Woman, Church & State

The records of this remarkable trial were preserved to the world by a gentleman who privately took a report for his own use, which was published in pamphlet form a number of years afterwards. This extremely rare book is not to be found even in the Congressional Library at Washington, but the Supreme Court Library owns a copy from which this report is taken:

Trial March 10, 1664 by Sir Matthew Hale, Knight, Lord Chief Baron of his Majesty’s Court of Exchequer held before a judge who for his integrity, learning and wisdom hardly any age before or since could parallel; he not only took a great deal of pains and spent much time in this trial himself, but had the assistance and opinion of several other very eminent and learned persons; so that this was the most perfect narrative of anything of this nature hitherto extant.

The persons tried were Ann Durant, or Drury, Susan Chandler, Elizabeth Pacy. The celebrated Dr. Brown of Norwich who had written a work against witchcraft, was present and after hearing the evidence expressed himself as clearly of the opinion the persons were bewitched, and said in Denmark lately there had been a great discovery of witches who used the same way of afflicting persons by the agency of pins. This trial took place in the sixteenth year of Charles II. The witnesses were two children of eleven and nine years who fell into fits, vomiting pins and nails. Sargeant Keeling asserted deception on part of the witnesses. The Court appointed Lord Cornwallis, Sir Edmund Bacon and Sargeant Keeling as committee to examine the girl alone, when they became fully satisfied of her imposture but without convincing the learned judge who contrary to all justice and law did not sum up the evidence, but gave the great weight of his opinion in favor of their guilt saying: “That there are such creatures as witches, I have not doubt at all. For First, Scripture has offered so much. Second, the wisdom of all nations has propounded laws against such persons, which is an argument of their confidence of such a crime. And such has been the judgment of this kingdom as appears by that Act of Parliament which hath provided punishments proportionate to the guilt of this offense, and desired them strictly to observe the evidence; and desired the great God of Heaven to direct their hearts in the weighty things they had so heard. For to condemn the innocent and to let the guilty go free, were both an abomination to the Lord. Within half an hour the jury returned a verdict of guilty on thirteen counts. The judge and all the court were fully satisfied with the verdict and therefore gave judgment against the witches that they should be hanged.

The evidence was of the most paltry character; as when out of door a little thing like a bee flew upon the witness face, putting a ten penny nail with a broad head into her mouth. Lath nails and pins said to have been vomited by the children were produced in court. When arraigned the accused pleaded not guilty nor did they ever change this plea. Great pressure was upon them to induce confession, but they could not be prevailed upon to thus criminate themselves and were executed the seventeenth of March, just one week after trial, confessing nothing.

This trial is the more remarkable that confessions usually deemed the best of evidence, were not obtained, these poor illiterate, persecuted women braving all the learning of the great judge and power of the kingdom in maintaining to the last the assertion of their innocence. The minutes of this trial were taken by a gentleman in attendance upon the court and were not published until 1716 when the record fell into the hands of a person who saw its value “so that,” he says, “being the most complete minutes of anything of this nature hitherto extant, made me unwilling to deprive the world of it; which is the sole motive that induced me to publish it.”

Not alone the clergy and the legal fraternity wrought in unison, but the medical as well, gave the weight of their authority in favor of witchcraft; and many persons needing the wisest medical appliance for their relief from disease were executed as witches. Half-witted and insane persons met with the same persecution as old women. It was an era of the strong against the weak, the powerful against the helpless. Even Sir Thomas Browne, himself a physician, regarded the fainting fits to which one of the accused women had long been subject as fuller evidence of her guilt. In his character of medical examiner he asserted that the devil had taken opportunity of her natural fits, to operate with her malice.

An almost equally notable trial as that of Bury St. Edmunds before Sir Matthew Hale, was known as the Sommers Trial, or that of the “Lancashire Witches,” in 1612. Among the accused were two extremely aged women decrepit and nearly blind, tottering into second childhood, incapable of understanding whereof they were accused, or the evidence against them which, as in the case argued before Sir Matthew Hale, was of the most worthless character. One needs but refer to the records in order to learn the extreme age, ignorance and many infirmities of these women. But as was the case in Scotland, these weaknesses were used as evidences of guilt. The feeble mental and physical condition of “the Lancashire witches,” their great age and failing power were used as evidence for their condemnation. From published accounts of this trial, we learn that:

This Annie Whittle, alias Chattox, was a very old withered and decrepit creature, her sight almost gone, a dangerous witch of very long continuance, her lips ever chattering and walking (talking)? but no one knew what. She was next in order to that wicked, fierce bird of mischief, old Demdike.

This poor old creature “confessed” that Robert Nutter had offered insult to her married daughter; and the court decreed this was a fair proof of her having bewitched him to his death. No condemnation of the man who had thus insulted her daughter, but death for the aged mother who had resented this insult. Designated as “Old Demdike, a fierce bird of mischief” this woman of four score years of age, had not only brought up a large family of her own, but her grand children had fallen to her care. She had lived a blameless life of over eighty years, much of it devoted to the care of children and children’s children. But when decrepit and almost blind she fell under suspicion of a crime held by Church and State as of the most baleful character, her blameless and industrious life proved of no avail against this accusation. She seems to have originally been a woman of great force of character and executive ability, but frightened at an accusation she could not understand and overpowered by all the dread majesty of the law into whose merciless power she had fallen, she “confessed” to communion with a demon spirit which appeared to her in the form of a brown dog.³⁹⁸ From a work entitled The Sommers Trials, the form of indictment is learned.³⁹⁹

INDICTMENT

This Annie Whittle, alias Chattox, of the Forest of Pendle, in 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.⁴⁰⁰ 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 reward⁴⁰¹ 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.⁴⁰²

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.⁴⁰³ 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.⁴⁰⁴ 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.⁴⁰⁵

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.⁴⁰⁶

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.⁴⁰⁷ 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.⁴⁰⁸ 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.