Malcolm Gaskill - The ruin of all witches : life and death in the New World

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First published in Great Britain by Allen Lane 2021

Copyright Malcolm Gaskill, 2021

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Cover image: details from 17th and 18th century woodcuts (Stapleton Collection/Bridgeman Images)

ISBN: 978-0-241-41340-1

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For Sheena Peirse
Who makes all things possible

Always and everywhere, human beings have felt the radical inadequacy of their personal existence, the misery of being their insulated selves and not something else, something wider.

Aldous Huxley, The Devils of Loudun (1952), appendix

A house, a city, a kingdom, divided against itself cannot stand Therefore if division do inevitably bring destruction to a kingdom, to a city, how shall one poor family divided subsist without destruction?

Robert Burnam, A Remonstrance, 1645 the year Hugh Parsons and Mary Lewis were married in New England

One reason why she doth suspect you to be a witch is because you cannot abide that anything should be spoken against witches this expression of your anger was because she wished the ruin of all witches.

William Pynchon, interrogating Hugh Parsons about his wife Mary, 1651 the year their marriage ended

The dates of the Old Style Julian calendar, whereby the New Year began on 25 March, have been changed to New Style so that the year starts on 1 January.

Sums of money are given as pounds, shillings and pence (, s, d). There were twelve pence to a shilling and twenty shillings to a pound. In New England, where silver was scarce, other forms of currency were used, including bushels of corn and Native American wampum blue-and-white polished shells, pierced and strung on long cords.

Spellings and punctuation in quotations have been modernized, contractions expanded and names standardized. As in Old England, people addressed each other as Goodman, Goodwife (or Goody) and Widow. The gentry were Mister and Mistress.

Hugh Parsons, a turbulent English brickmaker and jack-of-all-trades, in his thirties.

Mary Parsons (formerly Lewis), a maidservant from Wales, Hughs wife (m. 1645).

Hannah (b. 1646), Samuel (b. 1648) and Joshua Parsons (b. 1650), their children.

William Pynchon, founder of Springfield, fur trader, magistrate and amateur theologian.

Anne Smith, Pynchons daughter, mother of many daughters, confidante to Mary Parsons.

Henry Smith, her husband (and Pynchons stepson), town clerk and sometime deputy magistrate.

Margaret (b. 1646) and Sarah (b. 1647), the Smiths daughters, who perished in June 1648.

George Moxon, minister, whose daughters Martha and Rebecca were possessed or bewitched.

Thomas Merrick, a Welshman, town constable.

Sarah Merrick, Thomass wife, implicated as a witch.

Mercy Marshfield, a widow of dubious reputation, who fled Windsor to resettle in Springfield.

Sarah Miller, wife of unlucky sawyer Thomas Miller and Widow Marshfields daughter, who suffered fits and saw terrifying apparitions.

John Stebbins, whose wife Anne also had fits, and on whose homelot the witches met in secret.

Mary Bliss Parsons (no relation), who was troubled by spirits and roamed the meadow at night.

Anthony Dorchester, a poor, ambitious man and his ailing wife Sarah, Hugh Parsonss lodgers.

John Lombard, a herdsman from Somerset, the Parsonses next-door neighbour, whose borrowed trowel mysteriously vanished.

Blanche Bedortha, a Welsh housewife, married to Reece, a carter, terrified of Hugh during her pregnancy.

Pentecost Matthews, also Welsh, wife of John, and first to notice Marys witch obsession.

William Branch, the town barber, who was disturbed in the night and fell strangely lame.

Griffith Jones, a Welsh tanner, tricked at home by witchery.

Thomas Cooper, a Warwickshire carpenter, who heard Mary Parsonss shocking confession.

George Colton, William Pynchons quartermaster, a principal witness against Hugh Parsons.

Benjamin Cooley, a weaver, Coltons brother-in-law, next-door neighbour to the Bedorthas.

George and Hannah Langton, who were convinced their steamed meat pudding was bewitched.

Simon Beamon, cobbler and servant to William Pynchon, prey to Hugh Parsonss impatience.

Alexander Edwards, who had known Mary in Wales, and whose cow gave abnormal milk.

Jonathan Taylor, a young married labourer, menaced in his bed by demonic serpents.

This is a true story about witchcraft in mid-seventeenth-century New England. At this time none of its colonies New Hampshire, Plymouth, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut, sited along Americas east coast was over thirty years old. Each was still finding its way in a new world. Unlike the icy shores of Newfoundland and Maine or the tropics of Virginia and the Caribbean, New England resembled the old, with hills and plains, forests and rivers. For much of the year the climate was mild well suited to English bodies, colonists felt. Farmsteads produced cattle and corn. There were busy ports at Boston and Salem, and trade flourished. Yet life was fraught with peril. Settlers were far from home, assailed by sharp winters and sweltering summers and hemmed in by wilderness. By day a labourer could pretend he was still tending wheat in Kent or herding sheep in Wiltshire; but the illusion was easily dispelled, especially after sunset. Old World folktales where travellers were stalked by evil became reality, trapping colonists in nightmares of echoing isolation and heart-thumping panic. In these moments, New England, for all its hopeful beginnings, meant only the skin-prickle of being watched, the twisting grip of a curse and the terrors of the dark.

The setting for this story is a remote community in Massachusetts, a hundred miles west of Boston, named Springfield. There, on the border between what they saw as civility and barbarism, Springfields pioneers laboured to cultivate both land and a new way of living together, only too aware of how closely their fragile world was overseen by God and existed at his mercy. They contended with waves of epidemics, severe flooding and constant tension with the Native Americans they called Indians, whose possessions they appropriated. They also clashed with Dutch traders into whose territory they strayed, and with English planters further down the Connecticut River valley. Mostly, however, they clashed with their own neighbours, competing furiously for material advantage: farmland, livestock, wealth and power. Whenever this fury subsided, consciences were apt to be pricked, guilt bubbling up in private thoughts, and in dreams where colonists saw their own self-serving desires wrestling with those of their enemies. But still they didnt yield; nor did they show remorse. Instead, conflicting emotions were batted away, projected onto a diabolic other onto witches and thus assuaged.