can
confederacies of the Middle Ages, will show the horrible convenience of
imputations of witchcraft, when royal or priestly wolves wanted a
pretext for a quarrel with the sheep.

The Frieslanders, inhabiting the district from the Weser to the
Zuydersee, had long been celebrated for their attachment to freedom,
and their successful struggles in its defence. As early as the eleventh
century, they had formed a general confederacy against the
encroachments of the Normans and the Saxons, which was divided into
seven seelands, holding annually a diet under a large oaktree at
Aurich, near the Upstalboom. Here they managed their own affairs,
without the control of the clergy and ambitious nobles who surrounded
them, to the great scandal of the latter. They already had true notions
of a representative government. The deputies of the people levied the
necessary taxes, deliberated on the affairs of the community, and
performed, in their simple and patriarchal manner; nearly all the
functions of the representative assemblies of the present day. Finally,
the Archbishop of Bremen, together with the Count of Oldenburg and
other neighbouring potentates, formed a league against that section of
the Frieslanders, known by the name of the Stedinger, and succeeded,
after harassing them, and sowing dissensions among them for many years,
in bringing them under the yoke. But the Stedinger, devotedly attached
to their ancient laws, by which they had attained a degree of civil and
religious liberty very uncommon in that age, did not submit without a
violent struggle. They arose in insurrection, in the year 1204, in
defence of the ancient customs of their country--refused to pay taxes
to the feudal chiefs, or tithes to the clergy, who had forced
themselves into their peaceful retreats, and drove out many of their
oppressors. For a period of eight-and-twenty years the brave Stedinger
continued the struggle single-handed against the forces of the
Archbishops of Bremen and the Counts of Oldenburg, and destroyed, in
the year 1232, the strong castle of Slutterberg, near Delmenhorst,
built by the latter nobleman as a position from which he could send out
his marauders to plunder and destroy the possessions of the peasantry.

The invincible courage of these poor people proving too strong for
their oppressors to cope with by the ordinary means of warfare, the
Archbishop of Bremen applied to Pope Gregory IX. for his spiritual aid
against them. That pr