The Salem Witch Trials Explained: The English Machine That Crossed the Atlantic

Written by Simon Williams

Here is a question I keep returning to whenever I write about witch trials on either side of the Atlantic.

Why did colonial Massachusetts, a society founded by people fleeing English persecution, end up building an almost exact replica of the English persecuting machine within seventy years of landing?

The Salem witch trials of 1692 are usually told as an American story: a handful of frightened girls in a Puritan village, a suspicious enslaved woman named Tituba, a court that lost its head, nineteen people hanged and one pressed to death under stones. All of that is true. But it is not the whole story, and told on its own it makes Salem sound like an aberration, a uniquely American panic born of an unusually strict religious culture in an unusually isolated place.

It was not an aberration. It was an inheritance.

Eighty years before Salem, in the Lancashire hills of northern England, ten people were hanged at Lancaster for witchcraft after a trial that used the same legal instrument, the same investigative logic, and very nearly the same cast of characters as the one that would later convict Salem's victims. I have written elsewhere about the Pendle witch trials of 1612 and the machinery behind them in depth, including in my book The Pendle Witch Conspiracy. What interests me here is the throughline: the statute, the procedure, and the theology that Massachusetts carried across the ocean and put back to work.

What Actually Happened at Salem

To see the inheritance clearly, it helps to be precise about what happened.

In January 1692, nine-year-old Betty Parris and her cousin Abigail Williams, living in the household of the Reverend Samuel Parris in Salem Village, began suffering fits: contortions, screaming, and complaints of being pinched and bitten by invisible hands. The village doctor, William Griggs, could find no physical cause and offered the only diagnosis available to him. Bewitchment.

Under pressure to name their tormentors, the girls accused three women: Tituba, an enslaved woman in the Parris household; Sarah Good, a homeless beggar; and Sarah Osborne, an elderly woman who rarely attended church. All three fit the profile that had already condemned women across England and Scotland for a century: poor, marginal, and already disliked by their neighbours. Tituba confessed, and in doing so made the crisis worse rather than better. She described a conspiracy of witches operating in the colony, and the accusations multiplied.

By May, Governor William Phips had established a special Court of Oyer and Terminer to try the growing backlog of cases, presided over by Chief Justice William Stoughton. The first person tried, Bridget Bishop, was hanged on 10 June. Five more followed on 19 July, five on 19 August, and eight on 22 September. Nineteen people in total died on Gallows Hill. Giles Corey, an eighty-year-old farmer, refused to enter a plea and was pressed to death under increasing weight of stones over two days in an attempt to force a confession. At least five more accused died in the disease-ridden jails awaiting trial that never came. Over two hundred people were formally accused before Phips, under pressure once his own wife came under suspicion, dissolved the court and ended the executions in October 1692.

The critical piece of evidence throughout was spectral evidence: testimony that the accused's spirit, invisible to everyone but the afflicted, had appeared and caused harm. It could not be cross-examined, contradicted, or verified. It could only be asserted. And it was enough, on its own, to send nineteen people to the gallows.

The English Playbook Salem Was Running

None of this was invented in Massachusetts. The legal foundation for prosecuting witchcraft as a capital crime came directly from England's Witchcraft Act of 1604, passed under King James I, a monarch personally obsessed with the subject who had written his own treatise on the detection of witches. That statute travelled with English law wherever English colonists settled, including to a Puritan colony that saw itself as a purer, more godly version of the England it had left.

The procedural fingerprints are just as direct. At Pendle in 1612, Justice Roger Nowell built his case on confession under interrogation, on the testimony of family members against each other, and decisively on the evidence of a child. Nine-year-old Jennet Device took the stand against her own mother, brother, and grandmother, and her testimony, uncorroborated by any physical evidence, helped send ten people to the gallows at Lancaster. Eighty years later at Salem, the accusations of children and teenagers, Betty Parris, Abigail Williams, Ann Putnam Jr, Mercy Lewis, again uncorroborated by anything except their own fits and visions, carried exactly the same evidentiary weight in exactly the same kind of court.

This was not coincidence. It was the same machine, built from the same parts: a legal system willing to treat spectral or testimonial evidence as sufficient for a capital conviction, a theology that made the Devil an active, immediate presence in daily misfortune, and a magistracy under political pressure to be seen acting decisively against a supernatural threat. Cotton Mather, the Boston minister whose sermons and writing shaped the Salem court's thinking, sat within a Puritan tradition that had absorbed English demonology wholesale, including the printed accounts of trials like Pendle's, which had been widely read as instruction manuals for identifying witches long after the executions themselves were history.

What changed between Lancashire in 1612 and Massachusetts in 1692 was not the machine. It was the scale of the anxiety feeding it. Salem Village in the early 1690s was a community under genuine strain: fear of attack from indigenous tribes allied with the French, a smallpox outbreak, a fractured local church, and a long-running land dispute between the more prosperous Salem Town and the poorer Salem Village. The machinery Massachusetts inherited from England did not need new instructions. It only needed a community frightened enough to reach for it.

Wales, the Exception That Proves the Rule

If the English machine is the whole explanation, then every part of the English-speaking world subject to the Witchcraft Act should have produced its own Salem or its own Pendle. It did not.

I have written in detail about why Wales largely escaped the witch trials despite sharing identical statutes, identical courts, and identical judges with the England that produced Pendle and, indirectly, Salem. Wales recorded fewer than forty prosecutions across the entire period of the European witch craze. The difference was not the law. It was the supernatural framework that ordinary people reached for when misfortune struck. Welsh communities blamed the Tylwyth Teg, the fairy folk of the hollow hills, rather than a human neighbour, and in doing so removed the human scapegoat the machine needed to function.

This matters for understanding Salem precisely because it shows the statute was never sufficient on its own. Massachusetts had the same legal tools available to every English jurisdiction. What it also had, and what Wales did not, was a Puritan theology that insisted misfortune had a human author working in league with a literal Devil, and a set of communities primed by genuine crisis to go looking for one. The law loaded the gun in both Lancashire and Massachusetts. The theology and the fear pulled the trigger. In Wales, a different set of stories meant nobody reached for the weapon at all.

Why Salem Still Fascinates

Salem has outlived Pendle in popular memory for reasons that have little to do with which trial was worse. Salem left behind an unusually rich paper trail, was written about almost immediately by participants like Cotton Mather, and later became the subject of Arthur Miller's The Crucible, which turned the trials into a permanent metaphor for mass accusation and political persecution. It was only as recently as July 2022 that Elizabeth Johnson Jr, the last of the Salem accused still formally convicted, was finally exonerated by the Massachusetts legislature, three hundred and thirty years after her trial.

But the machine that killed her contemporaries did not begin in Salem Village, and it did not end there either. It began with a statute passed in London, was rehearsed on the gallows at Lancaster in 1612, and was still recognisable enough eighty years later and three thousand miles away that a Massachusetts court could pick it up and use it without needing to be taught how it worked. Understanding Salem properly means understanding Pendle first. It means recognising that the American panic of 1692 was the English panic of 1612, run again on new ground, with a new cast, and a familiar set of instructions.

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Sources

• The National Archives (UK). Early Modern Witch Trials 
• The National Archives (UK). An Act against Witchcraft, 1604. 
• University of Virginia. Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive and Transcription Project. 
• Encyclopaedia Britannica. Salem Witch Trials: History, Summary, Location, Causes, Victims, and Facts. 
• History.com. Salem Witch Trials: Events, Facts and Victims. 
• Smithsonian Magazine. A Brief History of the Salem Witch Trials. 
• Lancaster Castle. The Pendle Witches

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