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In 1674 another Mary Parsons, this one of Northampton, was accused of familiarity with the Devil and of having caused the death of Mary Bartlett. The accused was a respectable woman and the wife of one of Northampton’s richest citizens, but according to Judd, she was proud and high-spirited to a point that had excited the ill will of her neighbors. At the preliminary hearing she vehemently asserted her innocence, whereupon the magistrate appointed a “jury of soberized, chaste women to make a diligent search upon the body of Mary Parsons, whether any marks of witchcraft might appear.” Suspicious marks were discovered, and she was sent to Boston for trial but there found innocent and discharged.

The Devils work

THE MOST FAMOUS witch of Hampshire County was Mary Webster of Hadley, a poor old woman who had the unfortunate habit of feuding with her neighbors—the customary background for a charge of witchcraft. Hadley folks told many tales of her devilries. Horses and cattle going by her house stopped and could not be driven past. A load of hay overturned near her home, and when the driver threatened her with his whip, she turned it back again. A hen fell down the chimney of a neighbor’s house and was scalded in the pot, whereupon it was discovered that Mary had just been scalded. Lt. Philip Smith fell strangely ill after she had threatened him. Feeling against her finally grew into such heat that in 1683 she was indicted and sent to Boston for trial, the charge being that “she not having the fear of God before her eyes, and being instigated by the devil, hath entered into a convernent and had familiarity with him in the shape of a warraneage [a fisher or marten] and had his imps sucking her.” She was found not guilty, and the colony paid the costs of her trial, amounting to twenty-three pounds, fifteen shillings, and twopence.

An odd and unexplained preface to this case is a court record of 1680 stating that Anne Belding, a sixteen-year-old girl, pleaded guilty to purposes and practices against the body and life of Mary Webster and was fined one pound. And an even stranger postscript is thus told in the words of Cotton Mather: “Mr. Philip Smith, aged about fifty years, deacon of a church in Hadley, and a man of devotion, sanctity and gravity, was … in the winter of 1684 murdered with a hideous witchcraft. He was, by his office, concerned about relieving the indigencies of a wretched woman in the town, who being dissatisfied at some of his just cares about her, expressed herself unto him in such a manner, that he declared himself henceforth apprehensive of receiving mischief at her hands.” Deacon Smith’s fears seemed to be verified when he became “very valetudinarious. … Galley pots of medicine were unaccountably emptied; audible scratchings were made about the bed, when his hands and feet lay wholly still, or were held by others. … Some of the young men of the town being out of their wits at the strange calamities … went to give disturbance to the woman thus complained of; and all the while they were disturbing her, he was at ease, and slept as a weary man. Mr. Smith dies; the jury that viewed his corpse, found a swelling on the breast, his back full of bruises, and several holes that seemed made with awls. … This was the end of a good man.”

“Give disturbance” strikes one as a rather mild way of putting it when we learn from another contemporary that “a number of brisk lads tried an experiment on the old woman. Having dragged her out of the house, they hung her up until she was nearly dead, let her down, rolled her some time in the snow, and at last buried her in it, and there left her; but she survived, and the melancholy man died.”

This was the last of the valley’s witchcraft trials. The old superstitions were dying out, and when a Northampton man accused a neighbor of bewitching him, the magistrate, instead of entering the complaint, is said to have ordered the accuser to be whipped ten stripes on the spot.

How the river towns were settled and governed

HADLEY AND OTHER FRONTIER towns were founded by companies of men, banded together by written agreement to establish new homes in the wilderness. The agreement first had to be approved by the General Court, which appointed a committee to lay out the bounds “that this wilderness may be populated and the main ends of our coming into these parts promoted.” When land had been bought from the Indians, it was divided among the “proprietors,” partly by lot and partly by proportional investment. A main street, often as much as 20 rods (320 feet) wide was fenced for a common grazing ground, and each proprietor received a home lot of eight acres (in the case of Hadley) and some meadowland for crops and grazing.