Goodwife

In the last decades of the eighteenth century, Thomas Jefferson, principal author of the American Declaration of Independence, began collecting documents related to the history of the Colony of Virginia. Among them was a volume of early seventeenth-century case records from the Williamsburg Courthouse. During the American Civil War, retreating Confederate forces burned the archives in Virginia’s state capital in 1865. This one volume, maintained in Jefferson’s private library, survived, and with it, the record of America’s earliest documented witch trial, some seventy years before the famous trials at Salem. This episode brings you the story of Goodwife Joan Wright and America’s first known witch trial.

Researched, written, and produced by Corinne Wieben with original music by Purple Planet.

Episode sources

Chapters

• 0:00 Pre-roll
• 0:07 Intro
• 2:14 Dairymaid
• 6:03 Midwife
• 11:38 Witch
• 18:15 Conclusion
• 20:19 Outro

Transcript

Pre-roll
You’re listening to Enchanted, a podcast on the history of magic, sorcery and witchcraft. I’m Corinne Wieben.

Intro
On July 4, 1776, delegates to the Second Continental Congress representing the thirteen American colonies adopted the Declaration of Independence, breaking from British rule and declaring the colonies members of a new, independent nation. In the last decades of the eighteenth century, Thomas Jefferson, the principal author of the Declaration and the man who would one day become the third president of the United States, began collecting documents related to the history of the Colony of Virginia. Among the documents he collected, some of them in such a state of decay that, as he wrote to a friend, “the leaf falls to pieces on being turned over,” was a volume of early seventeenth-century case records from the Williamsburg Courthouse. He decided to keep the volume, claiming that “our experience has proved to us that a single copy, or a few, deposited in manuscript in the public offices, cannot be relied on for any great length of time. The ravages of fire and ferocious enemies have had too much part in producing the very loss we are now deploring.” His decision ultimately saved these records. During the American Civil War, retreating Confederate forces burned the archives in Virginia’s state capital in 1865. This one volume, maintained in Jefferson’s private library, survived, and with it, the record of America’s earliest documented witch trial, some seventy years before the famous trials at Salem.

In this episode, I bring you the story of Goodwife Joan Wright and America’s first known witch trial.

Dairymaid
Joan was born in the port city of Kingston-upon-Hull in northern England sometime in the 1580s. As a girl, she worked as a dairymaid, milking cows and processing milk into butter and cheese. Churning butter by hand takes skill and an intense amount of manual labor. If the milk happens to curdle in the process, the work will fail, and no amount of churning will transform the spoiled milk into butter. For this reason, many seventeenth-century dairymaids, seeing half a day’s work wasted, blamed spirits, fairies, or witches for spoiling the milk or cursing the churn itself.

According to Joan, one day, an old woman came to her employer’s door, possibly asking for charity. Poverty and begging, in fact, anything that separated the poor from their well-to-do neighbors, could put a woman under suspicion of witchcraft. Among seventeenth-century Protestants, wealth was seen as an indication of God’s favor. By that logic, poverty could indicate God’s displeasure and some moral failing on the part of the poor. Witchcraft accusations often sprung from a neighbor’s refusal to help. If illness or other misfortune fell on that house, its inhabitants may well accuse the beggar woman they turned away of cursing them.

In order to prevent such curses, some people employed methods of counter-magic, purchasing or creating charms to ward off a supernatural attack. One day, as she waited to confront a suspected witch, Joan’s employer told Joan to stop churning. As she later related this story, Joan said that, on orders from the dame of the household, she “clapped the churn staff to the bottom of the churn and clapped her hands across upon the top of it.” Standing there idly holding the plunger, Joan waited for further instructions, but her employer merely told her to keep the staff at the bottom of the churn and left to invite the old beggar woman in. Sometime later, Joan’s dame returned with the suspected witch and revealed that she had ordered Joan to stand at the churn as a counter-magical measure to remove the witch’s curse. Joan then said that the suspected woman “fell down on her knees and asked forgiveness,” saying, “her hand was in the churn and could not stir before [the] maid lifted up the staff.” Joan lifted the staff, and the woman left. The dame—and Joan—believed that Joan had trapped the witch’s spectral hand, which had been keeping the churn from producing butter.

Shortly after, Joan’s “dame” fell ill and thought she herself had been bewitched, perhaps in retaliation for trapping the suspected witch. Again, she resorted to counter-magic to lift the curse, telling Joan to take an iron horseshoe and heat it in the oven. When it was red-hot, Joan was to throw the horseshoe into her mistress’s urine. Joan later explained that “as long as the horseshoe was hot, the witch was sick at the heart.” The witch’s agony would force her to lift the curse. Joan’s employer recovered shortly after, reinforcing the women’s belief in these magical countermeasures.

Midwife
Later, Joan left England for America. The sea journey to the American colonies was perilous, but many working-class people took it, hoping for a better life. For those who could not pay their own passage, English law allowed wealthy patrons to pay the travel expenses of servants and laborers. In return, the investor would receive fifty acres of colonial land. The demand for cheap labor in the colonies was met by this system. In return for having their passage paid, poor travelers would work off their debts by offering unpaid labor through indentured servitude. Some historians estimate that one-half to two-thirds of immigrants to the American colonies arrived as indentured servants. Many of these did not live to see the end of their terms.

Joan, however, seems to have escaped this onerous life by marrying a tobacco farmer and sawyer named Robert Wright. Records indicate that Robert had settled in or around Elizabeth City, Virginia, by 1608. By 1610, he and Joan were married, and she gave birth to two children in the following years. The couple earned a living working on their neighbors’ plantations and building side businesses that allowed them additional income. Robert plied his trade as a sawyer, helping clear lands and providing valuable timber for new settlements and the shipping industry. Joan, however, earned a living by working as a midwife and a fortune-teller, professions which often brought with them suspicions of witchcraft.

Thanks to the myriad dangers of childbearing, midwives often found themselves suspected of witchcraft. During the witch trials in Scotland under the Scottish Witchcraft Act, which was in place from 1563 until 1736, over a hundred of the accused, overwhelmingly women, were explicitly described as folk healers or midwives. Common factors among the accusations include disputes with neighbors over payment for services rendered. The animosity that grew from a healer attempting to collect a debt from their neighbors may have contributed to a significant number of these complaints. When a patient proved to be beyond the help of a healer and inevitably died or suffered permanent disability from their illness, their grieving relatives often accused the healer of witchcraft. Even those who successfully healed a patient or delivered a baby could fall under suspicion. Since many religious leaders, both Catholic and Protestant, viewed pain during childbirth as God’s punishment for women’s sinful nature, inherited from their rebellious biblical ancestor Eve, even a midwife’s attempts to reduce a patient’s labor pains could be viewed as ungodly behavior and result in accusations of witchcraft.

In addition to the pressures of survival in a new land, where disease and famine were constant threats, colonists in the Americas had invaded the lands of Indigenous people. Unfamiliar with growing local crops, settlers sometimes stole them to stave off hunger. Colonial officials, either unable or unwilling to understand the cultures of their Indigenous neighbors, failed to win allies and frequently made enemies. On March 22, 1622, Indigenous forces attacked colonial settlements along the James River, killing roughly a third of Virginia’s colonists. Following the attacks, English sources were quick to characterize it as an unwarranted assault, with one account calling it a “barbarous massacre in the time of peace and league.” Joan and Robert were fortunate enough to survive this series of attacks, living long enough to see their aftermath unfold.

After 1622, military patrols increased along the river. The initial purpose of these patrols was to detect and repel any external threat to the colony. However, internally, colonists began to examine one another’s behavior with a more critical eye. At one point, another Wright woman, this one named Jane Wright, was whipped for sewing shirts of poor quality for the colonial patrols. As farmers abandoned their more dangerous inland fields, famine struck in 1623, followed closely by an outbreak of disease. As starvation and fever decimated the population, the Virginia Company of London, the corporate entity that had founded the colony in hopes of creating an agricultural trade center, went bankrupt. By 1626, a new governor had taken control of the colony. Colonial officials increased military drills, ordered stricter adherence to Anglican Protestantism, and increased surveillance of colonists’ private lives. Authorities began cracking down on sinful behavior, increasingly prosecuting women for drunkenness and loose morals.

Witch
The original royal charter for the Virginia Company had been issued by King James I of England. Also known as James VI of Scotland, King James was an avid believer that witches were real and doing the Devil’s work in his kingdom. It was James who instigated the infamous North Berwick witch trials in 1590 and published a treatise on black magic entitled Daemonologie in 1597. Among the laws established in the Virginia colony was James’s 1604 Witchcraft Act, which sought to validate the existence of witches and punish those suspected of witchcraft. The penalty was death not only for those convicted of doing harm through witchcraft but for any of their “aiders, abettors, and counselors.” For James, witchcraft was a direct threat to the state, a political danger as well as a spiritual one.

The military men who policed the Virginia colony shared this view. In September 1626, Lieutenant Giles Allington accused Joan Wright of witchcraft. During the previous year, Allington and his colleagues had experienced poor hunting and food insecurity. A neighboring weaver, Thomas Jones, supported the accusation. As an example, both men pointed to Sergeant Reynold Booth, who “came to good game and very fair to shoot at, but for a long time after he could never kill any thing.” As their hunger grew, so did their suspicions that a witch was to blame. Booth reportedly claimed that he was “crossed by a woman” but “cannot say that it was Goodwife Wright.”

However, Allington had personal reasons to suspect Joan. Six months earlier, he had been charged with finding care for his pregnant wife. He asked Joan to serve as midwife, but upon meeting her, his wife rejected her help. Joan, it seems, was left-handed. Various European traditions have long held the left hand to be unlucky. The Latin word for “right” is dexter, from which we derive the English words “dexterity” and “dexterous,” meaning skilled and graceful in movement. The Latin for “left” is sinister, from which we get the English “sinister,” meaning harmful, wicked, or evil. Even in the clichéd depiction of an angel and a devil sitting on someone’s shoulders as they debate some ethical choice, the devil tends to sit on the left shoulder. With his wife’s refusal, Allington had to withdraw his offer of work to Joan.

Only, he didn’t. Uncomfortable with firing her in person, Allington just avoided her and quietly hired another midwife. When Joan heard about this, she went to Allington’s farm to confront him and “went away from his house very much discontented.” Shortly after the birth, Allington’s wife fell ill from an infection in her breast. She recovered after four or five weeks, but then Allington himself fell ill for several weeks. He also testified that “his child after it was born fell sick and so continued the space of two months, and afterwards recovered… for the space of a month, and afterwards fell into extreme pain the space of five weeks and so departed.” The grieving lieutenant blamed Joan.

This alone may not have been enough evidence to convict her, but Joan had also been working as a fortune-teller. She may have been doing this to make herself seem more powerful as a healer or perhaps as a separate sideline, but a number of witnesses came forward claiming that she had predicted the deaths of many of her neighbors. One woman, Rebecca Gray, said that Joan saw that “by one token which this deponent had in her forehead, she should bury her husband.” She also reported that Joan had told two men that they would outlive their wives, and it had proven true. Another neighbor, Isabella Perry, testified that, in a dispute with a neighbor’s maidservant, Joan had threatened that “she would make her dance stark naked.” As gossip spread, more and more rumors and accusations began to pile up.

Since the governor had established military rule, Joan was tried before a tribunal of colonial officials rather than a jury. Interestingly, the record makes no mention of a pact with the devil or demonology in general. The problem at hand was not a Satanic one, but a practical matter of the colony’s peace and survival. Robert Wright testified on his wife’s behalf, saying he had “been married to his wife sixteen years, but knoweth nothing by her touching the crime she is accused of.” Asked why, if the charges against her were false, Joan did not sue her accusers for slander, she reportedly “made light of it,” replying, “God forgive them.”

The record ends with no mention of Joan’s plea of guilty or not guilty, her testimony in her own defense, or even the court’s final verdict. Given the tradition of commuting harsh sentences in favor of confessions in church, Joan likely survived her ordeal. There is no record of her execution—or the execution of any convicted witch—in Virginia’s surviving court records. However, her husband’s name appears in some subsequent records. In January 1627, Robert Wright petitioned to move across the river to Jamestown. After relocating to twelve acres of marshy land nicknamed “Labor in Vain,” Robert entered into business with a joiner’s yard but was arrested and imprisoned for debt a year later. After that, his name—like his wife’s—disappears from the historical record.

Conclusion
As a historian who works in court records, I always find it frustrating when a case record is incomplete. We all want a satisfying story with a beginning, middle, and end, but there are a few things Joan’s story can teach us, even without knowing how it ends. The first is the lesson of all witch trials: that fear and grief can prompt us to look for an enemy, even where none exists.

In 2019, the Jamestown Settlement museum produced a play, Season of the Witch, based on Joan’s life and trial, as part of a larger exhibit called Untamed on women and the law in colonial American history. Joan’s case shows us that women, especially those who helped other women (like midwives), presented a challenge to masculine authority. Joan’s story tells us something else, too: that if a woman is strong enough and clever enough, she can carve out a life for herself in the most challenging of circumstances.

But perhaps the real lesson here is just how fragile one person’s story can be. Without Thomas Jefferson’s curiosity (and his refusal to surrender this volume of records), we would never have learned Joan Wright’s name at all. The lives of so many people, particularly women, have gone unrecorded in any document, let alone one that survived for centuries.

Joan’s story—during and even after her lifetime—is one of survival.

Outro
If you enjoyed this episode, you can subscribe to Enchanted wherever you listen. This episode was produced by me with original music by Purple Planet. You can find them at purple dash planet dot com. If you want to learn more about the trial of Goodwife Joan Wright, be sure to check out the sources link in the show notes, especially Marion Gibson’s Witchcraft: A History in Thirteen Trials. Special thanks to Enchanted’s Patreon patrons for supporting the production of this and every episode. If you want to support Enchanted, please visit patreon dot com slash enchantedpodcast. If you’re looking for a way to support the show that won’t cost you anything, you can always give Enchanted: The History of Magic & Witchcraft a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts, Podchaser, Audible, or wherever you listen and recommend it to your friends. You can get in touch with me via email at enchantedpodcast at gmail dot com or follow on Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr at enchantedpodcast. As always, for more information and special features, visit enchantedpodcast dot net. I’m Corinne Wieben. Thank you for listening and stay enchanted.