the countie of Lancaster, widow, being indicted for that she
feloniously had practiced, used and exercised divers wicked
and divelish artes, called witchcraftes, inchantments, charms
and sorceries, in and upon one Robert Nutter of Greenhead, in
the Forest of Pendle, in the countie of Lanc; and by force of
the same witchcraft, feloniously the sayed Robert Nutter had
killed, contra pacem, etc. Being at the barre was arraigned.
To this indictment, upon her arraignment, she pleaded, not
guiltie; and for the tryall of her life put herself upon God
and her country.
One of the chief witnesses at this trial was a child of nine years.[77]
Upon seeing her own daughter arraigned against her, the mother broke
into shrieks and lamentations pleading with the girl not to falsify the
truth and thus condemn her own mother to death. The judges instead of
seeing in this agony a proof of the mother’s innocence looked upon it
as an attempt to thwart the ends of justice by demoniac influence, and
the child having declared that she could not confess in her mother’s
presence, the latter was removed from the room, and as under the
Inquisition, the testimony was given in the absence of the accused.
The child then said that her mother had been a witch for three or four
years, the devil appearing in the form of a brown dog, Bill. These
trials taking place in protestant England, two hundred years after the
reformation, prove the worthless nature of witchcraft testimony, as
well as the superstition, ignorance and entire unfitness for the bench
of those men called the highest judicial minds in England. The church
having almost entirely destroyed freedom of will and the expression
of individual thought, men came to look upon authority and right as
synonymous. Works bearing the stamp of the legal fraternity soon
appeared. In 1618 a volume entitled, “The County Justice,” by Michael
Dalton, Gentleman of Lincoln Inn, was published in London, its chief
object to give directions, based upon this trial, for the discovery of
witches.
Now against these witches the justice of the peace may not
always expect direct evidence, seeing all their works are
works of darkness and no witness permitted with them to accuse
them, and therefore for their better discovery I thought good
here to set down certain observations out of the methods of
discovery of the witches that were arraigned at Lancaster, A.
D. 1612 before Sir James Altham and Sir Edward Bromley, judges
of Assize there.
1. They have ordinarily a familiar or spirit which appeareth
to them.
2. The said familiar hath some bigg or place upon their body
where he sucketh them.
3. They have often pictures of clay or wax (like a man, etc.)
found in their house.
4. If the dead body bleed upon the witches touching it.
5. The testimony of the person hurt upon his death.
6. The examination and confession of the children or servants
of the witch.
7. Their own voluntary confession which exceeds all other
evidence.
At this period many persons either in hope of a reward[78] or
because they believed they were thus aiding the cause of justice,
kept private notebooks of instruction in the examination of witches,
and new varieties were constantly discovered. When witchcraft by
Act of Parliament was decreed felony this statute gave the legal
fraternity double authority for a belief in its existence. Even Sir
George Mackenzie although convinced by his own experience that many
persons were wrongfully accused of witchcraft, still declared that its
existence could not be doubted, “seeing that our law ordains it to be
punished with death.” The most fatal record the world possesses of the
plague is that of the fourteenth century, known as the “Black Death,”
when whole villages were depopulated and more than half the inhabitants
of Europe were destroyed. It will aid in forming our judgment as to the
extent of woman’s persecution for witchcraft, to remember it has been
estimated that the number of deaths from this cause equalled those of
the plague.
The American Colonies adopted all the unjust previsions of European
christianity as parts of their own religion and government. Fleeing
from persecution, the Puritans yet brought with them the spirit of
persecution in the belief of woman’s inferiority and wickedness, as
taught by the church from whence they had fled. The “Ducking Stool”
for women who too vigorously protested against their wrongs, and
the “Scarlet Letter” of shame for the woman who had transgressed the
moral law, her companion in sin going free, or as in England, sitting
as juror in the box, or judge upon the bench. With them also came a
belief in witchcraft, which soon caused Massachusetts Colony to enact
a law ordering suspected women to be stripped naked, their bodies to
be carefully examined by a male “witch pricker” to see if there was
not the devil’s mark upon them. The public whipping of half naked
women at the cart’s tail for the crime of religious free thought soon
followed, a union of both religious and judicial punishment; together
with banishment of women from the Colony for daring to preach Christ
as they understood his doctrines. These customs more barbarous than
those of the savages whose home they had invaded, were the pleasing
welcome given to the pioneer woman settlers of America by the husbands
and fathers, judges and ministers of that period, with which the words
“Plymouth Rock,” “May Flower” and “Pilgrim Fathers” are so intimately
associated. The same persecution of aged women took place in New
England as in old England, while children of even more tender years
were used as witnesses against their mothers if accused of witchcraft,
or were themselves imprisoned upon like suspicion. The village of
Salem, Massachusetts, is indissolubly connected with witchcraft, for
there the persecution raged most fiercely, involving its best women in
ruin. One of the oldest buildings still extant in the United States is
“The Witch House” of that place, erected in 1631, although it was sixty
one years later before this persecution reached its height.
A terrible summer for Salem village and its vicinity was
that of 1692—a year of worse than pestilence or famine.
Bridget Bishop was hanged in June; Sarah Good, Sarah Wilder,
Elizabeth Howe, Susanna Martin and Rebecca Nurse in July;
George Burroughs, John Proctor, George Jacobs, John Willard
and Martha Carrier in August; Martha Corey, Mary Easty, Alice
Parker, Ann Pudeator, Margaret Scott, Wilmit Reed, Samuel
Wordwell, and Mary Baker in September; in which last month
Giles Corey eighty-one years of age, was pressed to death
under a board loaded with heavy stones, not heavy enough
however to crush out life until a day or two of lingering
torture had intervened. Sarah Good’s daughter Dorcas between
three and four years old, orphaned by her mother’s execution,
was one of a number of children who with several hundred other
persons were imprisoned on suspicion of witchcraft; many
of these sufferers remained in a wretched condition, often
heavily ironed for months, some upwards of a year; and several
dying during this time. A child of seven, Sarah Carrier, was
called upon to testify as witness against her mother.
Some of the condemned, especially Rebecca Nurse, Martha Corey,
and Mary Easty, were aged women who had led unblemished lives
and were conspicuous for their prudence, their charities and
all domestic virtues.[79]
So extended became the persecution for witchcraft that the king was
at last aroused to the necessity of putting a stop to such wholesale
massacre of his subjects, issued a mandate forbidding the putting of
any more persons to death on account of witchcraft.[80] A remarkable
family gathering took place at Salem, July 18, 1883, of two hundred
persons who met to celebrate their descent from Mrs. Rebecca Nurse,
who was executed as a witch at that place in 1692. The character and
life of Mrs. Nurse were unimpeachable. She was a woman seventy years
of age, the mother of eight children, a church member of unsullied
reputation and devout habit; but all these considerations did not
prevent her accusation, trial, conviction and death, although she
solemnly asserted her innocence to the last. A reprieve granted by
the governor was withdrawn through the influence of the church, and
she was hung by the neck till she was dead. In order to give her body
burial, her sons were obliged to steal it away by night, depositing
it in a secret place known but to the family. Forty persons at the
hazard of their own lives testified to the goodness and piety of Mrs.
Nurse. Their names were inscribed upon the monument erected by her
descendants, in 1892, to her memory.[81] The Rev. Cotton Mather and
the Rev. Samuel Parrish are indissolubly connected with this period,
as both were extremely active in fomenting a belief in witchcraft.
Richard Baxter, known as the “greatest of the Puritans” condemned
those who expressed a disbelief in witchcraft as “wicked Sadducees.”
Increase Mather, president of Harvard College, was one of the most
bitter persecutors of witches in New England. The dangerous spirit
of a religious autocracy like the priesthood, was forcibly shown by
a paper read by Rev. Dr. George E. Ellis, a few years since, before
the Massachusetts Historical Society, in which he excused the act
of stripping women naked in order to search for a witch mark, upon
the ground of its being a judicial one by commissioned officers and
universally practiced in christendom.
Boston as “The Bloody Town” rivalled Salem in its persecution of women
who dared express thoughts upon religious matters in contradiction
to the Puritanic belief; women were whipped because of independent
religious belief, New England showing itself as strenuous for
“conformity” of religious opinion as Old England under Queen Elizabeth.
The cruelties of this method of punishing free thought, culminated in
the Vagabond Law of Massachusetts Colony, passed May 1661.
The first ecclesiastical convocation in America was a synod especially
conveyed to sit in judgment upon the religious views of Mistress
Anne Hutchinson, who demanded that the same rights of individual
judgment upon religious questions should be accorded to woman which
the reformation had already secured to man. Of the eighty-two
errors canvassed by the synod, twenty nine were charged to Mistress
Hutchinson, and retraction of them was ordered by the church. The State
united with the Church in opposition to Mistress Hutchinson, and the
first real struggle for woman’s religious liberty, (not yet at an end),
began upon this side of the Atlantic. The principal charge brought
against Mistress Hutchinson was that she had presumed to instruct men.
Possessed of a fine intellect and strong religious fervor, she had
inaugurated private meetings for the instruction of her own sex; from
sixty to a hundred women regularly gathering at her house to hear her
criticism upon the Sunday sermon and Thursday lectures. These meetings
proved so interesting that men were soon found also in attendance and
for these reasons she was arbitrarily tried in November 1637, before
the Massachusetts General Court upon a joint charge of sedition and
heresy. In May of the same year a change had taken place in the civil
government of the colony. Sir Henry Vane, who like herself, believed in
the supreme authority of the in-dwelling spirit, having been superseded
by John Winthrop as governor, the latter sustaining the power of the
clergy and himself taking part against her. Two days were spent by him
and prominent clergymen in her examination, resulting in a sentence of
imprisonment and banishment from the colony for having “traduced the
ministers” and taught men against the direct authority of the Apostle
Paul, who declared “I suffer not a woman to teach.”
Thus the old world restrictions upon woman, and their persecutions,
were soon duplicated in the new world. Liberty of opinion became as
serious a crime in America as in England, and here as in Europe, the
most saintly virtue and the purest life among women were not proof
against priestly attack. While Mistress Hutchinson was the first woman
thus to suffer, many others were also persecuted. When Mary Fisher
and Anne Austin, two Quaker women who had become famous for their
promulgation of this heretical doctrine in many parts of the world,
arrived in Boston harbor, July 1656, they were not at first permitted
to land, but were ultimately transferred to the Boston jail, where they
were closely confined, and notwithstanding the heat of the weather
their one window was boarded up. Their persons were also stripped and
examined for signs of witchcraft, but fortunately not a mole or a
spot could be found. Boston—“The Bloody Town”—was the center of this
persecuting spirit and every species of wanton cruelty upon woman was
enacted. Stripped nude to the waist they were tied to a whipping-post
on the south side of King Street and flogged on account of their
religious opinions; but it was upon the famous “Common” that for the
crime of free speech, a half nude woman with a new born babe at her
breast was thus publicly whipped; and it was upon the “Common” that
Mary Dyer, another Quaker woman, was hung in 1659. Both she and Anne
Hutchinson prophesied calamity to the colony for its unjust course,
which was fulfilled, when in 1684, it lost its charter in punishment
for its intolerance. No Christian country offered a refuge for woman,
as did Canada the colored slave. But the evils of woman’s persecution
by the church, did not end with the wrongs inflicted upon her; they
were widely extended, affecting the most common interests of the world.
While famines were unknown among the ancient Romans in the first period
of their history, yet Christendom was early and frequently afflicted
with them. While the operations of nature were sometimes the cause, the
majority of famines were the result of persecutions, or of christian
wars, especially the crusades which took such immense numbers of men
from the duties of agriculture at home, making them a prey upon the
scanty resources of the countries through which these hordes passed.
As was seen in the Irish famine of 1847-8 and at the present moment as
result of a scanty food supply in Russia, pestilence of various kinds
followed famine years. But the crusades in which the church attempted
to wrest the holy sepulchre from Turkish hands, were scarcely more
productive of famines than its persecuting periods when mankind lost
hope in themselves and the future. Our own country has shown the effect
of fear and persecution upon both business and religion, as during the
witchcraft period of New England, scarcely two hundred years since,
all business of whatever nature in country and in town was neglected,
and even the meeting house was allowed to fall out of repair. Nor was
this ruin of a temporary nature, as many people left the Colony and
its effects descended to those yet unborn. Both Bancroft’s History
of the United States, and Lapham’s History of the Salem Witchcraft,
paint vivid pictures of the effects following the different church
persecutions of woman. Of the Hutchinson trial, Bancroft says:
This dispute infused its spirit into everything. It interfered
with the levy of troops for the Pequot war; it influenced the
respect shown to magistrates; the distribution of town lots;
the assessment of rates and at last the continued existence of
the two parties was considered inconsistent with public peace.
Of the witchcraft period, Upham says:
It cast its shadows over a broad surface and they darkened
the condition of generations.... The fields were neglected;
fences, roads, barns, even the meeting house went into
disrepair.... A scarcity of provisions nearly amounting to
a famine continued for some time. Farms were brought under
mortgage, or sacrificed, and large numbers of people were
dispersed. The worst results were not confined to the village
but spread more or less over the country.
Massachusetts was not the only colony that treated witchcraft as a
crime. Maryland, New Jersey and Virginia possessed similar enactments.
Witchcraft was considered and treated as a capital offense by the laws
of both Pennsylvania and New York, trials taking place in both colonies
not long before the Salem tragedy. The peaceful Quaker, William Penn,
presided upon the bench in Pennsylvania at the trial of two Swedish
women accused of witchcraft. The Grand Jury acting under instruction
given in his charge, found true bills against these women, and Penn’s
skirts were only saved from the guilt of their blood by some technical
irregularity in the indictment.
Virginia, Delaware, Maryland, South Carolina, Pennsylvania, New Jersey,
Massachusetts and New York, eight of the thirteen colonies recognized
witchcraft as a capital crime. Margaret M. was indicted for witchcraft
in Pennsylvania in 1683, the law against it continuing in force until
September 23, 1794. By law of the Province of East New Jersey, 1668,
any person found to be a witch, either male or female, was to suffer
death. In that state the right of complaining against a child who
should smite or curse either parent, pertained to both father and
mother; the penalty was death. As late as 1756, Connecticut recognized
the right of parents to dispose of children in marriage. In Maryland
1666 the commission given to magistrates for Somerset county directed
them under oath to make enquiries in regard to witchcraft, sorcery, and
magic arts. In 1706 Grace Sherwood of Princess Anne County, Virginia,
was tried for witchcraft. The records of the trial show that the court
after a consideration of the charges, ordered the sheriff to take the
said Grace into his custody and to commit her body to the common jail,
there to secure her with irons or otherwise, until brought to trial.[82]
In 1692, the Grand Jury brought a bill against Mary Osgood of the
Province of Massachusetts Bay, as follows:
The powers for our sovereign lord and lady, the king and
queen, present that Mary Osgood, wife of Captain John Osgood
in the county of Essex, about eleven years ago in the town
of Andover aforesaid, wickedly, maliciously and feloniously
a covenant with the devil did make and signed the devil’s
book, and took the devil to be her God, and consented to serve
and worship him and was baptized by the devil and renounced
her former Christian baptism and promised to the devil both
body and soul, forever, and to serve him; by which diabolical
covenant by her made with the devil; she, the said Mary Osgood
is become a detestable witch against the peace of our
sovereign lord and lady, the king and queen, their crown and
dignity and the laws in that case made and provided. A true
bill.[83]
When for “witches” we read “women,” we gain fuller comprehension of
the cruelties inflicted by the church upon this portion of humanity.
Friends were encouraged to cast accusation upon their nearest and
dearest, rewards being offered for conviction. Husbands who had ceased
to care for their wives or who by reason of their sickness or for any
cause found them a burden, or for reasons of any nature desired to
break the indissoluble bonds of the church, now found an easy method.
They had but to accuse the wife of witchcraft and the marriage was
dissolved by her death at the stake. Church history is not silent upon
such instances, and mention is made of a husband who by a rope about
the neck dragged his wife before that Arch Inquisitor, Sprenger, making
accusation of witchcraft against her. No less from protestant than from
catholic pulpits were people exhorted to bring the witch, even if of
one’s own family, to justice.
In 1736, the statute against witchcraft was repealed by the English
Parliament, yet a belief in witchcraft is still largely prevalent
even among educated people. Dr. F. G. Lee the vicar of an English
church, that of All Saints in Lambeth, a few years since publicly
deprecated the abolition of its penalties in a work entitled “Glimpses
of the Twilight,” complaining that the laws against witchcraft had
been “foolishly and short-sightedly repealed.” A remarkable case
occurred in Prussia 1883 when the father of a bed-ridden girl, having
become persuaded that his daughter was bewitched by a woman who had
occasionally given her apples and pears, was advised the child would
be cured if she drank some of the blood of the supposed witch. The
woman was therefore entrapped into a place where some of the chief
men of the commune had assembled to receive her. She was seized,
one of her fingers pricked with a needle and her blood given to the
sick child. In 1885 a case of slander based upon alleged witchcraft
came before Justice Randolphs, District Court of Jersey City. The
justice listened to the evidence for several hours before recalling
the fact that there was no law upon which he could base his decision,
the latest legislation being the law of 1668 repealed 1795 (twenty
years after our Declaration of Independence), the crime was no longer
officially recognized.[84] It is curious to note the close parallel
between accusations during the witchcraft period and those against the
New Jersey suspect of 1885. It was said of her that during the night
she accomplished such feats by supernatural power as jumping from a
third story window, alighting upon a gate post as gently as a falling
feather. It was also asserted that people whom she was known to dislike
became gradually ill, wasting away until they died. The accused woman
declared it was her superior knowledge that was feared, and thus
again the middle ages are paralleled, as the witches of that period
were usually women of superior knowledge. In 1882, a Wisconsin farmer
was put under bonds to keep the peace, on account of his attempts
to assault an old lady who he averred was a witch, who injured his
cattle, and entered his house through the chimney or key hole, to his
great terror and distress. The state of Indiana about sixty years ago
possessed a neighborhood where the people believed in witchcraft. If
the butter failed to come, or the eggs to hatch, or a calf got choked,
or even if the rail fences fell down when covered with sleet and snow,
the whole trouble was attributed to the witches, who were also believed
to have the remarkable power of saddling and bridling a man and with
sharp spurs riding him over the worst roads imaginable, to his great
harm and fatigue. Even the great Empire State, as late as January 1892,
had within its borders a case of murder where an inoffensive old man
lost his life because he was believed to be a wizard; and this occurred
in the center of a prosperous farming country where money is liberally
expended for educational purposes, this being one of the rare instances
where a man fell under suspicion.
It is but a few years since the great and enlightened city of Paris
caused the arrest, under police authority, of fourteen women upon
charge of sorcery; and it is but little more than twenty years since a
woman in the state of Puebla, Mexico, was hung and burned as a witch,
because unable to reveal the whereabouts of a lost animal. She was
seized, hung to a tree, shot at and then plunged into fire until she
expired.[85] The body at first buried in the cemetery, was exhumed the
following day by order of the priest, who refused to allow the remains
of a witch to be buried in consecrated ground. The state, in person of
the mayor of the city, authorized the proceedings by taking part in
them as principal persecutor. In the same province another woman was
severely flogged as a witch, by four men, one of them her own son. Thus
now, as in its earlier ages, wherever the light of civilization has not
overcome the darkness of the church, we find woman still a sufferer
from that ignorance and superstition which under Christianity, teaches
that she brought sin into the world.
_Chapter Six_
+Wives+