Cock Lane and Common-Sense

Now, before the jury were sworn, the counsel, Wright and Nicholson for the plaintiffs, Scott and Earle for the defendant, privately agreed that the money could not be recovered, for excellent legal reasons. But they kept this to themselves, and let the suit go on, merely for the pleasure of hearing Briggs, ‘a man of character, of firm, undaunted spirit,’ swear to his ghost in a court of law. He had been intimate with Thomas Harris from boyhood. It may be said that he invented the ghost, in the interest of his friend’s children. He certainly mentioned it, however, some time before he had any conversation with it.

Briggs’s evidence may be condensed very much, as the learned Mrs. Crowe quotes it correctly in her Night Side of Nature. In March, 1791, about nine a.m., Briggs was riding a horse that had belonged to Harris. In a lane adjoining the field where Harris was buried, the horse shied, looked into the field where the tomb was, and ‘neighed very loud’. Briggs now saw Harris coming through the field, in his usual dress, a blue coat. Harris vanished, and the horse went on. As Briggs was ploughing, in June, Harris walked by him for two hundred yards. A lad named Bailey, who came up, made no remark, nor did Harris tell him about the hallucination. In August, after dark, Harris came and laid his arms on Briggs’s shoulder. Briggs had already spoken to James Harris, ‘brither to the corp,’ about these and other related phenomena, a groan, a smack on the nose from a viewless hand, and so forth. In October Briggs saw Harris, about twilight in the morning. Later, at eight o’clock in the morning, he was busy in the field with Bailey, aforesaid, when Harris passed and vanished: Bailey saw nothing. At half-past nine, the spectre returned, and leaned on a railing: Briggs vainly tried to make Bailey see him. Briggs now crossed the fence, and walked some hundreds of yards with Harris, telling him that his will was disputed. Harris bade Briggs go to his aforesaid brother James, and remind him of a conversation they had held, ‘on the east side of the wheat-stacks,’ on the day when Harris’s fatal illness began. James remembered the conversation, and said he would fulfil his brother’s desire which he actually did. There was a later interview between Briggs and Harris, the matter then discussed Briggs declined to impart to the court, and the court overruled the question. ‘He had never related to any person the last conversation, and never would.’

Bailey was sworn, and deposed that Briggs had called his attention to Harris, whom he could not see, had climbed the fence, and walked for some distance, ‘apparently in deep conversation with some person. Witness saw no one.’

It is plain that the ghost never really understood the legal question at issue. The dates are difficult to reconcile. Thomas Harris died in 1790. His ghost appeared in 1791. Why was there no trial of the case till ‘about 1798 or 1799’? Perhaps research in the Maryland records would elucidate these and other questions; we do but give the tale, with such authority as it possesses. Possibly it is an elaborate hoax, played off by Nicholson, the plaintiffs’ counsel, on the correspondent of The Opera Glass, or by him on the editor of that periodical.

The hallucinations of Briggs, which were fortunate enough, it is said, to get into a court of justice, singularly resemble those of M. Bezuel, in July and August, 1697, though these were not matter of a sworn deposition. The evidence is in Histoire d’une Apparition Arrivée à Valogne. 164 The narrator of 1708, having heard much talk of the affair, was invited to meet Bezuel, a priest, at dinner, January 7, 1708. He told his one story ‘with much simplicity’.

In 1695, when about fifteen, Bezuel was a friend of a younger boy, one of two brothers, Desfontaines. In 1696, when Desfontaines minor was going to study at Caen, he worried Bezuel into signing, in his blood, a covenant that the first who died should appear to the survivor. The lads corresponded frequently, every six weeks. On July 31, 1697, at half-past two, Bezuel, who was hay-making, had a fainting fit. On August 1, at the same hour, he felt faint on a road, and rested under a shady tree. On August 2, at half-past two, he fainted in a hay-loft, and vaguely remembered seeing a half-naked body. He came down the ladder, and seated himself on a block, in the Place des Capucins. Here he lost sight of his companions, but did see Desfontaines, who came up, took his left arm, and led him into an alley. The servant followed, and told Bezuel’s tutor that he was talking to himself. The tutor went to him, and heard him asking and answering questions. Bezuel, for three-quarters of an hour, conversed, as he believed, with Desfontaines, who said that he had been drowned, while bathing, at Caen, about half-past two on July 31. The appearance was naked to the waist, his head bare, showing his beautiful yellow locks. He asked Bezuel to learn a school task that had been set him as a penalty, the seven penitential psalms: he described a tree at Caen, where he had cut some words; two years later Bezuel visited it and them; he gave other pieces of information, which were verified, but not a word would he say of heaven, hell, or purgatory; ‘he seemed not to hear my questions’. There were two or three later interviews, till Bezuel carried out the wishes of the phantasm.

When the spectral Desfontaines went away, on the first occasion, Bezuel told another boy that Desfontaines was drowned. The lad ran to the parents of Desfontaines, who had just received a letter to that effect. By some error, the boy thought that the elder Desfontaines had perished, and said so to Bezuel, who denied it, and, on a second inquiry, Bezuel was found to be right.

The explanation that Bezuel was ill (as he certainly was), that he had heard of the death of his friend just before his hallucination, and had forgotten an impressive piece of news, which, however, caused the apparition, is given by the narrator of 1708. The kind of illusion in which a man is seen and heard to converse with empty air, is common to the cases of Bezuel and of Briggs, and the writer is acquainted, at first hand, with a modern example.

Mrs. Crowe cites, on the authority of the late Mr. Maurice Lothian, solicitor for the plaintiff, a suit which arose out of ‘hauntings,’ and was heard in the sheriff’s court, at Edinburgh, in 1835-37. But we are unable to discover the official records, or extracts of evidence from them. This is to be regretted, but, by way of consolation, we have the pleadings on both sides in an ancient French case of a haunted house. These are preserved in his Discours des Spectres, a closely printed quarto of nearly 1000 pages, by Pierre le Loyer, Conseiller du Roy au Siège Présidial d’Angers. 165 Le Loyer says, ‘De gayétè de coeur semble m’estre voulu engager au combat contre ceux qui impugnent les spectres!’ As Le Loyer observes, ghosts seldom come into court in civil cases, except when indicted as nuisances, namely, when they make a hired house uninhabitable by their frolics. Then the tenant often wants to quit the house, and to have his contract annulled. The landlord resists, an action is brought, and is generally settled in accordance with the suggestion of Alphenus, in his Digests, book ii. Alphenus says, in brief, that the fear must be a genuine fear, and that reason for no ordinary dread must be proved. Hence Arnault Ferton, in his Customal of Burgundy, advises that ‘legitimate dread of phantasms which trouble men’s rest and make night hideous’ is reason good for leaving a house, and declining to pay rent after the day of departure. Covarruvias, a Spanish legist, already quoted, agrees with Arnault Ferton. The Parliament of Grenada, in one or two cases, decided in favour of the tenant, and against the landlord of houses where spectres racketed. Le Loyer now reports the pleadings in a famous case, of which he does not give the date. Incidentally, however, we learn that it can hardly have been earlier than 1550. The cause was heard, on appeal, before the Parlement de Paris.

Pierre Piquet, guardian of Nicolas Macquereau (a minor), let to Giles Bolacre a house in the suburbs of Tours. Poor Bolacre was promptly disturbed by a noise and routing of invisible spirits, which suffered neither himself nor his family to sleep o’ nights. He then cited Piquet, also Daniel Macquereau, who was concerned in the letting of the house, before the local seat of Themis. The case was heard, and the judge at Tours broke the lease, the hauntings being insupportable nuisances. But this he did without letters royal. The lessors then appealed, and the case came before the Cour de Parlement in Paris. Maître Chopin was for the lessors, Nau appeared for the tenant. Chopin first took the formal point, the Tours judge was formally wrong in breaking a covenant without letters royal, a thing particularly bad in the case of a minor, Nicolas Macquereau.

So much for the point of form; as to the matter, Maître Chopin laughed at the bare idea of noisy spirits. This is notable because, in an age when witches were burned frequently, the idea of a haunted house could be treated by the learned counsel as a mere waggery. Yet the belief in haunted houses has survived the legal prosecution of witches. ‘The judge in Tours has merely and mischievously encouraged superstition.’ All ghosts, brownies, lutins, are mere bugbears of children; here Maître Chopin quotes Plato, and Philo Judæus in the original, also Empedocles, Marcus Aurelius, Tertullian, Quintilian, Dioscorides. Perhaps Bolacre and his family suffer from nightmare. If so, a physician, not a solicitor, is their man. Or again, granting that their house is haunted, they should appeal to the clergy, not to the law.

Manifestly this is a point to be argued. Do the expenses of exorcism fall on landlord or tenant? This, we think, can hardly be decided by a quotation from Epictetus. Alexis Comnenus bids us seek a bishop in the case of psychical phenomena (τα ψυχικα απαντα). So Maître Chopin argues, but he evades the point. Is it not the business of the owner of the house to ‘whustle on his ain parten,’ to have his own bogie exorcised? Of course Piquet and Macquereau may argue that the bogie is Bolacre’s bogie, that it flitted to the house with Bolacre; but that is a question of fact and evidence.

Chopin concludes that a lease is only voidable in case of material defect, or nuisance, as of pestilential air, not in a case which, after all, is a mere vice d’esprit. Here Maître Chopin sits down, with a wink at the court, and Nau pleads for the tenant. First, why abuse the judge at Tours? The lessors argued the case before him, and cannot blame him for credulity. The Romans, far from rejecting such ideas (as Chopin had maintained), used a ritual service for ejecting spooks, so Ovid testifies. Greek and Roman hauntings are cited from Pliny, Plutarch, Suetonius; in the last case (ghost of Caligula), the house had to be destroyed, like the house at Wolflee where the ghost, resenting Presbyterian exorcism, killed the Rev. Mr. Thomson of Southdean, father of the author of The Castle of Indolence. ‘As to Plato, cited by my learned brother, Plato believed in hauntings, as we read in the Phaedo,’ Nau has him here. In brief, ‘the defendants have let a house as habitable, well knowing the same to be infested by spirits’. The Fathers are then cited as witnesses for ghosts. The learned counsel’s argument about a vice d’esprit is a pitiable pun.

The decision of the court, unluckily, is not preserved by Le Loyer. The counsel for Bolacre told Le Loyer that the case was adjourned on the formal point, but, that, having obtained letters royal for his client, he succeeded in getting the remainder of the lease declared void. Comparing, however, Bouchel, s. v. Louage, in his Bibliothèque du droit François, one finds that the higher court reversed the decision of the judge at Tours. In the Edinburgh case, 1835, the tenant, Captain Molesworth, did not try to have his lease quashed, but he did tear up floors, pull down wainscots, and bore a hole into the next house, that of his landlord, Mr. Webster, in search of the cause of the noises. Mr. Webster, therefore, brought an action to restrain him from these experiments.

Le Loyer gives two cases of ghosts appearing to denounce murderers in criminal cases. He possessed the speech of the President Brisson (at that time an advocate), in which he cited the testimony of the spectre of Madame de Colommiers, mysteriously murdered in full day, with her children and their nurse. Her ghost appeared to her husband, when wide awake, and denounced her own cousins. As there was no other evidence, beyond the existence of motive, the accused were discharged. In another well-known case, before the Parlement de Bretagne, the ghost of a man who had mysteriously vanished, guided his brother to the spot where his wife and her paramour had buried him, after murdering him. Le Loyer does not give the date of this trial. The wife was strangled, and her body was burned.

Modern times have known dream-evidence in cases of murder, as in the Assynt murder, and the famous Red Barns affair. But Thomas Harris’s is probably the last ghost cited in a court of law. On the whole, the ghosts have gained little by these legally attested appearances, but the trials do throw a curious light on the juridical procedure of our ancestors. The famous action against the ghosts in the Eyrbyggja Saga was not before a Christian court, and is too well known for quotation. 166

A MODERN TRIAL FOR WITCHCRAFT

Thorel v. Tinel. Action for libel in 1851. Mr. Dale Owen’s incomplete version of this affair. The suit really a trial for witchcraft. Spectral obsession. Movements of objects. Rappings. Incidental folklore. Old G. Thorel and the cure. The wizard’s revenge. The haunted parlour boarder. Examples of magical tripping up, and provoked hallucinations. Case of Dr. Gibotteau and Berthe the hospital nurse. Similar case in the Salem affair, 1692. Evidence of witnesses to abnormal phenomena. Mr. Robert de Saint Victor. M. de Mirville. Thorel non-suited. Other modern French examples of witchcraft.

Perhaps the last trial for witchcraft was the case of Thorel v. Tinel, heard before the juge de paix of Yerville, on January 28, and February 3 and 4, 1851. The trial was, in form, the converse of those with which old jurisprudence was familiar. Tinel, the Curé of Cideville, did not accuse the shepherd Thorel of sorcery, but Thorel accused Tinel of defaming his character by the charge of being a warlock. Just as when a man prosecutes another for saying that he cheated at cards, or when a woman prosecutes another for saying that the plaintiff stole diamonds, it is really the guilt or innocence of the plaintiff that is in question, so the issue before the court at Yerville was: ‘Is Thorel a warlock or not?’ The court decided that he himself had been the chief agent in spreading the slander against himself, he was non-suited, and had to pay costs, but as to the real cause of the events which were attributed to the magic of Thorel, the court was unable to pronounce an opinion.

This curious case has often been cited, as by Mr. Robert Dale Owen, in his Footfalls on the Boundary of Another World, 167 but Mr. Owen, by accident or design, omitted almost all the essential particulars, everything which connects the affair with such transactions as the witch epidemic at Salem, and the trials for sorcery before and during the Restoration. Yet, in the events at Cideville, and the depositions of witnesses, we have all the characteristics of witchcraft. First we have men by habit and repute sorcerers. Then we have cause of offence given to these. Then we have their threats, malum minatum, then we have evil following the threats, damnum secutum. Just as of old, that damnum, that damage, declares itself in the ‘possession’ of young people, who become, more or less, subject to trances and convulsions. One of them is haunted, as in the old witchcraft cases, by the phantasm of the sorcerer. The phantasm (as in Cotton Mather’s examples) is wounded, a parallel wound is found on the suspected warlock. Finally, the house where the obsessed victims live is disturbed by knocks, raps, flight of objects, and inexplicable movements of heavy furniture. Thus all the notes of a bad affair of witchcraft are attested in a modern trial, under the third Empire. Finally, some curious folklore is laid bare, light is cast on rural life and superstition, and a singular corroboration of a singular statement, much more recent than the occurrences at Cideville, is obtained. A more astonishing example of survival cannot be imagined, of survival, or of disconnected and spontaneous revival and recrudescence. 168

There was at Auzebosc, near famous Yvetot, an old shepherd named G-: he was the recognised ‘wise man,’ or white witch of the district, and some less noted rural adepts gave themselves out as his pupils. In March, 1849, M. Tinel, Curé of Cideville, visited a sick peasant, and advised him to discard old G., the shepherd magical, and send for a physician. G. was present, though concealed, heard the curé’s criticisms, and said: ‘Why does he meddle in my business, I shall meddle in his; he has pupils in his house, we’ll see how long he keeps them.’ In a few days, G. was arrested, as practising medicine unauthorised, was imprisoned for some months, and fancied that the cure had a share in this persecution. All this, of course, we must take as ‘the clash of the country side,’ intent, as there was certainly damnum secutum, on establishing malum minatum.

On a farm near the curé’s house in Cideville was another shepherd, named Thorel, a man of forty, described as dull, illiterate, and given to boasting about his powers as a disciple of the venerable G. Popular opinion decided that G. employed Thorel to procure his vengeance; it was necessary that a sorcerer should touch his intended victim, and G. had not the same conveniency for doing so as Thorel. In old witch trials we sometimes find the witch kissing her destined prey. 169 Thorel, so it was said, succeeded in touching, on Nov. 25, 1850, M. Tinel’s two pupils, in a crowd at a sale of wood. The lads, of fifteen and twelve, were named Lemonier and Bunel. For what had gone before, we have, so far, only public chatter, for what followed we have the sworn evidence in court of the curé’s pupils, in January and February, 1851. According to Lemonier, on Nov. 26, while studying, he heard light blows of a hammer, these recurred daily, about 5. p.m. When M. Tinel, his tutor, said plus fort, the noises were louder. To condense evidence which becomes tedious by its eternal uniformity, popular airs were beaten on demand; the noise grew unbearable, tables moved untouched, a breviary, a knife, a spit, a shoe flew wildly about. Lemonier was buffeted by a black hand, attached to nobody. ‘A kind of human phantasm, clad in a blouse, haunted me for fifteen days wherever I went; none but myself could see it.’ He was dragged by the leg by a mysterious force. On a certain day, when Thorel found a pretext for visiting the house, M. Tinel made him beg Lemonier’s pardon, clearly on the ground that the swain had bewitched the boy. ‘As soon as I saw him I recognised the phantasm which had haunted me for a fortnight, and I said to M. Tinel: “There is the man who follows me”.’ Thorel knelt to the boy, asked his pardon, and pulled violently at his clothes. As defendant, perhaps, the curé could not be asked to corroborate these statements. The evidence of the other boy, Bunel, was that, on Nov. 26, he heard first a rush of wind, then tappings on the wall. He corroborated Lemonier’s testimony to the musical airs knocked out, the volatile furniture, and the recognition in Thorel of the phantom. ‘In the evening,’ said Bunel, ‘Lemonier en eut une crise de nerfs dans laquelle il avait perdu connaissance.’

Leaving the boys’ sworn evidence, and returning to the narrative with its gossip, we learn that Thorel boasted of his success, and said that, if he could but touch one of the lads again, the furniture would dance, and the windows would be broken. Meanwhile, we are told, nails were driven into points in the floor where Lemonier saw the spectral figure standing. One nail became red hot, and the wood round it smoked: Lemonier said that this nail had hit ‘the man in the blouse’ on the cheek. Now, when Thorel was made to ask the boy’s pardon, and was recognised by him as the phantom, after the experiment with the nail, Thorel bore on his cheek the mark of the wound!

This is in accordance with good precedents in witchcraft. A witch-hare is wounded, the witch, in her natural form, has the same wound. At the trial of Bridget Bishop, in the court of Oyer and Terminer, held at Salem, June 2, 1692, there was testimony brought in that a man striking once at the place where a bewitched person said the shape of Mrs. Bishop stood, the bewitched cried out, that he had tore her coat, in the place then particularly specified, and Bishop’s coat was found to be torn in that very place. 170 Next day, after Thorel touched the boy, the windows broke, as he had prophesied. Then followed a curious scene in which Thorel tried, in presence of the maire, to touch the curé, who retreated to the end of the room, and struck the shepherd with his cane. Thereupon Thorel brought his action for libel and assault against the curé. Forty-two witnesses were heard, it was proved that Thorel had, in fact, frequently accused himself, and he was non-suited: his counsel spoke of appealing, but, unluckily, the case was not carried to a higher court. In a few weeks the boys were sent to their homes, when (according to the narrative) there were disturbances at the home of the younger lad. Thus the curé lost his pupils.

A curious piece of traditional folklore came out, but only as hearsay, in court. M. Cheval, Maire of Cideville, deposed that a M. Savoye told him that Thorel had once been shepherd to a M. Tricot. At that time Thorel said to one of two persons in his company: ‘Every time I strike my cabin (a shelter on wheels used by shepherds) you will fall,’ and, at each stroke, the victim felt something seize his throat, and fell! 171 This anecdote is curious, because in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research is a long paper by Dr. Gibotteau, on his experiments with a hospital nurse called Berthe. This woman, according to the doctor, had the power of making him see hallucinations, of a nature more or less horrible, from a distance. She had been taught some traditional feats of rural sorcery, among others that of making a man stumble, or fall, as he walked. The doctor does not make any allusion to the Cideville affair, and it seems probable that this trick is part of the peasant’s magical repertoire, or, rather, that the peasant warlocks boast of being able to perform the trick. But, if we can accept the physician’s evidence, as ‘true for him,’ at least, then a person like Berthe really might affect, from a distance, a boy like Lemonier with a haunting hallucination. To do this is witchcraft, and for crimes of this kind, or on false charges of this kind, poor Mrs. Bishop was burned at Salem in 1692.

At the lowest, we have all the notes of sorcery as our rude ancestors knew it, in this modern affair. Two hundred years earlier, Thorel would have been burned, and G., too, probably, for the Maire of Cideville swore that before the disturbances, and three weeks after G. was let out of prison, Thorel had warned him of the trouble which G. would bring on the curé. Meanwhile the evidence shows no conscious malignity on the part of the two boys. They at first took very little notice of the raps, attributing the noises to mice. Not till the sounds increased, and showed intelligence, as by drumming tunes, did the lads concern themselves, much about the matter. At no time (it seems) did they ask to be sent home, and, of course, to be relieved from their lessons and sent home would be their motive, if they practised a fraud. We may admit that, from rural tradition, the boys might have learned what the customary phenomena are, knocks, raps, moving tables, heavy objects sailing tranquilly about a room. It would be less easy for them to produce these phenomena, nor did the people of all classes who flocked to Cideville detect any imposture.