The indictment was as follows.
Anno Regis et Reginæ, &c. quarto.
Essex ss. The jurors for our sovereign lord and lady the king and queen
present, that George Burroughs, late of Falmouth in the province of
Massachusetts Bay, clerk, the ninth day of May, in the fourth year
of the reign of our sovereign lord and lady William and Mary, by
the grace of God of England, Scotland, France and Ireland, king and
queen, defenders of the faith, &c. and divers other days and times, as
well before as after, certain detestable arts called witchcrafts and
sorceries, wickedly and feloniously hath used, practised and exercised,
at and within the township of Salem, in the county of Essex aforesaid,
in, upon and against one Mary Walcot, of Salem village, in the county
of Essex, single woman; by which said wicked arts, the said Mary
Walcot, the ninth day of May in the fourth year abovesaid, and divers
other days and times as well before as after, was and is tortured,
afflicted, pined, consumed, wasted and tormented, against the peace of
our sovereign lord and lady the king and queen, and against the form
of the statute in that case made and provided. Endorsed _Billa vera_.
Three other bills were found for the like upon other persons, to all
which he pleaded not guilty, and put himself upon trial, &c.
The afflicted and confessing witches were first examined, for although,
by the advice of the elders, this kind of evidence was not to be deemed
infallible; yet it was presumptive, and, with other circumstances,
sufficient proof. It would be tedious to recite the whole of this
evidence, especially as it was of the same sort with what has been
already related in the confessions. The most material circumstance
which distinguished him [Burroughs] from the rest, was, that he was to
be a king in Satan’s empire.
The other evidence was that being a little man he had performed feats
beyond the strength of a giant; particularly that he would take a gun
of seven feet barrel behind the lock and hold it out with one hand;
that he would take up a barrel of molasses or cider and carry them in
a disadvantageous place and posture from a canoe to the shore; and
when in his vindication he urged that an Indian which was there held
out the gun as he did, the witnesses not seeing or not remembering any
Indian, it was supposed it must be the black man or the devil, who, the
witnesses swore, looks like an Indian.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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