On the tenth of March, 1662, at Bury St Edmunds, three young maidens appeared before the Court of Assize in the company of their kin. They were reasonably well-favoured in health, so the printed relation affirms, until the very instant they crossed the threshold of the hall to hear the indictments preferred against the prisoners. Thereupon the fits commenced: shrill cries, limbs stiffening to iron, and then an utter silence. The children could return no answer to the interrogatories required to open the proceedings. At the bar of the accused, two widows of Lowestoft, Rose Cullender and Amy Duny, pleaded not guilty.
The entire prosecution hung primarily upon this spectacle, and upon the gulf separating what the kinsfolk claimed to behold from what the court could judicially verify. The chronicle preserved by George Borrow marshals sworn informations, exhibited tokens, and wondrous episodes which the seventeenth-century relation tenders as proofs of sorcery. The supernatural occurrences therein related find no corroboration in this compilation. What may be read with certainty, however, is the exact path trodden by these accusations on their way to the fatal verdict.
The grievance of the Durent family reached back to a babe put out to a neighbour's care. Dorothy Durent, being obliged to leave her home, had desired Amy Duny to look after her son, who was yet at the breast, strictly charging her not to give him suck. Upon the mother’s return, Duny confessed she had transgressed the command; Dorothy fell into a fury. Duny departed the house uttering, according to the testimony, ominous and threatening words. That very evening, the infant was seized with grievous convulsions and swoonings, which persisted for several weeks.
Seeking some remedy, the distraught mother consulted a man reputed to cure children held to be bewitched. He counselled her to hang the infant’s blanket near the chimney corner throughout the day, and carefully observe what might tumble from it when she put the babe to bed. Dorothy swore that a great toad slipped from the cloth. A young boy seized it with the tongs and held it in the fire; a flash of flame and a detonation like a pistol-shot ensued, and the creature vanished. In her deposition, this event was held to be the first manifestation of a witch's revenge.
On the morrow, a kinswoman of Duny came to warn Dorothy that the old woman was sorely scorched in her face and legs. Dorothy went thither and found her, she averred, sitting alone in her cottage, without any fire upon the hearth. Duny retorted that Dorothy was the author of her hurt, prophesying that she would live to see several of her children die and would herself be brought to go upon crutches. Sometime later, Dorothy’s young daughter sickened; the mother drove Duny from the dwelling upon finding her near the child’s bed. Two days thereafter, the maid died. Dorothy laid the death wholly to sorcery. In due course, her own legs failed her, and she appeared before the assizes supported upon crutches.
These reported utterances forged a formidable chain of suspicion, yet few rested upon direct observation. The father of the Pacy family, a merchant of Lowestoft, set forth for his part the afflictions of his two daughters. He recounted that Amy Duny had repeatedly come to his house to buy herrings, and had as often met with a refusal. The younger child, Deborah, had already laboured for a week under an infirmity of the limbs. The moment the old woman turned away, according to the father, the child fell into violent fits. A physician summoned to the bedside confessed himself utterly unable to account for her distemper. Pacy declared that his suspicions fell upon Duny, whom he caused to be set in the stocks. Certain neighbour women inquired of her what she had done to the children; the answer they attributed to her—that she had been forced to wrench open her own child’s mouth with a tap to feed it—was straightway turned to her damnation.
The convulsions of the two sisters continued unabated for weeks. At times they were deprived of speech, of sight, or of the use of their limbs; they complained of grievous torments in their bellies and vomited crooked pins. Pacy affirmed he had seen scores of pins and an iron nail cast up from their mouths. When he bade them read from the New Testament, he added, they could by no means utter certain sacred names, yet would pronounce “Satan” and “the Devil” without the least impediment. This disparity he held to be an unanswerable proof. The narrative supplies no independent medical diagnostic; it merely transcribes the interpretation of the father and of those witnesses who shared his conviction.
Pacy subsequently dispatched the girls to the house of his sister, Margaret Arnold, at Yarmouth, in the hope that a change of air might relieve them. Arnold declared that at first she gave no credit to the report of witchcraft. She stripped all pins from their garments, sewing their shifts and kirtles instead of fastening them. Yet she affirmed that during their paroxysms she saw some thirty pins cast out from their bodies. She likewise related visions of flies bearing pins, of a great bee that thrust a nail into Deborah’s mouth, and of an invisible mouse which one of the maidens caught and cast into the hearth. This succession of marvels supplied the trial with its singular inventory of material tokens.
Other families came forward with like narrations. Anne Durent, Jane Bocking, and Susan Chandler were in their turn described as having been seized with pangs and fits following harsh encounters with, or denials made to, the prisoners. Several among them could give no oral testimony at Bury: they lost their faculties before the bar or fell into convulsions upon the floor. Their kinsfolk stepped forward to interpret their gestures and recall their former words. Certain informations described Rose Cullender or Amy Duny appearing in spectral visions; others repeated the dark menaces imputed to them. The testimony of communal terror thus became the substance of the proof against those whom it accused.
Another element wore the semblance of tangible evidence: certain matrons appointed to search the body of Rose Cullender deposed that they had discovered teat-like excrescences upon her flesh, which they judged to be witches’ marks. Cullender explained that one of these was the consequence of a strain sustained whilst carrying water. The trial thus exposed the prisoner’s body to an ignominious scrutiny, and the construction put upon the findings by the searchers was already coloured by the verdict they sought.
Yet the debate was not conducted before a wholly unanimous hall. Serjeant Keeling declared it unsafe to ground a conviction upon the mere imagination of the afflicted: if a spectral vision were admitted to convict a neighbour, he observed, no man’s life would be secure. But Dr Thomas Browne, the renowned physician, being called upon for his opinion, asserted on the contrary that the children were bewitched, comparing their distemper to cases of late observed in Denmark. He offered an exposition that intertwined bodily disease with the subtle malice of the Devil. A division of minds was thus visible in the very report of the trial, yet the physician’s authority lent weight to the supernatural theory maintained by the prosecution.
The ordeal of touch appeared at first to offer a decisive test. In the height of their fits, the children held their fists clenched so fast that no man could open them; yet at the touch of Cullender, they would shriek and their hands would instantly spread wide. Their faces were blindfolded to preclude any charge of contrivance. However, during an experiment conducted apart from the bench, one of the children reacted in the selfsame manner when touched by another hand. The gentlemen returned to court declaring their belief that the whole was an imposture. Thereupon Samuel Pacy proposed another construction: that his daughter might perceive what passed about her even when she appeared bereft of all sense. The doubt did not destroy the proof; it was merely absorbed into a fresh explanation.
Witnesses further swore to the loss of cattle, carts overturned, wagons jammed fast in gateways, and sudden distempers following upon altercations with the two women. Every such relation drew the jury further from any facts subject to direct verification. In summing up, the Lord Chief Baron, Sir Matthew Hale, proposed two questions for their decision: whether the children were bewitched, and whether the prisoners at the bar were guilty thereof. He openly affirmed his belief in the reality of witches, citing the Scriptures and the statutes of the realm. He nonetheless charged the jurors to weigh the evidence diligently, reminding them of the heinousness of condemning the innocent as well as the peril of suffering the guilty to escape.
On the thirteenth of March, the jury retired for less than half an hour and returned a verdict of guilty against both women upon all thirteen counts of the indictments. On the morrow, three of the children were brought before the judge, appearing, as their friends declared, perfectly restored to speech and health. Duny and Cullender steadfastly refused to make the confessions demanded of them. On the seventeenth of March, they were hanged. The chronicle asserts that the children’s afflictions ceased once the verdict was delivered; yet it affords no proof linking that recovery to any preternatural power in the accused. It leaves behind only a stark judicial reality: a court of law decreed two capital executions, accepting bodily convulsions, household tales, and contested experiments as legal demonstration. That judgment reveals, above all else, what the men of that age were prepared to believe.