But it is not for the sake of lauding their penitential exercises that I lay stress upon the unexampled character of our forefathers' action. There is another aspect from which the outcome of the Salem trials ought to be regarded. They fell at a critical moment, when witchcraft was, for whatever reason, soon to become a crime unknown to the English courts. They attracted attention instantly in the Mother Country. 169 Can there be any question that the sensational recovery of the Province from its attack of prosecuting zeal, accompanied as that recovery was by retraction and by utterances of deep contrition, had a profound effect in England? The mere dropping of the prosecution would not have had this effect. In 1597, James I., alarmed at the extent to which witch trials were going in Scotland, revoked all the existing special commissions that were engaged in holding trials for this offence.170 But the evil was soon worse than ever. What was efficacious in the New England instance was the unheard-of action of judge and jury in recanting. This made the Salem troubles the best argument conceivable in the hands of those reformers who, soon after 1700, began to make actual headway in their opposition to the witch dogma. I am not reasoning a priori. By common consent one of the most effective arraignments of the superstition that we are discussing is the Historical Essay on Witchcraft of Dr. Francis Hutchinson, which appeared in 1718.171 Now Hutchinson, who gives much space to the New England trials, refers to Sewall's action, and prints the recantation of the jurors in full. Nor does he leave in us doubt as to the purpose for which he adduces these testimonies. "And those Towns," he writes, "having regained their Quiet; and this Case being of that Nature, that Facts and Experience are of more weight than meer rational Arguments; it will be worth our while to observe some Passages that happened after this Storm, when they had Time to look back on what had passed. "172 Whatever may be thought of these considerations, one fact cannot be assailed. In prosecuting witches, our forefathers acted like other men in the seventeenth century. In repenting and making public confession, they acted like themselves. Their fault was the fault of their time; their merit is their own. We must not leave this subject without looking into the question of numbers and dates. The history of the Salem Witchcraft is, to all intents and purposes, the sum total of witchcraft history in the whole of Massachusetts for a century. From the settlement of the country, of course, our fathers believed in witchcraft, and cases came before the courts from time to time, but, outside of the Salem outbreak, not more than half-a-dozen executions can be shown to have occurred. It is not strange that there should have been witch trials. It is inconceivable that the Colony should have passed through its first century without some special outbreak of prosecution-inconceivable, that is to say, to one who knows what went on in England and the rest of Europe during that time. The wonderful thing is, not that an outbreak of prosecution occurred, but that it did not come sooner and last longer. From the first pranks of the afflicted children in Mr. Parris's house (in February, 1692) to the collapse of the prosecution in January, 1693, was less than a year. During the interval twenty persons had suffered death, and two are known to have died in jail.178 If to these we add the six sporadic cases that occurred in Massachusetts before 1692, there is a total of twenty-eight; but this is the whole reckoning, not merely for a year or two but for a complete century. The concentration of the trouble in Massachusetts within the limits of a single year has given a wrong turn to the thoughts of many writers. This concentration makes the case more conspicuous, but it does not make 173 See W. F. Poole, in Winsor's Memorial History of Boston, II, 133. Dr. Poole finds twelve executions in New England before 1692. This makes the total for all New England, from 1620 to the present day, 34 (including two who died in jail). Cf. C. W. Upham, Salem Witchcraft, Boston, 1867, II, 351; 8. G. Drake, Annals of Witchcraft, pp. 191 ff. In this part of my paper I have made a few quotations from a book of my own, The Old Farmer and his Almanack (Boston, 1904). it worse. On the contrary, it makes it better. It is astonishing that there should have been only half-a-dozen executions for witchcraft in Massachusetts before 1692, and equally astonishing that the delusion, when it became acute, should have raged for but a year, and that but twentytwo persons should have lost their lives. The facts are distinctly creditable to our ancestors,-to their moderation and to the rapidity with which their good sense could reassert itself after a brief eclipse.174 . Let us compare figures a little. For Massachusetts the account is simple-twenty-eight victims in a century. No one has ever made an accurate count of the executions in England during the seventeenth century, but they must have mounted into the hundreds.175 Matthew Hopkins, the Witch-finder General, brought at least two hundred to the gallows from 1645 to 1647.176 In Scotland 174 "They were the first of all people," writes Mr. Goodell, "to escape the thraldom" (Reasons for Concluding that the Act of 1711 became a Law, 1884, p. 21). See Francis Hutchinson, Historical Essay, 2d edition, 1720, pp. 45 ff. 175 176 John Stearne, Hopkins's associate, speaks of what he has himself "learned and observed since the 25. of March 1645 as being in part an agent in finding out or discovering some of those since that time, being about two hundred in number, in Essex, Suffolke, Northamptonshire, Huntingtonshire, Bedfordshire, Norfolke, Cambridgeshire, and the Isle of Ely in the County of Cambridge, besides other places, justly and deservedly executed upon their legall tryalls" (A Confirmation and Discovery of Witch-craft, London, 1648, To the Reader). Stearne wrote his book after the death of Hopkins, which took place in 1647. In the life of Hopkins in the Dictionary of National Biography, the Witch-Finder is said to have begun operations in 1644. This is a manifest error. Hopkins himself (Discovery of Witches, 1647, p. 2, see below) says that his experiences began at Manningtree "in March 1644," but Stearne's statement makes it clear that this is Old Style, for Stearne was also concerned in the Manningtree business, and the year is completely established by the report of the proceedings,-A True and Exact Relation of the several Informations [etc.] of the late Witches, London, 1645 (cf. T. B. Howell's State Trials, IV, 817 ff.). The traditional statement that Hopkins was hanged as a wizard (cf. Hudibras, Part ii, canto 3, ll. 139 ff.) is disproved by the following passage in Stearne: "I am certain (notwithstanding whatsoever hath been said of him) he died peaceably at Manningtree, after a long sicknesse of a Consumption, as many of his generation had done before him, without any trouble of conscience for what he had done, as was falsly reported of him" (p. 61). For the record of his burial, Aug. 12, 1647, see Notes and Queries, 1st Series, X, 285. The notion that Hopkins was swum " and, since he floated, was subsequently hanged, most likely originated in a document criticising his performances which was brought before the Norfolk judges in 1646 or (more probably) in 1647. Hopkins printed a reply to this document shortly before his death,-The Discovery of Witches: in Answer to severall Queries, lately delivered to the Judges of Assize for the County of Norfolk. And now published by Matthew Hopkins, Witch-finder (London, 1647). The first " query, as printed by Hopkins, was this: -"That he must needs be the greatest Witch, Sorcerer, and Wizzard himselfe, else hee could not doe it." Cf. Wright, Narratives of Sorcery and Magic, II, 145 ff.; the number of victims was much larger. The most conscientiously moderate estimate makes out a total of at least 3,400 between the years 1580 and 1680, and the computer declares that future discoveries in the way of records may force us to increase this figure very much.177 On the Continent many thousands suffered Ideath in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Mannhardt reckons the victims from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century at millions,178 and half a million is thought to be a moderate estimate. In Alsace, a hundred and thirty-four witches and wizards were burned in 1582 on one occasion, the execution taking place on the 15th, 19th, 24th, and 28th of October.179 Nicholas Remy (Remigius) of Lorraine gathered the materials for his work on the Worship of Demons,180 published in 1595, from the trials of some 900 persons whom he had sentenced to death in the fifteen years preceding. In 1609, de Lancre and his associate are said to have condemned 700 in the Basque country in four months.181 The efforts of the Bishop of Bamberg from 1622 to 1633 resulted in six hundred executions; the Bishop of Würzburg, in about the same period, put nine hundred persons to death.182 These figures, which might be multiplied almost indefinitely, help us to look at the Salem Witchcraft in its true proportions, 183 Lives of Twelve Bad Men, edited by Thomas Seccombe, London, 1894, p. 64; Ady, A Candle in the Dark, 1656, pp. 101-102; James Howell, as above (p. 8, note 7); Gough, British Topography, 1780, II, 254. 177 Legge, Scottish Review, XVIII, 273-274. Ady (A Candle in the Dark, 1656, p. 105) says: "A little before the Conquest of Scotland (as is reported upon good intelligence) the Presbytery of Scotland did, by their own pretended authority, take upon them to Summon, Convent, Censure, and Condemn people to cruel death for Witches and (as is credibly reported) they caused four thousand to be executed by Fire and Halter, and had as many in prison to be tried by them, when God sent his conquering Sword to suppress them." The "conquest" to which Ady refers is Cromwell's, in 1650. It is well known that from 1640 to Cromwell's invasion, witch prosecution ran riot in Scotland, but that during his supremacy there were very few executions in that country (see Legge, pp. 266-267). Cf. p. 8, note 6, above. 178 Die praktischen Folgen des Aberglaubens, p. 34. 179 Soldan, Geschichte der Hexenprozesse, ed. Heppe, I, 492. 180 Dæmonolatreia, Lugduni, 1595. 182 183 Soldan, Geschichte der Hexenprozesse, ed. Heppe, II, 38 ff. See the extraordinary enumeration in Roskoff, Geschichte des Teufels, Leipzig, 1869, II, 293 ff.; cf. S. Riezler, Geschichte der Hexenprozesse in Bayern, pp. 141 ff., 283 ff. as a very small incident in the history of a terrible superstition. These figures may perhaps be attacked as involving a fallacious comparison, inasmuch as we have not attempted to make the relative population of New England and the several districts referred to a factor in the equation. Such an objection, if anybody should see fit to make it, is easily answered by other figures. The total number of victims in Massachusetts from the first settlement to the end of the seventeenth century was, as we have seen, twenty-eight, -or thirty-four for the whole of New England. Compare the following figures, taken from the annals of Great Britain and Scotland alone. In 1612, ten witches were executed belonging to a single district of Lancashire.184 In 1645 twentynine witches were condemned at once in a single Hundred in Essex,185 eighteen were hanged at once at Bury in Suffolk-186 "and a hundred and twenty more were to have been tried, but a sudden movement of the king's troops in that direction obliged the judges to adjourn the session.187 Under date of July 26, 1645, Whitelocke records that "20 Witches in Norfolk were executed, "188 and again, under April 15, 1650, that “at a little Village within two Miles [of Berwick] two Men and three Women were burnt for Witches, and nine more were to be burnt, the Village consisting of but fourteen Families, and there were as many witches" and further that "twenty more were to be burnt within six Miles of that place. "189 If we pass over to the Continent, the numbers are appalling. Whether, then, we take the computation in gross or in detail, New England emerges from the test with credit. The last execution for witchcraft in Massachusetts took place in 1692, as we have seen; indeed, twenty of the total of twenty-six cases fell within the limits of that one year. There were no witch trials in New England in the 184 Potts, The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches, 1613 (Chetham Society reprint). 185 Matthew Hopkins, Discovery of Witches, 1647, p. 3. 186 187 John Stearne, A Confirmation and Discovery of Witchcraft, 1648, p. 14. Wright, Narratives of Sorcery and Magic, Chap. xxv. 188 Memorials, 1732, p. 163. 189 Page 450. |