Notes
[[134].]
Of Ipswich. For the touching story of her trial and of the loyalty of her
blind husband and her daughters, see especially Upham,
Salem Witchcraft, II. 216-223, and, in the
Historical Collections of the Topsfield Historical Society,
XIII. (1908), the study on “Topsfield in the Witchcraft Delusion,”
by Mrs. Towne and Miss Clark. In the same volume (pp. 107-126) Mr. G. F.
Dow has published the records of her case more completely than has Woodward
in Records of Salem Witchcraft (II. 69-94). She was
executed on July 19.
[[135].]
What this purpose may have been does not appear in the evidence: John
How testifies merely that a neighbor who had laughed at him for thinking the sow
bewitched told him to cut off her ear, “the which I did.” It was
doubtless to burn it, as a means to detect the witch. So, Perkins and Gaule say,
in England it was a practice to burn the thing bewitched; and so at New Haven,
in 1657, Thomas Mullener cut off the tail and ear of a pig and threw them into
the fire to find out the witch (Records of the Colony of
New Haven, II. 224). The belief was that the person who then first came
to the fire was the witch (see below, p.411).
