soon as may be." Not content with this formal claim, which he
pushed before the king, Robert resorted to most unworthy weapons in his
contest with Mahaut, stirring up the vassals and communes of Artois,
inciting them to acts of violence against her and her children, and
circulating rumors most dangerous in an age when people were but too
ready to credit accusations of the sort that Mahaut had employed sorcery
against her son-in-law, Philippe le Long, and had poisoned the King,
Louis X.

We have had occasion to mention now and again this subject of
witchcraft; it may be permissible, therefore, to give some few details
brought out in the investigation, in 1317, of the charges of evil
practices brought against Mahaut d' Artois. The belief in witchcraft was
almost a cardinal article of faith throughout many centuries, even among
the educated classes, and one might say that the cynical author of the
second part of the _Roman de la Rose_, Jean de Meung, is almost a unique
exception in his scepticism regarding the power of sorcery. Many a
miserable old woman had suffered horrible tortures at the hands of
justice or had been hounded to her death by superstitious neighbors who
credited her with causing diseases of men and cattle, dearth, drouth,
storms, or any other untoward misfortunes; and many a monk, devoting
himself to rational study of the phenomena of nature, to chemistry,
astronomy, medicine, or any other science, had incurred suspicion of
damnable traffic with the devil, like the Guichard mentioned above, and
like Gerbert himself, who lived to become Pope. The Church authorized
the belief in evil spirits and provided forms of exorcism to rid the
land, the cattle, the house, the body, of the demons that possessed
them; while the mediaeval books of medicine show us that that science
relied largely upon charms, peculiar times and seasons, and
incantations, for the compounding of the drugs that were to effect
cures. The witch and her hellish brews maintained a perfect reign of
terror over the ignorant and the superstitious.

Instigated doubtless by Robert d'Artois or his emissaries, a certain
Isabelle de Ferieves, reputed a witch in her own country of Hesdin,
testified that Mahaut d'Artois had come to her and asked her to compound
a sort of philtre or potion to restore the love of Count Philippe de
Poitiers for her daughter Jeanne, then imprisoned at Dourdan under the
charge of adultery. Isabelle required Mahaut to procure