Religious heresy and dissension raged in late C15th Europe. People knew that witches belonged to a Satanic conspiracy, working together in an organised, murderous conspiracy. In fact the licence given to witchcraft judges came from Innocent VIII via a papal bull in 1484.
In the solidly Catholic southern countries of Italy and Spain, witch trials were rare-ish. The Spanish Inquisition was far more interested to rooting out heresy, secret Jewish converts and Islam. So after the Protestant Reformation, we can limit large scale witchcraft trials to Protestant northern Europe, in countries like Germany and Scotland. Yet even in northern countries with a long history of witch trials, witch-hunting largely ended in The 30 Year War (1618-48).
Stacy Schiff’s book The Witches: Salem 1692 analyses witchcraft trials in the USA, decades after they had almost disappeared in the rest of the Christian world. Cotton Mather, minister of Boston's Old North church, was a true believer in witchcraft. In 1688 he had investigated the strange behaviour of four children of John Goodwin, a Boston mason. The children described sudden pains and convulsions. Rev Mather was convinced that witchcraft was responsible.
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Witch House in Salem
Salem, a Puritan town close to Boston, had been founded in 1626. In 60 years, Salem had developed a mercantile elite amongst the 600 citizens and two families were competing for control of the village and its church. In 1688 Samuel Parris, a successful merchant in Barbados, was invited to become Salem’s minister. During the very cold winter of 1692, his daughter Betty Parris acted strangely, contorted in pain and fever. Was it epilepsy, encephalitis or ergot? No, the most popular explanation was witchcraft. Betty's behaviour was very similar that of the afflicted washer-woman described in Cotton Mather's book only four years earlier. The devil must have been close to Salem in 1692.
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More confident now, the special prosecutor sped up his trials and convictions. Rebecca Nurse was a pious, respected farm worker. The Nurse jury returned a verdict of not guilty which Chief Justice Stoughton hated, so he told the jury to go back to the jury room verdict. The jury reconvened, this time finding her guilty. In July 1692, Nurse and four other convicted witches were hanged.
Yet ever more people displayed signs of affliction. Thus accusations and arrests for witchcraft continued to grow. By mid 1692, 200 people had been charged with witchcraft, based largely on spectral evidence.
Any outspoken opponent of the Salem witchcraft trials risked being hanged. Local tavern owner John Proctor accused the judges of bias and corruption, so he was hanged. Wife Elizabeth, also convicted of witchcraft, avoided execution only because she was pregnant. Seeing how unjust the trials were, an elderly Giles Corey would not cooperate with the trials and was pressed to death under boulders. Soon after Corey's death, in Sept 1692, eight more convicted witches were hanged. They were Salem’s last victims.
By late 1692, Salem's passion for locating and eradicating witchcraft was diminishing. How could so many respectable people be guilty, especially in such a small town? Cotton’s father, Increase Mather, published America's first tract on evidence, Cases of Conscience, and insisted that spectral evidence be excluded.
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The New York Times noted something an Australian would not have understood. The irony that the Puritans had come to the New World to escape an interfering civil authority was lost on the colonists, who unleashed on one another the kind of abuse they had deplored in royal officials. So was the fact that the embrace of faith, meant to buttress the church, would tear it irrevocably apart. And tear the Puritan town against itself.
The parts of this book dealing with the terrible miscarriage of justice are the most significant. But what happened in Salem after the trials were over and the injustice ended? Cotton Mather was given the official records of the Salem trials to prepare a book that would look on the judges’ role in the tragic affair sympathetically. His book Wonders of the Invisible World: An Account of the Tryals of the Several Witches Lately Executed in New-England l693, vigorously defended the judges’ verdicts, especially Mather's. Governor Phips blamed it all on William Stoughton who refused to apologise and who became the next governor of Massachusetts! Did the good citizens of Salem learn nothing?
A few places should be visited. Modern visitors still stand in awe of the memorial that reminds us of those miserable, 1692 victims. Trial relics and documents can also be found in Salem’s Peabody Essex Museum. Witch House, the one house still standing in Salem with direct ties to the Witch Trials, opened with a new museum after WW2. And the historically-minded tourist can still locate John Ward’s house, built for an English tanner in 1684, and the old bakery, built 1682.
I suppose we can be grateful that no one ever died as a convicted witch in the USA again. But could such mass insanity ever happen again? Of course! It may happen as soon as young people break out of their usual powerless role and a community has no proper way of handling divisive clashes. Australians need think no further back than the Cronulla Riots of 2005.
In the solidly Catholic southern countries of Italy and Spain, witch trials were rare-ish. The Spanish Inquisition was far more interested to rooting out heresy, secret Jewish converts and Islam. So after the Protestant Reformation, we can limit large scale witchcraft trials to Protestant northern Europe, in countries like Germany and Scotland. Yet even in northern countries with a long history of witch trials, witch-hunting largely ended in The 30 Year War (1618-48).
Stacy Schiff’s book The Witches: Salem 1692 analyses witchcraft trials in the USA, decades after they had almost disappeared in the rest of the Christian world. Cotton Mather, minister of Boston's Old North church, was a true believer in witchcraft. In 1688 he had investigated the strange behaviour of four children of John Goodwin, a Boston mason. The children described sudden pains and convulsions. Rev Mather was convinced that witchcraft was responsible.
Salem, a Puritan town close to Boston, had been founded in 1626. In 60 years, Salem had developed a mercantile elite amongst the 600 citizens and two families were competing for control of the village and its church. In 1688 Samuel Parris, a successful merchant in Barbados, was invited to become Salem’s minister. During the very cold winter of 1692, his daughter Betty Parris acted strangely, contorted in pain and fever. Was it epilepsy, encephalitis or ergot? No, the most popular explanation was witchcraft. Betty's behaviour was very similar that of the afflicted washer-woman described in Cotton Mather's book only four years earlier. The devil must have been close to Salem in 1692.
Then other girls began to exhibit similar behaviours. When the local doctor could not cure the girls with regular medicine, supernatural cures were sought instead. The Puritan girls, who were normally confined to boring, lady-like behaviour started to yell like boys. The girls contorted into grotesque and decidedly unPuritan behaviours.
Convulsive behaviour in front of the judges
Salem witch trial early 1692
Betty Parris and her friends named their demons and the witch-hunt began in March 1692. The first three to be accused of witchcraft were black Tituba, social misfit Sarah Good and old Sarah Osborne. The influential Putnam family brought their complaint against the three women to county magistrates who arranged for the suspected witches to be examined in a local inn.
Hearsay, gossip and spectral evidence were accepted in court as proof! The judges requested examinations of the women for Witches' Marks i.e moles for their familiars to attach themselves. Worst still, the accused witches had no-one to defend them in court.
The judges asked the same questions of each suspect over and over: Were they witches? Had the seen the Devil? If they were not witches, how did they explain the contortions caused by their presence? Clearly the judges thought the women were guilty. So the afflicted girls gave increasingly professional performances in front of the judges.
Suspects thought that if they confessed to witchcraft, they would avoid execution. The Chief Justice, and most influential member of the five judges, was the gung-ho witch hunter, William Stoughton. And three of the judges were friends of Rev Mather!
Hearsay, gossip and spectral evidence were accepted in court as proof! The judges requested examinations of the women for Witches' Marks i.e moles for their familiars to attach themselves. Worst still, the accused witches had no-one to defend them in court.
The judges asked the same questions of each suspect over and over: Were they witches? Had the seen the Devil? If they were not witches, how did they explain the contortions caused by their presence? Clearly the judges thought the women were guilty. So the afflicted girls gave increasingly professional performances in front of the judges.
Suspects thought that if they confessed to witchcraft, they would avoid execution. The Chief Justice, and most influential member of the five judges, was the gung-ho witch hunter, William Stoughton. And three of the judges were friends of Rev Mather!
Hanging of the witches
Salem July 1692
The first to be brought to trial was elderly Bridget Bishop, owner of a boozy house, critical of her neighbours and slow on bill payments. Special prosecutor Thomas Newton selected Bishop for his first prosecution because she was guilty, without a doubt. At Bishop's trial in June 1692, Bishop's jury found her guilty. Chief Justice Stoughton signed Bishop's death warrant, and in June 1692, Bishop was hanged.
More confident now, the special prosecutor sped up his trials and convictions. Rebecca Nurse was a pious, respected farm worker. The Nurse jury returned a verdict of not guilty which Chief Justice Stoughton hated, so he told the jury to go back to the jury room verdict. The jury reconvened, this time finding her guilty. In July 1692, Nurse and four other convicted witches were hanged.
Yet ever more people displayed signs of affliction. Thus accusations and arrests for witchcraft continued to grow. By mid 1692, 200 people had been charged with witchcraft, based largely on spectral evidence.
Any outspoken opponent of the Salem witchcraft trials risked being hanged. Local tavern owner John Proctor accused the judges of bias and corruption, so he was hanged. Wife Elizabeth, also convicted of witchcraft, avoided execution only because she was pregnant. Seeing how unjust the trials were, an elderly Giles Corey would not cooperate with the trials and was pressed to death under boulders. Soon after Corey's death, in Sept 1692, eight more convicted witches were hanged. They were Salem’s last victims.
By late 1692, Salem's passion for locating and eradicating witchcraft was diminishing. How could so many respectable people be guilty, especially in such a small town? Cotton’s father, Increase Mather, published America's first tract on evidence, Cases of Conscience, and insisted that spectral evidence be excluded.
Cotton Mather's book
Wonders of the Invisible World, l693
Governor Phips ordered all future trials to exclude spectral evidence, and to require proof of guilt by proper, verifiable evidence. Thus most of the last 33 trials ended in acquittals. Phips dissolved the Court and released all remaining accused witches. Witch-fever, which started with Cotton Mather’s first case in 1688, disappeared by Oct 1692. 19 convicted witches were killed, 4 accused witches died in prison, 1 man had been pressed to death. 200 others arrested.
The New York Times noted something an Australian would not have understood. The irony that the Puritans had come to the New World to escape an interfering civil authority was lost on the colonists, who unleashed on one another the kind of abuse they had deplored in royal officials. So was the fact that the embrace of faith, meant to buttress the church, would tear it irrevocably apart. And tear the Puritan town against itself.
The parts of this book dealing with the terrible miscarriage of justice are the most significant. But what happened in Salem after the trials were over and the injustice ended? Cotton Mather was given the official records of the Salem trials to prepare a book that would look on the judges’ role in the tragic affair sympathetically. His book Wonders of the Invisible World: An Account of the Tryals of the Several Witches Lately Executed in New-England l693, vigorously defended the judges’ verdicts, especially Mather's. Governor Phips blamed it all on William Stoughton who refused to apologise and who became the next governor of Massachusetts! Did the good citizens of Salem learn nothing?
A few places should be visited. Modern visitors still stand in awe of the memorial that reminds us of those miserable, 1692 victims. Trial relics and documents can also be found in Salem’s Peabody Essex Museum. Witch House, the one house still standing in Salem with direct ties to the Witch Trials, opened with a new museum after WW2. And the historically-minded tourist can still locate John Ward’s house, built for an English tanner in 1684, and the old bakery, built 1682.
I suppose we can be grateful that no one ever died as a convicted witch in the USA again. But could such mass insanity ever happen again? Of course! It may happen as soon as young people break out of their usual powerless role and a community has no proper way of handling divisive clashes. Australians need think no further back than the Cronulla Riots of 2005.