The title page named Stubbe Peeter. Inside were two women who had died with him. Their names were Beele and Katherine Trompin.
On 31 October 1589, both women were executed at Bedburg, near Cologne, alongside the farmer now usually called Peter Stumpp. He had been accused of becoming a wolf and committing murders in that shape. Beele was his daughter. Katherine was a woman linked to him by accusations of a sexual relationship. The account that carried their deaths into print condemned them as his accomplices.
Before it did that, it described them rather differently.
Beele, it said, was a daughter whose beauty and good grace "deserved commendations of all those that knew her." Katherine was "a woman of tall and comely stature of exceeding good favour, and one that was well esteemed among her neighbours." The English pamphlet gave its readers both descriptions in the same pages that told them the women deserved to die. Neither woman entered the story as a stranger nobody could place. Both belonged to a small world of recognisable faces and familiar names.
A good reputation had not kept either of them out of it.
Bedburg lay in the Rhineland, a short distance west of Cologne, in country that had just come through years of war. At the end of 1582 the Archbishop of Cologne had declared himself a Protestant and tried to keep his territory anyway, and Catholic and Protestant armies fought over the question across the region until 1588. Religious allegiance could divide rulers and neighbours, while accusations of sorcery brought fears of the Devil into the business of magistrates and courts. This was the late sixteenth century, a world in which a story about a man becoming a wolf could end with sentences passed on human beings.
The accusations against Stumpp joined several terrors together. He was said to have killed children and adults, harmed livestock and obtained from the Devil a belt that allowed him to take a wolf's shape. The story made the danger a familiar man who walked the streets in good clothes and was greeted by people who knew him, without anyone suspecting a thing. The neighbours who recognised him were part of its horror. So were the women connected to him.
Brought to the rack after his arrest, Stumpp confessed before it was used, the pamphlet said, out of fear of the torture. He told the magistrates he had thrown the belt away in a valley. Men were sent to search for it and found nothing at all. The writer supposed it had gone back to the Devil it came from. Even the missing object was made to fit the story.
For Beele, the accusations carried a particular cruelty. The same account alleged that her father had committed incest with her, then went on to place her among the people condemned with him. On one page she was a daughter he had wronged. On a later one she was a daughter held responsible for helping him. The movement from one to the other took very little space.
Katherine's place was drawn through another alleged relationship. The writer described Stumpp winning her over with fair and flattering speech and presented her connection to him as part of his wrongdoing. The woman praised for her standing among her neighbours reappeared, with Beele, among those accused of assisting murders. Familiarity offered no protection once it had become evidence of association.
The charge against the two women was participation, not merely kinship. The magistrates, the pamphlet said, found them both accessory to divers murders, and it added sexual misconduct to the accusations. It moved briskly from that assertion to their sentences. It preserved no word spoken by either woman in her own defence.
Sentence was pronounced on 28 October. Three days later, all three were dead. The printed account gave considerable attention to Stumpp's punishment. Beele and Katherine's deaths occupied much less space, joined to his by the instruction that their sentences be carried out at the same time and on the same day. In the telling, the women remained attached to him to the end. The name that would travel furthest was his.
In 1590, the story reached English readers in a pamphlet sold in Fleet Street, at the sign of the Vine. Its title announced the life and death of a most wicked sorcerer and promised an account of murders committed in the likeness of a wolf. The execution date appeared on the title page. So did the claim that it had been translated from a German copy printed in Cologne and brought into England by a man named George Bores.
The book presented itself as a warning to sorcerers and witches. There was a place in that lesson for the two women, but only as accomplices whose punishment completed the story of the man.
The title page named Stubbe Peeter. Further inside, the same little book praised Beele's grace and Katherine's standing among her neighbours, recorded that both died on the same day as the man whose name sold it, and gave neither of them a single word of her own. It closed with the names of four men listed as witnesses that it was true. One of them was George Bores.
