Joanna bore two more children in New England, Sarah and Joseph, but when is uncertain. Both were baptized in 1648, but that ceremony did not necessarily happen as soon after a baby’s birth as it would in England. There, every loyal subject was expected to be a member of the Church of England and, therefore, eligible—if not required—to partake of the sacraments. New England churches, however, were each independent, and only full members were eligible for the sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper (the only two that Puritans recognized). What constituted a proper membership, however, became a bone of contention in the early days of Massachusetts. Influenced largely by the beliefs of the banished Ann Hutchinson and her followers, membership indicated a person who was considered saved, someone who, after much soul searching, felt (relatively) sure they were not damned.
Once applied, examined, and accepted, fully communing members could be baptized (if they had not been already) and have their children baptized.
While political and religious tensions between Royalist and Puritan factions worsened in England, leading to a civil war that the Puritans would win, Rebecca Towne married Francis Nurse in Salem on August 24, 1644. The earliest record of her future husband in Salem is a March 1, 1640 court case in which “Francis Nurse a youth” (he was about nineteen) was presented “for stealing of victuals & suspicion of breaking [into] a house.” A note in the published record says that this entry was “crossed slightly,” so perhaps Francis was exonerated. Some deeds describe Francis as a “tray maker.” (Perhaps he was from Lincolnshire, where “tray” could mean a woven wattle hurdle—sections of temporary fencing used to pen sheep or make a gate, a handy skill for farmers.)
Presumably Francis rented his acres at first, while Rebecca began the constant work of keeping a house in order and bearing children about every other year, beginning in 1645, with son John. In 1648, a year between the births of daughter Rebecca and son Samuel, one Margaret Jones of Charlestown, a folk healer who frightened some of her patients, was tried for witchcraft and hanged in Boston.
Daughter Sarah was born around 1651, the year Rebecca’s father, William Towne, moved the family to Topsfield—the year a Springfield couple, Hugh and Mary Parsons, were tried for witchcraft. Instead, the wife, a disturbed woman, was found guilty of infanticide, whereas the magistrates could not agree on the guilt of her moody husband, so he, unlike his wife, did not hang. In the years following, another woman—Ann Hibbins of Boston, a forceful widow whose arguments with difficult building contractors escalated into witchcraft charges—was found guilty of witchcraft and hanged in 1656 despite her kinship with Governor Richard Bellingham.
In the same decade the Society of Friends—Quakers, to their detractors, and even more nonconforming than other Nonconformists—began preaching views that the Massachusetts government found threatening: that because the non-Friends had religion all wrong and were going to Hell, none of their opinions counted. The legislature instituted draconian laws against the Quakers, who only protested more, even at the risk of their lives. One of Rebecca’s female relatives, a distant Buxton cousin by marriage, demonstrated repeatedly and publicly—which was shocking enough in women—even appearing naked in the street to symbolize a point that the scandal of her nudity thoroughly obscured.
Francis once again had to enter a slander suit in 1651, this time against Jonathan and Eunice Porter. Once again the reason was not recorded, but Eunice Porter “made acknowledgement which the court accepted.” Two years later Francis was “discharged from training”—excused, that is, from mustering with the local militia, the community’s only defense. As he was still a young man of about thirty-three, perhaps he had been injured. Perhaps Rebecca had also been unwell. Later she would refer to the “difficult Exigences that hath Befallen me In the Times of my Travells” and the “fits that shee formerly use to have.”
After an eight-year gap, around 1659, Rebecca gave birth to her next recorded child, Mary, followed by Francis Jr. in 1661. In England, meanwhile, the Puritan Commonwealth ended in 1660 with the restoration of the monarchy. Charles II’s government now sided with the New England Quakers, requiring Massachusetts to tolerate sects other than orthodox Congregational only—although all Nonconformists were persecuted in England itself. Rebecca bore her daughter Elizabeth in 1665, the year of England’s Great Plague, which killed 15 percent of London’s population and compelled the king to evacuate the government to Oxford. Rebecca had her last child, Benjamin, in 1666, the year that marked London’s Great Fire, which burned for five days over 436 acres, leveling eighty-seven churches and destroying 13,200 houses. Then, an attack up the Thames from the Dutch fleet compounded these disasters.
Meanwhile, Rebecca’s seventy-five-year-old mother, Joanna Towne, twice spoke up publicly in a 1670 suit and countersuit that grew from Topfield’s division over the suitability of its minister. Reverend Thomas Gilbert, despite claims from the Perkins family, had not been drunk one volatile Sabbath, she deposed in May. She had sat next to him at dinner and thought him “very temperate.” If he acted oddly, then it was due to “his distemper” (a disorienting physical ailment that his supporters mentioned) but not from drinking “as some so uncharitably surmise against him.” She repeated this in the November countersuit and added that he did not guzzle from the cup passed round the table but instead passed it to her, saying that “I needed it more than he, being older.” Then when he did get a turn, there were only two or three spoonfuls of wine left in the cup. “He was moderate both in eating and drinking, and he knew what he said and did, and this I can safely testify upon oath.”
Joanna’s willingness to speak out may have caused lingering resentment, especially among Reverend Gilbert’s critics. Her support of a man whom they considered wholly unsuitable to lead a church may have fueled the circulating gossip that hinted she may have been a witch. Gilbert, after all, had been in court repeatedly over slander suits. He allowed his personal resentment to intrude into his sermons (as when he remarked that “the necks of all who opposed the ministers of the Gospel should be broken”). More alarming were comments like “kings are asses and the scum of the earth,” which could have serious consequences for all of Massachusetts if they ever reached London.
Unlike her Buxton kin, and after much soul searching and with the good report of her neighbors and fellow congregants, Rebecca joined the Salem Church in 1672, the year the General Court finally granted her rural neighborhood of Salem Village permission to begin to establish its own parish and hold religious services closer to home. William Towne, Rebecca’s aged father, died in the following year.
In 1674 Elizabeth Clungen, a desperate woman who had been living in the neighborhood, left her four-year-old child at the Nurse household, then, according to the county records, “went away out of the jurisdiction privately.” Elizabeth, whose own identity is obscure, had been married to one Thomas Clungen, who had earlier lived in Ipswich. She and Thomas were in Salem when their daughter, also named Elizabeth, was born in August 1670. Perhaps Thomas soon died. By the time her daughter was four, Elizabeth left a quantity of household furnishings stored at Goodman Richard Sibley’s and entrusted the child to the Nurses—or, rather, to Rebecca. After Elizabeth did not return, Francis appeared before the authorities and “in charity took the child into his care and custody.” The Essex County court ordered the Clungen property inventoried—iron cookware, bedding, a chest, and a silk waistcoat among other items—and granted a chair, a lamp, and a few other items to Sibley as payment for “house room, room & trouble about the goods.” Francis paid the Clungen’s debts with some of the other items and retained the rest “for the use of the child.” Unfortunately, what became of mother or child is unclear. Such were often the fates of the impoverished and dispossessed.
Having been relieved of militia duty and having served a term as constable, Francis occasionally sat on grand juries and trial juries in Essex County’s Quarterly Courts, gave evidence in land cases, and helped inventory the estates of deceased nei
ghbors. In 1676 he was part of a coroner’s jury that considered the alarming death of Jacob Goodall, a slow-witted man allegedly beaten to death by Giles Corey. (The court decided that Corey was not the sole means of the man’s demise but set him a heavy fine nonetheless. This essentially favorable ruling made some folk conclude that Corey had bought his way out of a murder charge and its accompanying noose. Goodall’s death and the “thwarted” justice would continue to be a topic of gossip.) In 1677 Francis was named guardian of the orphaned teenager Samuel Southwick, whose grandparents, Lawrence and Cassandra Southwick, had been exiled from Massachusetts years earlier as convicted Quakers.
While all this went on, worsening relations between the settlers and the native peoples erupted in 1675 into the conflict known as King Philip’s War. Both sides suffered great losses, but the Indians lost nearly everything, including self-rule.
Once that disaster subsided locally—for skirmishes continued to the Eastward on the Maine and New Hampshire frontier—Francis made a down payment on a three hundred–acre farm to Reverend James Allen on April 29, 1678. (Francis had evidently rented that land or another farm nearby because the coroner’s jury he had served on was made up of men from the same neighborhood.) Allen lived in Boston and had acquired the farm through marriage to the widow Elizabeth Endicott, whose first husband, John Endicott, had inherited the farm from his father, Governor John Endicott. The governor had once owned the whole peninsula between the Crane and Cow House Rivers with his Orchard Farm to the east and Governor’s Plain to the west, where Francis and Rebecca settled. Endicott heirs still owned most of Orchard Farm, but lawsuits flared disputing the widow’s right to let the land pass out of the family when there were no Endicott heirs from her first marriage. However, Nurse was not part of that legal tussle, and the courts eventually recognized Allen’s right to the land. (Though conflicting boundary surveys did lead to disputes between Francis and Zerubabel Endicott, who cut wood on the disputed land. Francis twice sued him for trespass and twice lost.)
The terms of purchase were somewhat unusual in that the full price of £400 was not due for twenty-one years (and both Francis and Rebecca were already in their late fifties). Within that time Nurse would pay rent of £7 a year for the first dozen years and £10 yearly thereafter. He would be credited for improvements made to the farm and reimbursed, if he did not complete the transaction, for any improvements over the value of £150. Best of all, any proportion of the principal paid before the twenty-one-year deadline would count as the purchase of an equal proportion of the land, so that if he could not pay the whole £400, he would not lose the entire farm.
The two small rivers that bordered the Endicott lands narrowed inland into creeks as they reached the Nurse property, forming a peninsula called Birchwood. To the north was the Conamabsqnooncant, which the settlers called Duck or Crane River. To the south flowed the Soewamapenessett, called the Cow-House or Endicott River (Endicott’s cow barn was near its shore), and it bordered William Towne’s former farm. The road from Salem to Ipswich crossed these two salty streams near the Nurse property by Rum Bridge (at Philips’s tavern) to the south and Hadlock’s Bridge (named for the neighboring farmer) to the north.
Francis built a house here on a gentle rise above the fields and meadows. It probably had one room downstairs and one room above and faced south, with its back to the winter winds. (Another house stands there now, with some of its timbers recycled from an older building.)
In 1680 Elizabeth Morse of Newbury, an elderly woman formerly beset by poltergeists, was convicted of witchcraft, but because the branches of government could not agree on the degree of her guilt, she was spared from hanging and returned home to a form of house arrest instead.
Rebecca’s mother, Joanna, died in 1682 after ten years of widowhood, and the Towne estate was divided among her children: land to the three sons, household goods to the three daughters. “Francis Nurs with the consent of Rebeka” made his mark on the agreement. Her two sisters made their own marks: “Mary Esty, formerly Mary Towne” and “Sarah Bridges.” (This youngest sister would soon be widowed and marry a second time to Peter Cloyce.)
Shortly after this time Francis may have faced some manner of financial pinch, for he mortgaged the farm back to Reverend Allen in 1684, a situation apparently soon remedied. Not so quickly resolved, however, was the loss of the Massachusetts Charter that year. England revoked all charters in its realm, then restored them as each colony, business, and any other organization proved its loyalty to the crown. Massachusetts, however, resisted, so England combined all the colonies from Maine to West Jersey into one province, and in 1686 sent the royally appointed Governor Sir Edmund Andros to rule with the help of a regiment of redcoats.
In 1688 Goodwife Glover of Boston was hanged as a witch (under Andros’s government).When news arrived the next spring that the Glorious Revolution in England had overthrown King James II and placed William and Mary on the throne, Boston rebelled, jailed Andros, and shipped him back to England. Unfortunately, his absence encouraged more frontier attacks from French and Indian forces.
Then, in the fall of 1689, someone’s pigs dug up Rebecca’s garden. This exasperated her enough that she, with her youngest son, marched over to Benjamin Holton’s house and exchanged heated words about wandering swine and the damage they caused. Holton fell ill and died not long afterward, a circumstance that would later cause considerable trouble.
At the beginning of 1690 the aging Francis divided some of his fields into long, narrow strips of and conveyed them to his son Samuel Nurse and to his sons-in-law Thomas Preston and John Tarbell, adding to the land he had already given them. The youngest son, Benjamin, and his wife were living at the homestead and working his father’s farm. Then, in June 1691, Benjamin was called to militia duty Eastward (Maine and New Hampshire). Rather than risk his son’s life, or lose his labor, Francis hired a neighbor to take his place, an arrangement that was legal at the time. John Hadlock had served his own term six months earlier but accepted the job in return for the military pay plus two shillings six pence a week from the Nurse family and the loan of a gun. Hadlock returned on leave the following December to collect twenty shillings from Francis, who had arranged payment through his friends Jonathan Walcott and Daniel Andrews.
Thus began 1692 for the Nurse family.
Benjamin was safe at home with his wife and their new baby. Rebecca was by now rather hard of hearing and not feeling her best. Nonetheless, she had her faith and her family around her, and what could be better than that?
Bridget Bishop
Bridget stands in the marketplace, glaring over the gag that muffles her mouth as she watches the people watching her.
Arms folded before her, she stares down the gawkers, those who gaze directly and smirk to see her there, the brats who shout insults, the adults who look shocked to read the caption pinned on the front of her cap, those who whisper to each other and glance away as if fearful of her glance.
With his black staff of office to show he is on duty, a constable stands by her to make sure that she does not leave before her time is up and that onlookers remain orderly. Now and then he gossips with his friends among the passersby, making nervous jests to keep his confidence, edgy about having to remain so close to such as she, as some folk think of her as more than merely a scold. Thus the constable is tethered here as well by her sentence and for the same amount of allotted time. This gives Bridget a modest amount of satisfaction.
She thinks she sees her daughter in the crowd, keeping to the edges and looking fearful. Her child’s concern touches her, but she shouldn’t have to see her mother mortified like this. Bridget catches the child’s eye and shakes her head, motioning the girl to leave, to go home, which she does, with regret and relief competing in her face.
Bridget has been found guilty of fighting with her husband, of shouting terrible insults at him.
And so she had.
And so had he—fought and insulted her in front of their little gir
l, and not for the first time. The county court had found him guilty as well, but he was not here to be stared at and made a mockery. No, he was one of the onlookers. His older daughter—Bridget’s stepdaughter—had paid her father’s fine to spare him this hour of humiliation.
No one offered to spare Bridget.
Well, he is an old rogue and as bad as a devil to be married to, she thinks as the interminable minutes unfold. The facts, damning as they might be, are no less true because Bridget shouted them in the presence of others. If she regrets anything, it is getting into this situation, having to endure the court’s public punishment.
Standing there, she is certain of one thing: fighting back she does not regret, nor landing a clout on his scowling face that resulted in such a satisfying smack!
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Bridget’s earliest record concerns her marriage to Samuel Wasselbe on April 13, 1660, at St. Mary-in-the-Marsh in Norwich, Norfolk County, England. Just what Goodman Wasselbe did and to whom he may have been related is another unanswered question. (The variously spelled Aslebee family of Andover would have two of their number accused of witchcraft in 1692—Rebecca (Aslebee) Johnson and Sarah (Aslebee) Cole—but presently there is no definite connection known between the families.) Samuel and Bridget’s son Benjamin was baptized in the same church on October 6, 1663. As this is the only record, presumably Benjamin died young.
Sometime between spring of the next year and the following winter Samuel himself died. Their daughter Mary was born in Boston, Massachusetts Bay, on January 10, 1665. The record there calls her a daughter of “Samuel dec[eased] & Bridget Wasselbee late of Norwich in England.” Mary is not mentioned again and, like her brother, apparently died in infancy.
Six Women of Salem Page 2
