Salem Witch Trial

Salem Witch Trial

Since 1641 witchcraft was considered a capital crime by English law.
The facts that led to this bloody series of executions began in 1688 with the hanged of the laundress Goody Glover, arrested and tried for bewitching the Goodwin children.
Reverend Cotton Mather took Martha Goodwin to his house to analyse her behaviour and wrote a book about it that later influencedSalem’s Village persecutions.
Who , where and When?

From June 1692 to May 1693 nineteen persons, all having been convicted of witchcraft, were hanged on Gallows Hill, near Salem Village. Another man of over eighty years was pressed to death under heavy stones for refusing to submit to a trial on witchcraft charges. Hundreds of others faced accusations of witchcraft. Dozens were in prison formonths without trials. Some were members of some of the Churches of New England, and others respectable people in general.

The events took place during a difficult and confusing period for Salem Village. As part of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Salem was under British rule. It was divided into two distinct parts: Salem Town and Salem Village. Salem Farms was actually part of Salem Town but wasset apart by its economy, class, and character. Residents of Salem Village were mostly poor farmers who made their living cultivating crops in the rocky terrain. Salem Town, on the other hand, was a prosperous port town inhabited by wealthy merchants.

Samuel Parris was the preacher in the village church. His young daughter Betty became strangely ill. The same happened to her playmates andothers in Salem later in the year. Talk of witchcraft started when a doctor called to examine the girls, suggested that the girls' problems might have a supernatural origin.
In a village where everyone believed that the devil was real, close at hand, and acted in the real world, the suspected affliction of the girls became an obsession. The prominent Putnam family supported the girls' accusations,putting considerable impetus behind the prosecutions.
The first three to be accused of witchcraft were Tituba (Parris’ slave), Sarah Good (a homeless woman), and Sarah Osborn. The first accused witch to be brought to trial was Bridget Bishop.  Almost sixty years old, owner of a tavern where customers could drink ale and play shuffleboard (even on the Sabbath), critical of her neighbors, andreluctant to pay her bills, Bishop was a likely candidate for an accusation of witchcraft.  A villager named Samuel Grey told the court that Bishop visited his bed at night and tormented him. A jury of matrons assigned to examine Bishop's body reported that they found an "excrescence of flesh."  Several of the afflicted girls testified that Bishop's specter afflicted them.  Numerous other villagersdescribed why they thought Bishop was responsible for various bits of bad luck that had befallen them.  There was even testimony that while being transported under guard past the Salem meeting house, she looked at the building and caused a part of it to fall to the ground.  Bishop's jury returned a verdict of guilty. One of the judges, Nathaniel Saltonstall, aghast at the conduct of the trial,resigned from the court.  Chief Justice Stoughton signed Bishop's death warrant, and she was carted to Gallows Hill and hanged.
But what were the Salem Witch Trials? And where did they happen?
They were a series of hearings and prosecutions of people accused of witchcraft in colonial Massachusetts. They took the name of the village but
were conducted in a variety of towns across the province: SalemVillage (now Danvers), Ipswich, Andover and Salem Town.

What evidence was used to convict the accused?
The fact that Thomas Newton, special prosecutor, selected Bishop for his first prosecution suggests that he believed the stronger case could be made against her than any of the other suspect witches. At Bishop's trial on June 2, 1692, a field hand testified that he saw Bishop's image...