The points to be noted are: First, the execution by order of the king, the highest authority in the land. Second, the fury of the queen and mob. What part, if any, the clergy had in stirring up this feeling we are not told, neither do we know exactly what action, or recommendation to action, came from the assembled bishops. Third, the constancy of the heretics and, fourth, the fearful nature of their punishment, go to make this first case a typical one. To the manner of the punishment we shall in a moment return. We hear of the execution of heretics here and there throughout Northern France, Belgium, the Rhineland, and Lombardy from this time on. Sometimes the authorities would act, although the canon law was vague on the subject. When they would not, the people would rush the jail and burn the accused, quite in the style of our Southern lynchings. When the higher clergy protested and tried to save them, as they sometimes did, it made no difference. Once in Germany we hear of their being hanged, but in the other cases they were burned. If anyone asks why burning was thought appropriate for the heretic, there is no answer to be given. These people were raised to the same pitch of fury by heresy, and avenged it in the same fashion, as a Southern mob of to-day in the case of negro rape upon a white woman. A difference appears in the attitude of the authorities. Throughout the twelfth century many of the higher clergy continued opposed to harsh measures. But other churchmen and invariably the civil government were usually ready to burn by full process of law, methodically, as if they were seizing property for debt. As time went on and the law on the subject became fixed, we lose the atmosphere of lynching and mob fury. Early in the fifteenth century, when the fiendish Breton noble, Gilles de Rais, was about to be burned, he repented and asked the people to pray for him; whereupon they went so far as to parade the streets, chanting and praying earnestly for the soul of the monster whom their authorities, with the entire approval of the paraders, were to burn on the morrow. To quote Belloc there was in all this “... cruelty which to us as we read of it seems something quite remote from human habit and experience.... You will perpetually hear vigorous protests against the justice of some particular sentence, but you will very rarely (but for the fear of such a negative I should say never) find men saying ‘just or unjust, the cruelty of the execution is so revolting that I protest against it.’ Men believed something with regard to the whole doctrine of expiation, of penal arrangements which they have not described to us and which we cannot understand save through the glimpses, sidelights, and guesses through what they imagine to be their plainest statements. Thus in the particular case of burning alive ... a thing we can scarcely bear to contemplate even in words ... the framers of the statutes seem to have thought not of the thing as a