Read Online In the Devil's Snare by Mary Beth Norton - Free Book Online

pointed out (and John Hale concurred), a 1662 witchcraft prosecution in Bury St. Edmunds, England, described in a book printed two decades later, was “much considered by the Judges of
New England.”
Presided over by Sir Matthew Hale, who was widely known to be reluctant to convict witches without adequate evidence, the Bury St. Edmunds trial seemed to many the closest parallel to the Essex County episode. In the 1662 English case, Mather asserted, we “see the
Witchcrafts
here most exactly resemble the
Witchcraft
there; and we may learn what sort of Devils do trouble the World.” 56
    The Bury St. Edmunds trial involved seven children and teenagers, six of them girls, from Lowestoft, Suffolk, who claimed to have been bewitched by two local widows, Rose Cullender and Amy Denny. None of the complainants, who came from four different families, testified at the trial; one was thought too young and the others too ill. Three attended the proceedings, but “fell into strange and violent fits, screeking out in a most sad manner, so that they could not in any wise give any Instructions in the Court who were the Cause of their Distemper.” A learned doctor testified that “he was clearly of Opinion, that the persons were Bewitched.” Parents and other relatives spoke for the young people, describing the tortures they had endured, including “feeling most extream pain in her Stomach, like the pricking of Pins”; experiencing convulsions, lameness, and “sometimes a soreness over their whole Bodies”; occasionally being unable to speak or hear; and vomiting up pins and nails. Furthermore, the afflicted complained of seeing the apparitions of Denny and Cullender, “to their great terrour and affrightment.” Discerning the specters “sometimes in one place and sometimes in another,” the girls would run to them, and “striking at them as if they were present,” would be in turn “derid[ed] and threatn[ed]” by the apparitions. Once, one of the younger children “ran round about the House holding her Apron, crying
hush, hush,
as if there had been some Poultrey in the House,” but the deponent (her aunt) “could perceive nothing.” 57
    A notable aspect of the Bury St. Edmunds trial was its use of the same touch test employed by Samuel Willard in 1671. Judge Hale ordered Amy Denny to touch the hand of an eleven-year-old complainant as she lay “as one wholly senseless in a deep Sleep” on a table in the courtroom. At that “the Child without so much as seeing her, for her Eyes were closed all the while, suddenly leaped up . . . and with her Nails scratched her till Blood came” and had to be pulled away from Denny, still making “signs of Anger.” Other tests were undertaken while the afflicted were “in the midst of their Fitts,” with fists closed “in such manner, as that the strongest Man in the court could not force them open.” Yet at Rose Cullender’s “least touch . . . they would suddenly shriek out opening their hands, which accident could not happen by the touch of any other person.” 58
    Not everyone, however, was convinced, and so one of the girls was taken aside, blindfolded, and touched by a randomly selected person. When
that
“produced the same effect” as the witch’s touch, some leading barristers pronounced the bewitchment “a meer Imposture.” But the girl’s father explained that since—when his daughters came out of their fits—they turned out to have known everything that had happened in the interim, the apparently failed test should not be interpreted in that manner. Rather, it should be taken as “a confirmation that the Parties were really Bewitched” because “the Maid might be deceived by a suspition that the Witch touched her when she did not.” In the end, his argument (which even Cotton Mather found dubious) carried the day. The observers concluded, as did most of those in Essex County thirty years later, that “it is not possible that any should counterfeit such