Jerry Keiser - October 2011

Talbot's Witchcraft Trials

by

Jerry Keiser

As autumn’s familiar olfactory sensations fill the crisp air, our attentions turn to Friday night football games, shorter days and the distinct melodious sounds of geese filling the morning and evening skies of the Eastern Shore. Crops of corn, soybeans, pumpkins and apples are harvested from fields and orchards. Fall arrives with its bounty of color, and everyone’s attention turns to the ancient festival of Halloween with its ghosts, ghouls and witches. In times past, one could easily get away with being a ghost or ghoul, but witches carried with them a more serious concern, and labeling as such could mean death by hanging.
Witchcraft has a long history in America dating back to the 1690s. During this era, a witch was defined as “anyone who invoked evil spirits or communed with familiar spirits.” The most well known account of witches and witchcraft, occurring in this country, came from history books relating the story of the unusual events occurring in Salem, Massachusetts. There a group of young girls took it upon themselves to proclaim certain individuals within the community had proven themselves to fill the definition of witches. The trials resulting from those events held between the years of 1692 and 1697 are infamous.
The basis upon which these trials were held started almost one hundred years before as King James I of England produced a publication entitled An Act Against Conjuration, Witchcraft And Dealing With Evil And Wicked Spirits. This was the law in England and her American colonies, of which Maryland was one. James VI, King of the Scots, became James I, King of England on March 25, 1603 and thereby united England and Scotland under one monarch. James’ ascension to the throne could not be perceived as welcome news to anyone who had been accused of witchcraft, since King James attended the more famous North Berwick Witch Trials in East Lothian, Scotland, in 1590. These witch trials were the first large scale persecution of witches in Scotland under the Witchcraft Act of 1563. These trials lasted for two years and implicated seventy Scots. James became obsessed with witchcraft during his tenure as King of England. His views were expressed in his work entitled Daemonologie which he published in 1597. Interestingly, Shakespeare’s play Tragedy of Macbeth would use this work as background material. In 1604, a year following his ascension to the English throne, James updated the Witchcraft Act of 1563. The new act was entitled ‘An Act against Conjuration, Witchcraft and dealing with evil and wicked spirits’. This act, commonly referred to as the Witchcraft Act of 1604, made two significant changes to the old law. It made witchcraft a felony, and most significantly it moved witchcraft trials out of the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts to the jurisdiction of secular courts. This provided that the accused witches enjoyed the benefit of a customary criminal procedure. The only good news regarding the new law for those accused of witchcraft was that witches could no longer be burned at the stake. After the Witchcraft Act of 1604, most convicted witches were hanged.
The infamous Salem Witchcraft Trials took place in the Salem area of Massachusetts between February 1692 and May 1693. Over one hundred fifty people were arrested and imprisoned, and twenty-six were convicted. Nineteen of those were hanged, most of them women. The Salem Witch Trials ended in 1697, and by 1711 the court system of Massachusetts Bay Colony began to make monetary restitution to the families of those who were jailed and persecuted.
Four years after Massachusetts started making amends for its overzealous use of the Witchcraft Act of 1604, and eighteen years after the last witchcraft trial in Salem, the citizenry of Talbot County conducted its first witch trial. Virtue Violl was a white spinster woman who lived along Plaindealing Creek She was arrested in August of the year 1715 by the Talbot County Sheriff, Foster Turbutt, on suspicion of witchcraft. Turbutt bound her over for trial. He took her by boat to Annapolis and turned her over to the Sheriff of Anne Arundel County to await trial for witchcraft.
The jurors who were summoned to Annapolis are familiar names in the historic record books on Talbot County. Among those names were John Bozman, who was elected foreman of the group, along with John Taney, Henry Austin, Thomas Taylor, Notley Maddox, Philemon Armstrong, Patrick Dunkin, Edward Veazey, Ubgate Reeves, Thomas Tolley, William Denton, Joseph Harrison, Thomas Thackstone, Arnold Elzey, William Sweatnam, William Gray, William Willowghby, James Keech, Jonathan Back, William Stevens, Joshua Cecill, Thomas Price, James Monat, and Paul Busey. The jurors were paid three thousands pounds of tobacco, or sotweed as it was referred to on the Eastern Shore, each for sitting as a juror. Virtue would spend over month in the custody of the Sheriff of Anne Arundel before William Bladen, Maryland’s Attorney General, would send a bill of indictment charging Virtue with exercising black magic by “God before her Eyes not Having but being Seduced by the devil most Wickedly & diabolically did Use Practice & Exercise Witchcraft” and “did waste Consume and pine the body” of Elinor Moore, also a spinster, like Virtue, woman of Talbot County and with “her most wicked and Diabbolical Use Practice & Exercise of Witchcraft” did “lame” Elinor Moore’s tongue and render her speechless. Essentially, she was accused of causing Elinor’s mental and physical decline. Virtue was found not guilty of the said crimes and was released.
It would be nearly seventy-five years before another witch would terrify the citizens of Talbot County. A poor elderly woman described as “deformed and hideous” by local accounts lived in a small farmhouse at the edge of a cemetery on Thomas Chamberlain’s Plaindealing Plantation. Witchie Caty, as she was called by the local residents, became the topic of folklore for many years after her death. In his last will and testament, Thomas Chamberlain, Jr. wished that Caty Coburn should be able to live her last days in the little farmhouse. It is not known how long Witchie Caty stayed on the Plaindealing Plantation. County legend says she suddenly disappeared when a ghost started appearing to a local farm boy, directing him in the search of the buried treasure that some still believe is buried on the Plaindealing grounds.
In all, Maryland would conduct only five witchcraft trials, including Virtue’s. So remember when that witch comes to your house dressed in the familiar Wizard of Oz-inspired costume, let your mind take you back three hundred years in the past, when witchcraft and black magic conveyed a much more sinister connotation than they do today in Talbot County. You might even throw in an extra piece of candy to show your understanding of their persecution.