Witchcraft in Old and New England

mitted, for once, to abandon custom, and to express my sympathy with poor Alice Butler, who had lost her husband and two of her children by some strange wasting sickness, for which she had no name, and who could only revert to the primeval tenets of savage man in her attempt to explain so dreadful a visitation? Few utterances in any records are more artlessly pathetic.

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To the student of English witchcraft the document is very valuable on account of the purity and simplicity of type which it exemplifies. Maleficium Original: Latin for "evil deed" or "harmful magic." is the gist of the whole matter, and the process described is perfectly accordant to rule. We have the damnum minatum Original: Latin for "threatened loss." and the malum secutum Original: Latin for "subsequent harm.". That is all. There are no complications whatever. There is not a trace of those foreign and learned elements that are often thought to constitute the bulk of the English witchcraft doctrine after the Reformation. There is no Black Man, no book to sign, no compact with Satan. There are no infernal revels, no fiendish lovers. In short, there is nothing that is non-essential. Alice Butler’s evidence is precisely the kind of testimony that might have been offered against a witch in any land and in any stage of civilization, from the Stone Age to day-before-yesterday. It would be quite pertinent at the trial of a witch of Ashanti or Congo or the Australian bush. It exhibits the primitive and universal creed of the whole human race, preserved without the contamination of culture or education, and surviving every religious vicissitude, to the beginning of the seventeenth century, in one of the most enlightened countries in the world. Incidentally, it was quite enough to send Michael Trevisard to the scaffold if he came to trial and the jury believed Alice’s story. Finally, nobody was to blame. The responsibility lay not upon the jurists or the theologians or the neighborhood: it was the burden of the human race as a whole.

An equally distressing case was that of Joan Baddaford. Alice Trevisard, it appears, had fallen out with John Baddaford, Joan’s husband, and had “said unto him that he should go to Pursever Wood and gather up his wits.” The precise meaning of this railing speech escapes me, but I fancy it was equivalent to calling John a scatter-brained fool. The phrase reminds one, though perhaps whimsically, of Pandar’s con-