The Crucible, Salem history and gruesome anniversaries

[Thanks to Trudy for providing the final impetus for this post, which had been churning around in my mind this morning after reading Twitter. See below.]

[Left: current most plausible site of the hangings of the victims of the Salem witch trials. Source.]

Our fellow fan and frequent commentator Trudy just sent me this link about the research on the actual locations of the executions at Salem. (No, Trudy, I was not aware of this, although I am also not surprised either at the research or the results.) It’s a very interesting, meditative exploration by local historian Daniel V. Boudillion of where the hangings might have taken place on the basis of sources, local traditions, and historians’ claims. The author’s conclusion? After evaluating the claims of three authors who’ve written on the topic, he surmises that the place now known as Gallows Hill does not correspond to the site of the hangings — which, the author concludes plausibly, is probably now buried under the parking lot of a Walgreens. This link is really worth reading just for the pictures of the journey that Rebecca Nurse’s son must have taken in order to collect his mother’s body after the judicial murders were over.

(Servetus pauses to think of Richard III and his original gravesite, originally in a monastery church, found by the University of Leicester team under a modern-day car park.)

I don’t agree with Boudillion’s conclusion that only the accused deserve our prayers. As ex-SO said to me once about my lack of sympathy for Holocaust perpetrators who’d begged for forgiveness after 1945: if they didn’t have the hope of the charity of history and heaven, how could they go on living? Some of the accusers did apologize during their own lifetimes. And after four centuries, I hope we can understand a bit better about how incidents like this function as the consequence of a closed system in which accuser and accused both play predetermined roles. Moreover, [ETA: Thanks to the reader who pointed out that I misread this. Ich nehme alles zurück und behaupte das Gegenteil. Too much of a rush on my part. So I agree with the author, instead.] I don’t think Salem can be charged with having forgotten this incident, even if the modern memorials for the victims are located in an entirely different place, neither here nor on Gallows Hill, and even if some of us may be bothered by the more commercializing aspects of Salem’s current recollection of 1692.

But the piece made me think about the ongoing persistence of people to know what, where, and when, and to locate their memories precisely. As a historian this always confused me; I think that legends about history are not entirely separated from history themselves, and that tradition is certainly just as interesting as fact (even if both are important components of the historical endeavor). Why does the place we associate with the trials need to be in the exact historical location where the trials occurred?

I’d thought about a parallel problem first this morning after reading tweets from the cast of The Crucible in London:

Today marks the anniversary of the deaths of several innocent people who were hanged in Salem in 1692. May they rest in peace. #TheCrucible

— Daisy Waterstone (@DaisyWaterstone) July 19, 2014

Today is the anniversary of some killed in the Salem Witch Trials 1692. Reminds us why this play is so important #TheCrucible @oldvictheatre — Lauren Lyle (@LlaurenLyle) July 19, 2014

Bridget Bishop was the first to be executed; she died June 10, 1692. The next five victims died on July 19, 1692 (links go to their documentary traces): Sarah Wilds, Elizabeth Howe, Susannah Martin, Sarah Good, (played by Paddy Navin in “our production”), Rebecca Nurse (played by Anne Firbank).

But which July 19?

Tedious historical explanation follows: In 1692, following the English practice of the time, the Massachusetts colony still followed the Julian calendar, while today we use the Gregorian calendar. (The European calendar reform, which had been recognized as necessary for some time, got caught up in the squabbles of the Reformation so that Catholic countries went over to the new dating system first. So September 1, 1600, is a different day in Rome than in London. Isn’t that neat?) Reference works usually give dates for the deaths of the victims at Salem with the Julian day and the Gregorian year. (The Julian year also started on a different date; in most cases, not January 1, but rather March 25th.) English, Wales, Ireland, and the British colonies did not go over to new-style dating until a 1750 Act of Parliament; Scotland had changed the year reckoning in 1600 but didn’t change its day reckoning until 1752. So any date found in an English-language or British Isles or colony-written source before then has to be checked for its correspondence to other sources and calendars. If you find this confusing, you’re not alone — somewhere in my crate of office reference works I have a German book that’s devoted to calculating the exact conversions between numerous different calendar systems so that chronologies determined from pre-modern sources can be reconstructed accurately.

The upshot for the cast of The Crucible? Julian dates were ten days off of Gregorian dates in 1692.

The anniversaries of the deaths of the five victims of July 19, 1692 — occurred ten days ago.

If we want to mourn John Proctor’s death on August 19, 1692, then the anniversary date is August 9th by our reckoning (and incidentally this would also be the case with Richard III’s death, reckoned by our calendar as August 12th. Richard Armitage’s birthday occurred on our calendar on August 22nd and in fact not on the anniversary of his demise at Bosworth Field).

Does it matter? I don’t think so. The point of this post isn’t to say, nyah, nyah, boo, boo, silly folks, you got it wrong, but simply to point to the importance of anniversaries — whether actual or imagined — in the stories we tell ourselves. Like places, it’s not so much knowing the “real place” (actual historical locations can be abandoned for all kinds of reasons intentional and accidental and practical and idealist), as it is the meaning to which we assign that place. To some extent the battle over Richard III’s re-interment reflects exactly this problem, not least because the actual location of the burial seems inappropriate and there is no clear intended location. The place becomes the focus of an identity battle that tells us something about ourselves, not about history.

And yet at the same time, history is not irrelevant — there’s something about knowing the exactness of the place that assures that our imagination of the past is significantly real. So it goes with dates as well. Whether Armitage’s birthday fell on the anniversary of Richard III’s death, his father allegedly believed that to be the case and the story has been one that appears to have carried an important weight for the actor himself. Whether the actors in The Crucible find the exact dates of their characters’ deaths, the point is that the anniversary and its putative relationship reality provoke the reflection.

But the significant piece of that is less the actual anniversary — we can remember Sarah Good on any day of the year — than the reflection. The important thing is that we remember and not so much when (or where). And what that memory means to us — another topic of infinite possibilities.

~ by Servetus on July 19, 2014.