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Jorgen R. Enger, the chaplain of a Kansas-Missouri outfit, carried the wounded for three days from the Montfaucon woods two miles to the ambulance. Searching in the woods in the darkness one night with shells bursting and bullets whistling he found a husky sergeant wounded in the foot and growing weaker and weaker from loss of blood.
Without any authority whatsoever he brought her forcibly to his house and caused her to be scratched. Not only so, but he threw the woman and her daughter, tied and bound, into his mill-pond to prove their guilt. In the mean time the wretched creatures had been stripped of their clothes and examined for marks, under whose oversight we are not told, but Master Enger was responsible.
We shall see plenty of it when we come to the early part of the eighteenth century. But there was in 1613 one significant instance of independence of any jurisdiction, secular or ecclesiastical. In the famous case at Bedford, Master Enger, whom we have met before, had been "damnified" in his property to the round sum of £200. He was at length persuaded that Mother Sutton was to blame.
The woman berated him with angry words, and, feeling ill the next morning he had been drinking heavily the night before he dragged her off to the justice. A few weeks later she and her daughter were hanged at Hertford. The story of Mother Sutton and Master Enger has been referred to in several connections, but it will bear telling in narrative form.
Legend goes on to tell us that he became a Christian of such hot zeal as to exact a bloody atonement from the Frisians for their murder of Boniface and his fellow-priests a generation before. It further tells us that he founded a church at Enger, in Westphalia, was murdered by Gerold, Duke of Swabia, and was buried in the church he had founded, and in which his tomb was long shown.
But the servants watched the sow and saw it enter Mother Sutton's house. Master Enger made light of the story when it was told to him, and, with remarkable insight for a character in a witch story, "supposed they were drunke." But a few days later the same servant fell into conversation with Mother Sutton, when a beetle came and struck him.
On a "moonshine night" she came in at the window in her "accustomed and personall habite and shape" and knitted at his side. Then drawing nearer, she offered him terms by which he could be restored to his former health, terms which we are to understand the virtuous witness refused. It is pleasant to know that Master Enger was "distrustfull of the truth" of this tale.
Enger and Mary Sutton. In the case of three of these four we know only that they were sentenced. Before the Flower case at Lincoln came the Willimot-Baker cases at Leicester. The Bedford trial resembled much the Northampton trial of the previous year.
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