QUOD · SCRIPSI · SCRIPSI ANNO · DOMINI · MDCXCII
From the private papers of Prof. Alethea Whitford, bequeathed MCMXXIV.
Essex County · Anno Domini MDCXCII

witch-trial.com

Acta et Testimonia
Being a true transcript of depositions sworn before the Court of Oyer and Terminer, preserved from the archive and set down herein without emendation.
Edited by the hand of A. W.
ii
The Indictment

Be it remembered, that upon the ninth day of the month of June, in the year of Our Lord sixteen hundred and ninety-two, there was brought before this Court at Salem, in the County of Essex, a true bill of indictment against sundry persons of the Township of Andover, and of parts adjacent, for that they, not having the fear of God before their eyes, but being seduced by the instigations of the Devil, did upon divers days and at divers places within the said County practise certain detestable arts, called witchcraft and sorceries, upon and against the bodies of one Ann Putnam, Mercy Lewis, and Abigail Williams, and others; by reason whereof the said persons were grievously tormented, pined, consumed, wasted, and afflicted, against the peace of our sovereign Lord and Lady the King and Queen, their Crown and Dignity.

The particulars of the charge are these: that the accused did appear in spectral form unto the afflicted; that they did afflict, prick, pinch, and almost squeeze to death the said complainants; that they did suckle familiars, to wit, a yellow bird, a black dog, and a red cat; and that they did sign their names, or marks, in a red book presented to them by a black man of small stature. †

The examiner notes, in a clerical hand laid sideways in the margin, that the whole matter of the red book was first described by a child of nine, and was thereafter repeated by every subsequent witness in nearly the same words — quaere, whence the uniformity?

iii
The Deposition of Rebekah Nurse, Taken Upon Oath
Sworn and subscribed the fifteenth day of June, before John Hathorne, Magistrate.

I.I, Rebekah Nurse, of the Town of Salem-Village, being of the age of seventy and one years, doe testifie and say, that upon the eve of Easter last past, I was taken from my bed by a grievous convulsion, and saw at my chamber-door a woman whom I knew not, but who had the countenance of my neighbour, Goody Osborn, though Goody Osborn was at that hour abed in her own house.

II.The apparition did stand at the foot of my bed, and did not speak, but held forth unto me a red book, bound with cord, and bid me by gesture to set my hand therein. When I would not, she did pinch me sorely upon the left arm, so that the mark remained three days.‡

III.And further this deponent saith, that she did hear a voice, small and coaxing, as of a fly near the ear, which said: Thou art of the Elect, Rebekah; why then doſt thou refuse the surer covenant? And I did cry out upon the name of the Lord, and the apparition did vanish into a smoke that smelt of sulphur and of tallow burning.

IV.The witneſſes unto this affliction are my husband Francis Nurse, and my daughter Rebekah the younger, who did come at my cry, and did find the print of a small hand upon my arm where no hand of flesh had been laid.

— the mark of Rebekah + Nurse, her hand being unsteady.

iv
The Deposition of Giles Corey, Yeoman, of Salem
Taken before the Magistrates the nineteenth day of September, sub protestatione.

I.The deponent, being required to plead, did stand mute, and would give this Court neither yea nor nay, saying only that the Court hath condemned him already in its heart, and that he would not by his plea lend it a further colour of law.

II.Whereupon, at the charge of the Magistrate, the said deponent was pressed of the peine forte et dure, a weight of stones being laid upon his breast, augmented from the forenoon of one day to the forenoon of the next. †

III.It is reported — though not entered in the official minute — that the said Giles Corey, his chest near caved in, did twice cry out the words: More weight. And no further word.

Here the examiner's hand breaks through the deposition and writes across the body of the page, in an angrier ink: “There is no evidence of witchcraft in the case of Giles Corey save that he would not bow. Pressing a yeoman of eighty for refusing to plead — what sort of Christian court is this? The stones are on our conscience still.”

v
The Examination of Tituba Indian, Servant in the House of Rev. Parris
Taken the first day of March, by the hand of the parish-clerk, the deponent unable to write.

I.Magistrate: Tituba, what hast thou to say for thyself in this miſchief? Deponent: I say, sir, I have never hurt the children. I love them.

II.Magistrate: But thou hast made a cake of rye and urine and fed it to a dog, that by it the afflicted might name their tormentors. Deponent: My mistress bid me. She said it was an old charm of her own grandmother's, from the North country.

III.Magistrate: And hast thou seen the Devil? Deponent: I have seen, sir, what you wish me to have seen. I have been beaten. The answer you want, I will give. Is it not why I was brought here?†

IV.And the examination was stayed, and the deponent, being of broken spirit, did thereafter confess to such particulars as were put unto her, to wit: a book signed, a familiar suckled, a flight upon a pole — all of which she did agree to, and was thereupon returned to the gaol, there to remain above a year for want of her gaol-fees.

vi
The Examiner's Marginalia
— a private note laid between the folios, in the hand of A. W., circa 1923 —

I have now read these depositions through three times. I am no longer able to treat them as curiosity. What strikes me, cataloguing them these thirty years, is how ordinary the language is — a dead cow, a neighbor who kept to herself, a daughter who would not milk, a child with a fit. The supernatural is a thin varnish over the mundane grievance.

Spectral evidence was admitted in this court. That is to say: an affliction caused by a shape resembling the accused was treated as an affliction caused by the accused. The shape was permitted to testify. What court in history has made a more dangerous evidential rule?

Cotton Mather, writing after the fact, had the decency to be ashamed. Increase Mather, in Cases of Conscience, conceded at last that it were better ten witches should live than one innocent die. A sentence too late for Rebekah Nurse, hanged upon the nineteenth of July. Too late for George Burroughs, who recited the Lord's Prayer perfectly upon the ladder — a thing, the folk said, no true witch could do — and was hanged regardless.

I set down here, in these margins, what cannot be set down in the edition I am to publish: that there were no witches in Essex County in 1692. There were frightened children, grieving parents, land disputes, a doctrine of spectral evidence, and a court that forgot its office. This is the whole of the matter.

Upon the whole evidence, the Court doth find

Guilty

— so ran the verdict upon twenty souls, in the summer of the year sixteen hundred and ninety-two. The sentence of the court was execution by hanging, save one, pressed to death. The record closeth here. Requiescant in pace.
viii
The Coda — Errata & Historiographic Notes
  1. For Goody Osborn, read Sarah Osborn, she having died in gaol the tenth of May, 1692, before trial.
  2. The phrase peine forte et dure is of Norman French, rendered in the common tongue as hard and strong punishment. Abolished in English law, 1772.
  3. The total persons executed at Salem and adjacent courts in the year 1692: nineteen hanged upon Proctor's Ledge; one pressed to death; at least five dead in the gaols of natural want. Twenty-five souls. ‡
  4. In 1711, the Massachusetts General Court reversed the attainders of those condemned. The descendants of certain families were paid restitution in sums ranging from £7 to £150. Tituba's name does not appear upon the list.
  5. In 2001, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts formally exonerated the five remaining convicted women whose names had been omitted from the 1711 reversal. The last of these was Margaret Scott, hanged at Salem, 22 September 1692, aged 77.
[pencilled, later:] ▌
Here endeth the transcript — quod scripsi scripsi.