Louis IX. ordered that those who had spoken indecently should have their tongues pierced and their upper lips cut away.[507] Pope Innocent IV. remonstrated with the king against this barbarity. The mutilation of the tongue was a punishment known and inflicted in England for blasphemy. In 1656 one James Nayler, “the mad Quaker,” had his tongue pierced with a hot iron for claiming to be the Messiah.[508] He was also whipped at the cart’s tail, and kept in prison for two years. A drunkard was sometimes walked about in a barrel, his head protruding from the top and his hands from two holes made in its sides.[509] For the village scold[510] they kept the brank or bridle of iron, which contained a flat (and for the unfortunate witches[511] occasionally a spiked and painful) gag that went into the mouth and pressed down the tongue. They might also be placed in the local ducking chair[512] and immersed in water. A remarkable illustration[513] of the intensely individual and personal aspect of primitive penalties[514] is furnished where—as it sometimes happened—the prosecutor had himself to execute his convict assailant, “or dwelle in prison with the felon unto the time that he wyll do that office or else find a hangman.”[515] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER II THE WITCH TRIALS Towards the middle of the seventeenth century there lived at Manningtree a certain Matthew Hopkins, whose name deserves perhaps to be recorded. Not that he stands by any means apart, a veritable Lucifer among the devils. Sprenger in Germany, Torquemada in Spain, Grillandus in Italy, de l’Ancre in France, and other persecutors over Christendom, were better known and had killed more people. But Hopkins went to work on English ground. The people were then professing the same creed that the majority do now. Shakespeare had been in his grave more than a generation, and trees may have been standing as bushes in the fields and lanes of Essex which will yet renew leaves and branches at the kiss of coming spring. Hopkins reveals the spirit of his time, for it has been wisely observed that every society has the criminals it deserves. His kind remain with us still as spies and blackmailers, traitors and “friendly natives” of the tribe of Judas generally. But they derive their power to harm from the community in which they live. Parasites need a proper “host” to flourish in. A dark and superstitious age it must have been to countenance this man; for he was a professional “discoverer,” or, as he was sometimes called and styled, Witch-Finder General. He began with the destruction of some half-dozen persons in his native hamlet. We cannot determine what had marked them down—perhaps they were his private enemies—moral reform has always been a ready pretext to work vengeance with, and has been much employed in these latter days.