Starkey points out that none of these women attend church. Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne claim to be innocent of any witchcraft all the way up until when they were hanged. When Tituba is on trial she explains that the devil made her do it, and that Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne and the three others where involved. Two others are accused of being witches; Martha and her husband Giles. When the trials began, many accused others of witchcraft and this lead to them accusing even more.
Between 1645 and 1647, England was in the midst of it's most serious witchcraft outbreak. Several hundred people were hanged with approximately 90 percent of them being women. In 1656, a widow residing in Boston was called to stand before the elected officials and representatives in Massachusettes County Court. Her name was Ann Hibbens and although she desperately plead innocent, even after having her case re-tried, she was once again convicted by the jury and by the words of Governor John Endicott, she was to “goe from the barr to the place whence she came, and from thence to the place of execution, and there to hang till she was dead.” Five weeks later, Ann Hibbens was executed as a witch. It was no shock to New Englanders that a woman be executed for witchcraft, they had already witnessed 'Hibbens Fate' with sixteen previous executions in the decade before, which included between eight and nine women and one man.
At the start of 1692, two adolescent girls from Salem village started to ail from mysterious fits. Seventeen months afterwards, after lawful action was taken on 144 individuals, with 20 of them being sentenced to death, the humiliating Salem witchcraft court proceedings ended at long last. (Norton, 2003 pg. 3 -4) During those times, the magistrates who headed court cases paid no attention to women as well as girls who were aged below twenty five years old but in that witch case, things took a different turn as women were the prevalent accusers and the magistrate gave them opportunity to air their views (Norton, 2003 p.7). Norton's supposition regarding the 1692 hunt for witches at Salem village support a clash of traditions thesis and some
The Salem Witch Trials Brittany Johnson Marc Romanelli Monday April 8, 2013 The Salem Witch Trials (Rough Draft) Fear of Devil-worshipping and witchcraft swept through Salem, Massachusetts, like a plague. During the years of 1692 and 1693, more than 200 people—men, women, and even children—were accused of witchcraft (Blumberg). Words of friends, neighbors, and even complete strangers put many people's lives in danger. Nineteen people were hanged, one person pressed to death, and four known deaths occurred in prison. The accusations, the trials, the executions, and the events leading up to and after the deaths, kept Salem, Massachusetts on its toes in
The Salem Witch Trials, The Crucible, and the Red Scare all relate in one major way; groups of people all accused for actions that most of them never did. During the Salem Witch Trials at least two hundred people, mainly women, were accused of practicing witchcraft (Salem). The court had no actual proof of witchcraft against them except, they were still sentenced to jail or execution. The Crucible takes place in the same time period of the Salem Witch Trials and very closely mirrors the trials with a few liberties taken by Arthur Miller to make the stage production work with the space of a stage, and make the plot more relatable. Written in the early 1950’s and published not long after that, many believe that Miller wanted to connect the Salem Witch Trials to what was happening with McCarthyism.
It says in the textbook that it’s estimated that between on million and nine million Europeans were executed as witches in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Again, also people from the British colony were doing what they wanted to do, But in there colony witchcraft is bad and you get hung for it, my thing is that the people they locked up for witchcraft and killed, Judge Hawthorne would not let the people tell there part because some of them did it and some didn’t. it also says in the book, small parish of Salem village many were quick to blame witchcraft when the ministers daughter and several other girls were afflicted by seizures and lapses. I just think its crazy how judge Hawthorne and Judge Kaufman could really execute people without getting the full story on both parts of the
The notorious judges of the Holy Roman Empire, for example, simply applied thumbscrews until the unfortunate suspects confessed. And during the English witch craze in the 1640s, the Rev. John Gaule recorded that 'every old woman with a wrinkled face, a furr'd brow, a hairy lip, a gobber tooth, a squint eye, a squeaking voice, or a scolding tongue ... is not only suspected,
Reverend John Hale “The Crucible” is a tale of witches, death, greed, lies and infidelity. In “The Crucible,” by Arthur Miller, it plays out the events of the witch hunt trials in Salem, Massachusetts, during the spring of 1692. Led by seventeen-year-old Abigail Williams, a group of young girls claim to have been bewitched by members of the town. With only the testament of the “afflicted” girls, people are accused and forced to either confess to witchcraft or be hanged. By the time it is all over, countless numbers of people are accused and nineteen men, women, and children, are hanged.
As colonial Massachusetts began to recuperate from the recent King Philip's War, which ravaged though the majority of New England, another event was just around the corner. In the year of 1692 village minister Samuel Parris's daughter Betty and niece Abigail had contracted some sort of odd illness that numerous doctors could not categorize as a specific illness or disease. As many doctors came through the town of Salem to take a look at the girls, one doctor boldly made the assumption the some type of witchcraft was responsible for these girls' current state. It was due to this assumption that the witch hunt had begun, and 178 Massachusetts citizens were accused of using witchcraft or being a witch (Davidson & Lytle 42). Of these over 178 citizens three out of four were female, which made this witch hunt a gender issue (Davidson & Lytle 42).
Many of these characters go through life changing events that change them forever. Even the neighbors suddenly turn on each other and accuse people they’ve known for years of practicing witchcraft and devil-worship. The town of Salem falls into mass hysteria, “an uncontrollable outburst of emotion or fear.” Arthur Miller’s play, “The Crucible” is about the Salem witch trials in 1860. These were classic examples of mass hysteria, resulting in the hanging of a great many respectable men and woman of charges of “trafficking” with the devil. They were convicted by people at least as themselves, largely on the evidence of four young girls who had been caught dancing in the moonlight and laid their dissolute behavior to the influence of Satan.