Free The Book of Books by Melvyn Bragg

you were against them you were to be attacked, defeated and, if necessary, destroyed. They used the Old Testament but also English common law to justify the persecution of what they saw as ‘immorality’. This included breaking the Sabbath or blasphemy, which were criminalised. Hysterical insanity could take over. In 1642, the New Haven authorities examined a piglet whose face, they said, bore a resemblance to one George Spenser. He was convicted of bestiality. He confessed and was hanged; and so was the sow.
    Non-Puritans were not encouraged to come to New England and one of the leading men of the Chosen spoke of ‘the lawlessness of liberty of conscience’. Dissenters were given, as another Puritan said, ‘free liberty to keep away from us’. When the intellectually adventurous Quakers came, they were prosecuted and their ears were cropped and they were expelled. When four of them returned between 1659 and 1661, they were hanged.
    One unexpected consequence of this was that Roger Williams, a minister in Salem in the 1630s, was moved to say that the Puritans had gone too far. He fled to found what became Rhode Island, unique in the English-speaking world for welcoming exiles and Dissenters, Anglicans, Baptists, Quakers and also those from another religion – one both deeply allied and historically alien – Jews.
    These New England Puritans hunted down witches. It was a period when medicine was primitive and when magic and ‘signs’
would be sought out to fill the gaps in knowledge. The devil was held to be ceaseless in his attempts to deform, damage, disrupt, distort and dismantle the plans and purposes of the best of God’s people. It was a time of the dramatically inexplicable and in that fear-fraught and fortressed society, vengeance seemed an essential defence. And though ‘vengeance is mine, saith the Lord’, the Old Testament furnished many dramatic examples not only of a vengeful God but also of vengeful Israelites and their enemies. It was there in the book and so it could be followed as an example.
    Witches were a prime target. Overwhelmingly women and mostly of the poorer class. These were usually women canny in their knowledge of traditional country cures. They were powerless and easy to capture. For those in authority they were useful, perhaps in some primitive way: they were essential victims. For such furious and strained endeavours as the Puritans were undertaking, perhaps sacrifices were needed to satisfy the tribe – blood sacrifices, human sacrifices.
    Puritan New England was persistent in the matter of witches. In Virginia, there were nine cases, only one suspect and he sentenced to a whipping and banishment. In the north ninetythree were tried, sixteen executed.
    Then came Salem in 1692. Accusations by feverish adolescent girls were taken seriously and acted upon. Hundreds, mostly women, were accused by them. Eighteen were hanged. Sense returned only when the accusers turned their venomous hysteria on the ruling elite, including the governor’s wife. That went too far. ‘Further trials were suppressed,’ the historian Alan Taylor writes. ‘Regarded as a fiasco, the Salem mania became a spectacular flame-out that halted the prosecution of witches in New England.’
    But the stain remained. Salem is dead but not buried. Arthur
Miller’s play, The Crucible , keeps it alive; Senator McCarthy’s search for communists in the 1950s was called a ‘witch hunt’.
    These English, soon to be joined by Irish, Scots and Welsh, Puritans, and other hard-line Protestants, brought to New England a fanaticism allied with righteousness which would begin to clear the new continent of its natives. It would go on to build a capitalist democracy, global industries, new technologies, weaponry, and it would encourage mass education, equality, and princely philanthropy. The dark side led the settlers into the deceits, injustices and crimes of