The History of the Devils of Loudun, Volumes I-III: The Alleged Possession of the Ursuline Nuns, and the Trial and Execution of Urbain Grandier, Told by an Eye-witnessDes Niau
History
The History of the Devils of Loudun, Volumes I-III: The Alleged Possession of the Ursuline Nuns, and the Trial and Execution of Urbain Grandier, Told by an Eye-witness
Des Niau
Couvent des Ursulines (Loudun, France); Demoniac possession; Grandier, Urbain, 1590-1634
Within four miles of Edinborough, there lived an aged godly minister,
one that was esteemed a Puritan; his son, now minister of the same
place, and then ordained his assistant. Their house was extraordinarily
troubled with noises, which they and their family, and many neighbours
(who for divers weeks used to go watch with them) did ordinarily hear.
It troubled them most on the Saturday night, and the night before their
weekly lecture day. Sometimes they would hear all the locks in the
house, on doors and chests, to fly open; yea, their cloaths, which were
at night locked up into trunks and chests, they found in the morning
all hanging about the walls. Once they found their best linnen taken
out, the table covered with it, napkins as if they had been used,
yea, and liquor in their cups as if company had been there at meat.
The rumbling was extraordinary; the good old man commonly called his
family to prayer when it was most troublesome, and immediately it was
converted into gentle knocking, like the modest knock of a finger; but
as soon as prayer was done, they should hear excessive knocking, as
if a beam had been heaved by strength of many men against the floor.
Never was there voice or apparition; but one thing was remarkable (you
must know that it is ordinary in Scotland to have a half cannon-bullet
in the chimney-corner, on which they break their great coals,) a merry
maid in the house, being accustomed to the rumblings, and so her fear
gone, told her fellow maid-servant that if the devil troubled them
that night, she would brain him, so she took the half cannon-bullet
into bed; the noise did not fail to awake her, nor did she fail in her
design, but took up the great bullet, and with a threatning, threw it,
as she thought, on the floor, but the bullet was never more seen; the
minister turned her away for meddling and talking to it. All these
particulars I have had from the mouth of the minister, now living; he
is an honest man, of good natural parts, well bred both in learning and
by travel into foreign parts in his youth. I was not in the country
myself during the time, but I have it from many other witnesses; and my
father's steward lived then in a house of mine, within a mile of the
place, and sent his servants constantly thither; his son now serves me,
who knows it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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