How fear, fanaticism and vengeance fuelled the brutal witch trials
The winter of 1691-1692 was a long, hard one in Massachusetts. Fevers and colds swept through the communities of European settlers who had colonised North America’s eastern coastal strip during the past 50 years. As snow piled up in drifts, the settlers were isolated and confined. Many were Puritans – religious fundamentalists who had fled from England to build an ideal godly society in America – and they had few permitted pleasures. For most of them, the only allowable entertainment was going to church to pray and hear sermons preached by their ministers, and this was a duty rather than fun. It was in these circumstances that in February 1692 two girls living in the house of the Salem Village church’s minister Samuel Parris began to suffer fits, their bodies cramping and distorting painfully. The girls were Samuel’s niece Abigail Williams, aged eleven, and his daughter Betty Parris, aged nine.
Salem in the 1690s was a difficult time and place to be a child. Games and social contacts were strictly policed. Children were expected to be silent and pious, focused on studying God’s word as it appeared in the Bible rather than on play or other kinds of learning. Girls often received no schooling and we know from documents that Abigail Williams could not even write her own name: she had to sign with a mark. Already suppressed and resentful, Abigail and Betty also knew food and firewood were running short, and wars were raging between colonists and Native American people to the north. Some of their friends – perhaps even Abigail herself, an apparent orphan – were refugees from that war. The parsonage house where Abigail and Betty lived offered no defence against any Native American attack. It was a two-storey wooden box and just as it let in the cold and damp, so it also lay open to killers wielding knives and guns. It was the kind of scenario to cause nightmares and it would not be surprising if by February 1692 Abigail and Betty were tired, bored, hungry and frightened.
