But Glanvill, who quotes the record of the trial (January, 1664), holds that witchcraft is proved by the coincidence of the witch’s confession that she, the devil, and others made an image of the girl and pierced it with thorns! The confession is a piece of pure folklore: poor old Elizabeth Style merely copies the statements of French and Scotch witches. The devil appeared as a handsome man, and as a black dog! Glanvill denies that she was tortured, or ‘watched’ – that is, kept awake till her brain reeled. But his own account makes it plain that she was ‘watched’ after her confession at least, when the devil, under the form of a butterfly, appeared in her cell.
This rampant and mischievous nonsense was dear to the psychical inquirers of the Restoration; it was circulated by Glanvill, a Fellow of the Royal Society; by Henry More; by Sinclair, a professor in the University of Glasgow; by Richard Baxter, that glory of Nonconformity, who revels in the burning of an ‘old reading parson’ – that is, a clergyman who read the Homilies, under the Commonwealth. This unlucky old parson was tortured into confession by being ‘walked’ and ‘watched’ – that is, kept from sleep till he was delirious. Archbishop Spottiswoode treated Father Ogilvie, S. J., in the same abominable manner, till delirium supervened. Church, Kirk, and Dissent have no right to throw the first stone at each other.
Taking levitation, haunting, disturbances and apparitions, and leaving ‘telepathy’ or second sight out of the list for the present, he who compares psychical research in the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries finds himself confronted by the problem which everywhere meets the student of institutions and of mythology. The anthropologist knows that, if he takes up a new book of travels in the remotest lands, he will find mention of strange customs perfectly familiar to him in other parts of the ancient and modern world. The mythologist would be surprised if he encountered in Papua or Central Africa, or Sakhalin, a perfectly new myth. These uniformities of myth and custom are explained by the identical workings of the uncivilised intelligence on the same materials, and, in some cases, by borrowing, transmission, imitation.
Now, some features in witchcraft admit of this explanation. Highland crofters, even now, perforate the image of an enemy with pins; broken bottle-ends or sharp stones are put, in Russia and in Australia, in the footprints of a foe, for the purpose of laming him; and there are dozens of such practices, all founded on the theory of sympathy. Like affects like. What harms the effigy hurts the person whose effigy is burned or pricked. All this is perfectly intelligible. But, when we find savage ‘birraarks’ in Australia, fakirs in India, saints in mediæval Europe, a gentleman’s butler in Ireland, boys in Somerset and Midlothian, a young warrior in Zululand, Miss Nancy Wesley at Epworth in 1716, and Mr. Daniel Home in London in 1856-70, all triumphing over the law of gravitation, all floating in the air, how are we to explain the uniformity of stories palpably ridiculous?
The evidence, it must be observed, is not merely that of savages, or of persons as uneducated and as superstitious as savages. The Australian birraark, who flies away up the tree, we may leave out of account. The saints, St. Francis and St. Theresa, are more puzzling, but miracles were expected from saints. 65 The levitated boy was attested to in a court of justice, and is designed by Faithorne in an illustration of Glanvill’s book. He flew over a garden! But witnesses in such trials were fanciful people. Lord Orrery and Mr. Greatrakes may have seen the butler float in the air – after dinner. The exploits of the Indian fakirs almost, or quite, overcome the scepticism of Mr. Max Müller, in his Gifford Lectures on Psychological Religion. Living and honourable white men aver that they have seen the feat, examined the performers, and found no explanation; no wires, no trace of imposture. (The writer is acquainted with a well vouched for case, the witness an English officer.) Mr. Kellar, an American professional conjurer, and exposer of spiritualistic pretensions, bears witness, in the North American Review, to a Zulu case of ‘levitation,’ which actually surpasses the tale of the gentleman’s butler in strangeness. Cieza de Leon, in his Travels, translated by Mr. Markham for the Hakluyt Society, brings a similar anecdote from early Peru, in 1549. 66 Miss Nancy Wesley’s case is vouched for (she and the bed she sat on both rose from the floor) by a letter from one of her family to her brother Samuel, printed in Southey’s Life of Wesley. Finally, Lord Lindsay and Lord Adare published a statement that they saw Home float out of one window and in at another, in Ashley Place, S.W., on December 16, 1868. Captain Wynne, who was also there, ‘wrote to the Medium, to say I was present as a witness’. 67 We need not heap up more examples, drawn from classic Greece, as in the instances of Abaris and Iamblichus. We merely stand speechless in the presence of the wildest of all fables, when it meets us, as identical myths and customs do – not among savages alone, but everywhere, practically speaking, and in connection with barbarous sorcery, with English witchcraft, with the saintliest of mediæval devotees, with African warriors, with Hindoo fakirs, with a little English girl in a quiet old country parsonage, and with an enigmatic American gentleman. Many living witnesses, of good authority, sign statements about Home’s levitation. In one case, a large table, on which stood a man of twelve stone weight rose from the floor, and an eye-witness, a doctor, felt under the castors with his hands.
Of all persons subject to ‘levitation,’ Saint Joseph of Cupertino (1603-1663) was the most notable. The evidence is partly derived from testimonies collected with a view to his canonisation, within two years after his death. There is a full account of his life and adventures in Acta Sanctorum. 68 St. Joseph died, as we saw, in 1663, but the earliest biography of him, in Italian, was not published till fifteen years later, in 1678. Unluckily the compiler of his legend in the Acta Sanctorum was unable to procure this work, by Nutius, which might contain a comparatively slight accretion of myths. The next life is of 1722, and the author made use of the facts collected for Joseph’s beatification. There is another life by Pastrovicchi, in 1753. He was canonised in that year, when all the facts were remote by about a century.
Joseph’s parents were pauperes sed honesti; his father was a carpenter, his mother a woman of almost virulent virtue, who kept her son in great order. From the age of eight he was subject to cataleptic or epileptic fits and convulsions. After his novitiate he suffered from severe attacks of melancholia. His ‘miracles’ attracting attention, he was brought before the Inquisition at Naples, as an impostor. He was sent to an obscure and remote monastery, and thence to Assisi, where he was harshly treated, and fell into Bunyan’s Slough of Despond, having much conflict with Apollyon.
He was next called to Rome, where cardinals testify that, on hearing sacred names, he would give a yell, and fall into ecstasy. Returning to Assisi he was held in high honour, and converted a Hanoverian Prince. He healed many sick people, and, having fallen into a river, came out quite dry. He could scarcely read, but was inspired with wonderful theological acuteness. He always yelled before falling into an ecstasy, afterwards, he was so much under the dominion of anæsthesia that hot coals, if applied to his body, produced no effect. Then he soared in air, now higher, now lower (a cardinal vouches for six inches), and in ære pendulus hærebat, like the gentleman’s butler at Lord Orrery’s.
Seventy separate flights, in-doors and out of doors, are recorded. In fact it was well to abstain from good words in conversation with St. Joseph of Cupertino, for he would give a shout, on hearing a pious observation, and fly up, after which social intercourse was out of the question. He was, indeed, prevented by his superiors from appearing at certain sacred functions, because his flights disturbed the proceedings, indeed everything was done by the Church to discourage him, but in vain. He explained his preliminary shout by saying that ‘guns also make a noise when they go off,’ so the Cardinal de Laurea heard him remark. He was even more fragrant than the Miraculous Conformist, or the late Mr. Stainton Moses, to whose séances scent was marvellously borne by ‘spirits’. It must be remembered that contemporary witnesses attest these singular circumstances in the evidence taken two years after his death, for the beatification of Joseph. From Assisi he was sent to various obscure convents, where his miracles were as remarkable as ever. One Christmas Eve, hearing sacred music, he flew up like a bird, from the middle of the church to the high altar, where he floated for a quarter of an hour, yet upset none of the candles. An insane nobleman was brought to him to be healed. Seizing the afflicted prince by the hair of the head, he uttered a shout, and soared up with the patient, who finally came down cured! Once he flew over a pulpit, and once more than eighty yards to a crucifix. This is probably ‘a record’. When some men were elevating a cross for a Calvary, and were oppressed by the weight, Joseph uttered a shriek, flew to them, and lightly erected the cross with his own hand. The flight was of about eighty yards. He flew up into a tree once, and perched on a bough, which quivered no more than if he had been a bird. A rather commonplace pious remark uttered in his presence was the cause of this exhibition. Once in church, he flew from his knees, caught a priest, lifted him up, and gyrated, lætissimo raptu, in mid air. In the presence of the Spanish ambassador and many others, he once flew over the heads of the congregation. Once he asked a priest whether the holy elements were kept in a particular place. ‘Who knows?’ said the priest, whereon Joseph soared over his head, remained kneeling in mid air, and came down only at the request of his ecclesiastical superior. Joseph was clairvoyant, and beheld apparitions, but on the whole (apart from his moral excellence) his flights were his most notable accomplishment. On one occasion he ‘casual remarked to a friend,’ ‘what an infernal smell’ (infernails odor), and then nosed out a number of witches and warlocks who were compounding drugs: ‘standing at some considerable distance, standing, in fact, in quite another street’.
Iamblichus, in the letter to Porphyry, describes such persons as St. Joseph of Cupertino. ‘They have been known to be lifted up into the air… The subject of the afflatus has not felt the application of fire… The more ignorant and mentally imbecile a youth may be, the more freely will the divine power be made manifest.’ Joseph was ignorant, and ‘enfeebled by vigil and fasts,’ so Joseph was ‘insensible of the application of fire,’ and ‘was lifted up into the air’. Yet the cardinals, surgeons, and other witnesses were not thinking of the pagan Iamblichus when they attested the accomplishments of the saint. Whence, then, comes the uniformity of evidence?
The sceptical Calef did not believe in these things, because they are ‘miracles,’ that is, contrary to experience. But here is experience enough to which they are not contrary.
There are dozens of such depositions, and here it is that the student of testimony and of belief finds himself at a deadlock. Believe the evidence we cannot, yet we cannot doubt the good faith, the veracity of the attesting witnesses. Had we only savage, or ancient and uneducated testimony, we might say that the uniformity of myths of levitation is easily explained. The fancy wants a marvel, it readily provides one by positing the infraction of the most universally obvious law, that of gravitation. Men don’t fly; let us say that a man flew, like Abaris on his arrow! This is rudimentary, but then witnesses whose combined testimony would prove almost anything else, declare that they saw the feat performed. Till we can find some explanation of these coincidences of testimony, it is plain that a province in psychology, in the relations between facts as presented to and as represented by mankind, remains to be investigated. Of all persons who have been levitated since St. Joseph, a medium named Eglinton was most subject to this infirmity. In a work, named There is no Death, by Florence Marryat, the author assures us that she has frequently observed the phenomenon. But Mr. Eglinton, after being ‘investigated’ by the Psychical Society, ‘retired,’ as Mr. Myers says, ‘into private life’. The tales told about him by spiritualists are of the kind usually imparted to a gallant, but proverbially confiding, arm of Her Majesty’s service. As for Lord Orrery’s butler, and the others, there are the hypotheses that a cloud of honourable and sane witnesses lied; that they were uniformly hallucinated, or hypnotised, by a glamour as extraordinary as the actual miracle would be; or again, that conjuring of an unexampled character could be done, not only by Home, or Eglinton, in a room which may have been prepared, but by Home, by a Zulu, by St. Joseph of Cupertino, and by naked fakirs, in the open air. Of all these theories that of glamour, of hypnotic illusion, is the most specious. Thus, when Ibn Batuta, the old Arabian traveller, tells us that he saw the famous rope-trick performed in India – men climbing a rope thrown into the air, and cutting each other up, while the bodies revive and reunite – he very candidly adds that his companion, standing by, saw nothing out of the way, and declared that nothing occurred. 69 This clearly implies that Ibn Batuta was hypnotised, and that his companion was not. But Dr. Carpenter’s attempt to prove that one witness saw nothing, while Lord Lindsay and Lord Adare saw Home float out of one window, and in by another, turns out to be erroneous. The third witness, Captain Wynne, confirmed the statement of the other gentlemen.
We now approach the second class of marvels which regaled the circle at Ragley, namely, ‘Alleged movements of objects without contact, occurring not in the presence of a paid medium,’ and with these we shall examine rappings and mysterious noises. The topic began to attract modern attention when table-turning was fashionable. But in common table-turning there was contact, and Faraday easily demonstrated that there was conscious or unconscious pushing and muscular exertion. In 1871 Mr. Crookes made laboratory experiments with Home, using mechanical tests. 70 He demonstrated, to his own satisfaction, that in the presence of Home, even when he was not in physical contact with the object, the object moved: e pur si muove. He published a reply to Dr. Carpenter’s criticism, and the common-sense of ordinary readers, at least, sees no flaw in Mr. Crookes’s method and none in his argument. The experiments of the modern Psychical Society, with paid mediums, produced results, in Mr. Myers’s opinion, ‘not wholly unsatisfactory,’ but far from leading to an affirmative conclusion, if by ‘satisfactory’ Mr. Myers means ‘affirmative’. 71 The investigations of Mrs. Sidgwick were made under the mediumship of Miss Kate Fox (Mrs. Jencken). This lady began the modern ‘spiritualism’ when scarcely older than Mr. Mompesson’s ‘two modest little girls,’ and was accompanied by phenomena like those of Tedworth. But, in Mrs. Sidgwick’s presence the phenomena were of the most meagre; and the reasoning faculties of the mind decline to accept them as other than perfectly normal. The society tried Mr. Eglinton, who once was ‘levitated’ in the presence of Mr. Kellar, the American conjurer, who has publicly described feats like those of the gentleman’s butler. 72 But, after his dealings with the society, Mr. Eglinton has left the scene. 73 The late Mr. Davey also produced results like Mr. Eglinton’s by confessed conjuring.
Mr. Myers concludes that ‘it does not seem worth while, as a rule, to examine the testimony to physical marvels occurring in the presence of professional mediums’. He therefore collects evidence in the article quoted, for physical marvels occurring where there is no paid medium. Here, as in the business of levitation, the interest of the anthropologist and mythologist lies in the uniformity and identity of narratives from all countries, climates, and ages. Among the earliest rappings with which we chance to be familiar are those reported by Froissart in the case of the spirit Orthon, in the fourteenth century. The tale had become almost a fabliau, but any one who reads the amusing chapter will see that it is based on a belief in disturbances like those familiar to Glanvill and the Misses Fox. Cieza de Leon (1549) in the passage already quoted, where he describes the levitated Cacique of Pirza in Popyan, adds that ‘the Christians saw stones falling from the air’ (as in the Greatrakes tale of the Youghal witch), and declares that, ‘when the chief was sitting with a glass of liquor before him, the Christians saw the glass raised up in the air and put down empty, and a short time afterwards the wine was again poured into the cup from the air’. Mr. Home once equalled this marvel, 74 and Ibn Batuta reports similar occurrences, earlier, at the court of the King of Delhi. There is another case in Histoire Prodigieuse d’une jeune Fille agitée d’un Esprit fantastique et invisible. 75 A bourgeois of Bonneval was beset by a rapping rattle of a sprite. ‘At dinner, when he would lay his hand on a trencher, it was carried off elsewhere, and the wineglass, when he was about drinking, was snatched from his hand.’ So Mr. Wesley’s trencher was set spinning on the table, when nobody touched it! In such affairs we may have the origin of the story of the Harpies at the court of Phineus.
In China, Mr. Dennys tells how ‘food placed on the table vanished mysteriously, and many of the curious phenomena attributed to ghostly interference took place,’ so that the householder was driven from house to house, and finally into a temple, in 1874, and all this after the death of a favourite but aggrieved monkey! 76 ‘Throwing down crockery, trampling on the floor, etc. – such pranks as have attracted attention at home, are not unknown… I must confess that in China, as elsewhere, these occurrences leave a bonâ fide impression of the marvellous which can neither be explained nor rejected’. 77
We have now noted these alleged phenomena, literally ‘from China to Peru’. Let us next take an old French case of a noisy sprite in the nunnery of St. Pierre de Lyon. The account is by Adrien de Montalembert, almoner to Francis I. 78 The Bibliography of this very rare tract is curious and deserves attention. When Lenglet Dufresnoy was compiling, in 1751, his Dissertations sur les Apparitions he reprinted the tract from the Paris quarto of 1528, in black letter. This example had been in the Tellier collection, and Dufresnoy seems to have borrowed it from the Royal Convent of St. Geneviève. Knowing that Cardinal Tencin had some acquaintance with the subject, Dufresnoy wrote to him, and publishes (vol. i. cxli.) his answer, dated October 18, 1751, Lyons. The cardinal replied that, besides the Paris edition of 1528, there was a Rouen reprint, of 1529, by Rolin Gautier, with engravings. Brunet says, that there are engravings in the Paris edition of 1528, perhaps these were absent from the Tellier example. That of Rouen, which Cardinal Tencin collated, was in the Abbey of St. Peter, in Lyons. Some leaves had been thumbed out of existence, and their place was supplied in manuscript. The only difference was in chapter xxviii. where the printed Rouen text may have varied. In the MS. at all events, it is stated that on March 21, the spirit of Sister Alix de Telieux struck thirty-three great strokes on the refectory of her convent, ‘mighty and marvellous,’ implying that her thirty-three years of purgatory were commuted into thirty-three days. A bright light, scarcely endurable, then appeared, and remained for some eight minutes. The nuns then went into chapel and sang a Te Deum.
At the end of the volume, a later hand added, in manuscript, that the truth of the contemporary record was confirmed by the tradition of the oldest sisters who had received it from eye-witnesses of the earlier generation. The writer says that she had great difficulty in finding the printed copy, but that when young, in 1630, she received the tale from a nun, then aged ninety-four. This nun would be born in 1536, ten years after these events. She got the story from her aunt, a nun, Gabrielle de Beaudeduit, qui étoit de ce tems-la. There is no doubt that the sisters firmly and piously believed in the story, which has the contemporary evidence of Adrien de Montalembert. Dufresnoy learned that a manuscript copy of the tract was in the library of the Jesuits of Lyons. He was unaware of an edition in 12mo of 1580, cited by Brunet.
To come to the story, one of our earliest examples of a ‘medium,’ and of communications by raps. The nunnery was reformed in 1516. A pretty sister, Alix de Telieux, fled with some of the jewels, lived a ‘gay’ life, and died wretchedly in 1524. She it was, as is believed, who haunted a sister named Anthoinette de Grolée, a girl of eighteen. The disturbance began with a confused half-dream. The girl fancied that the sign of the cross was made on her brow, and a kiss impressed on her lips, as she wakened one night. She thought this was mere illusion, but presently, when she got up, she heard, ‘comme soubs ses pieds frapper aucuns petis coups,’ ‘rappings,’ as if at the depth of four inches underground. This was exactly what occurred to Miss Hetty Wesley, at Epworth, in 1716, and at Rio de Janeiro to a child named ‘C.’ in Professor Alexander’s narrative. 79 Montalembert says, in 1528, ‘I have heard these rappings many a time, and, in reply to my questions, so many strokes as I asked for were given’. Montalembert received information (by way of raps) from the ‘spirit,’ about matters of importance, qui ne pourroient estre cogneus de mortelle créature. ‘Certainly,’ as he adds, ‘people have the best right to believe these things who have seen and heard them.’
The rites of the Church were conferred in the most handsome manner on the body of Sister Alix, which was disinterred and buried in her convent. Exorcisms and interrogations of the spirit were practised. It merely answered questions by rapping ‘Yes,’ or ‘No’. On one occasion Sister Anthoinette was ‘levitated’. Finally, the spirit appeared bodily to her, said farewell, and disappeared after making an extraordinary fracas at matins. Montalembert conducted the religious ceremonies. One case of hysteria was developed; the sufferer was a novice. Of course it was attributed to diabolical possession The whole story in its pleasant old French, has an agreeable air of good faith But what interests us is the remarkable analogy between the Lyons rappings and those at Epworth, Tedworth, and countless other cases, old or of yesterday. We can now establish a catena of rappings and pour prendre date, can say that communications were established, through raps, with a so-called ‘spirit,’ more than three hundred years before the ‘Rochester knockings’ in America. Very probably wider research would discover instances prior to that of Lyons; indeed, Wierus, in De Praestigiis Daemonum, writes as if the custom was common.
It is usual to explain the raps by a theory that the ‘medium’ produces them through cracking his, or her, knee-joints. It may thus be argued that Sister Anthoinette discovered this trick, or was taught the trick, and that the tradition of her performance, being widely circulated in Montalembert’s quarto, and by oral report, inspired later rappers, such as Miss Kate Fox, Miss ‘C.’ Davis, Miss Hetty Wesley, the gentlewoman at Mr. Paschal’s, Mr. Mompesson’s ‘modest little girls,’ Daniel Home, and Miss Margaret Wilson of Galashiels. Miss Wilson’s uncle came one day to Mr. Wilkie, the minister, and told him the devil was at his house, for, said he, ‘there is an odd knocking about the bed where my niece lies’. Whereupon the minister went with him, and found it so. ‘She, rising from her bed, sat down to supper, and from below there was such a knocking up as bred fear to all that were present. This knocking was just under her chair, where it was not possible for any mortal to knock up.’ When Miss Wilson went to bed, and was in a deep sleep, ‘her body was so lifted up that many strong men were not able to keep it down’. 80 The explanation about cracking the knee-joints hardly covers the levitations, or accounts for the tremendous noise which surrounded Sister Anthoinette at matins, or for the bright light, a common spiritualistic phenomenon. Margaret Wilson was about twelve years of age. If it be alleged that little girls have a traditional method of imposture, even that is a curious and interesting fact in human nature.
As regards imposture, there exists a singular record of a legal process in Paris, 1534. 81
It may have been observed that the Lyons affair was useful to the Church, as against ‘the damnable sect of Lutherans,’ because Sister Alix attested the existence of purgatory. No imposture was detected, and no reader of Montalembert can doubt his good faith, nor the sincerity of his kindness and piety. But such a set of circumstances might provoke imitation. Of fraudulent imitation the Franciscans of Orleans were accused, and for this crime they were severely punished. We have the Arrest des Commissaires du Conseil d’État du Roi, from MS. 7170, A. of the Bibliothèque du Roi. 82 We have also allusions in the Franciscanus, a satire in Latin hexameter by George Buchanan. Finally, we have versions in Lavaterus, and in Wierus, De Curat. Laes. Maleficio (Amsterdam, 1660, p. 422). Wierus, born 1515, heard the story when with Sleidan at Orleans, some years after the events. He gives the version of Sleidan, a notably Protestant version. Wierus is famous for his spirited and valuable defence of the poor women then so frequently burned as witches. He either does, or pretends to believe in devils, diabolical possession, and exorcism, but the exorcist, to be respectable, must be Protestant. Probably Wierus was not so credulous as he assumes to be, and a point of irony frequently peeps out. The story as told by Sleidan differs from that in the official record. In this document Adam Fumée counsellor of the king, announces that the Franciscans of Orleans have informed the king that they are vexed by a spirit, which gives itself out by signs (rappings), as the wife of François de St. Mesmin, Provost of Orleans. They ask the king to take cognisance of the matter. On the other side, St. Mesmin declares that the Franciscans have counterfeited the affair in hope of ‘black-mailing’ him. The king, therefore, appoints Fumée to inquire into the case. Thirteen friars are lying in prison in Paris, where they have long been ‘in great wretchedness and poverty, and perishing of hunger,’ a pretty example of the law’s delay. A commission is to try the case (November, 1534). The trouble had begun on February 22, 1533 (old style), when Father Pierre d’Arras at five a.m. was called into the dormitory of ‘les enfans,’ – novices, – with holy water and everything proper. Knocking was going on, and by a system of knocks, the spirit said it wanted its body to be taken out of holy ground, said it was Madame St Mesmin, and was damned for Lutheranism and extravagance! The experiment was repeated before churchmen and laymen, but the lay observers rushed up to the place whence the knocks came where they found nothing. They hid some one there, after which there was no knocking. On a later day, the noises as in Cock Lane and elsewhere, began by scratching. “M. l’Official,” the bishop’s vicar, ‘ouit gratter, qui etoit le commencement de ladite accoutummée tumulte dudit Esprit’. But no replies were given to questions, which the Franciscans attributed to the disturbance of the day before, and the breaking into various places by the people. One Alicourt seems to have been regarded as the ‘medium,’ and the sounds were heard as in Cock Lane and at Tedworth when he was in bed. Later experiments gave no results, and the friars were severely punished, and obliged to recant their charges against Madame de Mesmin. The case, scratches, raps, false accusations and all, is parallel to that of the mendacious ‘Scratching Fanny,’ examined by Dr. Johnson and Douglas, Bishop of Salisbury. In that affair the child was driven by threats to make counterfeit noises, but, as to the method of imposture at Orleans, nothing is said in the contemporary legal document.
