Notes on witchcraft

by George Lyman Kittredge

It is unnecessary for us to consider how much of the evidence offered at witch trials in England was actually true. Some of the defendants were pretty bad characters, and it would be folly to maintain that none of them tried to cause the sickness or death of their enemies by maltreating clay images or by other arts which they supposed would avail. Besides, now and then an injury is testified to which may well have been inflicted without diabolical aid. Thus Ann Foster, who was hanged for witchcraft at Northampton in 1674, confessed that she had set a certain grazier’s barns on fire, and there is much reason to believe her, for she was under considerable provocation.[118] As to occult or super-normal powers and practices, we may leave their discussion to the psychologists. With regard to this aspect of the Salem troubles, we must accept, as substantially in accordance with the facts, the words of Dr. Poole: “No man of any reputation who lived in that generation, and saw what transpired at Salem Village and its vicinity, doubted that there was some influence then exerted which could not be explained by the known laws of matter or of mind.”[119] Even Thomas Brattle, in speaking of the confessing witches, many of whom he says he has “again and again seen and heard,” cannot avoid the hypothesis of demoniacal action. They are, he feels certain, “deluded, imposed upon, and under the influence of some evil spirit; and therefore unfit to be evidences either against themselves, or any one else.”[120]

One common misapprehension to which the historians of witchcraft are liable comes from their failure to perceive that the immediate responsibility for actual prosecution rests frequently, if not in the majority of instances, on the rank and file of the community or neighborhood. This remark is not made in exculpation of prosecutors and judges,—for my purpose in this discussion is not to extenuate anybody’s offences or to shift the blame from one man’s shoulders to another. What is intended is simply to remind the reader of a patent and well-attested fact which is too often overlooked in the natural tendency of historians to find some notable personage to whom their propositions, commendatory or damaging, may be attached. A prosecution for witchcraft presupposes a general belief among the common people in the reality of the crime. But this is not all. It presupposes likewise the existence of a body of testimony, consisting of the talk of the neighborhood, usually extending back over a considerable stretch of years, with regard to certain persons who have the reputation of being witches, cunning men, and so on. It also presupposes the belief of the neighborhood that various strange occurrences,—such as storms, bad crops, plagues of grass-hoppers and caterpillars, loss of pigs or cattle, cases of lunacy or hysteria or chorea or wasting sickness,—are due to the malice of those particular suspects and their unknown confederates. These strange occurrences, be it remembered, are not the fictions of a superstitious or distempered imagination, they are—most of them—things that have really taken place; they are the res gestae of the prosecution, without which it could never have come about, or, having begun, could never have continued. And further, in very many instances of prosecution for witchcraft, there have been among the accused, persons who believed themselves to be witches,—or who had, at any rate, pretended to extraordinary powers and—in many instances—had either used their uncanny reputation to scare their enemies or to get money by treating diseases of men and cattle. And finally, the habit of railing and brawling, of uttering idle but malignant threats, and, on the other hand, the habit of applying vile epithets—including that of “witch,”—to one’s neighbors in the heat of anger—customs far more prevalent in former times than now—also resulted in the accumulation of a mass of latent or potential testimony which lay stored up in people’s memories ready to become kinetic whenever the machinery of the law should once begin to move.[121]

Nobody will ask for evidence that railing and brawling went on in colonial New England, that our forefathers sometimes called each other bad names, or that slander was a common offence.[122] That suspicion of witchcraft was rife in various neighborhoods years before the Salem outbreak, is proved, not only by the records of sporadic cases that came before the courts,[123] but by some of the evidence in the Salem prosecution itself.

That the initial responsibility for prosecution usually rested with the neighborhood or community might further be shown by many specific pieces of testimony. The terrible prosecution in Trier toward the close of the sixteenth century is a case in point. “Since it was commonly believed,” writes Linden, an eyewitness, “that the continued failure of the crops for many years was caused by witches and wizards through diabolical malice, the whole country rose up for the annihilation of the witches.”[124] To like purpose are the words of the admirable Jesuit, Friedrich Spee, in the closing chapter of the most powerful and convincing protest against witch trials ever written—that chapter which the author begged every magistrate in Germany to mark and weigh, whether he read the rest of the book or not:—“Incredible are the superstition, the envy, the slanders and backbitings, the whisperings and gossip of the common people in Germany, which are neither punished by magistrates nor reproved by preachers. These are the causes that first rouse suspicion of witchcraft. All the punishments of divine justice with which God has threatened men in the Holy Scriptures are held to come from witches. God and nature no longer do anything,—witches, everything. Hence it is that all demand, with violent outcry, that the magistracy shall proceed against the witches, whom only their own tongues have made so numerous.”[125]

As for England, the annals of witchcraft are full of instances which show where the initial responsibility rests in particular prosecutions. Two examples will serve as well as many.

Roger North, the distinguished lawyer, who was at Exeter in 1682, when a famous witch trial occurred,[126] gives a vivid account of the popular excitement:—[127] “The women were very old, decrepit, and impotent, and were brought to the assizes with as much noise and fury of the rabble against them as could be shewed on any occasion. The stories of their acts were in everyone’s mouth, and they were not content to belie them in the country, but even in the city where they were to be tried miracles were fathered upon them, as that the judges’ coach was fixed upon the castle bridge, and the like. All which the country believed, and accordingly persecuted the wretched old creatures. A less zeal in a city or kingdom hath been the overture of defection and revolution, and if these women had been acquitted, it was thought that the country people would have committed some disorder.”[128]

Our second example is a very notable case, which occurred in 1712,—that of Jane Wenham, the last witch condemned to death in England. Jane Wenham had a dispute with a neighboring farmer, who called her a witch. She complained to the local magistrate, Sir Henry Chauncy. He referred the dispute to the parson of the parish, who, after hearing both sides, admonished the wranglers to live at peace and sentenced the farmer to pay Jane a shilling. The old crone was not pleased. Shortly after, one of the clergyman’s servants, a young woman, was strangely afflicted. Jane was brought to trial. Every effort seems to have been made by the court to put a stop to the affair, but the local feeling was so strong, and the witnesses and complainants were so many (including the clergymen of two parishes) that nothing could be done. The official who drew up the indictment endeavored to make the whole affair ridiculous by refusing to use any other phraseology in describing the alleged crime than “conversing with the devil in the form of a cat.” But the well-meant device only intensified the feeling against the witch. Mr. Justice Powell, who presided, did what he could to induce the jury to acquit, but in vain. They brought in a verdict of guilty, and he was obliged to pass sentence of death. He suspended the execution of the sentence, however, and secured the royal pardon,—to the intense indignation of the neighborhood. Here we have a jury of the vicinage, accurately reflecting the local sentiment, and insisting on carrying out its belief in witchcraft to the bitter end, despite all that the judge could do.[129] It is well to note that the clergymen involved in the prosecution were not New England Puritans, and that the whole affair took place just ten years after the last execution of a witch in Massachusetts. Of itself, this incident might suffice to silence those who ascribe the Salem outbreak to the influence of certain distinguished men, as well as those who maintain that the New Englanders were more superstitious than their fellow-citizens at home, that their Puritanism was somehow to blame for it, and that witchcraft was practically dead in the Mother Country when the Salem outbreak took place.[130]

Yet Thomas Wright—never to be mentioned without honor—speaks of the New England troubles as “exemplifying the horrors and the absurdities of the witchcraft persecutions more than anything that had occurred in the old world,”[131] and Dr. G. H. Moore,—in an important article on The Bibliography of Witchcraft in Massachusetts—declares that the Salem outbreak “was the epitome of witchcraft! whose ghastly records may be challenged to produce any parallel for it in the world’s history!”[132] In further refutation of such reckless statements I need add but a single instance. In 1596 there was an outbreak of some pestilence or other in Aberdeen. The populace ascribed the disease to the machinations of a family long suspected of witchcraft. A special commission was appointed by the Privy Council, “and before April 1597, twenty-three women and one man had been burnt, one woman had died under the torture, one had hanged herself in prison, and four others who were acquitted on the capital charge, were yet branded on the cheek and banished from the sheriffdom.”[133]

There was a very special reason why troubles with the powers of darkness were to be expected in New England—a reason which does not hold good for Great Britain or, indeed, for any part of Western Europe. I refer, of course, to the presence of a considerable heathen population—the Indians. These were universally supposed to be devil-worshippers—not only by the Colonists but by all the rest of the world—for paganism was held to be nothing but Satanism.[134] Cotton Mather and the Jesuit fathers of Canada were at one on this point.[135] The religious ceremonies of the Indians were, as we know, in large part an invocation of spirits, and their powwows, or medicine men, supposed themselves to be wizards,—were wizards, indeed, so far as sorcery is possible.[136] The Colonial government showed itself singularly moderate, however, in its attitude toward Indian practices of a magical character. Powwowing was, of course, forbidden wherever the jurisdiction of the white men held sway, but it was punishable by fine only, nor was there any idea of inflicting the extreme penalty[137]—although the offence undoubtedly came under the Mosaic law, so often quoted on the title-pages of books on witchcraft, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.”

The existence of all these devil-worshipping neighbors was a constant reminder of the possibility of danger from witchcraft. One is surprised, therefore, to find that there was no real outbreak until so late in the century. It argues an uncommon degree of steadiness and common sense among our forefathers that they held off the explosion so long. Yet even this delay has been made to count against them, as if, by 1692, they ought to have known better, even if they might have been excusable some years before. In point of fact, the New Englanders, as we have seen, made an end of trying witches nearly ten years earlier than their English fellow-citizens. But we shall come back to this question of dates presently.