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Updated: June 3, 2025
If the defendant refused to appear, after being three times cited, the sentence of the Vehm was pronounced against him, a dreadful sentence, ending in, "And I hereby curse his flesh and his blood; and may his body never receive burial, but may it be borne away by the wind, and may the ravens and crows, and wild birds of prey, consume and destroy him.
For further security of the secrets of the Vehm, no mercy was given to strangers found within the limits of the court. All such intruders were immediately hung. The number of the Schöffen, or members of the free courts, was very great. In the fourteenth century it exceeded one hundred thousand.
This was a knife, thrust to the hilt in the earth. As they gazed upon it they muttered the mysterious words, "Vehm gericht," and quickly dispersed, none daring to touch the corpse or disturb the significant signal of the vengeance of the executioners.
But what were known as Freistuhls, or free courts, were confined to the duchy of Westphalia. Some of the sessions of these courts were open, some closed, the Vehm constituting their secret tribunal. Though complaints might be brought and persons cited to appear from every part of Germany, a free court could only be held on Westphalian ground, on the red earth, as it was entitled.
To her ladyship's unaccustomed ears that indictment, translated literally from the Latin original, sounded terrible as an impeachment in the subterranean halls of the Vehm Gericht, or in the most select and secret council in the Venetian Doge's Palace.
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