Witchcraft in old and New England / by George Lyman Kittredge.

  • George Lyman Kittredge
Date:
1929
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Witchcraft in old and New England / by George Lyman Kittredge. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    605/660 page 591
    It is important to notice that North wrote his biographies late in life and that his death did not take place until 1734, only two years before the statute against witchcraft was repealed. 128. North remarks that Guilford (then Francis North, Chief Justice of the Common Pleas) “had really a concern upon him at what happened; which was, that his brother Raymond’s passive behavior should let those poor women die” (Life of the Lord Keeper Guilford, I, 267). Raymond was, to be sure, the judge who presided at the trial, but Francis North can¬ not be allowed to have all the credit which his brother Roger would give him, for he refused to reprieve the convicted witches (see his letter, quoted at p. 334, above). 129. There was a fierce war of pamphlets over Jane Wenham’s case. See the bibliography in Notestein, pp. 373—375. Cf. Memoirs of Litera¬ ture, 1722, IV, 357; Wright, Narratives of Sorcery and Magic, 1851, II, 319-326. Jane Wenham lived nearly twenty years after her trial; she died in 1730 (Clutterbuck, History and Antiquities of the County of Hertford, II, 461; W. B. Gerish, A Hertfordshire Witch, p. 10). 130. I refer to such remarks as the following: “As the devil lost his em¬ pire among us in the last age, he exercised it with greater violence among the Indian Pawwaws, and our New England colonists” (Richard Gough, British Topography, 1780, II, 254, notep); “The colonists of [Massa¬ chusetts] appear to have carried with them, in an exaggerated form, the superstitious feelings with regard to witchcraft which then [at the time of the settlement] prevailed in the mother country” (Introduction to the reprint of Cotton Mather’s Wonders of the Invisible World, in the Library of Old Authors, 1862); “In the dark and dangerous forests of America the animistic instinct, the original source of the superstition, operated so powerfully in Puritan minds that Cotton Mather’s Wonders of the Invisible World and the Salem persecution surpassed in credulity and malignity any¬ thing the mother country could show” (Ferris Greenslet, Joseph Glanvill, New York, 1900, pp. 150-151); “The new world, from the time of its settle¬ ment, has been a kind of health resort for the worn-out delusions of the old. . . . For years prior to the Salem excitement, European witchcraft had been prostrate on its dying bed, under the watchful and apprehensive eyes of religion and of law; carried over the ocean it arose to its feet, and threat¬ ened to depopulate New England” (George M. Beard, The Psychology of the Salem Witchcraft Excitement, New York, 1882, p. 1). 131. Wright, Narrative of Sorcery and Magic, II, 284. 132. Proceedings American Antiquarian Society, New Series, V, 267. 133. F. Legge, Witchcraft in Scotland, in The Scottish Review, October, 1891, XVIII, 263. 134. On modern savages as devil-worshippers, see, for example, Henry More, Divine Dialogues, 1668, I, 404 ff. (Dialogue, iii, sections 15-16). 135. Mather, Magnalia, Book i, chap, i, § 2, ed. 1853, I, 42; Book, vi, chap, vi, §3, III, 436; Jesuit Relations, ed. Thwaites, I, 286; II, 76; VIII, 124, 126. See also Thomas Morton, New English Canaan, 1637, chap, ix, ed. Adams (Prince Society), p. 150, with the references in Mr. Adams’s note. Cf. Hutchinson, History of Massachusetts, chap, vi, ed. 1795, I,
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