The Witch Burning of Ribe

The children of the village scampered out of their cottages and trudged through the mud and over the canal to the forest at the north end of town by the Nørremark. Their parents followed just behind unafraid to let them out of sight as everyone was headed to the same place on that special day. It had been whispered of for many weeks but the day had finally come and it had brought the king himself to bear witness. For the villagers of Ribe, it was a chance not only to catch a glimpse of their sovereign king but a chance to see a criminal burned for their crimes and, most importantly, the one opportunity they all might have in their lifetimes to feast their eyes on a real living witch.

Maren steadied herself with a dram of schnapps passed to her by her husband, Laurids, who hugged her and placed a small sack of gunpowder under her blouse that, when the flames would begin to take hold, might end her life more quickly. He looked deep into her tired eyes as the last tear she could muster from her already broken body streamed down her cheek. He was reminded about all that they had shared, how much he had loved her and how sad he was that he would never see her again here or in the afterlife. Her soul was forfeit and condemned to hell for heresy to which she freely confessed before the king himself. To her husband, she was beautiful and had always been kind, but such is the spell that those of her kind cast upon their victims.

Beginning in 1635, the low-lying Jutland plains had encountered a series of long winters and wet summers that had left much of their pasture lands flooded and it had brought economic hardship to many in the town of Ribe. Laurids and Maren had done well in the years prior to this period of recession by owning an inn and working as a tailor and, as such, were able to ride out the 5-year storm. When rooms were not filled, they would bring in the less fortunate and shelter them on credit with an understanding that the situation could not last forever.

Didrik had come to Ribe from Fyn looking for work as a tailor but found life difficult and more often than not could only work odd jobs in the spring and summer as a farmhand. Seen as an outsider, he had difficulty fitting in and it was rumoured that he had fled his native village after starting a fire in the stables killing 12 horses. In the wintertime, he would frequent Laurids’ inn in Ribe often canvassing for work as a tailor or to spend his summer krone on ale. One night, when he was particularly drunk, he was expelled from the inn and thrown into the street. Laurids was known for tolerating all manner of drunken behaviour but had decided that Didrik needed to be expulsed for suggesting to him that he control his woman. In a scene that had garnered much attention, Maren had gravely insulted Didrik by violently slapping him across the face after spurning his advance. Patrons of the inn cheered and laughed at Didrik for getting slapped and then laughed and cheered again when he spat at Maren, dropped his trousers and pissed on her. They laughed and cheered a third time when Maren exposed her privates to him yelling, “This belongs to a lady, now go stick yours in the sheep with whom you might have half a chance of satisfying” before she poured a draught over him and conked his head with the stein that shattered it into pieces.

Fifty years earlier, Christian IV of Denmark was coronated at the tender age of 11 after the death of his father who had declared him, his eldest son, the prince elect at age 3. When he entered adulthood and during the early years of his reign he vanquished many enemies, expanded his empire’s borders, and was beloved by his people. He was married at age twenty to Anne Catherine who, during their 15-year marriage bore him 7 children and then died aged only 36. Four years later, the king, in a private ceremony married Kirsten Munk, twenty years his junior, who would go on to become queen and bare him a further 12 children in the short space of just 14 years. However, towards the end of her childbearing years for the king, it was rumoured that she had taken another lover. Having already felt slighted by her husband’s well-known infidelities with her own handmaid, Vibeke Kruse, Kirsten no longer felt compelled to honour the dictates of their marriage and it was assumed that the youngest of the 12 children she bore, Countess Dorothea Elisabeth, was in fact the issue of the nobleman Otto Ludwig. She was dismissed as queen and placed under house arrest before being released and allowed to return to her estates in Jutland where she retired.

After his humiliation at the Spliid’s inn, Didrik’s life took a turn for the worse. He found himself unable to secure summer work and his tailoring business was floundering. He visited the cathedral and prayed for God’s help. During confession, he told the priest of his sins and wept saying that he drank too much and was lustful with women outside of any contract of marriage. He recounted the scene at the inn that had taken place months earlier and also described a dream he had had where three witches, one of them Maren, had held him down and blown into his mouth leading him to be ill the next day and vomiting unnatural substances. What was unnatural was the nature of the relationship between Didrik and the priest who abandoned his oaths and succumbed to lustful pleasures of the flesh. In a quid pro quo of heavenly dispensation in exchange for carnality, Didrik preyed on the priest’s depravity and used their sex to bring his accusations to the court. On the word of the priest and the local bishop, charges were laid against Maren who was brought before the court and allowed to plead her case. No evidence supporting Didrik’s claim could be substantiated and Maren was free and hoped to put the ordeal behind her. Weeks later, Father Mikkel, the priest that had presented the case to the court was found murdered and several weights of gold bullion were stolen from the church coffers. Nothing was said about the priest’s relationship with Didrik the tailor who disappeared right around the same time. There was insufficient evidence to lay an effective charge and the matter was put to rest as most likely the work of a wandering band of looters.

The queen’s infidelity was like an open sore that would never heal. Blind to his own hypocrisy, the king was so enraged that he neglected the lovers that had replaced her, and, worse for his country, he was forced to concede defeat in the Thirty-Years’ War, his erratic foreign policy found him unable to contain the advancing Swedes, and by the end of his reign, he found his Danish kingdom in decline and ceding territory that had once been part of his empire. Christian IV, during his reign, had reformed and modernized his military, he was the lead patron during a Danish golden age of art and culture, and for 40 years had been much beloved by his people. His reign had been so unequivocally successful that, until then, the idea of witchcraft had never crossed his mind. That is until one day he heard wind of a case in one of the low Sjaelland courts of a man who had been arrested for drunk and disorderly conduct after having upturned tables and caused a ruckus at a Copenhagen tavern alleging that witches were bent on destroying the empire.

The criminal was brought in to speak with King Christian. He was washed and fed and afforded every luxury of the court. The king asked the man what he knew of witches, what they looked like and what manner of spells they cast. The man revealed to the king the details of a dream he had had where three witches pinned him down and breathed into his mouth leading to his illness and fits of vomiting the next day. The King could never forget and he could never forgive and with the details of this man’s story, all he could think of was his former queen Kirsten and her willingness to give herself to a man that was not her king. Her dismissal from court had been swift, but with his mind elsewhere and concerned with foreign affairs he realized he had skimped just a little on the retribution. The king did not like the idea of destroying what belonged to him, but in offering her lust to another she was boldly stating that she could not be owned and the king could not let such precedent stand. The king asked the man where the encounter with this witch had taken place and he told him: Jutland.

The king ordered his council to bring forth all court documents from the Jutland jurisdiction for the last five years and investigate any case where witchcraft may have been at play. His councillors uncovered but a single case of the wife of a tailor and innkeeper but where the charges had been dropped. All the details aligned with the man’s story and the king decided that it should be revisited in the higher courts. Once the case was uncovered an armed emissary was sent from the king’s court to Ribe where Maren was arrested. This time, instead of appearing before a local court, she was brought to the capital to plead her case before the king himself – or so it was understood.

Upon her arrival in Copenhagen, she was thrown in prison and shackled to the wall where she was fed a small ration of bread and water for 30 days as she awaited her trial. The prison guards collected her and brought her to the cleansing room where two hooded men asked her if she was a witch. “No,” she replied. They asked her if she was guilty of the crimes for which she was accused but she had never been told what she had been arrested for and, in fact, when the emissaries had arrived in Ribe they had neglected to charge Maren with any crime. She did not know how to answer. First, she was whipped and then sodomized by the prison guards who proceeded to lance her womanhood from her body and through her screams they yelled at her repeatedly to admit to the pact she had made with Satan. Broken and unable withstand any more torture she was thrown back into her prison cell and this time no manacles were necessary to keep her subdued. Before closing the cell door, one of the men removed his hood so that she could see his face.

The warden testified before the king that, on the good word of his guards, the prisoner charged with heresy and witchcraft had freely confessed to her crimes and that she was indeed a witch. The king who, jilted by his own queen, had ordered the arrest and given license to the prison guards and torturers to extract a confession now had all the evidence he needed to pass judgment on the life of Maren Spliid. A smile ran across the king’s face when he issued the sentence that she be burned as a heretic with no possibility to receive rites of the church thus condemning her soul to hell.

The news was dispatched to every corner of King Christian’s empire of Maren’s confession and the subsequent sentence that was handed down. To all the citizens of the realm, it seemed logical, for the king was infallible and the only enemies who could possibly vanquish him would be those of unnatural origins. What other defence did the king have against The Devil and his daemons but for the church and to burn every heretic thereby expunging the force of their dark magic?

By the time she was returned to Ribe for her execution, starved and repeatedly beaten, Maren was already just days away from dying. To the crowd that had gathered, she appeared a hideous sight and the truest spectre of evil and all gasped in horror when she was revealed. Her nose broken and twisted, her skin pale, rotting and covered in abscesses, and her hair falling out in patches from two months of stress and inadequate nutrition. Only Laurids could see the beauty she had once been all the while reasoning to himself that her pact with the devil must explain why she never bore him any children. He could not bear to watch her suffer nor could he offer any tender words to comfort her.

The regent and the sergeant at arms had gathered branches and formed a heap of kindling while guards with torches stood at the ready. The expectant townsfolk swept the forest floor gathering branches and the children were encouraged to toss a branch upon the pyre to give them the sense they were a part of what would be a major event in the town’s history and a major coup in humanity’s righteous conquest over evil.

King Christian looked on from his steed as the regent read the charges and details of the manner of Maren’s confession which proved her guilt. While the regent was reading the charges the guards tied Maren’s feet and arms to a wooden ladder. When it came time to recite the words of her sentence the regent bellowed in a loud and powerful voice that drew cheers from the crowd. “Burn her! Burn her!” they cried. The regent gave the signal to the guards to proceed with lighting the fire. When the flames grew high enough the ladder, with Maren affixed to it, was thrown on top. In her weakened state, Maren could not even muster the strength to cry out in agony and to the onlookers, the flames failing to cause her any noticeable pain only further confirmed that she was indeed a witch. The flames quickly surrounded her body and her clothes caught fire and the smell of her scalding flesh caused many to cover their faces. In just a few seconds, the satchel Laurids had affixed to her blouse ignited and erupted in a fiery burst of sparks and pieces of what had once been Maren’s neck and shoulder. The explosion took with it the last of Maren’s strength as her body slumped and she breathed her last choking breath while the flames reduced her mortal remains to ash.

Within 10 years, almost two hundred women were convicted of sorcery and burned in Denmark, and, with the death of Maren Spliids, the precedent had been set. Seven years after Maren’s execution, a dying king sent a rider to Jutland to call on Kirsten Munk, the disgraced queen, that she should be brought to his bedside. By the time she arrived the king was already dead and with his passing the flames of hatred began to wane.

Officially, Maren Spliids was rightly and reasonably condemned to die by fire according to the laws of the Danish kingdom. It was the duty of the king to protect all of his subjects not only from the enemies beyond the borders of the empire but also from those within. The villagers of Ribe had witnessed the spectacle they had hoped to see and were not only complicit but abettors in the state-sanctioned murder of Maren Spliids. Before her transition to the forces of dark magic, Maren had been a common child of Ejsberg and Jutland who had always dreamed of the simple life of a commoner. Her parents knew her as a happy child with a brave spirit and a confident demeanour. She spoke well and they trusted that one day she would make a fine wife and mother. She grew up, she fell in love, but, despite their prayers, she and her husband never had any children. In the moments before her body, bound to the wooden ladder, was thrown upon the fire, she herself doubted the Christian conviction of her own soul. As the flames began to tickle her chin she recalled all the important moments of her life searching for the one when she might have traded her grace for wickedness. The devil employs countless means of deception, but in no other form is the seed of evil more likely to take root than in the heart of a self-righteous man jilted by someone he believes to be beneath him.