Encyclopedia of the Undead, page 11
Michael Verdung
Gilles Garnier was not the first werewolf to terrify the French people. Around 1520, three of the creatures had been discovered in the village of Poligny in the Jura region close to the Swiss Alps. This was a remote and mountainous area and well-suited to tales of the loup-garou, a wolf-like creature that was, in actuality, an evil spirit going about in the form of a massive hound. The first of these wolf-men to be discovered was Michel Verdung (also known as Michael Udon) who had allegedly been wounded whilst in his wolf form by a traveller whom he had attacked. Following the trail of blood, some local men found their way to Verdung’s hut, where they found a woman with whom he lived, bathing his fresh wounds. The matter was put in front of the Inquisitor-General at Besancon who commenced a rigorous investigation. Under torture, Verdung implicated another man whom he knew—one Pierre Bourgot, known locally as Big Peter. This man was known for his surly attitude, irascible temper, and strange ways, and it came as no surprise that he should be involved in something so dark and sinister as werewolfery. Under torture himself, Peter confessed to how he had first become a werewolf. Whilst hunting for some sheep that had been scattered by a storm, he was approached by three dark horsemen to whom he told his troubles. One of them promised Bourgot help and contentment if he would agree to serve these three masters and do whatever they asked. Bourgot promptly accepted and found his lost sheep soon afterward. A few days later, the three horsemen arrived at his house to seal the bargain they had made and the one who had spoken revealed himself to be an instrument of the Devil. He made Big Peter deny his Christian birthright and to take an oath to serve Satan by kissing his left hand. Later, Bourgot began to doubt the wisdom of his agreement and as he was considering going to the priest to confess what he had done, Michel Verdung appeared at his door. Verdung informed him that he had been sent by the Devil and promised him gold and great wealth if he would renew his oath of allegiance to the Evil One. He then made Peter disrobe and applied an ointment to him that changed him into the form of a wolf. In this guise, Verdung told him, he could attend the Devil’s Sabbat. Verdung was able to restore him to human form by means of another ointment that he (Verdung) kept. When in the wolf form, Peter experienced awful lusts and desires, including the desire to eat human flesh. He had, for example, eaten the flesh of a four-year-old child and had found it sweet and delicious. He had also broken the neck of a nine-year-old girl and had devoured her as well. Not only this, but Verdung had assumed a wolf-shape as well. Not only had he assisted him in his foul crimes, but together they had also copulated with wild female wolves. Faced with such a catalogue of horrors, there could be no other option save execution and burning. The imprint of the werewolf had, however, been set in the popular mind.
Jacques Roulet
Stories of Gilles Garnier and the lycanthropes of Poligny began to circulate around Europe, adding fuel to the fire of the werewolf panic. However, he was not the only French werewolf to arouse both fear and hatred. In the summer of 1598, a soldier walking through the fields near Angers, in the French northwest, together with some local peasants, came across a wild beggar, cowering half-naked in the bushes. Upon pulling him out, they found blood smeared across his hands and face, and pieces of what looked similar to human flesh embedded under his long and filthy finger nails. On searching further, they also found, the body of a murdered fifteen-year-old boy.
The beggar’s name was Jacques Roulet and he was both mentally retarded and an epileptic. This did not prevent him from being taken back to Angers to be interrogated. Although there is no record as to whether the interrogation was actually carried out, it probably involved torture and resulted in a full confession of werewolfery to the court of Judge Pierre Herault. Roulet admitted that he had a magic ointment that, when rubbed into his skin, changed him into the form of a wolf. The judge asked him if that meant he was dressed as a wolf, but Roulet denied this. He said that he was an actual animal and that his hands had become rending paws. He could not, however describe his head but thought that whilst his body was that of a wolf, his head remained human. He also confessed to have taken part in the Devil’s Sabbat at which others of his kind had participated.
There is no real record of what actually befell Jacques Roulet, following his confession, but it is likely that he was burned—not as a werewolf—but as a witch and a heretic. The court records, containing the details of his abominable crimes, were ordered to be burnt and so only fragments of them survive. However, the year 1598 seems to have been a particularly troublesome year in France with regard to werewolves, for the weak-minded, flesh-eating beggar was not the only such case in the country. Indeed, this year was to produce a veritable epidemic of werewolf accusations. One of the most notable occurred in Chalons, where a tailor, living within the town boundary, was found to have committed a number of cannibalistic crimes. He attacked children who ventured into or near his place of work. In nearby woods and fields just outside the town, he ate their flesh, which he found particularly succulent. He stored their bones among some chests and barrels at the back of his shop. When these were accidentally discovered, the tailor’s game was up. Like Jacques Roulet, the lycanthrope tailor of Chalons was probably sentenced to death and once more the directives of the court were destroyed.
Devil’s Sabbat
The notion of the Sabbat tied werewolfery inextricably to witchcraft and to the enemies of the Church. Sabbats were believed to be great gatherings, attended by the vilest of witches and presided over by the Devil himself. Their primary purpose was to do evil, but there was also an element of revelry to them in which the participants often adopted the characteristics of animals—baying, howling, and copulating at random. The whole idea of such gatherings was to strip away all that was good and ordered by God, and to give in to one’s primal desires in order to affect great harm on Christian communities. The ravening beast was now seen as an agent of the Evil One and an enemy of all Mankind, to be hunted down and destroyed.
Pierre Gandillion
In the area of Franche-Comte, near the Swiss Alps, not far from Poligny where Michel Verdung and his companion had terrified the populace, a whole family of werewolves had been discovered as well. The region was very remote and was thickly forested with the mountains rising majestically behind it. Two children were picking fruit near the village of St. Claude in Burgundy in the spring of 1598 when one of them, sixteen-year-old Benoit Bidel, momentarily left his younger sister at the foot of a great tree whilst he climbed into its branches. Whilst he was still climbing disaster struck. A “tailless wolf” suddenly sprang from the surrounding forest and attacked the defenseless girl. Benoit, who was armed with a knife that he’d been using for cutting down fruit, jumped to the ground and prepared to defend his sister. The wolf, however, which seemed to have a human face and fur-covered hands, struck the knife away and delivered the boy a fatal blow on the neck. The girl screamed and her cries alerted some peasants who were working in the fields nearby. They found Benoit close to death, but he was able to pass on crucial information concerning the “wolf” before he did so. The workmen now began to search the area and in some woodlands close by, they found a girl, Perrenette Gandillion, wandering among the trees. There were traces of blood on her dress and, both outraged and frightened, the mob tore her to pieces.
The Gandillions lived close by, and now the people of St. Claude turned their attentions upon the family. They had been under suspicion for some time as being witches and Devil-worshipers, and this incident gave the local authorities the excuse they needed to investigate further. Other members were now arrested and brought to trial. Perrenette’s sister, Antoinette, was accused of being a werewolf and of being able to create hailstorms that had flattened the crops of her neighbours. She was also accused of having attended a witch’s Sabbat where she copulated with the Devil, who had come to her in the guise of a goat. Her brother, Pierre Gandillion, was similarly accused. Subject to swoons and epilepsy, he was said to lie at home in a cataleptic state whilst his spirit roamed through the woods in the guise of a werewolf, doing harm. He was also accused of attending a Sabbat, convened by the Devil and comprised entirely of werewolves. Under torture, he revealed how Satan had given both him and others clothes of wolf’s skin that covered their human shape, and had made them run throughout the country on all fours, attacking both humans and animals to satisfy their unholy lusts. Pierre’s son, Georges, also confessed to having a salve or ointment that could turn him into a wolf and, together with Perrenette and Antoinette, killing two goats belonging to a neighbour.
Henri Boguet
In the St. Claude cases, a new and slightly sinister figure emerged—Henri Boguet. A Grand Justice for the Franche-Comte region, Boguet was a University-educated lawyer who had made a special study of witchcraft cases. His book Discours des sorciers was an exhaustive (if biased) work that would become the staple text for French witch hunters and magistrates for years after his death in 1619. His record of finding witches in the Franche-Comte and Jura Mountain regions was exemplary. At one stage he boasted that he was responsible for over 600 executions for witchcraft between the years 1598 and 1616. He was especially adept at fining instances of witchcraft amongst the Jews of his area. At the time of the St. Claude cases, his witchcraft book was already in print, and he was widely regarded as France’s leading demonologist, but as he investigated the evidence, Boguet decided to release a second edition of the work that would include a lengthy chapter on lycanthropy. He used the Gandillion family as an example of how the Devil could corrupt God’s people and turn them into beasts. He said that he had observed members of the family walking on all fours around their cells, just as they had done in the fields, and he observed that Pierre Gandillion was so disfigured that he actually resembled a beast. All of them had shown an appetite for human flesh.
Sawney Bean
Although it is questionable as to whether the Gandillions were indeed werewolves, it may be possible that they were actually cannibals. Indeed, some scholars have argued parallels between those who have been convicted of werewolfery and cases such as that of Sawney Bean and his family in 14th century Scotland. During the reign of the Scottish king James I (1406–1437), Alexander Bean (also known as Sandy or Sawney Bean), a surly and uneducated man, the son of a hedger and ditcher, absconded from his East Lothian home with a woman as brutish and unlettered as himself. Bean is described as insolent and overbearing, and his new partner displayed similar characteristics. They went to live in a deep cave at Bennane Head near Ballintrae, which was then part of Galloway (today it is part of Ayrshire). They would live there for more than 25 years, making little contact with the local villages, so that few knew of their existence. During that time, they sustained themselves and their family by capturing and killing travellers on a nearby moor, taking their bodies back to the cave, and cooking and eating them. It is said that when discovered, the cave resembled “a butcher’s kitchen.” Sawney and his partner raised a brood of children around them—some of whom were very badly deformed—all of whom had a taste for human flesh. As travellers in the area began to disappear with increasing frequency, the authorities in Ballantrae became alarmed. Word reached the ears of King James and he decided that the matter should be investigated. By now bits and pieces of human remains had washed up along the coast as the Bean’s discarded some of their food. To the horror of some of those who found them, they appeared to have been gnawed by human teeth. The King himself now took personal charge of the investigation and ordered a hunt with hounds all along the coastline near Ballintrae. He had heard vague stories of a hermit and his wife who lived somewhere around the area. The hounds and men soon found the concealed entrance to Sawney Bean’s cave and recoiled from the horrors that it held. It is said that the King himself was violently sick at the stores of human remains, some of them half-eaten, that were laid out deep in the cavern. Here, too, were piles of clothes, wallets, money, and valuables that the cannibals had stored away without actually realizing the value of what they held. Bean and his family were so used to their cannibalistic lifestyle that they could not understand that they had committed any crime. But in the eyes of the law, they had committed the most abominable of crimes and they were all arrested and taken back to the Tollbooth in Edinburgh. From there, they were taken to Leith where they were formally tried and sentenced to death. So gruesome was the effect of their crimes on the Scottish people that the method of their execution in many ways reflected the horror of their lives. The men were sentenced to have all their limbs amputated and to be allowed to bleed to death whilst the women were to be killed as slowly as possible. Some of Sawney Bean’s children died wondering what they had done wrong. The name of Sawney Bean, however, passed into folklore as “the Maneater of Midlothian” and actually spawned a number of stories and plays as well as a Shockfest underground film in the style of “Cannibal Holocaust.”
Although he was not classed as a werewolf—rather as a cannibal and a mass murderer—Sawney Bean’s case may reflect some of the aspects of the French lycanthropy trials. Lonely men and women such as Gilles Garnier, Sawney Bean, and the Gandillion family, dwelling in the utmost poverty in remote rural areas, may have preyed upon their vulnerable neighbours in order to sustain themselves without having to work. They may have looked on those around them as a ready source of food during desperate times, and therefore cannibalism may well have been much more widespread than we commonly suppose. However, it was men like Henri Boguet who made the connections between the rapacious beast and the agents of evil, and it was they who stoked up the notion of werewolves.
Nicholas Remy
Having burnt the Gandillions, Boguet turned his attention to seeking out other werewolves in the Jura region. It is unclear whether he found any, but his efforts against witches seems to have increased. Numbers of those people brought before the courts for practicing witchcraft grew dramatically. However, although Boguet insisted that werewolves were lurking everywhere in society (he continually cited the instances of Poligny and of the tailor of Chalons), the number of actual citations of werewolfery are extremely scant. Indeed, although instances of witchcraft trials went up, their total number was remarkably less than the likes of Boguet were to later claim. Boguet’s counterpart in Lorraine, the judge Nicholas Remy, himself a writer of a major book on witchcraft entitled Demonoltary, was to grandly claim that he had tried and executed no less than 900 persons for sorcery, including werewolfery. The actual records however, suggest that the number was far, far lower. And yet, the notion of witches and werewolves were potent figures that lurked deep in the French mind. The werewolf was still seen as the agent of the Devil.
France, Religion, and Terror
Part of the reason for much of the terror during early times may lie in the changing of the times that plagued France throughout the mid-to-late 16th century. The difficulties, (social, religious, and economic), were, of course, reflected all over Europe. But in France they seemed to take on a special resonance. The nub of these problems seemed to be the steady emergence of a Protestant tradition, that promised freedom and independence from a perceived Catholic tyranny. This was not only a purely doctrinal standpoint but, as with most religious teachings, it had political ramifications.
Huguenots
The austere Protestant Huguenots looked upon the French monarchy with something akin to disdain and sought to administer their own affairs in a “Godly way”—that is, separate from the laws laid down by the king. Many of the Huguenot towns operated almost as independent republics, and Huguenot leaders and ministers encouraged the nonpayment of ecclesiastical tithes—usually 10 percent of overall income—to the Church authorities. In doing so, they placed themselves on a collision course with the state. Violent protests against tithes flared in areas such as Languedoc and Aquitaine, placing strains on the levying of secular taxation and disturbing the government immensely. Such a situation could not be allowed to continue. As the civil disobedience and riots continued all through the 1560s, the authorities realized they had to take action.
St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre
On 24th August 1572, large numbers of French Protestants streamed into Paris to witness the marriage of Henry of Navarre to Margaret of Valois. The occasion, St. Bartholomew’s Day, was supposed to be a holy and joyous one. It was also the day that the Catholic machinery of state chose to act. The army was unleashed and hundreds of Huguenots were massacred, souring the air between Catholics and Protestants for years to come. The event ushered in a period known as the Wars of Religion, a series of civil wars in which Protestants and Catholics vied for control of their respective regions. In 1598, the formerly Protestant French king, Henry IV, tried to ameliorate the situation by enacting the Edict of Nantes that promised religious tolerance to all French citizens. Less than a hundred years later in 1685, however, Henry’s grandson, Louis XIV, revoked this Edict, outlawing Protestantism, making France a Catholic country, and expelling the Huguenots. Mixed in amongst this religious and civil unrest were other factors such as plague and personal and economic hardship that often touched daily lives. Religious hatred, disease, poverty, and civil war all had a corrosive effect on the social structure, particularly in relatively isolated areas. In times of uncertainty and pestilence, people looked around for scapegoats, and communally religious certainties sought to reassert themselves. God was in His Heaven but the Devil was in the world, and he was determined to attack and destroy the righteous. Nor could the populace look to the central authorities for any sort of stability, because they too were in a dangerous state of flux. The uniformity of state that had characterized the reign of Henry II now gave way to a period of vacillating and weak administration under those of his sons. Francis II had ruled for little more than a year, guided as the Scottish Protestant Reformer John Knox (Francis was married to the young Mary, Queen of Scots), by “the vile whispers of Popish priests.” He was only fifteen when he ascended the throne in 1559 and realizing that the new monarch was young and impressionable, the various great French houses—such as the formidable Catholic house of Guise—strove to advance their own fortunes. By 1560, after a year of ineffectual and indifferent rule, however, Francis was dead from a cancer of the ear (vindication, said Knox, that the whisperings of the Catholics were poisonous) and was succeeded by his younger brother Charles IX. Charles was only a weak-minded child and so the country was in effect ruled by his powerful mother, Catherine de Medici. A skilled politician, Catherine was able to play off one side against the other, but was set on France remaining a Catholic nation. All the same, she did not want a powerful Catholic family such as the Guises to have involvement in affairs of state and take powers from her easily influenced son, and she even courted some of the leading Protestants to counterbalance their influence. She was also acutely aware of the rise of the powerful Huguenot factions within the country and it was she who authorized the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, although her weak-willed son, the king, ordered it.
