Cheryl Lassiter's Blog - Posts Tagged "witchcraft"
New Book Still Needs Reviews!
If you've read my latest book, "The Mark of Goody Cole," I'd love it if you'd post your review! Thank you!
Goody Cole Book Trailer
I just discovered that I can link my YouTube book trailer (for The Mark of Goody Cole) to Goodreads. It's now available on my Author Profile page. Check out the awesome flying crow at the end of the trailer!
New Fiction Series: KINDREAD
When a family with supernatural powers goes to war with itself, a daughter must use her inherited powers to stay alive.
The Witch of Hampton
It’s my guess that most people in town would not be surprised to learn that the most frequently asked questions by visitors to the Tuck Museum, especially around this ghostly time of year, are those about Goody Cole, the Witch of Hampton.
For the benefit of those who might not have heard of Hampton’s most famous citizen: Goody Cole, whose given name was Unise (alternately, Eunice), was a seventeenth-century miscreant whose hateful presence disturbed the town’s peace, leaving the magistrates no other choice but to physically punish her, and when that didn’t produce the desired good behavior, to charge her with witchcraft.
Unise Cole has been portrayed as a foul-tempered misanthrope imbued with magical powers. In modern times she has been variously feared and pitied, and has achieved minor cult status as a witch and renowned victim of a cruel belief system. The truth is, the facts of Goody Cole’s existence present themselves like the prison she was so often in: dark, windowless, and having a heavily barred door to further inquiry. It is impossible to know who she really was and what her desires and demons might have been. But we can try.
From England to America
In 1635, a maid named Eunice Giles married a sawyer named William Coules at the medieval Anglican church of St. Dunstan’s in the parish of Stepney, Middlesex, England, just outside of the walled city of London, adjacent to the East India Company’s sprawling shipyard in Blackwall. I believe this was the Unise and William Cole who arrived in New England during the summer or fall of 1636.
They lived at Mount Wollaston, south of Boston, until 1638, when they were among the first settlers of Exeter, New Hampshire. In 1640 the town of Hampton granted land to William, but he continued to appear in the Exeter records until about 1644, in which year it is supposed he and Unise moved to Hampton. Once here, Unise’s legal troubles began almost immediately. Long before her first trial for witchcraft, she was fined, set in stocks, “admonished,” and even whipped for various infractions of the law, much of it related to bad relations with her neighbors. Neither the civil authorities nor her husband, who once joined her in railing against a perceived injustice, could subdue her for long.
During the quarter century from her first witchcraft trial in 1656 until her death in 1680, Unise spent more than half the time in prison. In all, she was whipped at least two, perhaps three, times, was hauled before the court on at least eight occasions, fined twice, admonished once, twice put under a bond, set in the stocks, searched for witch-marks, watched for diabolical imps, and, near the end of her life, was locked in leg irons and imprisoned one final time.
First Trial for Witchcraft
Twenty-six witnesses testified at her first trial for witchcraft, held in Boston. The main evidence brought against her was the witch-marks discovered on her body at her first whipping. The reason for the whipping seems to have been related to her involvement in the death of a (possibly deformed) child. Witnesses also implicated her in the death of a bedridden man, said she had killed their cattle through demonic agency, and that she had had an uncanny knowledge of a private conversation.
Convicted on a lesser charge, Unise was kept in the Boston prison until early 1660. When she returned home she was immediately back in trouble. For calling her neighbors despicable names, she was again whipped and sent back to prison.
When William died in 1662 Unise petitioned the court for release, which was granted. Unable to abide by the terms of the release, she was sent back to prison for a third time—coincidentally on the morning after she had been observed discoursing in her house with the Devil himself.
Her house and land were taken from her and she became a ward of the town, which paid a yearly charge to keep her incarcerated. Eight years later, over 70 years old and homeless, she was freed from prison. When she returned to Hampton the town put her in a cottage near the meeting house and grudgingly provided her with food and wood.
Second Trial for Witchcraft
The trouble again started up, with a whining pup in the meeting house, threats made to the night’s watchmen, and the enticing of a nine-year-old girl. The last offense was deemed witchcraft and in 1673 Unise was again put on trial in Boston.
The prosecutors, John Sanborn and/or Nathaniel Weare, threw the kitchen sink of testimony at her, even bringing in decades-old evidence to wring out a conviction. Yet, after all their hard work, the jury stubbornly refused to find her legally guilty.
Unise again returned to Hampton. Nothing more was heard of her by way of the court until 1680 when she was again accused of being a witch, for which she was locked in leg irons and held in the local prison. One month later she died, and a legend was born.
Early Legends
By the nineteenth century, tales of old Goodwife Unise Cole were circulating in written form thanks to the pens of local historians like Edmund Willoughby Toppan (1808-1845) and Joseph Dow (1807-1889), and the poems of John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892) of Amesbury, Massachusetts.
Toppan was the first person, as far as is known, to set down the Cole lore as it existed in his time. He looked with a bemused eye upon claims of Unise’s “alliance with the Devil,” observing that despite her reputation as a fearsome witch, the “young people of that day” delighted in antagonizing her with tricks. Concerning her death,
Toppan wrote that after a few days of not seeing her out and about, the townspeople “plucked up courage enough to break into the house” and found her dead. They buried her and drove a stake into the grave, with a horseshoe attached, “to prevent her from ever coming up again.” When Toppan was a student at Hampton Academy, a “little mound of earth was pointed out [to him] as the veritable grave of the once powerful Eunice Cole.”
Whittier also took an interest in the lore. Much of today’s popular perception of her can be traced back to the scratchings of his imaginative quill. The 1864 ballad Wreck of Rivermouth recast a real-life 1657 shipwreck near the mouth of the Hampton River into a doomed fishing excursion to the Isles of Shoals. The poet places “the mad old witch-wife” in a riverside shack, where she is able to curse her antagonists as they sail merrily by. When a young lady onboard makes fun of the “bent and blear-eyed poor old soul” sitting at her door a-spinning, Unise conjures up a storm to teach her a lesson. Whittier must have felt a pang of guilt for abusing her memory in this way; at the end of the tale he gives her a heart: as she sees the sinking ship, a tear stains her cheek and she is utterly shaken that her “words were true.”
Joseph Dow, who wrote the History of Hampton, just stuck to the facts.
The Goody Cole Society
The Great Depression with its Dust Bowl, dispossessed farmers, and homeless vagabonds had sparked America’s social imagination and fired enormous interest in the lives and sufferings of ordinary people. It was during this time that Unise Cole’s life story became an object lesson in injustice, and her reputation as a witch rocketed to celebrity status. She was Hampton’s most well-known citizen, with a story ripe for exploitation.
In 1937 the Goody Cole Society was formed to “restore” Unise Cole to the “citizenship” of which she had been deprived by many years of imprisonment, and at the town meeting in 1938 residents voted to give back her “rightful place as a citizen of the town of Hampton.” Two weeks later she and her latter-day champions starred in a nationally broadcast radio program to dramatize the event.
As the star of the town’s three-hundredth birthday, held in August 1938, her imagined likeness was emblazoned on pamphlets, plaques, street signs, commemorative coins, and an air mail cachet; there was a Goody Cole doll and a Witch of Hampton booklet. Goody Cole scenes appeared in the town’s historical pageant. An entire day was devoted to her memory, with a special ceremony, attended by local and state dignitaries and a national celebrity, to restore her rights as a citizen of Hampton.
Later Legends
In 1937, Haverhill, Massachusetts newspaperman William D. Cram invented the enduring story of Goody Cole’s magic well, placing it alongside her riverside shack at The Willows on Sargent’s Island. Then in the early 1960s, just in time for another town anniversary, came a spate of sightings of the ghost of Goody Cole (as well as the installation at the local museum of a large lump of granite in her honor).
A Well-treated Witch?
Since those earlier times, the town’s demeanor has taken a more sophisticated turn: the two most recent town anniversaries were devoid of any new Cole lore. But she is far from forgotten—a musical album about her legend has been produced, information about her life is one of the top visitor requests at the Tuck Museum, and the Witch of Hampton remains as well-known to the town’s children as the local candy store. Remembrances of her have become, in their own way, part of the lore. It begs the question—has any other “witch” in history been treated so well post mortem as our own Goodwife Unise Cole?
History Matters is a monthly column devoted to the history of Hampton and Hampton Beach. Cheryl Lassiter is the author of “The Mark of Goody Cole: a tragic and true tale of witchcraft persecution from the history of early America” (2014). Her website is http://www.lassitergang.com.
For the benefit of those who might not have heard of Hampton’s most famous citizen: Goody Cole, whose given name was Unise (alternately, Eunice), was a seventeenth-century miscreant whose hateful presence disturbed the town’s peace, leaving the magistrates no other choice but to physically punish her, and when that didn’t produce the desired good behavior, to charge her with witchcraft.
Unise Cole has been portrayed as a foul-tempered misanthrope imbued with magical powers. In modern times she has been variously feared and pitied, and has achieved minor cult status as a witch and renowned victim of a cruel belief system. The truth is, the facts of Goody Cole’s existence present themselves like the prison she was so often in: dark, windowless, and having a heavily barred door to further inquiry. It is impossible to know who she really was and what her desires and demons might have been. But we can try.
From England to America
In 1635, a maid named Eunice Giles married a sawyer named William Coules at the medieval Anglican church of St. Dunstan’s in the parish of Stepney, Middlesex, England, just outside of the walled city of London, adjacent to the East India Company’s sprawling shipyard in Blackwall. I believe this was the Unise and William Cole who arrived in New England during the summer or fall of 1636.
They lived at Mount Wollaston, south of Boston, until 1638, when they were among the first settlers of Exeter, New Hampshire. In 1640 the town of Hampton granted land to William, but he continued to appear in the Exeter records until about 1644, in which year it is supposed he and Unise moved to Hampton. Once here, Unise’s legal troubles began almost immediately. Long before her first trial for witchcraft, she was fined, set in stocks, “admonished,” and even whipped for various infractions of the law, much of it related to bad relations with her neighbors. Neither the civil authorities nor her husband, who once joined her in railing against a perceived injustice, could subdue her for long.
During the quarter century from her first witchcraft trial in 1656 until her death in 1680, Unise spent more than half the time in prison. In all, she was whipped at least two, perhaps three, times, was hauled before the court on at least eight occasions, fined twice, admonished once, twice put under a bond, set in the stocks, searched for witch-marks, watched for diabolical imps, and, near the end of her life, was locked in leg irons and imprisoned one final time.
First Trial for Witchcraft
Twenty-six witnesses testified at her first trial for witchcraft, held in Boston. The main evidence brought against her was the witch-marks discovered on her body at her first whipping. The reason for the whipping seems to have been related to her involvement in the death of a (possibly deformed) child. Witnesses also implicated her in the death of a bedridden man, said she had killed their cattle through demonic agency, and that she had had an uncanny knowledge of a private conversation.
Convicted on a lesser charge, Unise was kept in the Boston prison until early 1660. When she returned home she was immediately back in trouble. For calling her neighbors despicable names, she was again whipped and sent back to prison.
When William died in 1662 Unise petitioned the court for release, which was granted. Unable to abide by the terms of the release, she was sent back to prison for a third time—coincidentally on the morning after she had been observed discoursing in her house with the Devil himself.
Her house and land were taken from her and she became a ward of the town, which paid a yearly charge to keep her incarcerated. Eight years later, over 70 years old and homeless, she was freed from prison. When she returned to Hampton the town put her in a cottage near the meeting house and grudgingly provided her with food and wood.
Second Trial for Witchcraft
The trouble again started up, with a whining pup in the meeting house, threats made to the night’s watchmen, and the enticing of a nine-year-old girl. The last offense was deemed witchcraft and in 1673 Unise was again put on trial in Boston.
The prosecutors, John Sanborn and/or Nathaniel Weare, threw the kitchen sink of testimony at her, even bringing in decades-old evidence to wring out a conviction. Yet, after all their hard work, the jury stubbornly refused to find her legally guilty.
Unise again returned to Hampton. Nothing more was heard of her by way of the court until 1680 when she was again accused of being a witch, for which she was locked in leg irons and held in the local prison. One month later she died, and a legend was born.
Early Legends
By the nineteenth century, tales of old Goodwife Unise Cole were circulating in written form thanks to the pens of local historians like Edmund Willoughby Toppan (1808-1845) and Joseph Dow (1807-1889), and the poems of John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892) of Amesbury, Massachusetts.
Toppan was the first person, as far as is known, to set down the Cole lore as it existed in his time. He looked with a bemused eye upon claims of Unise’s “alliance with the Devil,” observing that despite her reputation as a fearsome witch, the “young people of that day” delighted in antagonizing her with tricks. Concerning her death,
Toppan wrote that after a few days of not seeing her out and about, the townspeople “plucked up courage enough to break into the house” and found her dead. They buried her and drove a stake into the grave, with a horseshoe attached, “to prevent her from ever coming up again.” When Toppan was a student at Hampton Academy, a “little mound of earth was pointed out [to him] as the veritable grave of the once powerful Eunice Cole.”
Whittier also took an interest in the lore. Much of today’s popular perception of her can be traced back to the scratchings of his imaginative quill. The 1864 ballad Wreck of Rivermouth recast a real-life 1657 shipwreck near the mouth of the Hampton River into a doomed fishing excursion to the Isles of Shoals. The poet places “the mad old witch-wife” in a riverside shack, where she is able to curse her antagonists as they sail merrily by. When a young lady onboard makes fun of the “bent and blear-eyed poor old soul” sitting at her door a-spinning, Unise conjures up a storm to teach her a lesson. Whittier must have felt a pang of guilt for abusing her memory in this way; at the end of the tale he gives her a heart: as she sees the sinking ship, a tear stains her cheek and she is utterly shaken that her “words were true.”
Joseph Dow, who wrote the History of Hampton, just stuck to the facts.
The Goody Cole Society
The Great Depression with its Dust Bowl, dispossessed farmers, and homeless vagabonds had sparked America’s social imagination and fired enormous interest in the lives and sufferings of ordinary people. It was during this time that Unise Cole’s life story became an object lesson in injustice, and her reputation as a witch rocketed to celebrity status. She was Hampton’s most well-known citizen, with a story ripe for exploitation.
In 1937 the Goody Cole Society was formed to “restore” Unise Cole to the “citizenship” of which she had been deprived by many years of imprisonment, and at the town meeting in 1938 residents voted to give back her “rightful place as a citizen of the town of Hampton.” Two weeks later she and her latter-day champions starred in a nationally broadcast radio program to dramatize the event.
As the star of the town’s three-hundredth birthday, held in August 1938, her imagined likeness was emblazoned on pamphlets, plaques, street signs, commemorative coins, and an air mail cachet; there was a Goody Cole doll and a Witch of Hampton booklet. Goody Cole scenes appeared in the town’s historical pageant. An entire day was devoted to her memory, with a special ceremony, attended by local and state dignitaries and a national celebrity, to restore her rights as a citizen of Hampton.
Later Legends
In 1937, Haverhill, Massachusetts newspaperman William D. Cram invented the enduring story of Goody Cole’s magic well, placing it alongside her riverside shack at The Willows on Sargent’s Island. Then in the early 1960s, just in time for another town anniversary, came a spate of sightings of the ghost of Goody Cole (as well as the installation at the local museum of a large lump of granite in her honor).
A Well-treated Witch?
Since those earlier times, the town’s demeanor has taken a more sophisticated turn: the two most recent town anniversaries were devoid of any new Cole lore. But she is far from forgotten—a musical album about her legend has been produced, information about her life is one of the top visitor requests at the Tuck Museum, and the Witch of Hampton remains as well-known to the town’s children as the local candy store. Remembrances of her have become, in their own way, part of the lore. It begs the question—has any other “witch” in history been treated so well post mortem as our own Goodwife Unise Cole?
History Matters is a monthly column devoted to the history of Hampton and Hampton Beach. Cheryl Lassiter is the author of “The Mark of Goody Cole: a tragic and true tale of witchcraft persecution from the history of early America” (2014). Her website is http://www.lassitergang.com.
Discussion Questions for Marked
Marked: The Witchcraft Persecution of Goodwife Unise Cole
1. Do you think the people of Hampton were justified in their treatment of Unise Cole?
2. Did any part of Unise Cole's story inspire you in some way? If so, how?
3. Was the book what you thought it would be?
4. What events were the most interesting to you? Were there any surprises?
5. Was the 'cast of characters' in Appendix IV helpful in keeping everyone in the story accounted for? What about the maps?
6. Did the story give you a sense of what life might have been like in 17th century Hampton?
7. In several places the author departs from a non-fiction narrative to use imagined scenes and dialogues to tell the story. Did you feel these scenes were effective?
8. Unise Cole's life was/is the subject of several legends. Do you feel the book successfully separated the facts from the fiction?
9. Were you sympathetic or critical of Unise? How about the author, what was her feeling towards Unise?
10. No one knows why Unise Cole did the things she did. What's your theory? Is it possible that she really was a witch?
11. (As Nigel says in Spinal Tap, "But it goes to eleven.") The author changed the title of the book from "The Mark of Goody Cole" to "Marked: The Witchcraft Persecution of Goodwife Unise Cole." For better or worse?
Books are available on amazon.com and through your local bookseller. Contact me hamptonwriter@gmail.com if you'd like a signed copy with bookmark.
Happy Reading in the New Year!
Cheryl
1. Do you think the people of Hampton were justified in their treatment of Unise Cole?
2. Did any part of Unise Cole's story inspire you in some way? If so, how?
3. Was the book what you thought it would be?
4. What events were the most interesting to you? Were there any surprises?
5. Was the 'cast of characters' in Appendix IV helpful in keeping everyone in the story accounted for? What about the maps?
6. Did the story give you a sense of what life might have been like in 17th century Hampton?
7. In several places the author departs from a non-fiction narrative to use imagined scenes and dialogues to tell the story. Did you feel these scenes were effective?
8. Unise Cole's life was/is the subject of several legends. Do you feel the book successfully separated the facts from the fiction?
9. Were you sympathetic or critical of Unise? How about the author, what was her feeling towards Unise?
10. No one knows why Unise Cole did the things she did. What's your theory? Is it possible that she really was a witch?
11. (As Nigel says in Spinal Tap, "But it goes to eleven.") The author changed the title of the book from "The Mark of Goody Cole" to "Marked: The Witchcraft Persecution of Goodwife Unise Cole." For better or worse?
Books are available on amazon.com and through your local bookseller. Contact me hamptonwriter@gmail.com if you'd like a signed copy with bookmark.
Happy Reading in the New Year!
Cheryl
New Giveaway of Marked!
Another giveaway so soon? I know, I know, but the truth is, the joy of Christmas holiday gift gifting is still with me!
From January 11-17, I'll be giving away two copies of my book Marked: The Witchcraft Persecution of Goodwife Unise Cole.
Please watch for it and enter. As always in affairs of this nature, Good Luck!
Cheryl
WHAT OTHERS ARE SAYING ABOUT 'MARKED':
—I’m really impressed with both your scholarship and your writing, which is clear and also–rare in this kind of book–entertaining. I loved knowing that Thomas Bradbury of Salisbury had “attractive handwriting” and that Robert and Susanna Smith had an “enchanted oven.” I want you to get famous over this well-written book, Cheryl. Keep writing! – Judge, 22nd Annual Writer’s Digest Book Awards
—An excellent story told in wonderful detail, this book beautifully captures life in the 1600s. Goody Cole is at times portrayed as a sympathetic character; she was also her own worst enemy. Painstakingly researched, Cheryl Lassiter also weaves in a contemporary view of the events that surrounded the enigmatic Goody Cole. A treat for anyone who wants insight into the witch mania of early colonial days. – Mike on Goodreads
—The author has taken a subject surrounded in mystery and has assembled extant documents concerning the life of this woman accused of witchcraft in a 17th century New England town. Ms. Lassiter gives a picture of colonial life and the people who embellished their superstitions into crimes resulting in torture and imprisonment of what we might today call a “batty” old lady. It is a fun read for those who are interested in early times in America. – Gail on Amazon.com
From January 11-17, I'll be giving away two copies of my book Marked: The Witchcraft Persecution of Goodwife Unise Cole.
Please watch for it and enter. As always in affairs of this nature, Good Luck!
Cheryl
WHAT OTHERS ARE SAYING ABOUT 'MARKED':
—I’m really impressed with both your scholarship and your writing, which is clear and also–rare in this kind of book–entertaining. I loved knowing that Thomas Bradbury of Salisbury had “attractive handwriting” and that Robert and Susanna Smith had an “enchanted oven.” I want you to get famous over this well-written book, Cheryl. Keep writing! – Judge, 22nd Annual Writer’s Digest Book Awards
—An excellent story told in wonderful detail, this book beautifully captures life in the 1600s. Goody Cole is at times portrayed as a sympathetic character; she was also her own worst enemy. Painstakingly researched, Cheryl Lassiter also weaves in a contemporary view of the events that surrounded the enigmatic Goody Cole. A treat for anyone who wants insight into the witch mania of early colonial days. – Mike on Goodreads
—The author has taken a subject surrounded in mystery and has assembled extant documents concerning the life of this woman accused of witchcraft in a 17th century New England town. Ms. Lassiter gives a picture of colonial life and the people who embellished their superstitions into crimes resulting in torture and imprisonment of what we might today call a “batty” old lady. It is a fun read for those who are interested in early times in America. – Gail on Amazon.com
Thank you, secret readers
January has been a good month of sales for Marked. I just wanted to thank all those who have been opening their pocketbooks and wallets to buy the book.
Year of the Monkey - 1692 Style
A History Matters column first published in the Hampton Union on February 19, 2016.
IT’S NO SURPRISE THAT OUR PRESIDENTAL elections always fall in the Year of the Monkey, a Chinese astrological cycle rife with the potential for all manner of monkey business—trickery, discord, even chaos to the point of pandemonium.
The year 1692 had been a Monkey year, too, one that in New England fully lived up to its reputation.
To set the stage, in June 1689 Hampton (New Hampshire) town clerk Henry Dow was going about his business as usual—planting his corn, mending his barn, cutting timbers for a vessel he was building. On Sunday the twenty-third, his day of weekly rest was shattered by an Indian alarm raised in Portsmouth. Coming as it did during a period of relative peace, the alarm had its skeptics. Better safe than sorry was Henry’s creed, and for the next five days he set aside his saw and hoe to “hail” his townsmen to the danger of attack. Twenty miles to the north at Cocheco, the famous Indian deceiver Major Richard Waldron also had received rumblings of strange Indians in the area, but unlike our vigilant Henry, he foolishly chose to ignore them.
The tomahawk fell in the early morning hours of June 28. Houses sacked and burned, scores of settlers captured or killed, 80-year-old Waldron tortured to death in his home, his body gleefully mutilated by enemies who had come to settle old scores. Before the sun had reached its zenith, messengers were shouting out the dire details from horseback as they raced south to alert the Massachusetts militia. The English would point to Cocheco as the spark that ignited the nine-year conflict known as King William’s War.
King William’s War
Since the overthrow of the sitting English monarch in late 1688, the imperial glue that held the New England colonies together had dissolved, their governor-general deposed and held captive in Boston. With Roman Catholics and Anglicans occupying the highest seats of power, this sudden vacuum of authority failed to distress the Puritans of Hampton, an independent-minded lot if ever there was one. They were, however, in a state of alarm over the Cocheco massacre.
One week after the raid, the men of Hampton chose Henry Dow and others to attend a meeting of the New Hampshire towns to decide what should be done for their “peace and safety.” And, “to secure themselves and their families from the violence of the heathen,” they voted to build a fortification around their meeting house.
Hampton was made part of a cobbled-together regional defense force. Every man over the age of 16 was bound to serve, and many fathers, sons, and brothers took up arms together. The Towle twins, Joseph and Benjamin, went to Wells under Captain Sam Sherburne; Thomas Nudd and his son Samuel, Sgt. John Smith and his son John, Abraham Drake and his son Robert, Joseph Dow, Sr. and his son Joseph—all did garrison duty together. Henry Dow, now in his mid-50s, did garrison duty several times a month, sometimes “a-warding” for his sons Simon and Samuel.
Henry also kept account of the town’s militia men. The preserved remnant of this mouse-eaten record divulges that the standard time served was 37 days, at a rate of one shilling per day; that Hampton men scouted the nearby woods; posted messages to Portsmouth, Haverhill, and Exeter; soldiered at Wells, Cocheco, Exeter, and Lamprey River; chased Indians north to the shores of Winnipesaukee and west to Pennecook on the Merrimack River. Men who stayed at home billeted and fed out-of-town soldiers and took up arms “in defense of their garrison the town and country.”
The Year of the Monkey
The year 1692 more than satisfied the Monkey’s potential for chicanery and chaos. The tragedies of that time still haunt us today, their effects frothing into the following years like an overfilled pot of misery. It began in January with the French and Wabanaki visiting death and destruction on the settlement of York, Maine and the heretofore well-mannered girls of Salem Village unleashing their own bizarre brand of terror. They writhed, twitched, and in time accused nearly 200 persons of witchcraft. Town constables and jailers were hard put to keep up with the bedazzled magistrates’ thirst for arrest warrants and imprisonments.
Into the midst of this welling cauldron of conflict stepped Sir William Phips—swashbuckling, barely literate, stamped with the reluctant imprimatur of the English Crown—to reimpose the royal will and to save the northern colonies from their “thousand perplexities and entanglements.” Boston took the measure of Sir Phips, and as usual, observed where best to insert the blade.
The men of Hampton, meanwhile, having endured three years of a huddled existence within their meeting house palisade periodically awash with distraught goodwives and crying children, voted to expand the cramped fortification by rebuilding it “between the minister’s house, the prison, and the meeting house.” Men would have “liberty” to build private houses inside the fort, “according to the custom in other forts.”
The Monkey marched on. By the time the corn in Salem Village was waist-high, six women had been convicted of witchcraft and hanged. The people of Hampton could hardly be blamed if they worried that the contagion might leak northward. They had endured their own brushes with the Devil, the last one just twelve years earlier (another Monkey year). Rachel Fuller, a young mother of three who fancied herself a healer, had been accused of murdering her neighbor’s child with witchcraft. She was jailed but never brought to trial. The memory of the trauma had faded, but Rachel and other named witches still lived in town. Now under constant threat of Indian attack, striving to settle a permanent minister, their land rights jeopardized by a carnival of inept officials, it seemed that a new storm of witchcraft might just well destroy the town.
Sir Phips ceded the witchcraft worries to the experts while he concentrated on matters more mundane, commissioning Major Benjamin Church, who knew a thing or two about fighting Indians, to lead a force of men into Maine to fight their earthly foes. To that end, Henry Dow was out and about on July 28 rounding up men for the “present expedition to the eastward.” By the next day he had the names of eight volunteers; all were unmarried, the youngest, twenty-one, the oldest, forty-four: Ichabod Roby, Abraham Cole, Jr., Jonathan Moulton, Ben Taylor, James Crafford, Joseph Cram, Nehemiah Hobbs, and Henry’s youngest son, Jabez. Henry shepherded his volunteers to Great Island, where they boarded a ship to join the main force of 450 soldiers at Boston.
Accompanying the Church expedition, Phips supervised the building of a large stone fortress at Pemaquid, a jut of land on the rocky Maine coast, the Crown’s eastern line in the sand between English and French America. The Hampton volunteers may have worked on the fort, named William Henry, or they may have gone with Major Church on what would prove to be a fruitless search for the enemy.
In-mid August, Hampton tavernkeeper Love Sherburne received news that her mother, Frances Hutchins of Haverhill, had been carted off to Salem’s jail, accused of afflicting the Salem girls. She would ultimately be spared, but by late September the count of those hanged at Salem Village had reached nineteen. One man was pressed to death for obstinately refusing to enter a plea when he was charged with witchcraft. When Phips returned to Boston at the end of the month, he was appalled to learn that his own wife had been accused. No longer able to sidestep the issue, he ended the trials, and as a salve to his outraged chief justice ordered a new court to try the cases, but without the use of “spectral evidence.” By May 1693 he had pardoned the remaining accused and ordered their release from prison.
Treaty of Pemaquid
Phips had quelled the juvenile terrorists of 1692, but the war dragged its feet until he and the chief sagamores of the eastern tribes smoked the peace pipe in late summer 1693. When a copy of their treaty made its way to Hampton, Henry Dow wrote down its most significant passage (in his own unique shorthand) along with the names of the native signers and the three Indians taken hostage as a “pledge of good faith.” ** This treaty turned out to be little more than a much-needed cease fire.
“The people had a respite from hostilities for about a year,” wrote Joseph Dow, the fourth great grandson of Henry Dow. Then, on a warm summer day in 1694, “a large number of Indians fell upon the settlement at Oyster River (Durham); took three garrisons, burned thirteen houses, and killed or carried into captivity ninety-four persons. Other outrages followed,” including the destruction of Sir Phips’s Pemaquid fortress.
All things run their course, including men, munitions, and the money to pay for them. War had exhausted both sides, and in 1697 the English and French concluded a treaty of peace. The following year the eastern Indians made peace with the English. This ended the hostilities—for the next four years, anyway, another Monkey year.
**The shorthand notation reads: “In a due course of Justice the Indians submit to be ruled by their Majesties laws and desire to benefit of the same.” Translation by Cheryl Lassiter from Henry Dow's Journal 1672-1702. The Herbert H. Dow Museum in Midland MI owns the original journal; the Hampton Historical Society was given a bound copy. To see the journal page, go to http://lassitergang.com/2016/02/21/th...
History Matters is a monthly column devoted to the history of Hampton and Hampton Beach, New Hampshire. Cheryl Lassiter is the author of “Marked: The Witchcraft Persecution of Goodwife Unise Cole.” Follow her @hamptonwriter, on Facebook, or at lassitergang.com.
IT’S NO SURPRISE THAT OUR PRESIDENTAL elections always fall in the Year of the Monkey, a Chinese astrological cycle rife with the potential for all manner of monkey business—trickery, discord, even chaos to the point of pandemonium.
The year 1692 had been a Monkey year, too, one that in New England fully lived up to its reputation.
To set the stage, in June 1689 Hampton (New Hampshire) town clerk Henry Dow was going about his business as usual—planting his corn, mending his barn, cutting timbers for a vessel he was building. On Sunday the twenty-third, his day of weekly rest was shattered by an Indian alarm raised in Portsmouth. Coming as it did during a period of relative peace, the alarm had its skeptics. Better safe than sorry was Henry’s creed, and for the next five days he set aside his saw and hoe to “hail” his townsmen to the danger of attack. Twenty miles to the north at Cocheco, the famous Indian deceiver Major Richard Waldron also had received rumblings of strange Indians in the area, but unlike our vigilant Henry, he foolishly chose to ignore them.
The tomahawk fell in the early morning hours of June 28. Houses sacked and burned, scores of settlers captured or killed, 80-year-old Waldron tortured to death in his home, his body gleefully mutilated by enemies who had come to settle old scores. Before the sun had reached its zenith, messengers were shouting out the dire details from horseback as they raced south to alert the Massachusetts militia. The English would point to Cocheco as the spark that ignited the nine-year conflict known as King William’s War.
King William’s War
Since the overthrow of the sitting English monarch in late 1688, the imperial glue that held the New England colonies together had dissolved, their governor-general deposed and held captive in Boston. With Roman Catholics and Anglicans occupying the highest seats of power, this sudden vacuum of authority failed to distress the Puritans of Hampton, an independent-minded lot if ever there was one. They were, however, in a state of alarm over the Cocheco massacre.
One week after the raid, the men of Hampton chose Henry Dow and others to attend a meeting of the New Hampshire towns to decide what should be done for their “peace and safety.” And, “to secure themselves and their families from the violence of the heathen,” they voted to build a fortification around their meeting house.
Hampton was made part of a cobbled-together regional defense force. Every man over the age of 16 was bound to serve, and many fathers, sons, and brothers took up arms together. The Towle twins, Joseph and Benjamin, went to Wells under Captain Sam Sherburne; Thomas Nudd and his son Samuel, Sgt. John Smith and his son John, Abraham Drake and his son Robert, Joseph Dow, Sr. and his son Joseph—all did garrison duty together. Henry Dow, now in his mid-50s, did garrison duty several times a month, sometimes “a-warding” for his sons Simon and Samuel.
Henry also kept account of the town’s militia men. The preserved remnant of this mouse-eaten record divulges that the standard time served was 37 days, at a rate of one shilling per day; that Hampton men scouted the nearby woods; posted messages to Portsmouth, Haverhill, and Exeter; soldiered at Wells, Cocheco, Exeter, and Lamprey River; chased Indians north to the shores of Winnipesaukee and west to Pennecook on the Merrimack River. Men who stayed at home billeted and fed out-of-town soldiers and took up arms “in defense of their garrison the town and country.”
The Year of the Monkey
The year 1692 more than satisfied the Monkey’s potential for chicanery and chaos. The tragedies of that time still haunt us today, their effects frothing into the following years like an overfilled pot of misery. It began in January with the French and Wabanaki visiting death and destruction on the settlement of York, Maine and the heretofore well-mannered girls of Salem Village unleashing their own bizarre brand of terror. They writhed, twitched, and in time accused nearly 200 persons of witchcraft. Town constables and jailers were hard put to keep up with the bedazzled magistrates’ thirst for arrest warrants and imprisonments.
Into the midst of this welling cauldron of conflict stepped Sir William Phips—swashbuckling, barely literate, stamped with the reluctant imprimatur of the English Crown—to reimpose the royal will and to save the northern colonies from their “thousand perplexities and entanglements.” Boston took the measure of Sir Phips, and as usual, observed where best to insert the blade.
The men of Hampton, meanwhile, having endured three years of a huddled existence within their meeting house palisade periodically awash with distraught goodwives and crying children, voted to expand the cramped fortification by rebuilding it “between the minister’s house, the prison, and the meeting house.” Men would have “liberty” to build private houses inside the fort, “according to the custom in other forts.”
The Monkey marched on. By the time the corn in Salem Village was waist-high, six women had been convicted of witchcraft and hanged. The people of Hampton could hardly be blamed if they worried that the contagion might leak northward. They had endured their own brushes with the Devil, the last one just twelve years earlier (another Monkey year). Rachel Fuller, a young mother of three who fancied herself a healer, had been accused of murdering her neighbor’s child with witchcraft. She was jailed but never brought to trial. The memory of the trauma had faded, but Rachel and other named witches still lived in town. Now under constant threat of Indian attack, striving to settle a permanent minister, their land rights jeopardized by a carnival of inept officials, it seemed that a new storm of witchcraft might just well destroy the town.
Sir Phips ceded the witchcraft worries to the experts while he concentrated on matters more mundane, commissioning Major Benjamin Church, who knew a thing or two about fighting Indians, to lead a force of men into Maine to fight their earthly foes. To that end, Henry Dow was out and about on July 28 rounding up men for the “present expedition to the eastward.” By the next day he had the names of eight volunteers; all were unmarried, the youngest, twenty-one, the oldest, forty-four: Ichabod Roby, Abraham Cole, Jr., Jonathan Moulton, Ben Taylor, James Crafford, Joseph Cram, Nehemiah Hobbs, and Henry’s youngest son, Jabez. Henry shepherded his volunteers to Great Island, where they boarded a ship to join the main force of 450 soldiers at Boston.
Accompanying the Church expedition, Phips supervised the building of a large stone fortress at Pemaquid, a jut of land on the rocky Maine coast, the Crown’s eastern line in the sand between English and French America. The Hampton volunteers may have worked on the fort, named William Henry, or they may have gone with Major Church on what would prove to be a fruitless search for the enemy.
In-mid August, Hampton tavernkeeper Love Sherburne received news that her mother, Frances Hutchins of Haverhill, had been carted off to Salem’s jail, accused of afflicting the Salem girls. She would ultimately be spared, but by late September the count of those hanged at Salem Village had reached nineteen. One man was pressed to death for obstinately refusing to enter a plea when he was charged with witchcraft. When Phips returned to Boston at the end of the month, he was appalled to learn that his own wife had been accused. No longer able to sidestep the issue, he ended the trials, and as a salve to his outraged chief justice ordered a new court to try the cases, but without the use of “spectral evidence.” By May 1693 he had pardoned the remaining accused and ordered their release from prison.
Treaty of Pemaquid
Phips had quelled the juvenile terrorists of 1692, but the war dragged its feet until he and the chief sagamores of the eastern tribes smoked the peace pipe in late summer 1693. When a copy of their treaty made its way to Hampton, Henry Dow wrote down its most significant passage (in his own unique shorthand) along with the names of the native signers and the three Indians taken hostage as a “pledge of good faith.” ** This treaty turned out to be little more than a much-needed cease fire.
“The people had a respite from hostilities for about a year,” wrote Joseph Dow, the fourth great grandson of Henry Dow. Then, on a warm summer day in 1694, “a large number of Indians fell upon the settlement at Oyster River (Durham); took three garrisons, burned thirteen houses, and killed or carried into captivity ninety-four persons. Other outrages followed,” including the destruction of Sir Phips’s Pemaquid fortress.
All things run their course, including men, munitions, and the money to pay for them. War had exhausted both sides, and in 1697 the English and French concluded a treaty of peace. The following year the eastern Indians made peace with the English. This ended the hostilities—for the next four years, anyway, another Monkey year.
**The shorthand notation reads: “In a due course of Justice the Indians submit to be ruled by their Majesties laws and desire to benefit of the same.” Translation by Cheryl Lassiter from Henry Dow's Journal 1672-1702. The Herbert H. Dow Museum in Midland MI owns the original journal; the Hampton Historical Society was given a bound copy. To see the journal page, go to http://lassitergang.com/2016/02/21/th...
History Matters is a monthly column devoted to the history of Hampton and Hampton Beach, New Hampshire. Cheryl Lassiter is the author of “Marked: The Witchcraft Persecution of Goodwife Unise Cole.” Follow her @hamptonwriter, on Facebook, or at lassitergang.com.
"The VVitch" is VVorth VVatching
The Witch: A New England Folktale is the debut film of writer/director Robert Eggers, who hails from southern New Hampshire, one of the oldest English-settled regions in America, famous for creepy folktales and ghostly hauntings, and, of course, steeped in the memory of the Salem witchcraft trials and Goodwife Cole, the Witch of Hampton.
Aside from wanting to see a good horror flick, I was curious to see the results of Eggers's efforts to accurately portray a 17th-century setting and capture the Puritan zeitgeist. I'm no expert, but I was impressed with the attention lavished on the details of dress, speech, culture, and living spaces.
Seventeenth-century Massachusetts was a dirty, grubby, sickness-infested wilderness - yet one in which the majority of the people managed to thrive, mainly by sticking together as a community -- so when Eggers's antinomian farmer and his family are banished from the town, the lesson they learn (the hard way) is that conformity is a good thing...if you want to survive.
Like The Witch, my own book, Marked: The Witchcraft Persecution of Goodwife Unise Cole (1656-1680), is set in the Puritan world of the Massachusetts Bay colony. Eggers' film offers a little window into that tumultuous time --when the veil between the worlds was especially thin -- in a most entertaining and spooky way.
Aside from wanting to see a good horror flick, I was curious to see the results of Eggers's efforts to accurately portray a 17th-century setting and capture the Puritan zeitgeist. I'm no expert, but I was impressed with the attention lavished on the details of dress, speech, culture, and living spaces.
Seventeenth-century Massachusetts was a dirty, grubby, sickness-infested wilderness - yet one in which the majority of the people managed to thrive, mainly by sticking together as a community -- so when Eggers's antinomian farmer and his family are banished from the town, the lesson they learn (the hard way) is that conformity is a good thing...if you want to survive.
Like The Witch, my own book, Marked: The Witchcraft Persecution of Goodwife Unise Cole (1656-1680), is set in the Puritan world of the Massachusetts Bay colony. Eggers' film offers a little window into that tumultuous time --when the veil between the worlds was especially thin -- in a most entertaining and spooky way.
