Six Women of Salem (2 page)

East Anglia’s textile production—a cottage industry of independent spinners and weavers—languished as European wars disrupted old markets for the woolens. Merchants’ storehouses filled with unsold cloth, and with no work to be had, weavers’ families lapsed into malnutrition. Rising land prices squeezed small farmers off their holdings, and larger landowners found themselves caught between the government’s mounting demands for taxes and increasingly desperate tenants who were unable to pay rent.

The price of grain doubled in the winter after Edmund’s birth. Now desperate spinners sold their tools for food. During this three-year famine a mob in Colchester attacked a wagon transporting grain. In Yarmouth itself a merchant tried to ship out a load of chicken feed only to have a mob attack the boatmen and seize the once-despised buckwheat. In Malden a woman urged a band of men to break into a warehouse in broad daylight. “Come, my brave lads,” she cried. “I will be your leader, and we will not starve.” And they did not starve—for all were caught, tried for theft, and hanged.

Crops improved somewhat after 1632, when brother Jacob was born, but the bishops began to clamp down on Nonconformists like the Townes.

In the seventeenth century religion was as much a matter of national identity as it was of personal conviction—perhaps more so. Loyal subjects of most countries were expected to follow the forms of worship their monarchs approved, displaying solidarity as well as faith (or at least lip service). Few considered it possible that a nation could separate church and state without weakening itself. (Although the Netherlands had an official church, it allowed other well-behaved faiths.) But over a century earlier Henry VIII of England had separated from Rome for dynastic reasons. Without a divorce from his first wife, he could not hope to sire a legal male heir, and without one ready to assume the throne upon Henry’s death, the nation risked civil strife from within and invasion from without. But Henry’s national Church of England did not change enough in its ideals and customs to match the hopes of reform that many of his subjects longed for. This was especially so in East Anglia, the hump of land containing Norfolk (where Great Yarmouth was located), Suffolk, and Essex counties opposite the Netherlands. Here the literacy rate (among men at least) was higher than elsewhere in the realm, and here was the Puritan hotbed of Cambridge University. Here folk hoped to improve the new church further—to purify it from extraneous distractions and concentrate on the word of God. Their critics called them Puritans for that, and East Anglia was full of them.

The Townes were among them, gathering every Sabbath in Saint Nicholas to hear sermons from mostly sympathetic preachers. Rebecca watched and listened from the congregation as the minister spoke from the pulpit in the south transept—eight-sided like the baptismal font (an “octagonal tub,” said detractors). Gilt letters shone under its book rest: “Feare God, Honour the Kynge 1 Pet 2.” People sometimes wondered which of these the government considered more important.

The bishop of London, who oversaw and managed the region, eventually clamped down on just
what
was being said—or not said—in his pulpits, and people began to think of leaving. The economy was bad enough, and famine was a reality. But now their spiritual lives were also under assault. The Book of Sports was only one insulting example. In Lancashire in 1618, to solve the controversy between Puritans and gentry (most of whom were definitely
not
Puritans) over what activity was suitable for a Sabbath, King James I issued a “Declaration of Sports,” a definition of allowable Sunday pastimes. He ordered it be read from every pulpit.

The Declaration did have the decency to prohibit bear baiting, “interludes” (theater was going
too
far), and bowling, which was “in the meane sort of people by law prohibited” anyway. But lawful activities, according to the king, included dancing, archery, leaping and vaulting, plus seasonal May Games, Witsun Ales, and Morris dances, even Maypoles as long as these were conducted “in due and convenient time without impediment or neglect of divine service.”

Even if none of this interrupted services, it surely interrupted the peace of the Sabbath and personal contemplation of the Scriptures. The Sabbath, to the reformers, was intended for the Lord, not for idle play or heathen crudities like Maypoles. The resulting outcry was severe enough that the king withdrew the proclamation.

Then, in 1633, James’s son and successor, Charles, reintroduced the order everywhere in the realm and punished clergy who, in conscience, would not proclaim the Book of Sports (as its detractors called it) to their congregations and, thus, be a party to it. These men frequently digressed from approved procedure by omitting much of the church’s ceremonies; elaborate vestments were another sore point. Largely Puritan parishes then found that conforming clergy were replacing their ministers. Ministers who were thus silenced—forbidden a voice from their former pulpits—delivered their sermons in other venues as lectures, with loyal listeners traveling considerable distances to hear them. When they were further threatened with arrest, jail terms, and fines, some went into hiding or fled oversea to the Netherlands.

The desperate economy combined with religious convictions impelled many in East Anglia to risk emigration. Land, they knew, was available in far-flung colonies among the savages of Northern Ireland and the New World. Some of those places, like Virginia, were dominated by leaders supportive of the bishops in the Church of England; others had been established by Puritans who sought to put as much distance as possible between the bishops and themselves. New England seemed a likely spot, and many Great Yarmouth folk were going there—whole families, not just young men seeking their fortunes. Removal required an investment: ship passage, supplies for the voyage over, and food to last until a farm or business could be made productive. But at least the place was no longer entirely a wilderness; others had already settled several towns and raised a few harvests.

Sister Mary was baptized in August 1634, and the family left Yarmouth for good, all except Edmund, who was still indentured to his shoemaker master. He could join the rest once he was free.

The year 1635 for their removal is approximate: after Mary’s August 1634 christening, as recorded in Saint Nicholas’s records, probably before September 1635, when the authorities cited as “Separatists, William Towne and Joanna his wife” for neglecting communion at St. Nicholas, and before the distribution of lots in Salem’s Northfields that occurred before that town’s records began in 1635. Northfields was the part of Salem across the North River from the peninsula where the town center was. William Towne’s saltwater farm lay on the south shore of the Endicott River, where it met the Williston River. Their combined streams flowed south, met the North River, then rounded the peninsula of Salem town into Massachusetts Bay.

Edmund arrived in Salem two years later when his master, Henry Skerry, immigrated with his family
and
Edmund. (Skerry’s wife, Elizabeth, brought old-country traditions with her for, as a great, great granddaughter related in 1802, she “always swept her hearth before she went to bed for the Fairies.”) In addition, Rebecca’s widowed aunt ­Alice Fermage (one of her mother’s two older sisters) was also in Salem by 1638, along with two sons and four daughters. The eldest Blessing sister, Margaret, had died shortly before the Townes emigrated, but her widowed husband, Robert Buffum, and his new wife and her daughter from a first marriage soon immigrated and settled in Salem.

Joanna bore two more children in New England, Sarah and Joseph, but when is uncertain. Both were baptized in 1648, but that ceremony did not necessarily happen as soon after a baby’s birth as it would in England. There, every loyal subject was expected to be a member of the Church of England and, therefore, eligible—if not required—to partake of the sacraments. New England churches, however, were each independent, and only full members were eligible for the sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper (the only two that Puritans recognized). What constituted a proper membership, however, became a bone of contention in the early days of Massachusetts. Influenced largely by the beliefs of the banished Ann Hutchinson and her followers, membership indicated a person who was considered saved, someone who, after much soul searching, felt (relatively) sure they were not damned.

Once applied, examined, and accepted, fully communing members could be baptized (if they had not been already) and have their children baptized.

While political and religious tensions between Royalist and Puritan factions worsened in England, leading to a civil war that the Puritans would win, Rebecca Towne married Francis Nurse in Salem on August 24, 1644. The earliest record of her future husband in Salem is a March 1, 1640 court case in which “Francis Nurse a youth” (he was about nineteen) was presented “for stealing of victuals & suspicion of breaking [into] a house.” A note in the published record says that this entry was “crossed slightly,” so perhaps Francis was exonerated. Some deeds describe Francis as a “tray maker.” (Perhaps he was from Lincolnshire, where “tray” could mean a woven wattle hurdle—sections of temporary fencing used to pen sheep or make a gate, a handy skill for farmers.)

Presumably Francis rented his acres at first, while Rebecca began the constant work of keeping a house in order and bearing children about every other year, beginning in 1645, with son John. In 1648, a year between the births of daughter Rebecca and son Samuel, one Margaret Jones of Charlestown, a folk healer who frightened some of her patients, was tried for witchcraft and hanged in Boston.

Daughter Sarah was born around 1651, the year Rebecca’s father, William Towne, moved the family to Topsfield—the year a Springfield couple, Hugh and Mary Parsons, were tried for witchcraft. Instead, the wife, a disturbed woman, was found guilty of infanticide, whereas the magistrates could not agree on the guilt of her moody husband, so he, unlike his wife, did
not
hang. In the years following, another woman—Ann Hibbins of Boston, a forceful widow whose arguments with difficult building contractors escalated into witchcraft charges—was found guilty of witchcraft and hanged in 1656 despite her kinship with Governor Richard Bellingham.

In the same decade the Society of Friends—Quakers, to their detractors, and even more nonconforming than other Nonconformists—began preaching views that the Massachusetts government found threatening: that because the non-Friends had religion all wrong and were going to Hell, none of their opinions counted. The legislature instituted draconian laws against the Quakers, who only protested more, even at the risk of their lives. One of Rebecca’s female relatives, a distant Buxton cousin by marriage, demonstrated repeatedly and publicly—which was shocking enough in women—even appearing naked in the street to symbolize a point that the scandal of her nudity thoroughly obscured.

Francis once again had to enter a slander suit in 1651, this time against Jonathan and Eunice Porter. Once again the reason was not recorded, but Eunice Porter “made acknowledgement which the court accepted.” Two years later Francis was “discharged from training”—excused, that is, from mustering with the local militia, the community’s only defense. As he was still a young man of about thirty-three, perhaps he had been injured. Perhaps Rebecca had also been unwell. Later she would refer to the “difficult Exigences that hath Befallen me In the Times of my Travells” and the “fits that shee formerly use to have.”

After an eight-year gap, around 1659, Rebecca gave birth to her next recorded child, Mary, followed by Francis Jr. in 1661. In England, meanwhile, the Puritan Commonwealth ended in 1660 with the restoration of the monarchy. Charles II’s government now sided with the New England Quakers, requiring Massachusetts to tolerate sects other than orthodox Congregational only—although
all
Nonconformists were persecuted in England itself. Rebecca bore her daughter Elizabeth in 1665, the year of England’s Great Plague, which killed 15 percent of London’s population and compelled the king to evacuate the government to Oxford. Rebecca had her last child, Benjamin, in 1666, the year that marked London’s Great Fire, which burned for five days over 436 acres, leveling eighty-seven churches and destroying 13,200 houses. Then, an attack up the Thames from the Dutch fleet compounded these disasters.

Meanwhile, Rebecca’s seventy-five-year-old mother, Joanna Towne, twice spoke up publicly in a 1670 suit and countersuit that grew from Topfield’s division over the suitability of its minister. Reverend Thomas Gilbert, despite claims from the Perkins family, had not been drunk one volatile Sabbath, she deposed in May. She had sat next to him at dinner and thought him “very temperate.” If he acted oddly, then it was due to “his distemper” (a disorienting physical ailment that his supporters mentioned) but not from drinking “as some so uncharitably surmise against him.” She repeated this in the November countersuit and added that he did not guzzle from the cup passed round the table but instead passed it to her, saying that “I needed it more than he, being older.” Then when he did get a turn, there were only two or three spoonfuls of wine left in the cup. “He was moderate both in eating and drinking, and he knew what he said and did, and this I can safely testify upon oath.”

Joanna’s willingness to speak out may have caused lingering resentment, especially among Reverend Gilbert’s critics. Her support of a man whom they considered wholly unsuitable to lead a church may have fueled the circulating gossip that hinted she may have been a witch. Gilbert, after all, had been in court repeatedly over slander suits. He allowed his personal resentment to intrude into his sermons (as when he remarked that “the necks of all who opposed the ministers of the Gospel should be broken”). More alarming were comments like “kings are asses and the scum of the earth,” which could have serious consequences for all of Massachusetts if they ever reached London.

Unlike her Buxton kin, and after much soul searching and with the good report of her neighbors and fellow congregants, Rebecca joined the Salem Church in 1672, the year the General Court finally granted her rural neighborhood of Salem Village permission to begin to establish its own parish and hold religious services closer to home. William Towne, Rebecca’s aged father, died in the following year.