land and water to find out whether the children had possibly been stolen and led away. But nobody could tell what had become of the children. This grieved the parents terribly, and is a fearful example of divine anger against sin. This is all written in the town-book of Hammel, where many persons of high standing have read and heard it."
"Written in the town-book of Hammel", he says, and so say not only Hondorff[1] (1568), who took Fincelius on trust, and later men who nourished themselves on Hondorff; but the assertion is confirmed by Wier, who visited Hameln in 1567,[2] and seems to have made personal examination of all the evidence it could adduce in support of its fame. He had published his book on the "Delusions of Devils", De Præstigiis Dæmonorum, in 1563, the second edition in the following year, but showed no sign of knowing anything of that "modern instance", the Pied Piper. He had heard of it, however, before a third issue of his work was ready at Basle in 1566, and he made it the subject of a short paragraph. A few months later, he sought the locus in quo, and became as enthusiastic a believer as even I could wish in the authenticity of all that he was shown and told. The 4th edition of De Præstigiis, which came out in 1577, gives token of this: after repeating the narrative, he says in Latin, what amounts in English to: "These facts are thus written in the annals of Hammel and are religiously guarded in the archives; they are to be read also in the sacred books of the Church, and to be seen in the painted panes of the same; of which fact I am an eye witness. Besides, as confirmation of the story, the older[3]
- ↑ Promptorium Exemplorum, p. 60b.
- ↑ This and what follows concerning Wier is gathered from Aleinardus's pamphlet, Der historische Kern, pp. 14, 15. Wier's work is not in the British Museum Library.
- ↑ Subsequent to 1379 a change in the local government took place, and enactments in the statute-book (Der Donat) customarily begin "de olde rad un de nye hebbet ghesateghet". (Sprenger, pp. 31 and I77-)
