What else, shrugged one husband, could have caused the black and blue marks on his wife’s arms? It made sense of the unfortunate and the eerie, the sick child and the rancid butter along with the killer cat. The aggravating, the confounding, the humiliating all dissolved in its cauldron. If you point the finger elsewhere, it is unlikely to be pointed at you.įaith aside, witchcraft served an eminently useful purpose. As with all witch-hunts, the most obvious cause is the fear of being accused. The mistrust of women, jealousies, grievances and power struggles would also have played a part, with people seeing an opportunity to take revenge on past slights, or get their hands on much needed land. The strict puritanical lifestyle is one reason for the initial claims, with the original girls who started the rumours suffering from a kind of mass hysteria which resulted in shaking, fits and violent outbursts. It’s not hard to understand why a disgruntled servant might accuse their mistress of being a witch out of anger and jealousy, but Schiff recounts stories of children as young as six implicating themselves as witches, or worse, accusing their own mothers and then having to watch them put to death.Īs with all types of witch-hunts, Schiff is careful to explain where motivations may have come from that led to a town turning on itself. Some of these accusations make for difficult reading.
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