I can say before my Eternal father I am innocent, & God will clear my innocency.
—Rebecca Nurse
ALSO BY
MARILYNNE K. ROACH
Gallows and Graves:
The Search to Locate the Death and Burial Sites
of the People Executed for Witchcraft in 1692 (1997)
The Salem Witch Trials:
A Day-by-Day Chronicle of a Community Under Siege (2002)
Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt
Bernard Rosenthal, editor in chief,
M. K. Roach, associate editor (2009)
children’s non-fiction
In the Days of the Salem Witchcraft Trials (1996)
also by Marilynne K. Roach
Preface
Part One
Introductions
Rebecca Nurse
Bridget Bishop
Mary English
Ann Putnam Sr.
Tituba
Mary Warren
Part Two
January 1692
February 1692
March 1 to Mid-March 1692
March 18 to 31, 1692
April 1 to 19, 1692
April 19 to 30, 1692
May 1 to 12, 1692
May 12 to 30, 1692
June 1 to 9, 1692
June 10 to 30, 1692
July 1 to 18, 1692
July 19 to 31, 1692
August 1 to 11, 1692
August 12 to 31, 1692
September 1692
October 1692
November to December 1692
January to May 1693
Part Three
Rebecca Nurse
Bridget Bishop
Mary English
Ann Putnam Sr.
Tituba
Mary Warren
Photo Section
Coda & Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
INDEX
Copyright
PREFACE
THE SALEM WITCH TRIALS consumed over twenty communities in 1692, dragged at least 162 people (and their reputations) before the law, tried 52, condemned 30, and put 20 to death—19 by hanging and 1 by pressing to induce a proper plea. At least 5 more died in prison.
In addition, at least seventy people were considered to be the afflicted victims of witchcraft—the suffering prey of evil magic—whereas three times that number risked their own lives by adding their names to petitions or speaking on behalf of the accused.
All of this stands as statistics, typical or atypical of witchcraft panics, based on records that are sometimes full, sometimes scanty. Not all the records have survived, although the Salem cases are often better documented than other cases elsewhere. Overlooked documents continue to appear—having been misfiled or transcribed in fragments from lost papers printed in obscure, rediscovered volumes.
The stories are preserved in the court documents and the contemporary commentary published soon after the trials. These have passed into American folklore as hardly believable events played out by incomprehensible characters who accuse one another (or several others) of unprovable crimes, all of whom are portrayed as symbols and stereotypes rather than real people like ourselves.
Yet the tragedy and turmoil of 1692 fed on basic human emotions and weaknesses, and the trials touched people personally as individuals—people with real stories, real lives, real suffering, and real deaths.
After each person affected had died—of old age, of illness, or by the hangman’s rope—their families preserved the stories of their loved one’s fortitude or fell silent with a willful forgetting that buried an inconvenient memory, bestowing ignorance on succeeding generations.
The relative obscurity of some of these lives challenges our ability to reconstruct them. Even the bare vital records of birth, marriage, and death are missing in many instances. Some were well remembered by their families and towns. Others would have escaped all written notice had it not been for their presence in the court records. Often the known lives of the people around them—such as the more public lives of fathers and husbands that suggest the private world of woman’s work—give greater hints into their lives.
This book follows six such individuals, all women, for in Western culture most witch suspects were women. Although in 1692 several men were arrested for suspected witchcraft as well, as a few had been earlier, unlike most recorded historical events of the time, this one centered around the region’s women—the bewitched, the accusers, the accused.
The six are Rebecca Nurse, Bridget Bishop, Mary English, Ann Putnam Sr., Tituba, and Mary Warren. Together they represent accusers and accused or both in one; married and single; rich, poor, and middling; free and slave; hopeful and desperate. The Introductions chapter presents them chronologically by (approximate) age, with the backstory of their lives up to the point when the witch scare began. Then their stories are woven throughout the events of that tragic year, with their individual experiences comprising the focus of the narrative.
All of this is based on fact, even the fictionalized sections recreating the characters’ thoughts, and these are clearly marked by italicized text. Spelling is somewhat standardized in these fictionalized passages but kept close to the original in the body of the text. For example, “ye” becomes “the” (as it was pronounced), and “yt” becomes “that.”
Old-style dates that indicate the year beginning in March, written 1691/92 for example, are treated as new style, with the year beginning in January of 1692.
I have made every effort to the best of my ability to obtain proper permissions and credits for the material presented here as noted in the endnotes, bibliography, and captions. If anything has been omitted, it will be corrected in future editions.
All lives are stories, and history is made of stories.
PART ONE
Introductions
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Rebecca Nurse
Rebecca, holding the basket while her mother contemplates the fishmonger’s display, listens, despite herself, to the market women’s gossip.
“Black Shuck?” one says to a young sailor from somewhere else. “Oh, aye, you’d best be careful of that one. He roams the long sands, and those who meet the creature and live to tell the tale—and not all do, mind—commonly die within the year.”
Rebecca, like everyone else in Great Yarmouth, has heard the tale of the spectral hound that haunts the barrier beach between the town and the waves. Such fearsome spirits prowl Britain’s lonely places, the dark roads where travelers hear a quiet footfall behind them, moving when they move, stopping when they stop. Some brave enough to turn and face it report blazing red eyes. In other parts folk call them Bargest or Boggart, Padfoot or Pooka, and wonder if they are really devils in the shape of dogs.
A second woman nods in agreement, and the sailor looks alarmed.
“The creature doesn’t always stay just on the beach,” says the oldest of the fishwives. “When I was a girl there was a terrible day one summer. Storms rolled in with wind and tempests and lightning. And even though it was a Sabbath, Black Shuck rampaged through the countryside. Over the border in Sussex he burst into the church at Blythburg—during a service!—rushed up the nave between the people, and wrung the necks of two unfortunates as they kneeled at prayer. Then he collapsed the church tower right through the roof. But that wasn’t enough for the fiend. Within the hour he broke through the doors of the church at Bengay. And to this day both churches have the devil’s fingerprints scorched into the wood of their north doors. Scorched!”
The sailor tries not to look frightened as the old women nod sagely. Locals know enough to fear Black Shuck.
Rebecca’s mother drops a haddock into t
he basket and bids her with mild rebuke to come along now. It is impossible not to overhear—fishwives have loud voices. Rebecca follows, shivering a little at the thought of spectral hounds. Fortunately, she has never encountered Shuck in all her fifteen years, and soon her family will be gone from Yarmouth. They are moving to New England, and things are different there.
____________________
THE GREAT YARMOUTH of Rebecca’s childhood was a long, narrow, medieval city crowded between its ancient walls and the River Yare. The mass of small brick and stone houses shouldered each other along a few streets that followed the curve of the river. The Rows, a multitude of alleys, connected these streets like teeth on a comb, fanning downslope westward so rain could wash household swill and cess to the Yare and outgoing tide on the one hand and allow easterly breezes to shift the air between the cramped Rows on the other. Passages were only five to three feet across (or less), so carts ran on two tandem wheels, and law required house doors to open inward to protect passersby.
More space opened up along the Quay and in the Market Place and even more around the parish Church of Saint Nicholas. Six hundred years old and larger than many cathedrals, it stood anchored on wooden piles sunk into the sandy earth, its stones built and rebuilt around its tower, its art and ornament periodically repaired, replaced, or swept away. Over three centuries before, a furious sea had broken over the town’s protective dunes, surging over the walls and throughout the streets, four feet deep within the church itself. Human whims made their mark as well, when newer styles replaced old adornments on a caprice of fashion, disregarding the past enough to use old stone coffins in a staircase. In the middle of the previous century much of the art was removed or destroyed, considered too frivolous for a house of God, idolatrous distractions from true religion. When William Towne, a gardener, married Joanna Blessing here on April 25, 1620, the light of the North Sea fell through clear windows unencumbered by color, and only a pile of bright, shattered glass remained forgotten under a stair. And it was here that their firstborn was baptized Rebecca on February 21, 1621, in the ancient octagonal font of Purbeck marble—a limestone bearing ghostly fossils of fish and shells, antediluvian wonders.
Times were hard as Rebecca grew—learned to walk, learned to help with household tasks, learned to care for younger siblings as they were born, learned to read and attend to matters of her soul. Three years of heavy rains began the year of her birth, ruining harvest after harvest until 1623, when her short-lived brother John was born. By then, overseers of the poor could hardly help the aged and infirm of their parishes; poor families took to sheep stealing, and some folk ate dog. Crops improved eventually, but in 1625, when sister Susanna was born—and soon died—plague oppressed the region. Once that ended, harvests declined again beginning in 1628, when brother Edmund was born—and lived.
East Anglia’s textile production—a cottage industry of independent spinners and weavers—languished as European wars disrupted old markets for the woolens. Merchants’ storehouses filled with unsold cloth, and with no work to be had, weavers’ families lapsed into malnutrition. Rising land prices squeezed small farmers off their holdings, and larger landowners found themselves caught between the government’s mounting demands for taxes and increasingly desperate tenants who were unable to pay rent.
The price of grain doubled in the winter after Edmund’s birth. Now desperate spinners sold their tools for food. During this three-year famine a mob in Colchester attacked a wagon transporting grain. In Yarmouth itself a merchant tried to ship out a load of chicken feed only to have a mob attack the boatmen and seize the once-despised buckwheat. In Malden a woman urged a band of men to break into a warehouse in broad daylight. “Come, my brave lads,” she cried. “I will be your leader, and we will not starve.” And they did not starve—for all were caught, tried for theft, and hanged.
Crops improved somewhat after 1632, when brother Jacob was born, but the bishops began to clamp down on Nonconformists like the Townes.
In the seventeenth century religion was as much a matter of national identity as it was of personal conviction—perhaps more so. Loyal subjects of most countries were expected to follow the forms of worship their monarchs approved, displaying solidarity as well as faith (or at least lip service). Few considered it possible that a nation could separate church and state without weakening itself. (Although the Netherlands had an official church, it allowed other well-behaved faiths.) But over a century earlier Henry VIII of England had separated from Rome for dynastic reasons. Without a divorce from his first wife, he could not hope to sire a legal male heir, and without one ready to assume the throne upon Henry’s death, the nation risked civil strife from within and invasion from without. But Henry’s national Church of England did not change enough in its ideals and customs to match the hopes of reform that many of his subjects longed for. This was especially so in East Anglia, the hump of land containing Norfolk (where Great Yarmouth was located), Suffolk, and Essex counties opposite the Netherlands. Here the literacy rate (among men at least) was higher than elsewhere in the realm, and here was the Puritan hotbed of Cambridge University. Here folk hoped to improve the new church further—to purify it from extraneous distractions and concentrate on the word of God. Their critics called them Puritans for that, and East Anglia was full of them.
The Townes were among them, gathering every Sabbath in Saint Nicholas to hear sermons from mostly sympathetic preachers. Rebecca watched and listened from the congregation as the minister spoke from the pulpit in the south transept—eight-sided like the baptismal font (an “octagonal tub,” said detractors). Gilt letters shone under its book rest: “Feare God, Honour the Kynge 1 Pet 2.” People sometimes wondered which of these the government considered more important.
The bishop of London, who oversaw and managed the region, eventually clamped down on just what was being said—or not said—in his pulpits, and people began to think of leaving. The economy was bad enough, and famine was a reality. But now their spiritual lives were also under assault. The Book of Sports was only one insulting example. In Lancashire in 1618, to solve the controversy between Puritans and gentry (most of whom were definitely not Puritans) over what activity was suitable for a Sabbath, King James I issued a “Declaration of Sports,” a definition of allowable Sunday pastimes. He ordered it be read from every pulpit.
The Declaration did have the decency to prohibit bear baiting, “interludes” (theater was going too far), and bowling, which was “in the meane sort of people by law prohibited” anyway. But lawful activities, according to the king, included dancing, archery, leaping and vaulting, plus seasonal May Games, Witsun Ales, and Morris dances, even Maypoles as long as these were conducted “in due and convenient time without impediment or neglect of divine service.”
Even if none of this interrupted services, it surely interrupted the peace of the Sabbath and personal contemplation of the Scriptures. The Sabbath, to the reformers, was intended for the Lord, not for idle play or heathen crudities like Maypoles. The resulting outcry was severe enough that the king withdrew the proclamation.
Then, in 1633, James’s son and successor, Charles, reintroduced the order everywhere in the realm and punished clergy who, in conscience, would not proclaim the Book of Sports (as its detractors called it) to their congregations and, thus, be a party to it. These men frequently digressed from approved procedure by omitting much of the church’s ceremonies; elaborate vestments were another sore point. Largely Puritan parishes then found that conforming clergy were replacing their ministers. Ministers who were thus silenced—forbidden a voice from their former pulpits—delivered their sermons in other venues as lectures, with loyal listeners traveling considerable distances to hear them. When they were further threatened with arrest, jail terms, and fines, some went into hiding or fled oversea to the Netherlands.
The desperate economy combined with religious convictions impelled many in East Anglia to risk emigration. Land, they knew, was available in far-flung co
lonies among the savages of Northern Ireland and the New World. Some of those places, like Virginia, were dominated by leaders supportive of the bishops in the Church of England; others had been established by Puritans who sought to put as much distance as possible between the bishops and themselves. New England seemed a likely spot, and many Great Yarmouth folk were going there—whole families, not just young men seeking their fortunes. Removal required an investment: ship passage, supplies for the voyage over, and food to last until a farm or business could be made productive. But at least the place was no longer entirely a wilderness; others had already settled several towns and raised a few harvests.
Sister Mary was baptized in August 1634, and the family left Yarmouth for good, all except Edmund, who was still indentured to his shoemaker master. He could join the rest once he was free.
The year 1635 for their removal is approximate: after Mary’s August 1634 christening, as recorded in Saint Nicholas’s records, probably before September 1635, when the authorities cited as “Separatists, William Towne and Joanna his wife” for neglecting communion at St. Nicholas, and before the distribution of lots in Salem’s Northfields that occurred before that town’s records began in 1635. Northfields was the part of Salem across the North River from the peninsula where the town center was. William Towne’s saltwater farm lay on the south shore of the Endicott River, where it met the Williston River. Their combined streams flowed south, met the North River, then rounded the peninsula of Salem town into Massachusetts Bay.
Edmund arrived in Salem two years later when his master, Henry Skerry, immigrated with his family and Edmund. (Skerry’s wife, Elizabeth, brought old-country traditions with her for, as a great, great granddaughter related in 1802, she “always swept her hearth before she went to bed for the Fairies.”) In addition, Rebecca’s widowed aunt Alice Fermage (one of her mother’s two older sisters) was also in Salem by 1638, along with two sons and four daughters. The eldest Blessing sister, Margaret, had died shortly before the Townes emigrated, but her widowed husband, Robert Buffum, and his new wife and her daughter from a first marriage soon immigrated and settled in Salem.
Six Women of Salem Page 1
