The Vehmic courts, Vehmgericht, holy vehme, or simply Vehm, also spelled Feme, Vehmegericht, Fehmgericht, are names given to a tribunal system of Westphalia in Germany active during the Late Middle Ages, based on a fraternal organisation of lay judges called "free judges" ( or ). The original seat of the courts was in Dortmund. Proceedings were sometimes secret, leading to the alternative titles of "secret courts" (), "silent courts" (), or "forbidden courts" (). After the execution of a death sentence, the corpse could be hanged on a tree to advertise the fact and deter others.
thumb|200px|A Vehm on a miniature in Herforder Rechtsbuch (ca 1375)
The peak of activity of these courts was during the 14th to 15th centuries, with lesser activity attested for the 13th and 16th centuries, and scattered evidence establishing their continued existence during the 17th and 18th centuries. They were finally abolished by order of Jérôme Bonaparte, king of Westphalia, in 1811.
The Vehmic courts were the regional courts of Westphalia, which, in turn, were based on the county courts of Franconia. They received their jurisdiction from the Holy Roman Emperor, from whom they also received the capacity to pronounce capital punishment () which they exercised in his name. Everywhere else the power of life and death, originally reserved to the Emperor alone, had been usurped by the territorial nobles; only in Westphalia, called "the Red Earth" because here the imperial Blutbann (jurisdiction over life and death) was still valid, were capital sentences passed and executed by the Vehmic courts in the Emperor's name alone.
Etymology
The term's origin is uncertain, but seems to enter Middle High German from Middle Low German. The word vëme first appears in the Middle High German literature of the 13th century as a noun with the meaning of "punishment". A document dated to 1251 has the reference illud occultum judicium, quod vulgariter vehma seu vridinch appellari consuevit. ("It is hidden justice, that by common fashion is habitually referred to as vehma or vridinch.")
The general meaning of "punishment" is unrelated to the special courts of Westphalia which were thus originally just named "courts of punishment". But as the word entered the Southern German dialects via Saxony and Westphalia, the word's meaning in Early Modern German became attached to the activities of these courts specifically.
Jacob Grimm thought that the word is identical in origin to a homophonous word for the raising of pigs on forest pastures (Hutewald), just as the more familiar German Zucht can mean both breeding and discipline. Grimm considers the spelling with h unetymological in spite of its early occurrence in some 13th century documents, and hypothesizes a "lost root" "fëmen", connecting with Old Norse fimr and conjecturing a Gothic "fiman, fam, fêmun?".
During 18th to 19th century Romanticism, there were various misguided attempts to explain the obscure term, or to elevate it to the status of a remnant of pagan antiquity, scoffed at by Grimm's entry in his Deutsches Wörterbuch. An etymology suggested by James Skene in 1824 derives the word from Baumgericht (Lit. "Tree law"), supposedly the remnant of a pagan "forest law" of the Wild hunt and pagan secret societies.
Origin
The Westphalian Vehmic courts developed from the High Medieval "free courts" (Freigerichte), which had jurisdiction within a "free county" (). As a result of the 14th century imperial reform of the Holy Roman Empire (Golden Bull of 1356), the Landgraviates lost much of their power, and the Freigerichte disappeared, with the exception of Westphalia, where they retained their authority and transformed into the Vehmic court.
The seat of the Vehmic court () was at first Dortmund, in a square between two linden trees, one of which was known as the Femelinde. With the growing influence of Cologne during the 15th century, the seat was moved to Arnsberg in 1437.
Membership and procedure
The sessions were often held in secret, whence the names of "secret court" (), "silent court" (), etc. Attendance of secret sessions was forbidden to the uninitiated, on pain of death, which led to the designation "forbidden courts" (). A chairman () presided over the court, and lay judges () passed judgment. The court also constituted a Holy Order.
Any free man "of pure bred German stock"
With the growing power of the territorial sovereigns and the gradual improvement of the ordinary process of justice, the functions of the Fehmic courts were superseded. By the action of the Emperor Maximilian and of other German princes they were, in the 16th century, once more restricted to Westphalia, and here, too, they were brought under the jurisdiction of the ordinary courts, and finally confined to mere police duties. With these functions, however, but with the old forms long since robbed of their impressiveness, they survived into the 19th century. They were finally abolished by order of Jérôme Bonaparte, king of Westphalia, in 1811. The last Freigraf died in 1835.
Modern use of the term
Following the abandonment of the Vehmic courts, the term acquired a connotation of mob rule and lynching. In Modern German, the spelling of Feme is most common. Other variant forms are: Fehme, Feime, Veme. The verb verfemen is in current use and means "to ostracise", i.e. by public opinion rather than formal legal proceeding. A noun derived from this is Verfemter "outlaw, ostracised person".
The term was used in this sense — of "mob justice" bubbling up from below — by writers such as Thomas Carlyle (1840)
and Karl Marx (1856).
Within the politically heated turmoil of the early German Weimar Republic after World War I, the media frequently used the term Fememord to refer to right-wing political homicides, e.g. the murder of Jewish politicians such as Kurt Eisner (1919) or Walther Rathenau (1922) and other politicians including Matthias Erzberger (1921) by right-wing groups such as Organisation Consul. In 1926, the 27th Reichstag commission officially differentiated the contemporarily common Fememorde from political assassination in that assassination was by definition exerted upon open political opponents, whereas a Fememord was a form of lethal vengeance committed upon former or current members of an organization that they had become a traitor to. This definition is also found in the pseudo-archaic, alliterative right-wing phrase "Verräter verfallen der Feme!" ("Traitors shall be ostracized!", i. e. killed), quoted throughout the 1920s in mass media reports regarding violent acts of vengeance among the German Right.
The Vehmic courts in fiction
Vehmic courts play a key role in the novel Anne of Geierstein or, The Maiden of the Mist by Sir Walter Scott in which Archibald von Hagenbach, the Duke of Burgundy's governor at Brisach (Switzerland), is condemned and executed by the Vehmgericht. Scott drew his inspiration from Goethe's play Goetz von Berlichingen which he had translated, incorrectly. Hector Berlioz's first opera, Les francs-juges, was inspired by Scott's presentation of the Vehmic Courts. Though the work was never staged the overture survives as a concert piece. In the very first concert of Berlioz's work, on 26 May 1828, the overture was performed along with the Opus 1 Waverley overture, a further indication of Berlioz's debt to Scott's fiction. The Les francs-juges overture later became the signature tune for Face to Face, the early series of British television interviews presented by John Freeman.
In William Makepeace Thackeray's novel Vanity Fair "Was Rebecca guilty or not?" the Vehmgericht of the servants' hall had pronounced against her.
A character in the Dorothy L. Sayers novel Murder Must Advertise appears at a fancy-dress party as a member of the Vehmgericht, which allows him to wear a hooded costume to disguise his identity. People in Femgericht costumes also appear in Arthur Schnitzler's 1926 novella Dream Story.
In Fritz Langs M, the local criminals of an unnamed city (probably Berlin) capture a child murderer and hold a vigilante court.
In The Illuminatus! Trilogy, the Vehmic courts are mentioned as being connected to Nazi Werwolf commandos as well as the Illuminati.
In A Study in Scarlet, a Sherlock Holmes novel by Arthur Conan Doyle, a newspaper article mentions the Vehmgericht, stating that the features of a recent death are similar to the organization's killings.
The Vehmgericht also appear as antagonists in The Strong Arm, an 1899 novel set in the Holy Roman Empire by British-Canadian author Robert Barr.
Geoff Taylor's 1966 novel, Court of Honor, features the Fehme being revived by a German officer and Martin Bormann in the dying days of the Third Reich.
Season 3, episode 12 of The Blacklist, titled The Vehm is based on a group of vigilantes using medieval torture methods to kill paedophiles and money launderers.
Jack Mayer's 2015 historical fiction, Before the Court of Heaven, depicts the Fehme, and 'Fehme justice' as part of the extreme right-wing conspiracy to bring down Germany's Weimar democracy.
See also
- Feme murders
References
- This work in turn cites:
- P. Wigand, Das Femgericht Westfalens (Hamm, 1825, 2nd ed., Halle, 1893)
- L. Tross, Sammlung merkwurdiger Urkunden für die Geschichte der Femgerichte (Hanover, 1826)
- F. P. Usener, Die frei- und heimlichen Gerichte Westfalens (Frankfort, 1832)
- K. G. von Wächter, Beiträge zur deutschen Geschichte, insbesondere des deutschen Strafrechts (Tübingen, 1845)
- O. Wächter, Femgerichte und Hexenprozesse in Deutschland (Stuttgart, 1882)
- T. Lindner, Die Feme (Munster and Paderborn, 1888)
- F. Thudichum, Femgericht und Inquisition (Giessen, 1889)
- T. Lindner, Der angebliche Ursprung der Femgerichte aus der Inquisition (Paderborn, 1890) This source combats T. Linder's theory concerning the origin of the Fehme.
- K.M. Langmaier: Wo finde ich mein Recht? Ulrich Erhart gegen Kloster, Herzog und Reichsstadt: der „arme Mann" in den Mühlen der Justiz. Ein bayerischer Beitrag zur westfälischen Femegerichtsbarkeit im 15. Jahrhundert. In: Westfälische Zeitschrift 170, 2020 37–68
- Dahlmann and Waitz, Quellenkunde (Leipzig, 1906), p. 401; also the supplementary vol. (1907), p. 78. Lists of works on individual aspects.
- Daraul, Arkon, A History of Secret Societies, London, Tandem, 1965. Has a chapter on the Holy Vehm; among other things, it describes the practice of "Free As a Bird".
- This article (or an earlier version) contains text from the public domain Brewer's Reader's Handbook, published in 1898.