Vehmic court
The Vehmic courts, Vehmgericht, holy vehme, or simply Vehm, also spelt Feme, Vehmegericht, Fehmgericht,[1] 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" (German: Freischöffen or French: francs-juges).
[5] 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.
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 actual president of the court was the "free count" (German: Freigraf), chosen for life by the Stuhlherr from among the Freischöffen, who formed the great body of the initiated.
Crimes of a serious nature, and especially those that were deemed unfit for ordinary judicial investigation, such as heresy and witchcraft, fell within its jurisdiction, as also did appeals by persons condemned in the open courts, and likewise the cases before those tribunals in which the accused had not appeared.
Legend and romance have combined to exaggerate the sinister reputation of the Fehmic courts; but modern historical research has largely discounted this, proving that they never employed torture, that their sittings were only sometimes secret, and that their meeting-places were always well known.
[4] The system, though ancient, came into wider use only after the division of the duchy of Saxony after the fall of Henry the Lion, when the archbishop of Cologne Engelbert II of Berg, (also duke of Westphalia from 1180) placed himself at the head of the Fehme as representative of the emperor.
[3] That an organization of this character should have outlived its usefulness and ushered in corruption and other intolerable abuses was inevitable; from the mid-fifteenth century protests were raised against the enormities of the court.
[9] 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.
In an 1856 lecture, Karl Marx used the Vehmic courts as a metaphor to describe his predictions of the working-class revolution that would sweep Europe.
[10] 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.
[11][12][13] 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.
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.
In Fritz Lang's M, the local criminals of an unnamed city (probably Berlin) capture a child murderer and hold a vigilante court.
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.
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.
