The persecution seems to have commenced in the autumn of 1348, at Chillon, in Geneva, where criminal proceedings were taken against them, on the specific charge of having poisoned the wells. The same inquiries took place in other towns, as Berne and Freiburg. Some poison had been found in a well at Zoffingen—though by whom put in there was no evidence to determine. But the usual mode of eliciting evidence in those ages was resorted to, and with the customary result. Balavignus, a Jewish physician resident at Thonon, having been put on the rack, confessed that Rabbi Jacob, of Toledo, had sent him, by a Jewish boy, some poison in the mummy of an egg. The poison consisted of a powder, sewn up in a thin leathern pouch, and it was accompanied by a letter commanding him, on penalty of excommunication, to throw the powder into the principal wells of Thonon, in order to destroy the people who lived there. In obedience to this injunction he had distributed the poison in various places, and more particularly had thrown it into a spring on the shore near Thonon. He swore by the Law and the five Books of Moses that this confession was true, and also implicated several other Jews as accomplices. Another Jew, of Neustadt, named Banditono, was similarly put to the torture, and confessed to having thrown a packet of poison, given him by one of his brethren, into a well at Carulet, and denounced other Jews, whom he named, as having done the same. Eight others underwent the same treatment, and made confessions, all nearly resembling the two above quoted, with the difference that some admitted that the whole Jewish people, except those under seven years of age, were privy to and participators in the plot. It is wonderful that they did not implicate the infants in arms!