The Devil in Essex
Witch hunting in Old and New England
In the 1950s, the term 'witch hunt' acquired a new definition. Until then it had referred exclusively to the trials of alleged diabolists in the 16th and 17th centuries. Now it came to mean political persecution.
In Washington DC at that time, the Un-American Activities Committee was questioning suspected Communists, among them the playwright Arthur Miller. He counter-attacked by dramatising another episode of paranoia and persecution in America's history: the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692.
The timelessness of The Crucible makes it a classic play, but Miller's need to encapsulate the story for the stage makes an incomplete (and unreliable) history. Audiences can be left wondering not only what happened next but also what had happened before. Clearly, the Un-American Activities Committee was motivated by fear of the Soviet Union early in the Cold War. But what was it about the development of colonial society that had caused the original witch hunt 250 years earlier?
The colonial world-view
The immediate causes of Salem are well-known: political weakness,
economic competition, social conflict and evangelical Puritanism. But
to understand the broader and deeper culture of witchcraft, we need to
go further back, not just in time but across the Atlantic to the mother
country.
Earlier in the 17th century, Massachusetts Bay had first been colonised by migrants from England who brought with them few possessions, but in their heads carried a complex world-view according to which they rebuilt their lives in a strange place. At the centre of this world-view was the idea that the kingdom of Christ was constantly threatened by Satan, and that a battle with evil was being fought on earth through human ideas and actions. All people were thought to be sinful, but a few individuals were believed to have surrendered absolutely to the Devil's temptation and so had become his servants.
Colonists convinced that they had been bewitched often resorted to healing magic and other superstitious counter-measures. However, in the interests of orthodoxy and order, the authorities preferred them to use the law. As a result, a thin stream of cases passed through the colonial courts in the 17th century – for instance, there was a trial in New York in 1665.
In general, these were caused by mundane neighbourly squabbles and scarcely amounted to 'witch hunts'. Salem, then, was an American aberration: a social conflagration of unprecedented intensity. But two generations earlier, England, too, had endured its own Salem, and on an even more terrifying scale.
The East Anglian witch hunt
In the spring of 1645, during the agony and anxiety of the English
Civil Wars, fears about the malevolence of witches boiled over in Essex
and soon spread into Suffolk. Mass trials in these two counties the same
year resulted in nearly 40 executions, and there were more to come in
Norfolk and in other counties further to the west. In all, perhaps 250
women and men were accused, imprisoned and interrogated, of whom it is
safe to say over 100 were hanged – five times as many as would perish
at Salem.
Like Salem in the American experience, the East Anglian witch hunt of 1645-7 was a unique event in English history. There had been regular witch trials after the passing of the Witchcraft Acts of 1563 and 1604, many of them in Essex. But in the first half of the 17th century, several well-publicised frauds, growing legal scepticism and the changing policies of crown and Church had all contributed to a general decline.
That the East Anglian trials happened at all was due mostly to the self-appointed minor gentlemen Matthew Hopkins and John Stearne, who travelled around the eastern counties, exploiting pre-existing tensions and suspicions among villagers by initiating interrogations and setting the wheels of justice in motion.
Disquiet about Hopkins' and Stearne's methods (they used torture, contrary to common law) numbered their days as witchfinders even before Hopkins' death in 1647. And yet the godly zeal of the next 12 years – with the execution of the king and the establishment of the Puritan Commonwealth – meant that trials continued to occur, albeit conducted in a more regulated manner.
After 1660, with the fall of the English republic, witch-beliefs and village conflicts continued to find expression through the Witchcraft Act, although 'religious enthusiasm' was scorned as politically dangerous. Impassioned theocracy continued to thrive in Massachusetts, however, as did a legal system according to which witchcraft was formally tried as an offence against the peace of the English crown.
Transatlantic connections
Many of the men and women who began new lives in America hailed from
Essex and Suffolk where the English witch hunt was most intense in the
1640s – indeed, Salem was situated in a region christened 'Essex County'
by its settlers. There were other geographical echoes, principally in
the town of Lynn. Home to seven of the suspects at Salem, its name was
taken from King's Lynn, the Norfolk port where, in 1646, the witchfinder
Hopkins had been drummed into town as a liberating hero. Another Salem
suspect came from Chelmsford, its English namesake having been the town
where the first of Hopkins' executions had taken place in the summer of
1645.
Transatlantic connections can be traced even more precisely. Hopkins' father, a clergyman, knew John Winthrop, later governor of Massachusetts, as their families lived just a few miles apart. Similarly, village feuds that had simmered for years in England were exported and took root as witchcraft accusations.
A small but crucial step
The East Anglian witch hunt neither caused the Salem trials, nor did
it influence their end. Yet the links remain clear. Not only was the devil-fearing
mentality and legalistic culture of early Americans that of their English
relatives, but in time, the spreading stains of both episodes would bleed
into one another.
News from the colonies evoked memories of Hopkins in England, where the last witchcraft execution had taken place seven years previously, in 1685. In the 18th century, the legacy of 1645-7 and 1692 added powerfully to the sense that, even if the threat of witches was not to be dismissed lightly, circumstantial evidence and hearsay (not to mention stories of dreams and apparitions) must never again be the basis upon which to convict them. It was a small step towards a world where suspected witches would no longer be hanged, but it was a crucial one.
Dr Malcolm Gaskill is fellow and director of studies in history at Churchill College, Cambridge. He is the author of Hellish Nell: The last of Britain's witches (2001), Crime and Mentalities in Early Modern England (2000) and Witchfinders: A 17th-century English tragedy (2005).
