“In 1529, the Inquisitor General of Besancori, a Dominican friar named Jean Boin, visited incognito the village of Anjeux in the bailiwick of Luxeuil, Franche-Comte, and noted down the gossip of the villagers, which centered on 27-year-old Desle la Mansenee,” begins this vignette in the only part of Nigel Cawthorne’s Witches: History of Persecution that Google books preview will cough up.
You know this isn’t going to end well.
Our incognito Inquisitor swiftly decloaked and transformed Desle la Mansenee from grist for the neighbors’ grapevine into ash for their garden plots by torturing her into confessing to — oh, you know, the usual stuff. Dancing at witches’ sabbats and flying on broomsticks and banging the devil. That sort of thing.
People, these are infernal agents. It doesn’t get any worse than that. You’ve got to use tough tactics to get information, not just start salacious rumors and hope they’ll come clean.
On this day..
- 1953: Carl Hall and Bonnie Brown Heady
- 1591: Marigje Arriens
- 2009: Gerald Dube, from Cell 10
- 1942: Six aspiring escapees from Dulag-205
- 1946: One sex killer and four POW camp murderers
- 1939: Fifty-six Poles shot in retaliation at Bochnia
- 1894: John Cronin, by an automated gallows
- 1691: Eleven at Tyburn
- 1789: The Canadian Burglars
- 1609: Vicente Turixi, King of the Moriscos
- 1878: John Kehoe, king and last of the Molly Maguires
- 1838: Seven perpetrators of the Myall Creek Massacre