A King "Envoulted."

It was a current superstition of the Middle Ages that if a little waxen image were baptized by a priest, and then pierced with a needle at the place where the heart should be, the person represented by the image would die. Demons were evoked for this operation, which was called "envoulting." Robert of Artois has been called "the stormy petrel of the Hundred Years' War." Enraged at not receiving an inheritance to which he laid claim, and vowing vengeance against Philip VI., King of France (1328-1350), he fled to the English court, where he did his utmost to foment ill-will. Philip was terrified when he learned that Robert was employing magical arts for his destruction, and that he was "envoulted."

This strange word, according to Dier, is derived from the low Latin word invetare, which means to devote, and, in this case, to destruction. But Littre traces the word envoult to the Latin vultus, a face or image, because an image was the magical means of making a victim perish.

Strange to say, however, Philip lived for some years after the ceremony of envoulting had been performed for his destruction!

Hanging in effigy is a custom that would seem to have originated in an analogous superstition, and to be a survival of it. The English Richard III. charged his enemies with marking him with deformities. He cries:--

King James says: "The devil teacheth how to make pictures of wax or clay that, by roasting thereof, the persons that they may bear the name of may be continually melted or dried away by continual sickness."