The ideas of the profoundly superstitious middle ages resembled these. Even the great opponent or accuser, Satan, who was restored by Milton to the rôle of Ahriman,[651] was but a wretched creature, a poor devil,[652] in the popular imagination. “He” is continually outwitted like the pantomime policeman,[653] and nonplussed by the shallowest equivocations.[654] He beats a man[655] and is beaten and vanquished.[656] He aims a stone at Dunstan and misses,[657] and when seized by the nose with pincers, his bellowings are heard for three miles round.[658] He howls when sprinkled with holy water,[659] and Luther hurls an inkstand at his head.[660] This man-like and material monster of course felt pain, and when he took up his abode in a human body he was supposed to feel the blows inflicted on the sufferer.[661] It was the devil (or his representative) who might be driven out of man or woman; the demons could be commanded to quit each portion of the invaded body, member by member.[662] The fiends were supposed to writhe in anguish[663] when the possessed cowered beneath salt water or the whip.[664] On _them_ the curses and the stripes were meant to descend,[665] until at last, through unendurable torments, they fled the body by the nearest orifice.[666] This crude and savage way of expelling “devils” was long continued; belief in it is probably by no means dead in the minds of some countryfolk. Hawthorne, writing of the seventeenth century Puritans,[667] makes the gaoler say of his prisoner, “Verily she hath been like a possessed one, and there lacks but little that I should take in hand to drive Satan out of her with stripes.” But there were times enough when exorcism failed and flogging proved unavailing. Then the insane would have to be restrained and subjected to some sort of treatment[668]—to say some sort of _ill-treatment_ were nearer the truth. Doubtless they always aimed at quieting the more troublesome patients, and bringing them into order, if not back to reason. Says Andrew Boorde in his strange _Regyment of Health_:[669] “I do advertyse every mā the which is mad or lunaticke or frenticke or demoniacke, to be kept in save garde in some close house or chambre where there is lytell lyght. And that he have a keper the which the mad man do feare.” The same idea we see expressed by Shakespeare:[670] “We’ll have him in a dark room and bound,” is the immediate cry towards the mad. Shut up and bound they were, in all manner of ways and places, by relatives, monks, and keepers. As we have seen, many were executed as witches or malefactors, and would be thrown into gatehouses and prisons,[671] where they might furnish horrible diversion for the other prisoners,[672] and where they were sometimes drugged to make them silent and to cease from raving.[673] Sometimes they were placed in such hospitals as there were,[674] along with fever and accident cases.[675]