Since most of the women who were accused had no capable men to protect them from the accusations, they were seen as easy targets to win over their land or rid them from their town. This meant that many of the women never stood a chance against the tensions that they created over defying gender norms, so many of them were thought to be guilty of something even before the beginning of their trials.
Martha expressed her suspicions of the legitimacy of the claims and this caused tensions between her and the afflicted girls because they did not like anyone questioning their claims. Then, when Giles tried to watch another witch examination in town, Martha tried to convince Giles not to attend, going as far as to hide his horse saddle. This led to suspicions of Martha being a witch and the accusation from Ann Putman Jr. Her being accused led to a widespread fear that now anyone could be accused of witchcraft, since Martha was seen as a respectable woman, unlike those who had been accused before her.
Before filing an official claim against Martha, Edward Putman and Ezekiel Cheever decided to personally investigate the situation. They first went to Ann Putman Jr. Ann Putman Jr. When they arrived, Martha said that she knew exactly what they were coming for. Then, to her demise, she asked if Ann told them what clothes she had on. Immediately, it was presumed that she had come to this knowledge of them asking Ann what Martha was wearing only by supernatural means. But on Monday, March 21, Martha was taken to the courthouse to be examined for witchcraft by Judge Hawthorne.
He asked her many questions about how she knew that Edward and Ezekiel came to ask her about being a witch and if Ann had told them what clothes she was wearing, which she knew because Giles had told her that during other examinations, they had asked the afflicted girls what the attacker was wearing to prove themselves in court. Any time she tried to answer a question, Hawthorne accused her of lying. When she made any movements, the afflicted girls had fits like they were being tortured by her.
Hawthorne tried to convince Martha to admit guilt over practicing witchcraft, which would have kept her alive, but she refused. Although she maintained claims of innocence and being a gospel woman until the end of the examination, Martha was still charged with two counts of witchcraft against Mercy Lewis and Elizabeth Hubbard. After the examination, she was sent to jail in Salem to await her trial.
Later, Martha was moved to a jail in Boston due to overcrowding from the large numbers of accusations in Salem. He also claimed that Martha would kneel in front of the fire and pray, but he never heard her praying.
But his cooperation with the court ceased on April 18, when an arrest warrant was issued against him. They also tied his hands together to prevent him from practicing witchcraft and every time they untied one of his hands, the afflicted girls would have fits, just like when Martha tried to move during her examination. He pled not guilty and refused to submit himself to the court for a jury trial. He was silent during his trial, which brought it to a standstill. On September 17, , Giles Corey was taken to an empty field near Salem jail, undressed, put on his back, and tied to the ground.
Then, wooden beams were placed across his chest and heavy stones were placed on top of the beams. Many believe that Giles died instead of admitting guilt because he knew he was going to be executed one way or another. In light of this, not admitting guilt allowed him to pass all of his estates down to his children. On September 8, , Martha Corey was found guilty of witchcraft and was sentenced to death. On September 22, , Martha was brought to Gallows Hill with seven other convicted witches and was hanged.
The Salem Witch Trials are studied thoroughly today due to the mystery around the motives behind the afflicted girls accusing anyone and everyone. Although it was eventually stopped, and everything seemed back to normal, for those who had lost their innocent loved ones, it would never be the same.
This article was so interesting! It was so intriguing to have a glimpse in the history of witches in Salem and New England. Witch hunts were commonplace at the time. In Europe, the Inquisition tried to eliminate them en masse, but there were members of the institution who were not driven by ecstasy and madness, but had common sense, claiming that there was always a lack of evidence, or that the first witnesses of paranormal events were always children, who tend to have an inordinate imagination.
Bernard Rosenthal views him as the victim of fabrication. For example, Ann Putnam and Abigail Williams knowingly put pins in their hands and accused his specter of putting them there to add to evidence against him Salem Story. He was also a victim of the life-saving strategy that the accused learned during the early course of the trials: confess and your life will be spared.
Two of his primary accusers were among the accused who confessed to save themselves.. Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum interpret the trials in socio-economic and political terms.
They argue that many members of the more rural and agricultural Salem Village e. Salem Village had been trying to assert its independence from the Town by establishing its own church, and inhabitants of the Village with ties to the Town were seen as threats to the cause of Village independence. As such, the majority of accusers was from the Village and the majority of the accused who lived on the western side of the Village nearer to the Town. The phenomenon of the accused becoming accusers was due, they argue, to the swarm of accusations made in the heat of politics and economics.
Eventually the confusion had to fall back on itself. Carol Karlsen offers a more gender-oriented analysis. The "possessed accusers" were usually subordinate members of society such as servants. Many of them, like Sarah Churchill, were orphans. Their prospects for improving their social standings were virtually nonexistent since they had no families and no dowries to support them.
Totally dependent upon the will of others, their discontent and anxiety would have been quite marked. Puritan society, however, did not tolerate socially aggressive and assertive women. Their fears were then converted, psychologically, into the belief that they were either witches or were possessed.
After all, Carol Karlsen argues, a society that teaches the existence of possession will invariably contain persons who think they are possessed and are believed to be so by others. As for the specific reason that Sarah Churchill accused George Jacobs, he may have been seen as a tormentor or harsh master since most of the accusations contained charges of physical abuse.
All of these explanations fall short, however. None of them explains why Jacobs own granddaughter would accuse him of all people or why such a large number of accusations flew at Jacobs, except for the fact that he publicly denounced the circle of "afflicted" girls, thus opening them to charges of fraud and compliance with the Devil.
If modern students and scholars find it hard to explain why so many people would spend their time accusing a 70 year-old man, it is quite easy to see why George Jacobs, Sr.
The sixty-seven year old widow Susannah Martin of Amesbury was hanged as a witch on July 19, on the basis of the testimony of the accusing circle of girls of Salem Village and other neighbors. Although she maintained her innocence to the end, a previous history of witchcraft accusations and the momentum of Salem's accusations carried her to the gallows.
Martin figures in historian Carol Karlsen's account of the Salem outbreak as an example of a woman who was easily targeted as a threat to the orderly transmission of property down the paternal line because of Martin's role in an ongoing court dispute over her father's will. Source Mabel Martin:. Artist, Mary A. By David C. Maintaining her innocence up until the moment of her execution, Susannah North Martin was hanged with four other women on July 19, during the outbreak of witchcraft accusations in Salem.
At the time of her execution Martin was 67 and a widow. She arrived in Massachusetts in from Buckinghamshire, England, married the blacksmith George Martin in Salisbury, in and had eight children. During the course of her examination and trial 15 of Martin's neighbors accused her of afflicting them through her specter, by pinching them or causing their farm animals to die.
The Reverend Cotton Mather believed her to be "one of the most impudent, scurrilous, wicked Creatures in the World" Brave and outspoken, Martin refused to allow her accusers to shake her convictions. Standing in the courtroom, confronted by girls seemingly writhing from "afflictions" they blamed on her, Martin maintained that she only "desire[d] to lead my self according to the word of God. Martin was no stranger to witchcraft accusations, having been accused two decades earlier.
Her husband, deceased by the time of the Salem outbreak, had countered the charges of witchcraft and infanticide with slander suites. Although he did not win decisively, Susannah was acquitted in the criminal courts. In public gossip, however, her reputation as a witch appears to have continued irrespective of the court's findings.
At the same time as the first accusations of witchcraft Susannah and her husband were involved in a series of legal battles over her inheritance.
In her father, Richard North, died leaving two daughters, a granddaughter and his second wife to share his sizable estate. To the surprise of Susannah and her sister, they received only a tiny portion while the bulk of the estate passed to his second wife, who died soon after her husband.
Susannah's stepmother left the majority of North's estate to his granddaughter, continuing the exclusion of Susannah and her sister.
From to Susannah's husband and her sister pursued a series of appeals, all of which were ultimately unsuccessful. These familial disputes over inheritance were incorporated by historian Carol Karlsen in The Devil in the Shape of a Woman into her interpretation of the Salem outbreak in socio-economic terms. Karlsen postulated that accused witches were not only poor, disagreeable old women, but also women of social and economic standing within their community.
Specifically, Karlsen believes there is a correlation between witchcraft accusations and aberrations in the traditional line of property transmission. She notes that property, particularly land, typically went to the male relatives after the death of a parent. In the cases of many of the accused women, however, Karlsen discovered a pattern of women standing to inherit in the absence of male heirs. She develops this theme, and Martin's place within her theory, in chapter three of her book.
Although Karlsen's book offers invaluable insights in the role of gender in the Salem outbreak, in the case of Susannah Martin her theory stretches a bit too thin. The inheritance debate, which Karlsen cites as motivational for Martin's accusation, is separated from the Salem outbreak by twenty years.
Much fresher in the minds of her accusers would be the outspokenness demonstrated by her comments during her courtroom examination.
In this case, the accused fits very well with the stereotype of the accused witch as a disagreeable old woman. Martin's descendant, John Greenleaf Whittier, immortalized her innocence and bravery in his poem The Witches Daughter, published in Rebecca Nurse was an elderly and respected member of the Salem Village community. She was accused of witchcraft by several of the "afflicted" girls in the Village in March of Although a large number of friends, neighbors and family members wrote petitions testifying to her innocence, she was tried for acts of witchcraft in June, The jury first returned a "not guilty" verdict, but was told to reconsider, and then brought in a verdict of "guilty.
She was excommunicated from the Salem church and hanged on July 19, Her house in Danvers, the former Salem village, still stands and is open to visitors. A large monument also marks her grave in the Nurse family cemetery on the grounds. This drawing illustrates a scene in John Musick's book The Witch of Salem in which Rebecca Nurse is brought in chains to the meeting house where the Rev.
Nicholas Noyes pronounces her excommunication before the congregation. By John R. Artist: F. Diorama depicting the trial of Rebecca Nurse, shown seated in the dock at the right, the magistrates in the center, and the "afflicted" girls at the left. Artist: Yiannis Stefinarkis, ca. Source Video Cassette cover. Three sovereigns for Sarah. Night Owl Productions.
Producer, writer, Victor Pisano. Director, Philip Leacock. Rebecca Nurse Memorial, erected The inscription on the monument reads: Rebecca Nurse, Yarmouth, England Salem, Mass. The tall granite memorial is located in the cemetery of Rebecca Nurse Homestead, Danvers, Massachusetts. Rebecca Nurse, a sick and elderly woman of seventy-years old, stood for examination before the court on charges of practicing witchcraft on March 24, The examination of "Goody Nurse" developed into a spectacle worthy of the attendance of so many onlookers, as a number of afflicted women launched into "grevious fitts" and openly denounced Rebecca Nurse as the cause of their torment.
In the end, after one of the great confrontations between an accused and the infamous Judge Hathorne, the Judges found cause to bind Rebecca Nurse over for trial after which she was executed on Gallows Hill on July 19, The examination of Rebecca Nurse was recorded by the Reverend Samuel Parris, whose own young daughter Betty was one of the accusers together Betty's cousin, twelve-year old Abigail Williams.
He writes that the examination opened with Hathorne turning his attention not to Nurse, but rather to Abigail Williams. Williams reported to the magistrates that the apparition of Nurse had just that morning, as well as on previous occasions, afflicted her. Shortly after this statement, Ann Putnam, Jr. Hathorne first turned his attention to Nurse, and pointedly asked her to account for the accusations of Williams and Putnam.
Nurse, defiant and incredulous to the end, responded, "I can say before my Eternal Father I am innocent and God will clear my innocency. After receiving two more accounts implicating Nurse in witchcraft, this time from adult men in the community, Hathorne put the question more directly. In an interesting aside in the examination record, Parris wrote that one of these accusations came from, "Mary Walcott who often heretofore said she had seen her, but never could say or did say that she either bit or pinchted her, or hurt her ".
Here, Parris, who actively encouraged the accusations in Salem Village, suggests that Walcott was now able to confirm that Nurse was the cause of her previous torment.
Then the girls, with their eyes on Nurse's agitated movements, imitated her postures by contorting their own bodies. Thus they made it appear that Nurse implicated herself, as the afflicted cried out in pain with every movement of the examinant's head and arms, gaining the attion of the judges and the onlookers. Yet even in the face of this seemingly damning evidence, Nurse steadfastly proclaimed her innocence: "The Lord knows I have not hurt them.
I am an innocent person. The banter between Hathorne, and possibly at times Corwin, and Nurse continued as the judges attempted to badger a confession using different rhetorical devices.
The judges asked why Nurse stood stoically in the face of such afflictions suffered by the girls, to which Nurse replied, "You do not know my heart," and that she was, " Hathorne, likely frustrated at Nurse's refusal to cooperate and confess her dealings with the Devil, attempted a new approach.
First, Hathorne by this statement deftly forced Nurse to explain the afflictions witnessed in that very room as, if not her fault, then the fault of the very girls so "grievously afflicted".
Second, by stating that the afflicted girls would be "murderers" if merely pretending their affliction "by designe", it certainly became abundantly clear to Rebecca Nurse that it would be her own death to which these afflicted women would soon be responsible if they were lying, as executions had yet to be ordered or begun in Salem.
It was Hathorne's final, desperate attempt to force a confession from Nurse by ensuring she understood that her own life was in the balance. As the examination drew to a close, the best Hathorne could wrest from the steadfast Nurse was that though she did think the afflicted were "bewitcht", she stated that "I cannot help it, the Devil may appear in my shape.
Therefore, after an examination that was truly a circus hardly befitting a true and legal hearing, Judges Hathorne and Corwin bound Rebecca Nurse over for the trial which would result in her execution on charges of practicing witchcraft. During her examination she was asked, "How long have ye been in the snare of the devil? At the time, no one paid much attention.
Mary Ayer Parker was convicted and hanged by the end of the month. Modern historians have let her claim fall to the wayside as well, but what if she told the truth? Was there another Mary Parker in Andover? Could it be possible that the wrong Mary Parker was executed?
We know little about the Mary Parker of Other scholars presumed her case was unimportant-but perhaps that assumption was wrong. The end of her story is recorded for every generation to see, but the identity of this woman remained shrouded in mystery for over three centuries. We still don't know why she was accused in Puritan women were not particularly noteworthy to contemporary writers and record-keepers.
They appeared occasionally in the court records as witnesses and plaintiffs but their roles were restricted to the house and family. Mary Parker was a typical Puritan wife. She appeared in the records only in birth notices and the records associated with the will of her late husband Nathan Parker. Notably, the records included no legal trouble at all, for witchcraft or anything else. John and Hannah Ayer gave birth to their daughter Mary sometime in the early to mid 's.
Mary and her siblings may have been born in England, and later moved to North America with their parents. The Ayers moved several times during the early stages of their settlement in America but resettled for the last time in in Haverhill.
The family was apparently of some prominence. Tax records from showed that John Ayer possessed at least one hundred and sixty pounds, making him one of the wealthiest settlers in Haverhill. Mary Ayer married Nathan Parker sometime before her father's death in Although no marriage record survived in the hometowns of either Nathan or Mary, the wording of her father John Ayer's will made it obvious that she was married with children when it was written.
Mary and Nathan marriage was not documented but we do know Nathan and his brother Joseph settled in Newbury, Massachusetts sometime in the early 's. They settled in Andover where they were amongst its first settlers. The original size of his house lot was four acres but the Parker's landholdings improved significantly over the years to The early settlers, including the Parkers, would be those of importance.
By , Nathan began serving as a constable in Andover. It continued to do so during the early years of their marriage as he acquired more land. Mary and Nathan continued to have children for over twenty years after the birth of John Parker in Mary bore four more sons: James in , Robert in , Peter in , and a son Joseph.
James died on June 29, , killed in an Indian skirmish at Black Point. Hannah married John Tyler in When Nathan died on June 25, , he left an ample estate to his wife and children. The court awarded her one-third of the house and lands, equal shares to Robert, Joseph, Peter, Hannah, Elizabeth, and Sarah, and a double share to John. Mary Parker did not appear in Essex County records after September 29, when she brought the inventory to court.
We know little about her interaction with her neighbors and the community after her husband's death. The Parkers were a respectable family that continued to root itself in the community. So why, less than a decade after her husband's death, was Mary accused as a witch? There was no documented friction with any of her neighbors, any no prior accusations. The closest tie Mary had with witchcraft was a distant cousin on her father's side, William Ayers whose his wife Judith was accused of witchcraft in What really happened in to Mary Ayer Parker?
The examination of Mary Parker occurred the next day. At the examination, afflicted girls from both Salem and Andover fell into fits when her name was spoken. The records state that when Mary came before the justices, the girls were cured of their fits by her touch-the satisfactory result of the commonly used "touch test," signifying a witch's guilt.
When Mary denied being the witch they were after Martha Sprague, one of her accusers, quickly responded that is was for certain this Mary Parker, who had afflicted her. Sprague and Mary Lacy effectively fell into fits. Nevertheless, Mary Parker's defense was ignored, both by the courtroom, and most historians until now. In fact there were not one, but three other Mary Parkers in Andover.
The second was Joseph and Mary's daughter Mary. The third was the wife of Mary and Joseph's son, Stephen. Mary Marstone Parker married Stephen in Confusion could easily have arisen from the multitude of Mary Parkers abound in Essex County. However, similarities between Mary Ayer Parker and her sister-in-law may have instigated confusion in even her accusers.
The two Mary's married the Parker brothers by the late 's, and began having children in the early 's. They had children of the same name including sons named Joseph and daughters Mary and Sara Mary, daughter of Nathan and Mary may have died soon after her father Joseph's wife received their house and ample land from his will, dated November 4, But in September of , it was only Nathan Parker's wife who was accused, tried, and found guilty of witchcraft.
Why was Mary Ayer brought to trial? On the surface, the two Mary Parkers seemed almost interchangeable but the will of Joseph Parker revealed something important about his branch of the Parker family. Joseph made some peculiar stipulations regarding the inheritance of his son Thomas. The will described Thomas as "who by god's providence is disenabled for providing for himself or managing an estate if committed to him by reason of distemper of mind att certain seasons.
This "distemper of mind" seemed to run in the family. Stephen Parker later petitioned in September that his mother be barred from the management of her own affairs for the same reason. Stephen revealed that his mother was in a "distracted condition and not capable of improving any of her estate for her owne comfort. Mental illness was often distrusted and feared.
In fact, a case in involved a woman with a history of mental illness. Rebecca Fox Jacobs confessed to witchcraft in and her mother Rebecca Fox petitioned both the Court of Oyer and Terminer and Massachusetts Governor Phips for her release on the grounds of mental illness.
This does not guarantee the girls intended to accuse Mary Stevens Parker but it does make the case for Mary Ayer Parker's misidentification stronger.
A notorious figure in Salem Towne, also named Mary Parker muddled the case further. This Mary Parker appeared multiple times in the Essex courts and made a reputation for herself beginning in 's. In , she was sentenced for fornication. A year later, she went back to court for child support from Teague Disco of Exiter. She came to trial two more times for fornication in A scandalous figure indeed, Mary from Salem further sullied the name "Mary Parker.
A disreputable name could have been enough to kill the wrong woman in In a society where the literate were the minority, the spoken word was the most damaging. Gossip, passed from household to household and from town to town through the ears and mouths of women, was the most prevalent source of information.
The damaged reputation of one woman could be confused with another as tales of "Goode So-and-so" filtered though the community. The accused Sarah Bishop had a history of witchcraft suspicions, especially concerning the death of Christian Trask. Her death, ruled a suicide, remained a controversy and many believed that Sarah Bishop had bewitched her. Susanna Sheldon, joining the cast of afflicted girls, claimed that she saw Bridget Bishop in an apparition who told her she killed three women, one of them being Christian Trask.
The confusion associated with their cases proved how easily gossip could be attributed to the wrong woman. Mary Ayer Parker told the truth about the other Marys, but the court ignored her. William Barker Jr. He testified "looking upon Mary Parker said to her face that she was one of his company, And that the last night she afflicted Martha Sprague in company with him. In his own confession, William accused a "goode Parker," but of course, he did not specify which Goody Parker he meant.
Mary Parker's luck plummeted when Mary Warren suffered a violent fit in which a pin ran through her hand and blood came from her mouth during her examination. Martha's indictment was rejected, returned reading "ignoramus,"38 but the indictments for both Hannah Bigsbee and Sarah Phelps were returned "billa vera", and the court held Mary Parker for trial.
Sara claimed that Mary tortured her on the last day of August as well as "diverse other days and times. Thomas Chandler approved both indictments. Significantly both Sarah and Hanna were members of the Chandler family, one of the founding families in Andover.
Their daughter Sara Jr. Thomas, married Daniel Bigsbee on December 2, Thomas Chandler's daughter Hannah and granddaughter Sarah. Did the Chandler family have it out for the Parkers? Thomas and his son William settled in Andover in the s. Public and private ties between William, Thomas, and the Parker brothers were manifest in the public records.
Nathan and William Chandler held the responsibility of laying out the land lots, and probably shared other public duties as well. The only hint of any fallout between the families came more than a decade before Joseph Parker's will. On June 6, , Nathan Parker testified in an apprenticeship dispute between the Tylers and the Chandlers. Bad blood between the Chandler and Tyler families could have translated into problems between the Chandler and Parker families.
This discord would have been worsened by the alliance between the Tyler and Parker families through Hannah Parker and John Tyler's marriage in This still does not seem enough to explain the Chandlers' involvement Perhaps after Nathan Parker's death in , neighborly tensions arose between Mary's inherited state and the bordering Chandler estate. The existing records betray nothing further. Perhaps these speculated neighborly problems were coupled with the desire to distract attention from an internal scandal in the Chandler family.
In Hannah and Daniel Bigsbee testified in the trial of Elizabeth Sessions, a single woman in Andover who claimed to be pregnant with the child of Hannah's brother Joseph.
The Bigsbees refuted her claim and insisted she carried the child of another man. The crisis of was a perfect opportunity for them to divert attention away from the scandal. When Mary Parker was arrested, they found the ideal candidate to take advantage of: her husband and her brother-in-law were no longer around to defend her and her young sons could not counter the power of the Chandlers.
After the initial indictments, Hannah Bigsbee and Sarah Phelps dropped from documented involvement in the case. Here, the documentation gets rather sloppy and confused. Essex Institute archivists erroneously mixed much of the testimony from Alice Parker's case in with Mary Parker's.
When the irrelevant material is extracted, there is very little left of the actual case. Nothing else remains of Mary Parker case. It appeared that Mary's trial was over on September 16, She was executed only six days later. Evidence seems lacking. In essence, Mary was convicted almost solely from the testimony from two teenage confessors.
Her examination, indictment, and grand inquest all took place expediently, and within one month, Mary was accused, convicted and executed. Her death seems irresponsible at the least, and even almost outrageous. She was convicted with such little evidence, and even that seems tainted and misconstrued.
The Salem trials did her no justice, and her treatment was indicative of the chaos and ineffectualness that had over taken the Salem trials by the fall of However, her treatment by historians is even less excusable. The records of her case are disorganized and erroneous, but what has been written about the case is even more misinformed.
Today it is impossible to exonerate the reputation of Mary Ayer Parker. The records that survive are too incomplete and confused. But perhaps we can acknowledge the possibility that amidst the fracas of , a truly innocent woman died as the result of sharing the unfortunate name "Mary Parker. John Proctor was an elderly man of 60 years of age when accused, tried, and hanged for practicing witchcraft in Maintaining his innocence until death, he challenged the court to reexamine the validity of spectral evidence.
Though it did not save him, his legacy is remembered in Arthur Miller's play The Crucible. Though not an historically accurate depiction, The Crucible does bring attention to the story of John Proctor and his struggle as an innocent man. Of all the literature focused on the Salem witch trials of , Arthur Miller's The Crucible is the only one to treat John Proctor as the main character.
Proctor was a major figure to be put on trial and executed in the summer of And although his character in The Crucible is one of main significance, he is not portrayed in an historically accurate manner. Though certain features of Proctor prevail and are consistent with the record, he is contrived to be approximately 30 years younger in the play than his actual age of approximately years-old in John Proctor was born in Ipswich, Massachusetts in to an established family of farmers.
His father had left him a large estate , and in , according to Boyer and Nissenbaum, Proctor moved near Salem Village. There, "he leased one of the largest farms of the area, 'Groton,' a acre spread lying immediately southeast of the Village line.
Thus, along with establishing himself as a prosperous and wealthy farmer, Proctor also diversified his economic interests by owning and operating a tavern on Ipswich Road. His economic standing was undoubtedly recognized within the community even though he held no official title. By the time of the witch trials of , Proctor was a well-established man of 60 years of age. One of Arthur Miller's innovations in The Crucible is his description of Proctor as " a farmer in his middle thirties.
Proctor is described on several occasions, from various sources as a strong-willed beast of a man. Charles Upham writes, "He was a man of Herculean frame No one else had come as close as Proctor did to forcing the issue. Testimony against John Proctor revealed his true feelings of the trials. Thus it can be stated that John Proctor directly and on several occasions threatened the validity of the Court of Oyer and Terminer.
Regardless of the possible implications of such actions, his fellow inhabitants of Ipswich supported him after his arrest. The petition validates the character of John Proctor and his family. After receiving his sentence to die on Gallows Hill on August One of 19 victims hanged in , John Proctor embodies the legacy of innocence connected to the trials and executions of Proctor maintained his innocence until his death, all the while questioning the methods of the court and its acceptance of spectral evidence.
Because of his constant protest of the court proceedings, Arthur Miller found John Proctor to embody many qualities important to The Crucible. Such a strong will to oppose the trials proved catastrophic for Proctor and in August of , he paid the ultimate price. Executed on Sept. Highlights from her trial included the usual testimony of the circle of accusing girls that Ann had afflicted them in "spectral" form.
John Best, Sr. Mary Warren went to the extreme of implicating Pudeator in the deaths of four people. Historian Carol Karlsen speculates that Pudeator may have been targeted due to her profession as a midwife that placed her in direct competition with male care providers, as well as her defiance of the Puritan female gender ideal of meekness and submission to male authority.
Although the details of Ann Pudeator's birth are unknown, it is estimated that she was between 70 and 75 when she was hanged, still protesting her innocence at the hands of false accusations. When Ann was arrested on May 12th , she was a twice-widowed woman of property in Salem Town. Although her testimony is well-documented in the transcripts of the Court of Oyer and Terminer, details of her origins before the trials of are largely unknown. Ann is thought to have been born in England sometime between and She married her first husband, Thomas Greenslit also spelled Greenslade and had five children with him sometime before Her name appears for the first time in the public record of Salem Town on the certificate of inventory for the his estate following his death in Although the eventual whereabouts of each of her children remains almost as unknown as Ann's own activities, her eldest son Thomas Pudeator went on to play a central role in the trial of the Reverend George Burroughs.
He testified to the man's extraordinary feat of strength in lifting a gun at arm's length with just one finger in the barrel. In Salem Story, historian Bernard Rosenthal suggests that this may have been a last-ditch effort by Thomas to save his own mother from execution by appearing to join sides with the witch-hunters. Ann was left destitute after her first husband died in , probably working in the paid profession of a midwife and nurse.
Her name does not appear again until March of , when she is recorded as the wife of her neighbor Jacob Pudeator, a man about 20 years her junior. This unusual circumstance was calls attention to the fact that Ann had served as nurse to Jacob's first wife Isabel during her illness, and married Jacob less than a year after Isabel's unexplained death between Jacob, too, passed away in , leaving monetary bequests to each of Ann's five children, as well as the remainder of his property to Ann herself.
Afterwards, Ann occupied the rather precarious position of being a professional woman of property in a male-dominated society. Historian Carol F. Karlsen suggests that Ann became a prime target for allegations of witchcraft after she scolded John Best, Jr.
Best claimed that "he did conclude said Pudeator was a witch" because she "would chide me when I came home from turning the cow back. She also implies that Ann's occupation of midwife, regardless of whether she earned money for this is not confirmed , may have threatened other male medical professionals in Salem Town, leading to accusations.
Birth was a risky act and filled with apprehension in that time period, loss of life during the process was often blamed on the malignant forces of the devil at work through witchcraft. Whatever the motivations for her accusers, a warrant for Ann Pudeator and another woman, Alice Parker, was written on May 12th Pudeator was brought to trial on July 2nd, Sarah Churchill was the first to accuse Ann of having tormented her, by appearing with the book of the devil and asking her to sign it.
She also accused Ann of having presented her with several images of accusing girls that she proceeded to torture like voodoo dolls with thorns. Five more of the circle of accusing girls confirmed these accusations - both Mary Warren and Ann Putnam falling into fits during Pudeator's examination and then being cured by a touch of Ann's hand.
In addition to these displays, Elizabeth Hubbard, Mary Walcott, and Sarah Bibber also presented testimony that Pudeator had afflicted them through pinching, pressing and choking. The constable Joseph Neal described his discovery of "curious containers of various ointments" suspected to have been associated with Ann's alleged witchcraft at her house upon her arrest, and asserted that she was an "ill-carriaged woman" whom he was convinced had adversely affected his wife in her service as midwife.
During her examination Ann insisted that these jars were simply filled with Neat's Foot Oil. Incriminating evidence of Ann's relation to animal familiars was given by Samuel Pickworth, who related seeing a bird fly by one night as he walked upon Salem Street, and soon after noticing a woman coming out of Ann's home, presumably the same entity as the bird. Throughout the trials, Ann remained consistent but relatively unassertive in her declrations of innocence.
She insisted that she did not know her accusers, nor anything of the art of witchcraft. Naturally we also have a detailed timeline and our popular Salem Quiz. This site has been featured on CourtTV.
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