If a man got a good crop by careful farming, he was accused of transferring his neighbor's crops to his own ground. Passionate love and hate were thought to be due to witchcraft, — in fact, the whole life-philosophy as to the aleatory element was built upon this belief. The crowd treated the executions as a spectacle and hooted at the victims.[1] Old women, witches, accused young women whom they named of bearing infants from their necks of the size of a finger.[2] In 1816 witches confessed, under torture, that they had, by witchcraft, introduced fifty-seven bushels of fleas into Vienna.[3] That such assertions obtained a hearing and belief shows that "the minds of men were imbued with an order of ideas which had no connection with experience."[4] It also shows that pure skepticism, instead of being wrong, is a necessary protection against folly. Sidonie von Bork was a beautiful girl whom the Duke of Stettin wanted to marry, though she was of lower rank than he. His family objected to the match and she was put in a convent. In 1618, at the age of eighty, she was burned as a witch, women having named her, under torture, as one of their companions at a witches' sabbath. At Wolfenbüttel, in 1591, a woman one hundred and six years old was burned after being dragged over the ground for a time.[5] The trials and torture were attended by degrading and insulting treatment of the accused.[6] The devil was supposed to help his own; therefore, if an accused woman endured the torture, it was not inferred that she was innocent, but that the devil was helping her, and new and more hideous torture was necessary to solve the doubt. Shearing was introduced by the inquisitors, about 1460, in France
