They were a kind of secret police, having the right of life and death. The mystery which surrounded their judgments, the swiftness of their executions, helped to impress the imagination of people still in barbarism. The Holy Vehm assumed gigantic proportions; men shuddered in describing apparitions of masked persons, of summonses nailed to the doors of nobles in the very midst of their watch-guards and their orgies, of brigand-chiefs found dead with the terrible cruciform dagger in their breasts and on the scroll attached thereto an extract from the sentence of the Holy Vehm. The Tribunal affected most fantastic forms of procedure: the guilty person, cited to appear at some discredited cross-road, was taken to the assembly by a man clothed in black, who bandaged his eyes and led him forward in silence. This occurred invariably at some unseemly hour of the night, for judgment was never pronounced except at midnight. The criminal was carried into a vast underground vault, where he was questioned by one voice.[180] The hoodwink was removed, the vault was illuminated in all its depth and height, and the Free Judges sat masked and wearing black vestures. The sentences were not capital invariably, for those who judged were familiar with the circumstances of the crime, though nothing transpired concerning them, as death would have overtaken the revealer instantly.[181] Sometimes these formidable assemblies were so crowded that they were comparable to an army of avengers; one night the emperor himself presided over the Secret Tribunal, and more than one thousand Free Judges sat in a circle round him.[182] In the year 1400, ten thousand members existed in Germany. People with a bad conscience suspected their own relations and friends. William of Brunswick is reported to have said on a certain occasion: “If Duke Adolphus of Schleswig should pay me a visit, I must infallibly hang him, as I do not wish to be hanged.” Frederick of Brunswick, a prince of the same family, who was emperor for a moment, refused to obey a citation of the Free Judges, and from that time forward he went armed from head to foot and surrounded by guards. One day, however, he fell a little apart from his suite and had occasion to loosen some part of his armour. He did not return and his guards entered the copse where he had sought retirement for a moment. The unfortunate man was in the act of expiring, with the dagger of the Holy Vehm in his body and his sentence attached to the weapon. Looking round in all directions, they could distinguish a masked man retreating at a slow pace, but no one dared to follow him.