Appendix: Hale and witchcraft

Summary

The text of this book leaves unmentioned the best-known episode in Hale's career. This was the trial for witchcraft of Amy Duny and Rose Cullender at the Bury St Edmunds Assizes in March 1662. Both women had an evil reputation in their community. The matter had come to a head when they were accused of bewitching certain children. Five girls from four separate families, the eldest eighteen and the youngest only nine, had started to suffer from fits, in the course of which they vomited up pins. They blamed Rose Cullender and Amy Duny, and managed to convince surrounding adults, including at least one who was initially incredulous, that they had definitely been bewitched.

The trial was conducted in an admirably scientific spirit. The court was influenced by the expert opinion of ‘Dr Brown of Norwich, a person of great knowledge’, who noted that the vomiting of pins was a symptom of bewitchment reported in a recent Danish case. He diagnosed ‘the mother’ [that is some kind of feminine hysteria], which had been ‘heightened to a great excess by the subtlety of the devil, co-operating with the malice of these which we term witches’. Three of the five accusers were well enough to be present, though not to testify, and were subjected to experiments.