Page:Essay on Crimes and Punishments (1775).djvu/235

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may read with attention the work of that friend to humanity.


CHAPTER XIII.

Of certain Sanguinary Tribunals.

IS it credible, that there formerly existed a supreme tribunal more horrible than the Inquisition, and that this tribunal was established by Charlemagne? It was the judgment of Westphalia, otherwise called the Vhemic Court. The severity, or rather cruelty, of this court, went so far as to punish with death, every Saxon who broke his fast during Lent. The same law was also established in Franche-Comté, in the beginning of the seventeenth century. In the archives of a little place called St. Claude, situated in a remote corner of the most mountainous part of the county of Burgundy, are preserved the particulars of the sentence and verbal process of execution of a poor gentleman named Claude Guillon, who was beheaded on the 28th of July 1629. Being reduced to the utmost po-