Tag Archives | witch trials

Toil and Trouble: Help Posthumously Pardon the Hanged Witches of Bideford

By on June 15, 2013 in News 0

via Dana Matthews  Who Forted bideford witches1

A new campaign to make right the past wrongs of British witch hunts is gaining support from government officials, and you can help too.

British MP, Ben Bradshaw, has shown his support to posthumously pardon the last three women to be hanged for witchcraft in England, an act he says is “a stain” on British history.

The Witches of Bideford, otherwise known as Temperance Lloyd, Susannah Edwards and Mary Trembles, were hanged to death on August 25th 1682 after having been accused of performing acts of witchcraft against members of the town.

Temperance Lloyd was arrested in July 1682, after Thomas Eastchurch, the Bideford shoekeeper, accused Lloyd of being a witch. She was taken and held at the “chapel at the end of the bridge” until she was brought before the justices to defend herself against the charges.

Her charges were described as,

“…suspicion of having used some magical art, sorcery or witchcraft upon the body of Grace Thomas and to have had discourse or familiarity with the devil in the likeness or shape of a black man.”

Like most cases of witchcraft during that time period, the testimony was paranoid, suspicious, and mostly ridiculous.

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Descendants Want Connecticut To Clear Names Of Women Executed For Witchcraft

By on October 9, 2012 in News 5

More than three centuries later, Connecticut is the last state refusing to issue apology or posthumous pardons for those put to death during the time when laws based on the Bible held sway in America, Religion News Service writes:

At age 82, Bernice Mable Graham Telian doubts she’ll live long enough to see the name of her great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother and 10 others hanged in colonial Connecticut for witchcraft cleared.

Telian was researching her family tree when she discovered that her seventh grandmother, Mary Barnes of Farmington, Conn., was sent to the gallows at the site of the old State House in Hartford in 1663. “You won’t find Mary’s grave. She and all these people who were hanged were dumped in a hole. They wanted them to be forgotten,” said Telian, a retired university administrator.

Connecticut was executing suspected witches some 40 years before the infamous (and better known) trials in Salem, Mass.

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