Sarah Good
July 11th, 1653 (July 21st, Julian Calendar)
On July 19th, 1692, Sarah Good was hanged for being a bitch. Well, she was hanged for being a witch, but being a bitch and being a witch were largely interchangeable in Salem, in the Province of Massachusetts Bay in the late 17th Century.
To make things worse, Sarah committed the unforgivable crimes of being poor, being at the wrong end of a legal and social system that didn’t give her any chance in life and being a woman. Topped off with the cherry of having a husband who didn’t like her very much, she was obviously very guilty.
Sarah was born in 1653, the daughter of a reasonably wealthy tavern owner called John Solart, who died when Sarah was 16, in 1669. His estate was relatively valuable with 70 acres of good land, worth the not inconsiderable sum of 500 pounds. John Solart, however, died without a will and so his property was divided between his widow and two sons, with his seven daughters getting virtually nothing. Virtually nothing soon became nothing when Sarah’s mother remarried and her new husband took the lot.
With no prospects, no money, no property and no dowry, Sarah married an indentured servant named Daniel Poole who got them both into debt and then dropped dead in 1682.
Desperate, she married Willam Good, who sold off anything that Poole had left her to pay the debts, leaving them both impoverished and begging on the streets of Salem. She made the mistake of stopping to ask for charity from the Puritan minister of Salem, Samuel Parris, who would later kick off the infamous witch hunts and when she ‘walked off muttering’, the brazen hussy, her corruption into the arms of Satan had obviously begun.
She stayed with some local families for a while, who found her ‘a turbulent spirit’, which translates as ‘not very Puritan’, presumably for not wanting to wear sackcloth underpants or something, and they threw her out. Her credentials as Lucifer’s Bride were confirmed when it was noted that she was generally quite unhappy a lot of the time, despite appearing to have every reason to be quite unhappy a lot of the time. William was rather happier a lot of the time because he put on the sackcloth underpants and, as a result, nobody threw him out into the street and then grumbled about him.
Doing his best to help his wife, from the comfort of his warm, sackcloth underpants bedroom, William helpfully accused his wife, who was living outside in the forest, of being an ‘enemy to all that is good’ and of never going to church. When Sarah pointed out that she didn’t go to church because she had nothing to wear and they wouldn’t let her in, they accused her of muttering and not wearing enough sackcloth, which clearly meant she was a witch.
On March 6th, 1692, two young girls, Abigail Williams and her cousin Betty Parris, who by some amazing coincidence was the daughter of swivel-eyed Puritan bampot, Samuel Parris, accused Sarah of bewitching them.
The young girls, when instructed by the Reverend Parris, without any coaching whatsoever, would suddenly start convulsing, their eyes rolling back in their heads and their mouths hanging slackly open, which no teenage girl has ever done since. They accused three women of biting, punching and scratching them - Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne and an enslaved Native American woman called Tituba.
Sarah’s trial began on March 25th. She was accused of such debauchery as not being very Puritan and being rude, particularly to the children. During her trial, the crowd, presumably sensing that they might be next, decided to ham it up, writhing in their seats when the accused were brought into the room, wailing and rocking back and forth.
One member of the audience threw herself into a fit and when it stopped, claimed Good had attacked her with a knife, despite the fact that, very clearly, she had just been sitting there, a few feet away, all the time. The victim even produced a broken blade she claimed had been used in the attack, which confirmed the story in the eyes of Parris, despite someone else in the crowd pointing out that it was his knife he had lost the day before, that the woman who had the ‘fit’ had seen him lose it and picked it up, and that he had the other half in his pocket.
This did present something of a problem for the prosecution and jury, which the presiding judge, William Stoughton, dealt with by telling the ‘victim’ off for exaggerating and then letting the evidence stand anyway.
Both Sarahs denied the accusations, although Tituba was persuaded to give evidence against them both, claiming that Good was able to summon black and yellow birds to attack her victims and that a mysterious figure in black had made them sign their names in a spooky looking book.
With these revelations, everyone started having fits again and suddenly everyone could see black and yellow birds sitting in Sarah Good’s hands.
All of Sarah’s protestations of innocence were pointless. She had been found guilty long before any trial. After a few more random fits from the audience, for good measure, she was taken from jail and, on July 19th, 1692, alongside four other women, Rebecca Nurse, Susannah Martin, Elisabeth How and Sarah Wilds, hanged for witchcraft.
Sarah protested her innocence to the end. She refused the opportunity to repent and be forgiven of her ‘sins’ and, by legend, went to her death telling her confessor, Reverend Nicholas Noyes, that
"I'm no more a witch than you are a wizard, and if you take away my life God will give you blood to drink"
Although this appears nowhere in the contemporary records of the time, and the legend that Noyes later choked to death on his own blood is fun, but a myth.
Sarah’s primary ‘crime’ was that she was poor and a woman. She annoyed the other townsfolk by relying on them as a result of circumstances beyond her control, and then not appearing to be effusively grateful as a result. Reduced to hardship by an inheritance system that ignored daughters, her first husband’s debts and her second husband’s dislike of her feisty spirit. William Good said that she was a witch because of her ‘bad carriage to him’, which just means that she wasn’t a ‘dutiful’ wife and they didn’t appear to like each other very much.
Sarah Good paid for her bad luck with her life. William Good got paid for his.
After her death, despite his part in ensuring it happened, William sued the Great and General Court for damage done to his mental health for the execution of his wife and the arrest of their child.
Yes, I did say the arrest of their child because Sarah Good’s daughter, Dorothy, known as Dorcas, was accused, by William and the other bird-seeing, fit-having, knife-victim townsfolk of Salem, of being a witch’s familiar.
Dorcas was four years old.
Dorcas was imprisoned alongside her mother, although she was never tried or found guilty and was eventually released in December of 1692. Dorcas lived a transient life of poverty and indentured servitude, in and out of the workhouse, until disappearing from the records sometime around 1738.
Whilst in jail, Dorcas witnessed her mother give birth to another of William’s children, a girl called Mercy. Mercy died a few days later, probably of malnutrition. Sarah was led away and hanged a few days later.
As compensation, William Good received the princely sum of thirty pounds.
Most of the people in this story would later become characters in Arthur Miller's satirical play about the witch hunts, "The Crucible".