TAREA 9: Witch hunting and children

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Witch hunting and children

During the centuries of witch hunting in Europe, hundreds of people were sent to
their death because of the wanton mischief of undisciplined youngsters. England
was especially afflicted with such little monsters, and American children copied their
antics. In France, this particular delinquency took the form of girls' accusing priests
of immoral conduct.                                                                                                                                           (5)                                                                                                                       
Germany was so absorbed with mass executions that children's evidence was
incidental. One example, however, surpasses English parallels. In Hagenau (Alsace),
the disasters of war and bad harvests were linked to witchcraft, and for witchcraft, on
July 16, 1627, three women and a fourteen-year-old girl, Marie Niethin, were executed.
Among others, Marie inculpated a thirteen-year-old boy, Peter Roller. Under                                                          (10)
examination, Roller displayed a fertile imagination, inventing fantastic stories of
sabbats, and accusing everyone he knew of being present there.

Under torture, those accused could do little except confess and name other accomplices. To protect
his own life, the boy claimed he was bewitched, a ruse which sent him to hospital
instead of a death cell. After nine months, on March 23, 1628, Peter Roller was                                                   (15)
questioned. He was quite able to cope with the situation -in the name of Christ he
had just driven away the devil, who came to tempt him outside the hospital window.

This brave act was well thought of by the judges, who assigned two Capuchin friars
to complete his good beginnings. By May 17, Peter was freed from devils, and in
June returned home. This thirteen-year-old was responsible for twenty-four people                                             (20)
being burned, three suicides in prison, and three being dismissed after torture
-permanently crippled.

 Most examples of young people telling lies under oath ocurred in England. They
 start with a celabrated trial in 1593 of the Warboys Witches, when five hysterical girls
 sent an old couple and their daughter to the gallows. Four years later, a young                                                     (25)
 impostor, William Somers, the Boy of Nottingham, coached by a false exorcist, John
 Darrell, accused thirteen women of bewitching him. Exposed before his testimony
 convicted them, Somers confessed he had studied a chapbook on the Warboys
 Witches in order to manifest the appropriate symptoms. In 1604, Anne Gunter used this
 same pamphlet to learn how a bewitched child should act. The circumstances surrounding                              (30)
 a thirteen-year-old boy, John Smith, in 1614, at Leicester, so much resembled the
 Warboys case that direct stimulation seems likely. Nine persons had been hanged as
 witches on Smith's evidence before King James I ordered an investigation, discovered
 his imposture and released those still in jail.
 
 American children also proved impostors. The four Goodwin children of Boston recall                                    (35)
 the Warboys children. In 1688, they accused an Irish charwoman of bewitching them,
 going into convulsions at her approach. The Irishwoman was hanged as a witch. In
 1720, three young girls at Littleton (Massachusetts) convicted their neighbors they were
 hexed; eight years later, the eldest daughter confessed it was all a hoax, the girls having
 picked a woman at random to accuse as a witch. But the classic American example is                                       (40)
 Salem. Twenty-four people there died from the prank of several "witch bitches." The
 reason was admitted by one of them: "They must have some sport." Fourteen years
 later, the ring leader of the girls, Ann Putnam, confessed the fraud: "It was a great
 delusion of Satan that deceived me in that sad time, whereby I justly fear I have
 been instrumental... to bring upon myself and this land the guilt of innocent blood. "Yet,                                    (45)
 the rantings of these young women were considered by Governor Hutchinson "so
 exact as to leave no room for doubting the stories of previous possessed children."

 Among the English clergy who fought against accepting childish ravings were
 Archibishop Samuel Harsnett, author of Discovery of Fraudulent Practices (1599),
 refuting John Darrell, and Bishop Francis Hutchinson, who probably gave the practice                                        (50)
 its death blow in 1718.