The Penguin Book of Witches

by Katherine Howe

  6.For either “licorice” (sometimes spelled “liquorice”) or “liquors,” though precise determination is difficult to make.

  7.Margaret Jones makes a mistake that will appear often in North American witchcraft trials, in that she makes a remark that could be construed in a neutral way—that is, that her patient shouldn’t rely on anyone else because her medicine or care is the best—but which is later construed as a threat or prediction. The error lies in Margaret’s claim to authority and seeming dismissal of the services that might be offered by her rivals. Margaret’s accusers seem to share Perkins’s uneasy relationship with authoritative speech and the appearance or claim of skill, particularly when coming from someone who, like Margaret Jones, does not occupy a position of power and respect within her community.

  8.Margaret Jones knows secrets. Margaret Jones, in effect, knows too much. Her knowledge is unnatural, and Perkins would point to her knowledge as a sign of her seeking power and authority that God does not want her to have.

  9.Margaret Jones is found to have a mysterious “teat” in her “secret parts,” which more than one historian has suggested was likely the clitoris. See Elizabeth Reis, “The Devil, the Body, and the Feminine Soul in Puritan New England,” The Journal of American History 82:1 (June 1995): 15–36.

  10.To “use means” is another way of saying that she used technique, or witchcraft, that is, that Margaret Jones exercised some specific skill in the task of curing the unnamed woman in Winthrop’s account.

  11.Images of Hale’s original text may be viewed via the University of Virginia’s online Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive and Transcription Project. http://salem.lib.virginia.edu/archives/ModestEnquiry/images.01/source/17.html.

  12.Hall, Witch-hunting in Seventeenth-Century New England, 21.

  13.Hale is suggesting that Margaret Jones was found out as a witch through the intervention of folk magic, namely, the idea that a bewitched object, if burned, would either punish or summon the witch responsible, because of the correspondence established between the witch’s body and the bewitched object. In addition to having a personality that would make her an attractive prospect as a witch—her “rayling,” which carried on right until her death, according to Winthrop—Jones also might have been an economically marginal figure, as evidenced by Hale’s account of her past as a thief. Her gender, comportment, and economic status set Margaret Jones up as a fairly archetypal example, but even with witchcraft serving as a proxy for those other pressing issues, the presence of cunning-folk-informed magical practice remains paramount. Margaret Jones was undone by a charm.

  RALPH AND MARY HALL, SETAUKET, NEW YORK, 1665

  1.While Setauket is on Long Island and today belongs to New York, when Ralph and Mary Hall were tried the settlement was part of Connecticut. See Demos, Entertaining Satan, 409.

  2.Judith Richardson, Possessions: The History and Uses of Haunting in the Hudson Valley (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 18–19.

  3.Transcription from unbound manuscript, handwritten by Judge Gabriel Furman, Witchcraft Collection, unbound manuscripts, #4620. Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library.

  4.East Setauket, on the northern shore of Long Island.

  5.This account echoes the language used by William Perkins, who characterizes witchcraft as an art. The tricky distinction with felony witchcraft is that it is both a crime of method and a crime of outcome. In this instance, Ralph and Mary Hall are accused of causing the death of their neighbor George Wood. But they are not accused of murder—they are accused of using “wicked and detestable arts” to bring about his death.

  6.“Live voice,” that is, in person.

  7.Ralph and Mary Hall are fairly typical of North American accused witches if we consider the nature of their crimes, which specifically involve the harming of children and the negative impact on the health of a neighbor. Ralph Hall is the earliest example of a male witch that I have been able to find in colonial North America. Ralph’s gender makes him somewhat special, as women vastly outweighed men both in the abstracted conception of who likely witches were, and in the actual historical record. Ralph Hall, however, was typical of male accused witches in that he was associated with—married to—a woman who was also accused. Notably, while the court agrees that Mary’s actions are worthy of suspicion, they find that evidence against Ralph is insufficient for charging him. Instead, he is instructed to guarantee the appearance of his wife.

  8.Magnalia Christi Americana: the Ecclesiastical History of New England, published by Cotton Mather in London in 1702. This text represented Mather’s attempt to distance himself from some of what had happened at Salem and addresses the central theological problem of that trial, namely whether the Devil could assume the shape of an innocent person. Initially Mather had supposed that the Devil could assume the shape of anyone, innocent or guilty, in contrast to the belief of his father, Increase Mather. However, as the tide of public opinion about Salem turned in the decade immediately following the trial, Cotton Mather backed away from his earlier assertions.

  9.The OED edition of 1916 defines “venefick” as “Practicing, or dealing in, poisoning; acting by poison; having poisonous effects,” though the usage is rare enough that this passage quoted from the Magnalia is one of only three quoted examples. The OED holds the noun form of the word to be “One who practices poisoning as a secret art; a sorcerer or sorceress; a wizard or witch.”

  EUNICE COLE, HAMPTON, MASSACHUSETTS, LATER NEW HAMPSHIRE, 1647–1680

  1.Demos, Entertaining Satan, 171.

  2.Transcribed from Records of the Quarterly Courts of Essex County, Massachusetts State Archives, Document 1-93–1.

  3.Transcribed from Massachusetts Archives Collection, Massachusetts State Archives, Document 135: 2, 2.

  4.True copy by me.

  5.A transcription of these documents has previously been published by David Hall, though a few words were left out. Hall does not identify Thomas Mouton’s wife’s first name—Sobriety—though it is added in superscript in the original document. See Hall, Witch-hunting in Seventeenth-Century New England, 215.

  6.At this point in Eunice Cole’s career she has an established reputation as someone who is difficult to deal with. She also, as evidenced by her presentment for biting a constable, will express her anger in a physical way. But the Boultons are starting to suspect that Eunice’s attitude might be only part of the problem. At this juncture they stop short of suggesting that she was able to overhear their discussion using magical means, though the implication is there.

  7.Transcribed from Massachusetts Archives Collection, Massachusetts State Archives, Document 135: 3, 3.

  8.David Hall attributes this testimony to Edward Rawson, but the original text suggests otherwise.

  9.A witch’s teat could show up anywhere, as in this case, under the left breast of an aging woman. Goody Cole could have been suffering from skin tags. Less important than identifying the skin eruptions from a modern medical standpoint is the fact that the search for the witch’s teat on a suspected person creates the ideal set of circumstances for confirmation bias, in which evidence will only be gathered that reinforces a previously held position. If Eunice Cole was suspicious enough to warrant being searched for a witch’s teat, then they were bound to find one—wherever and whatever it was.

  10.The OED has the verb form of “flea” meaning “to remove fleas,” with the earliest appearance being 1610. OED, 1896 edition.

  11.Witches were typically suspected of interfering with such small-scale, yet personally devastating, situations as sick children and dead livestock. A confrontation about cows, and the question of their health and care, is what leads Abraham Drake to regard Eunice Cole’s prediction about his cattle falling sick as a threat, which was then carried out by invisible means.

  12.Eunice Cole was appar
ently convicted after this 1656 trial, and historian Carol Karlsen writes that she spent the better part of the next twelve to fifteen years in the Boston jail. See Carol F. Karlsen, The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England (New York: Norton, 1987, 1998), 53.

  13.Transcribed from Samuel Drake collection, Trials for witchcraft in New-England: original manuscript records, including affadavits in the cases against Eunice Coles, 1656; John Godfrey, 1659, etc, Houghton Library Special Collection, Harvard University, MS Am 1328.1-1.

  14.Lost?

  15.Eunice Cole appears in this account not just as an impoverished woman but as a grasping one who irritates her community with her need.

  16.Transcribed from Massachusetts Archives Collection, Massachusetts State Archives, Document 135, 4.

  17.Plums.

  18.“Would you like some candy, little girl?” That line is enough of a trope in contemporary American culture that it shows up everywhere from ironic Internet come-ons to Faith No More song lyrics. In this instance, Eunice Cole—marginalized, widowed, and already tried once as a witch in 1656 and imprisoned, with her property seized by the colony, living in destitution—is charged with trying to tempt the child Ann Smith into living with her. She offers her plums—a sweet enticement in the days of seasonal fruit—and failing that, she tries to physically drag Ann Smith back home with her.

  19.Transcribed from Massachusetts Archives Collection, Massachusetts State Archives, document 135, 5.

  20.A pearmain is either a variety of pear or an heirloom variety of apple that grows shaped like a pear. OED, September 2005. Another deposition identifies the tree as a persimmon.

  21.The spectacle of Eunice Cole’s begging Ann Smith to come live with her, and then reacting with violence when turned down, is both horrifying and moving. John Demos, in conducting a thorough reconstruction of the respective circumstances and webs of relationship between Eunice Cole and Ann Smith, proposes that Eunice, having spent her entire life childless in a culture that valued women principally in their roles as mothers, and Ann, a foster child on her third family in nine years, who would have responded skittishly to any overture of this kind, were drawn together not at random. At no point does Demos read any more into Eunice’s offer to “give [Ann] a baby,” though the offer and the physicality of the violent engagement under the pearmain tree contain elements of sexual violence that are difficult to overlook. For more detail on Eunice and Ann and their relative positions in the Hampton community, see Demos, Entertaining Satan, 327–30.

  22.Transcribed from Massachusetts Archives Collection, Massachusetts State Archives, Document 135, 6.

  23.Hall transcribes this as “very.”

  24.Transcribed from Massachusetts Archives Collection, Massachusetts State Archives, Document 135, 9.

  25.What became of Eunice Cole? Historians differ on whether she was ultimately convicted of witchcraft, with John Demos arguing that her lack of execution suggests that the community did not have enough evidence to convict her, while Carol Karlsen argues Eunice’s lengthy and indeterminate jail sentence in Boston would only be for a serious crime on par with witchcraft. Karlsen suggests that the magistrates might have been hesitant to execute Eunice Cole following the execution of Ann Hibbens in 1656. See Karlsen, Devil in the Shape of a Woman, 291, note 21. What is certain is that Eunice Cole lived out her days in the town of Hampton, a destitute and frightening creature on the outskirts of the community. Karlsen even points to Samuel Drake, A Book of New England Legends and Folklore in Prose and Poetry (Boston, 1901), 328–31, which holds that Eunice Cole was supplied with a hut along the river where she was feared until her death, and that when she died her body was dragged into a shallow grave and buried with a stake driven through it. Eunice Cole in that unverifiable folk tale begins to occupy a hazy middle ground between the historical witch and the mythical. The real woman behind the court records—poor, childless, widowed, publicly whipped, imprisoned, and who bashed a child’s head with a rock—recedes behind the stories that were spun about her both in life and after her death.

  MARY PHILIPS, CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS, 1659

  1.Transcribed from the unpublished notebook of George Lyman Kittredge, “Witchcraft and Sorcery Curios, before 1927,” Houghton Library Special Collections, Harvard University, MS Am 2585.

  2.There is no Dinton in Massachusetts. There is a Clinton, though it is about forty miles away. There is a Dinton in Britain, so it’s unclear if this apocryphal story was meant to take place in a town that has since been renamed or no longer exists, or if Kittredge noted the name down incorrectly.

  3.“Galled” in this instance means “sore from chafing,” that is, sore from having been spurred in her ribs. OED, 1898.

  JOHN GODFREY, HAVERHILL, MASSACHUSETTS, 1659–1665

  1.Demos, Entertaining Satan, 38.

  2.Demos, Entertaining Satan, 42.

  3.Transcribed from Essex County Court Papers, Volume 5, Massachusetts State Archives, Document 7-1.

  4.Transcribed from Essex County Court Papers, Volume 5, Massachusetts State Archives, Documents 7-2 and 7-2A.

  5.Transcribed from Essex County Court Papers, Volume 5, Massachusetts State Archives. Document 8-1.

  6.Bumblebee.

  7.Transcribed from Essex County Court Papers, Volume 5, Massachusetts State Archives, Document 8-2.

  8.Charles Brown and his wife claimed that they saw John Godfrey yawn in church (shocking on the face of it), but even worse than that, they observed what they took to be a witch’s teat under Godfrey’s tongue while his mouth was open. It must have been a wide yawn indeed.

  9.Transcribed from Essex County Court Papers, Volume 5, Massachusetts State Archives, Document 8-3.

  10.William Osgood is complaining of something he remembers John Godfrey doing in 1640, almost twenty years in the past. Such long memories for slights and wrongs are not unusual in New England witch trials. John Demos discusses John Godfrey at length in Entertaining Satan and points out that Godfrey seemed to enjoy shocking his neighbors with exclamations such as this one. Godfrey was by all accounts a pretty weird guy. Clearly his unusual, quarrelsome, and provocative manner, to say nothing of his own admissions, contributed to his long-standing reputation as a witch.

  11.“Ptesse” is rendered as a contraction in the manuscript. David Hall interprets it to mean “profess,” but remarks in a footnote that it might instead be read as “protest.” See Hall, Witch-hunting in Seventeenth-Century New England, 119.

  12.Transcribed from Essex County Court Papers, Volume 9, Massachusetts State Archives, Document 82-5.

  13.Ipswich.

  14.Here John Godfrey is accused of sending his spirit out to visit Jonathan Singletary while he is in prison. Godfrey has sued Singletary for slander, presumably for calling Godfrey a witch. One of the surest ways for Singletary to defend himself was to prove that he had spoken the truth, which is why he enters spectral evidence of this kind against Godfrey.

  15.Transcribed from Essex County Court Papers, Volume 9, Massachusetts State Archives, Document 83-1.

  16.Jonathan Singletary is testifying that John Godfrey has sent his spectral image to blackmail Singletary into paying him in corn to drop the slander charges against him.

  17.Probably cider. One wonders if Remington smelled the cider on himself, which would explain why it was so hard for him to stay seated on his horse.

  18.Is it a real crow or a diabolical crow? Will it just hurt his body or will it hurt his soul too? The New England Puritans lived in a world of invisible wonders, which, in their belief system, could sometimes be made manifest. Was the crow Godfrey, or Godfrey’s imp familiar? What’s certain is that John Remington fell from his horse, an injury that was as common as it was serious, and which could easily have killed him. That he was spared he would have owed to the grace of God. That he nearly wasn�
�t, he would have owed to diabolical influence, especially of a man with a twenty-year-long reputation for witchcraft.

  19.Four rods. A “rod” is defined as “A unit of length used esp. for land, fences, walls, etc., varying locally but later standardized at 51/2 yards, 161/2 feet (approx. 5.03 m).” OED, 2010.

  20.Cripple; “to move or walk lamely; to hobble.” OED, 1893.

  21.Hall notes that this likely means “boastful” or “cocky,” but that he can’t be sure. See Hall, Witch-hunting in Seventeenth-Century New England, 126. More likely it is a phonetic spelling for “cockading,” from “cockade,” which the OED, 1891, defines as “a ribbon, knot of ribbons, rosette, or the like, worn in the hat as a badge of office or party, or as part of a livery dress.” If a boy is “cockading,” he’s dressed up in livery for riding. In effect, Godfrey is calling Remington vain, in a manner that simultaneously insults his appearance, his horsemanship, and possibly his social class.

  22.Slang for “victuals.”

  23.Yet another example of an accused witch’s comportment causes something he says to be construed as having a greater meaning than it does. Godfrey is telling Remington—whose age we do not know, but who still lives at home with his parents—that if he had been thrown from a horse like that as a grown man he would have died. That could be true—children, even teenagers, are more flexible than adults. But Remington’s mother, Abigail, upon hearing such a frightening pronouncement, suggests that Godfrey has unnatural knowledge. Godfrey could just have been expressing an opinion about the severity of the fall, and telling Remington he would have to be careful riding as he got older. But Godfrey’s reputation clouds that message.