March 25, 2013 • 39 mins
Decades before the Salem trials, an East Hampton woman was tried for witchcraft. Before Lion Gardiner's daughter died, she accused Goody Garlick of bewitching her. Goody Garlick had hearings in two towns, during which she was accused of other bewitchings.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
My name is Holly Fry and I am Tracy V. Wilson.
And as Women's History Month it is, and we've talked
(00:22):
about some women already this month, but we're going to
talk about smart uh. And one thing I think that
always comes to mind for people when they are thinking
about women's history is or women in history is the
Salem witch Trials, which are fascinating in a very rich
tapestry of things to explore. But we're actually going to
turn back the clock a few decades to a witch
(00:43):
trial that happened before the really big onslaught of um
of the Salem witch trials. And it happened in East Hampton, right,
not in quite the New England area that people associate
with witch hunts and that sort of vindictive implementation to things,
but it was sort of the at the early stage,
(01:05):
there were other witch trials happening then. This is in
the sixteen late sixteen fifties, but as you'll see in
this story, not as much of a clear like how
to handle it mentality as there was by the time
things really got rolling in the witch trial arena when
(01:25):
when the which trials really were underway in Massachusetts, there
was a lot of hanging going on, and this, unfortunately
to spoil the ending, does not quite go in that
direction exactly. There are somewhat surprising results in this one. UH.
And what we're talking about is Goody Garlic, who who
is a woman that lived in East Hampton. Uh. And
(01:47):
this whole story starts in the spring of sixteen fifty
seven or sixteen fifty eight, depending on which calendar you're using.
If you go by the Julian calendar, it would have
been fifty seven. The Gregorian calendar it would have been
fifty eight, because the British did not switch over to
the Gregorian calendar until the mid seventeen hundreds, and in
the Julian calendar, March was the new year, so these
(02:09):
events happened prior to that. So you'll sometimes see them
listed as fifty seven and sometimes there's fifty eight. It's
just depending on where the source material, which calendar, which
calendar they went by. So UM. George Dewan wrote a
really great piece for the New York Archives UH talking
about this particular incident. But also he can characterizes the times,
(02:33):
particularly in East Hampton, as it being a very gossipy,
whispery innuendo late in society. Yes, it hit into context.
It was a tiny, tiny community. They were thirty four
families living in East Hampton in the time. They were
relatively isolated. The community was only about ten years old,
still trying to get a foothold really and established themselves
(02:55):
as a community, which had led to the unfortunate side
effect of it also being very back body and gossipy,
and people being angry at their neighbors for one thing
or another exactly. And if you look at the town
records for this time one you can get really lost
because they just were so wonderfully meticulous about notating everything
(03:16):
that was happening. But you'll see that there was a
lot of discord among the citizens and they often played
out in in the way of official complaints. They had
set up this sort of structure where you could go
and complain that you were shafted and did not get
the right amount of corn that you had been promised,
or you know that this piece of land that was
(03:36):
in dispute um they would officially complain so that that
was all on record and they really were very detailed about,
you know, including all of these arguments over property, money,
legal claims as part of the town history. Right. I
sort of imagine it is is like a a long
ago version of today's homeowner associations and all the squabbling
(03:58):
that can go on there with a different it's being
that normally the home Miners Association is not going to
put you to death if you were found guilty of
not paying your door the right color. Uh. And so
Goody Garlic was the wife of Joshua Garlic. Her name
was actually Elizabeth. Goody is actually a term similar to
the way we would use mrs today. Uh. It's short
(04:20):
for good wife, and it kind of is a way
that was often used to refer to normally married women, um,
the wife of the good wife part being the clue
there who were not particularly high status. It's not necessarily
a derogative term, but it was just a very common
way to refer to any woman. So as we go
(04:40):
through this storreal here a lot of people being referred
to as Goody and that is what that means. And
she was about fifty when this whole event took place, right,
and it all sort of was catalyzed by one tragic event,
and it's interesting and we'll talk about it a little
bit more later that this event actually doesn't always show
(05:03):
up in the tellings of the Goody Garlic story. One
of the historians in particular that I read a lot
of her work around it, mentions that she gotten interested
because she had gone on a tour and heard sort
of the really glossy version of it, and then she
knew it seemed like two sort of easy and packaged,
(05:24):
and so she started looking at various historians accounts of
this entire episode and how it played out, and they
there's really a lot of variety to it. And she
draws some interesting conclusions and will link to her research
in the show notes about why this particular event that
really catalyzed it kind of gets lost. But so it
(05:47):
starts out with a young girl by the name of
Elizabeth Gardner Howell. She was married to Arthur Howell, and
she was only sixteen, and she had recently become a mother.
She had had a daughter, and in the days following
the child's birth, she became quite ill um She in
(06:08):
fact had a fevered episode in which she cried out
a witch. A witch. Now you are come to torture
me because I spoke two or three words against you.
In the morning, you will come fawning. And that all
sounded very odd and sort of awkward to the modern ear,
but that's actually recorded. It's part of the That quote
is part of the transcripts from the hearings that eventually happened.
(06:32):
So a neighbor thought as happened. Yes, he had come
to check on her, she was home alone with the child.
He had actually come to speak to her husband, Arthur.
But who was out and happened to witness this episode. Yes,
so his name was Samuel Parson. He saw it has
happened and became worried that she was bewitched. Yes. Uh.
And in the meantime, Elizabeth's mother, Mary Gardner, who lived
(06:54):
very nearby. Again, tiny community, so everyone kind of lives
very close. It was basically a street with a row
of houses on either side. So when it boils down
to yes, and most accounts will sort of mention the
elder Gardener's home as being just across the street, so
she was very close. So Mary Gardner was ill at
the time, and Elizabeth's father, Lion Gardner, who was very
(07:14):
prominent man in the town, and he factors in a
lot as this story develops, left his wife's bedside to
go to his daughter's house because he had been sent
for and he was so worried about her the behavior
that was being described, and he witnessed the frantic behavior
and her claims of witchcraft, and Elizabeth Gardner Howell actually
claimed to have seen Goody Garlic, her neighbor, and a
(07:38):
black figure in her room, which if you were to
hear somebody say that that would be troubling, that they
are seeing these visions of a person and a specter
that the person has brought with them to torment you
in a room, that would be troubling. So eventually her mother,
Mary was well enough to visit. She crossed the street
and started trying to come her daughter, saying that she
(08:01):
was having bad dreams. But Elizabeth really insisted that Goody
Garlic had bewitched her. She was quite sincere on this point,
but that was what was going on. She was adamant,
completely believed that that was happening, and that evening or
an evening related to that, three women of the town
(08:21):
were watching over Elizabeth, and Elizabeth started to address Goody Garlic,
who was not with them physically as though she were
in the room. Yes, and she says, Ah, Garlic, you
jeered me when I came to your house to call
my husband home. You laughed and jeered me, and I
went crying away. Oh you are a pretty one send
for Garlic and his wife. I would tear her in
(08:42):
pieces and leave the birds to pick her bones. Uh.
And she went on because the women that were there
with her watching over her, uh, questioned this outburst and
asked her, you know why is she saying these things?
And she replied to them, did you not see her
last night stand by my bedside, ready to pull me
to pieces? She pricked me with pins, and she brought
a black thing to the foot of my bed. So
(09:05):
she thought not only was she bringing a black specter
into the room that no one else was seeing, but
that she and the specter were actually pricking her with pins.
So slightly troubling again and very adamant, I mean, she
really felt strongly that this was actually happening to her. Right.
She later had a coughing fit, which the women who
(09:27):
were looking after her tried to calm using oil and sugar,
which was an alleged treatment for witchcraft, and at that
point Elizabeth allegedly coughed up a pin. Two different women
witnessed that a pin fell out of her mouth after
she had this coughing fit. Yes, and that does come
up later on. Again, they testified that they saw this happen.
(09:49):
There is no clear, definitive account of how that actually happened,
if it happened for real, if it was slight of hand,
if the women were fibbing later on, but there is
testimony on the record that they saw this pin come
out of her mouth. So that night, Goody Simon's stayed
the night with Elizabeth. They they she slept there in
(10:10):
the bed with her to watch over her, and at
the same time, Arthur Howell, the husband of Elizabeth, another neighbor,
William Russell, and the gardener's slave, her parents slave watched
over the sleeping women. And they kept hearing weird sounds
throughout the night that we're not explained. There was one
in a fireplace, there was one that was under the bed,
but they could never locate the source of the noise.
(10:31):
And Elizabeth would wake up periodically and claim that she
was being pricked with pins. Uh and Unfortunately, Elizabeth did
not recover. Ever, she got worse and worse, her fever
horson and she passed away on February sixteen fifty seven. Again,
if we're going by the Julian calendar, her baby, though, survived,
even without her mother there to breastfeed her. Which, uh
(10:54):
did you find whether they were able to find a
wet nurse or I never saw any account of how
the baby was taken care of in that regard. I
know she did legally. The documents were quickly drawn up
to say that she was staying with her father. Uh.
It would be unusual for a baby without a mother
to survive at the time, but she did, and she
went on to lead, by all accounts, a pretty standard
(11:15):
normal life. But yeah, I wondered too, and I didn't
find any any hard evidence or accounts one way or
the other of how the baby was nourished from that
point on. It seems most likely that probably they found
someone else in the community who also either had a
child or had had a child, which was very common,
and that will actually come up later in the story
(11:37):
regarding someone else. Yes, Uh, so a hearing was underway
pretty much immediately and by some accounts. The calendar gets
a little weird because I did see some that suggests
the hearing had actually started even before Elizabeth had passed,
but verifying that was a little bit tricky. The date
stone always match up, but it was within a couple
(11:57):
of days. So it is conceivedable that they could have
started investigating these allegations since um claims were already being
made about Goody yardlic being implicated in the illness of Elizabeth.
But so the investigation had already begun by the time
Elizabeth had passed and really kicked in a high gear,
and they wanted to determine at that point if she
(12:19):
had been murdered, and if so, if witchcraft had been involved,
because both of those things were punishable by death. And
I feel like we should do a quick side note
and mentioned again in modern times we talked about witchcraft,
and we look at it as a quaint belief of
times past, but it was a very real fear for
this community at this time, and it was not uncommon
(12:39):
for people in general to be afraid of the dark arts,
so we used the dark arts to explain otherwise unexplainable
things correct, So it it really was something that was
taken very very seriously. When someone was accused of something
like that, it was investigated just as we would investigate
any UH legation today of a criminal nature. So this hearing, though,
(13:06):
was interesting because it was the first witchcraft hearing in
East Hampton. There had been others in New England already,
but East Hampton had never dealt with this subject before
on a legal level. UH. And a hearing began and
three village justices presided over it. They were John Wolford,
John Hand and Thomas Baker. And there is also some
discrepancy about how many witnesses actually testified. Most sources site eleven,
(13:30):
but the New York Archives telling of the story does
mention thirteen witnesses, so just keep that in mind. I
just in terms of volume, it seems like eleven is
the more accurate, but the archivists are usually very careful
with their numbers, so it could just be a matter
of someone accounting differently in historical records. And that's a
(13:50):
pretty significant portion of the population of the town at
that time. Yeah, either way, you're close to a third
whichever number happens. UH. And according to UH one text,
like I said, there were eleven, but most interesting are
that three people that never testified that we're very very involved.
(14:12):
One is Lying Gardner, the deceased father. One is Goody Garlic.
She never came forward to defend herself. She didn't speak
up to do so. I wonder if she was given
the options to do so. It seemed like she was
and she just wasn't interested in addressing any of these accusations. Uh.
And the other is a woman named Goody Davis, who
(14:32):
will come up again as we go forward. The only
person who wanted to defend Goody Garlic was her husband,
which is interesting you know that no one would come
forward to speak on her behalf because there are some
accounts also that say that she had friends in very
high places, which will figure into the lore as we
go forward and how this kind of gets absolved later on.
(14:55):
But if that were the case, you would think more
people would come forward to defend her. But again, dealing
with a very fearful subject that was not always easily explainable.
So going into this hearing, they used a seven point
system of criteria for determining the presence of witchcraft. And
this list is so intriguing to me because so many
(15:19):
of them are are really, what we've sort of mentioned
a couple of times, is something tragic happens that you
can't really explain witchcraft? Yeah, it's like, is it unexplainable witchcraft?
It must be which So point one, for example, when
a healthful body shall be suddenly taken without probable reason
or apparent natural cause. So basically, when someone dies without
(15:41):
an obvious cause it was previously healthy, right, And Samuel
Parsons testimony of Elizabeth's the sudden onset of Elizabeth's illness
easily met this requirement. The next one is when the
afflicted party in his fit tells truly what the witch
or other absent parties are doing or saying or the like.
So again, kind of odd because it's basically, at that
(16:05):
point there's no way to verify right there, just saying
it's what someone said, right, you're taking someone's word for it,
who may or may not be ill from fever at
that point or some other affliction. And several witnesses had
heard Elizabeth mentioned the black specters being pricked with pins,
goody garlic being in the room when she wasn't actually
there physically for other people to see, So that was
(16:26):
met very easily. The third was when there was a
supernatural strength such that a strong man or two shall
not be able to keep down a child or a
weak person upon a bed. Arthur Howell described the ways
that Elizabeth would try to strike out at the black figures,
and how he couldn't hold her in his grasp when
she tried to do this. So, even though she was
(16:48):
very ill when she was trying to fight back against
these specters that she saw, her strength appeared to be
more than it should have been considering her physical condition
at that point. The fourth one is the parties shall
do strange things or say strange things, and yet, when
out of their fits, know nothing of what they did
or said. So there was plenty of strange behavior in
(17:09):
all of the witness accounts. But according to one scholar,
she makes an interesting point that nevertheless, and I'm quoting
at this point, Nevertheless, none of the testimony clarifies whether
her delirium was punctuated by moments of clarity in which
she was unaware of what she had said or done.
So we're not sure if that part of the criteria
(17:30):
was actually really focused on at that point, um, but
we do know that she definitely had fits. The fifth
point when a party doth the found it up crooked pins, needles, nails, coal, lead, straw,
hair or the like. Lots of foreign objects in that list.
(17:50):
And we had the two women who we spoke about
previously testifying that they saw a pin fall out of
Elizabeth's mouth after she had a coughing fit. The sixth
is when the party shall see visitly some apparition, and
shortly after some mischiefel shall befall him. Goody Simon's testified
about Elizabeth's visions of black things in the room and
her rapid decline in health was already well established since
(18:12):
many people had witnessed her going from fairly okay to
really really ill in a very brief period of time.
The seventh point was when two or more are similarly
taken in strange fits, so basically, when more than one
person in the community is having the same experience. There
were two witnesses who backed Goody Simon's claimed that she
had had fits after seeing specters, and the garlic black
(18:36):
Cat was implicated as a specter figure. Yes, so Goody
Simmons had said she had seen the black Cat and
shortly after either had fits or her fits had gotten
worse after seeing the animal. So all seven of those
criteria were meant easily during testimony and then in the
in the midst of all of that testimony, there were
additional accusations made against Goodye Garlic. So in addition of
(19:00):
those seven criteria having been met by witness testimony easily,
additional accusations were made as part of that testimony, and
they sort of formed a bigger dossier of what people
perceived to be witchcraft behavior around Goody Garlic. Uh. It
was claimed that she caused four other deaths, one an
unidentified man, one a black child, and two infants. They
(19:25):
said that at one point she poisoned an infant with
cursed milk. Uh. As we had just mentioned, Goody Simon's
claimed that she had fits because of Goody Garlic. There
was a litter of piglets that died after the sow
had a very unusual birth which was attributed to her,
and at one point an ox had broken its legs
(19:46):
suddenly and her husband. Goody Garlic's husband, Joshua, is also
implicated here because he had apparently uttered some threats in
a disagreement with Lyon Gardner, who owned the ox, and
was the father of Elizabeth, who had just died shortly
before it happened, so they had had a verbal dispute
and then suddenly the ox's leg was broken. So once
(20:06):
witchcraft was established to have been involved, the next section
of the hearing is um meeting the criteria to prove
that the accused was the perpetrator of that witchcraft. So
there are three rules. Three criteria that that the accused
had appeared to the sick party and his or her fits,
(20:27):
that the afflicted was able to name the suspected witch,
and that the afflicted could describe the which is actions,
all of which has happened in what we've described so far. Right,
So the existing testimony that meant the first seven criteria
also pretty cleanly wrap up this portion of it as well.
So at that point, uh, things are not looking great
(20:48):
for Goody Garlic. Um. So one thing that's interesting is
historian Loretta Orian, who I've mentioned some of her work
previously in this in this episode, is that many of
the histories of the Easthampton area mentioned the trial of
Goody Garlic, but Elizabeth Gardner Howell's death is really not
part of it. The charges tend to be pretty general
(21:11):
about goody bewitching neighbors with herbs, ruining crops, sending her
spector cat after people. They're kind of more what we
would think of today is pretty standard witchy behaviors of
the time, you know, the things that we think of
historically is what people were accused of. And somehow Elizabeth's
death is really not is focused on as the catalyst
(21:33):
for this trial as it was. And Oriyan postulates that
part of that is because the Gardener family was very,
very important in the area and they really laid down
a lot of the groundwork for the community, and that
they maybe didn't want their family name associated with all
(21:53):
of this, and that some because there are still members
that Gardner family descendants there that you know, give to
hers that are part of this and right, so Ryan
is postulating that they just kind of want to keep
the family name out of it. And well, it was
one of those tours where as we talked about earlier
about you know, hearing the story while on a tour
like it was one of those tours of of one
(22:14):
of the old family properties that uh that she heard
about this story for the first time. Yeah, that really
catalyzed her interest in it and really sessing out the
truth in all of the various histories. And because the
community was very, very small, the Garlics had dealings with everyone,
and some of them, you know, involved disagreements, but all
(22:35):
of them of course came into focus at this time.
And because there is at that point so much information
about it, that's kind of what informs a lot of
the historical writings about it that that give Goody Garlic
more of a general witchcraft accusation rather than the specificity
of a murder. One thing that comes out that's very
interesting as you read this is there is an alternate
(22:58):
villain in this story as we look at it kind
of from our perspective, and that's Goody Davis, who was
this woman who clearly did not like Goody Garlic and
she felt that she had been personally wronged by her,
and much of the testimony against Goody Garlic, even though
Goody Davis never testified, it kind of came to light
that it could all be tracked back to stories that
(23:20):
Goody Davis had told people. So Goody Davis had lost
her own baby after what she claimed was Goody Garlic
casting the evil eye on it. Uh. The story is
that Goody Garlic had noted that the baby was ill,
saying the child is not well for it growne And
later after she said those words, the baby didn't open
(23:41):
its eyes or make noise ever again, and it died
five days later. H and Goody Davis. Her point of
view was that this was an active of witchcraft or
the evil eye from Goody Garlic. So an interesting element
comes into the story here regarding the Gardener family because
allegedly the day that this testimony came up in the
East Hampton hearing involving Goody Davis believing that her child
(24:04):
had been cursed by Goodye Garlic, servants of Lion Gardner,
a good Man Veil and his spouse claimed to have
heard Lyon Gardner say and remember this is the father
of the girl who has just died, and I quote
Goody Davis had taken an Indian child to nurse for
a little wampum and had starved her own child to death.
(24:24):
So someone with a pretty serious stake in seeing justice
done or vengeance if he really believed this woman had
killed his daughter, was actually speaking out against the women
that were accusing Goody Garlic and saying, oh no, you
brought that on yourself, although again he did not officially
testify in the trial. These are things that his servants
(24:45):
overheard him saying, and they reported back to other people.
So it establishes Lion is very even tempered and being
a voice of reason, even in you know, the depths
of grief, grief over losing his daughter, and in some
versions of history it's even suggested that Lyon Gardner is
actually a friend of Goody Garlic and that they have
a pretty good relationship and he actually wants to protect her.
(25:07):
We do know that Goody Garlic worked for him at
one point, but there's no real clear documentation that they
were really any more than that, you know, neighbors and friends.
I mean, there are even disputes in that long public
record that I mentioned earlier between the Garlics and the Gardeners,
But really there are disputes amongst almost every single family,
(25:28):
like you could do all of the possible permutations of
family to family amongst the thirty four that lived there,
and each of them have had some argument at some
point in time that was documented. So right, and I
still keep imagining it is as a seventeenth century condo association,
and everyone's squabbling with everyone all the time. It did
appear to have a lot of squabbles. And at this
(25:48):
point there is an another interesting development, which is that
the case moves on it the judgment is not handed
down there in East Hampton. Now they decided to send
it to Hartford, which had more experience in dealing with
charges like this. There was some trepidation on the parts
of the magistrates about ruling in a case that had
such serious consequences for the accused, which, considering the lore
(26:13):
of witch hunts, is pretty level headed. Like when you
read transcripts of witch trials and sort of read accounts
of uh towns in which a big witch trial became
the central focus, there tended to be a lot of
hysteria and a lot of rush to judgment, And this
is really like, we need to give this case to
someone else who has more experience considering the ramifications that
(26:39):
might come down. Yes, and it it does make me
wonder if some of that is just based on the
fact that it is such a small community and they
do all know each other, like if they have a
sense of the level of import of each person in
that community, or if they just rude that level headed generally,
and we don't know so uh Baker in hand were
then dispatched to Conecticut. They were two of the magistrates
(27:01):
that had heard the hearing there in East Hampton, and
they were bringing Goody Garlic to her trial there in
Hampton there in the Hartford rather, they were also finishing
up negotiations to make East Hampton part of the Connecticut colony.
So there was a double intent there in their travels,
and Lyon Gardner was actually part of the party, but
(27:23):
records indicate he did not have any involvement in the
Garlic case at that point. He was just there to
assist with the Connecticut negotiations. So there's some haziness and
some inconsistency at this point. There are accounts that claimed
there was no Hartford trial at all, and that Gardner
used his influence to spare the Garlics from that what
was likely to happen, which was that Goody Garlic would
(27:45):
be executed. But there are also records of the case
being heard by Governor John Winthrop Jr. And his six
other magistrates, as well as a twelve manajury. So we
mentioned that mostly because I mean, there really are government documents.
Govern records that indicate that this trial did happen. But
again it goes back to that sort of desire to
do very glossy versions of history. There are many accounts
(28:08):
that really seem to firmly believe that that trial never happened,
which kind of interesting. And so the indictment against Goody
Garlic that accompanied her to Hartford reads Elizabeth Garlic, thou
art indicated by the name of Elizabeth Garlic, the wife
of Joshua Garlic of East Hampton, that, not having the
fear of God before thine eyes, thou hast entertained Satan,
(28:29):
the great enemy of God and mankind, And by his help,
since the year sixteen fifty hath done works above the
course of nature, to the loss of lives of several persons,
with several other sorceries, and in particular the wife of
Arthur Howell, for which according to the laws of God
and the established law of the Commonwealth, thou deservest to die. Yeah,
so we we don't really have a lot of record
(28:49):
of what actually transpired in this court, So we don't
know what really happened in the courtroom. We don't really
know if Goody Garlic testified We just know that an
event happened at which there was a trial. Yes, there
has also never been any record of whether a witch
is mark was ever found on her. Which was pretty
(29:10):
common for women who were jailed as witches to have
their bodies searched pretty thoroughly for such a thing. Uh,
And there's never any record of one of those having
been found. We don't know if that ever happened to her,
but it is. It was such a common practice that
it would have been more unusual if it had not happened,
for her to have been pretty thoroughly examined. But here's
(29:35):
the interesting thing. The findings of the court are as such.
This was actually the judgment that they sent to the
town of East Hampton, along with some other documents which
we will talk about in just a moment, and it reads,
the jury doth not find Elizabeth, the wife of Joshua
Garlic guilty according to the indictment Joshua Garlic of East
(29:58):
Hampton for himself and wife Elizabeth, doth acknowledge himself bound
to this Commonwealth in a recognization of thirty eleven. We'll
come back to what that is, Uh, that he and
his wife shall carry good behavior to all the members
of this jurisdiction until the Court at East Hampton in
September or October next and that they will then and
there personally appear if he till that time continues his
(30:20):
habitation upon the island, but if he shall remove his
dwelling to the main within this jurisdiction, then they here
shall personally appear at the Quarter Court in Hartford on
the first Thursday of September next. So what that actually
means is that um Joshua actually had to pay a
bond to ensure that his wife would behave going forward. Like,
(30:40):
they didn't find her guilty, but they also found her
still suspicious, so not guilty but still suspicious kind of
like they have to do parole hearings even though she
was never in prison. Found great uh and that they
had to check in with the court either in East
Hampton or if they moved off of that island to
(31:01):
the mainland, they would have to go to Hartford from
time to time. Uh. So, Yeah, they didn't find her
guilty but also not quite not guilty. But this was
a surprisingly conservative approach. There had already been which is
tried in Hartford, that had been found guilty and had
been put to death. So it's very very interesting that
(31:22):
this happened, and the absence of testimony and the accounts
of what actually happened at the trial has kind of
created this nice little hotbed for speculation, right. I really
wish that we had those because many people really wish
that we had Like when you look at the criteria
and what went on in uh in East Hampton, it
(31:42):
seems like, from the point of view of witchcraft trials
at the time, to be almost an open inch at case. Yeah,
but generally went down. The deck was definitely stacked against
her at that point. So that's one of the reasons
kind of this mythology around Lyon Gardner has grown up
through the years, is that people have filled in those
(32:03):
blanks with him, you know, kind of swooping in almost
a D. S X. Makina like and doing some wonderful
thing that spared her at that point. But we don't know.
What we do know is that Governor John Winthrop sent
a letter to East Hampton along with that verdict, commending
the community for their Christian care and prudence, and that's
(32:24):
a quote in examining and handling the case, And he
also included in that letter the declaration of acceptance of
the town into the Connecticut government, so the two things
that were happening at the same time got lumped in
one letter together. He also included a bill for the
cost of jaling and trying Goody Garlic, which is kind
of funny. Uh if you read the letter, he's kind
of like and by the way, find attached you owe
(32:47):
us a little bit of money. Uh. Now, in the meantime,
Joshua Garlic actually filed a suit for defamation against Getty Davis, who,
as we mentioned, a lot of the testimony that came
up was tracked back to gossip and rumors she may
have started. It is worth noting that defamation suits were
pretty common when it came to settling differences at the time.
(33:07):
Like I mentioned, all possible permutations of family to family
had at some point in time had some disagreement or
argument that is recorded in the the the town records,
so it's not completely uncommon. But what sort of an
interesting coda is that Goodie Davis actually died shortly after this,
(33:27):
like within a couple of weeks. Uh, So she was
never really brought to any sort of accountability for any
of her actions, and I you know, don't think the
defamation suit really went anywhere. And then it's sort of
become a legend now, as many things do, a local
legend in which this story that people tell sort of
(33:47):
have a kind of glossy finish of what originally happened,
but skips over a lot of pertinent details, and the
legend based tellings of the storyline. Gardner gives the garlic
S a cottage john his own land for them to
live the rest of their lives in. And we know
that the Garlics did return to East Hampton and they
did live out their lives there, but there's a record
(34:10):
of one cottage on Gardner's island where Goody Simon actually lived,
but there is no such record of a Garlic house. Uh. However,
they did live there in East Hampton, Goody and Joshua
into their nineties, which is so old for the time.
There is a record of Joshua's death, but there's no
written account of his wife's passing, so we're not sure
(34:32):
exactly when she died. I have seen written that one
died at ninety two and one died at ninety four,
but I wasn't able to verify that, but most historians
agree that they did live into ripe old age and
presumably died of natural causes there. So that's the story
of Goody Garlic. She's one of the few people who
was tried as a witch and sort of lived to
(34:54):
tell the tale, although she didn't seem to say much
about it, but she did survive it and go on
to lea more or less a normal life for the
rest of her days. Yeah, it's just so unusual, really
extremely unusual. But part of that again, she probably benefited
from having been on the early part of the wave
of witchcraft fear and having been in a small enough
(35:17):
community that they really were trying to take their time
with the hearing and and the decision of it right well,
And a lot of the sort of big name witchcraft
trials in the United States happened a little further about
thirty five years later, and a little bit north north
of there, and a little bit later, Hi, you went
(35:37):
down a rabbit hole of of like archival records with
this episode, I went down a rabbit hole of trying
to find out for sure whether Goody Garlic is the
namesake of Magrat Garlic in the Discworld books by Terry Pratchett.
She is a witch who uh factors heavily into many
of the books that they're known as the Witch books.
That there's sort of several plot lines that the Discworld
(36:00):
books follows, and one of them is about a trio
of witches, and Magrat Garlic is one of them. I
love her. I would not be surprised if there were
some inspiration. And he definitely names a lot of his
characters after either historical figures or sort of a lampooning
way of coming up with neat names. For somebody cut
me own throat. Dibbler is the like a shuckster who
(36:22):
sells bad stuff, for example. So I went hunting for
whether Goodye Garlic is the source of Magrat Garlics name
and did not find a weird authoritative source on that.
But I'm going to now believe that she is. And
she's a fascinating story. H So that is the tale
of Getty Garlic and her trial that went much better
than most it. I believe you also have a listener
(36:46):
mail do. This is from listener Beth, and this is
actually from a podcast before you and I were doing it.
But it's really good information for people to have. She says, Hello,
I just listened to the Unearthed and podcast. As a
pre Columbian art historian, I just couldn't let two things go,
especially two things I try to beat into my students heads.
(37:07):
The first is about the temples. You said that the
Maya tore down and covered their temples. That is incorrect.
The Maya rarely tore down a temple. They simply built
over old ones, often protecting the earlier temple with some
sort of film. I describe it to my students as
the layers of an onion. The second point is about
the word Mayan. It is frequently misused. Mayan with the
N on the end only should be used when referring
(37:29):
to the language example Mayan hieroglyphics. Any other time you
talk about the Maya, whether it be the people, culture, religion, architecture, art,
et cetera, use the word Maya. This misuse of the
word is one of my biggest pet peeves. That being said,
I really enjoy the podcast, especially for long runs. Thank you,
But that's really good information. It's people to have because
I know I have done it before, I'm sure many
(37:49):
many other people have. Right, I need to go on
a quest on the website to make sure the website
uses it correctly and all times. Yes, ah, that could
be tricky. We're gonna have some work ahead of maybe so,
but that's cool. We can edit, which is one of
the wonderful things about online content. If you would like
to write to us with insights and knowledge you may
know things about goody garlic that we did not uncover,
(38:12):
you can do so at History Podcast at Discovery dot com.
You can also follow us on Twitter at missed in
History or on Facebook at facebook dot com slash history
class stuff. If you want to learn a little bit
more related to the topics we talked about today, you
can go to our website and type in the words
Salem in the search bar, and one of the articles
that comes up is worth the American Colonists drug during
(38:35):
the Salem which trial, and it's a really fascinating examination
of I believe it's called ergot poisoning, which is this
fungus that can grow on wheat and can cause some
very irrational behavior can and it's a really cool article.
So if you would like to learn about that or
anything else, you can do so at our website, which
is how Stuff Works dot com. For more on this
(39:00):
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Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
My name is Holly Fry and I am Tracy V. Wilson.
And as Women's History Month it is, and we've talked
(00:22):
about some women already this month, but we're going to
talk about smart uh. And one thing I think that
always comes to mind for people when they are thinking
about women's history is or women in history is the
Salem witch Trials, which are fascinating in a very rich
tapestry of things to explore. But we're actually going to
turn back the clock a few decades to a witch
(00:43):
trial that happened before the really big onslaught of um
of the Salem witch trials. And it happened in East Hampton, right,
not in quite the New England area that people associate
with witch hunts and that sort of vindictive implementation to things,
but it was sort of the at the early stage,
(01:05):
there were other witch trials happening then. This is in
the sixteen late sixteen fifties, but as you'll see in
this story, not as much of a clear like how
to handle it mentality as there was by the time
things really got rolling in the witch trial arena when
(01:25):
when the which trials really were underway in Massachusetts, there
was a lot of hanging going on, and this, unfortunately
to spoil the ending, does not quite go in that
direction exactly. There are somewhat surprising results in this one. UH.
And what we're talking about is Goody Garlic, who who
is a woman that lived in East Hampton. Uh. And
(01:47):
this whole story starts in the spring of sixteen fifty
seven or sixteen fifty eight, depending on which calendar you're using.
If you go by the Julian calendar, it would have
been fifty seven. The Gregorian calendar it would have been
fifty eight, because the British did not switch over to
the Gregorian calendar until the mid seventeen hundreds, and in
the Julian calendar, March was the new year, so these
(02:09):
events happened prior to that. So you'll sometimes see them
listed as fifty seven and sometimes there's fifty eight. It's
just depending on where the source material, which calendar, which
calendar they went by. So UM. George Dewan wrote a
really great piece for the New York Archives UH talking
about this particular incident. But also he can characterizes the times,
(02:33):
particularly in East Hampton, as it being a very gossipy,
whispery innuendo late in society. Yes, it hit into context.
It was a tiny, tiny community. They were thirty four
families living in East Hampton in the time. They were
relatively isolated. The community was only about ten years old,
still trying to get a foothold really and established themselves
(02:55):
as a community, which had led to the unfortunate side
effect of it also being very back body and gossipy,
and people being angry at their neighbors for one thing
or another exactly. And if you look at the town
records for this time one you can get really lost
because they just were so wonderfully meticulous about notating everything
(03:16):
that was happening. But you'll see that there was a
lot of discord among the citizens and they often played
out in in the way of official complaints. They had
set up this sort of structure where you could go
and complain that you were shafted and did not get
the right amount of corn that you had been promised,
or you know that this piece of land that was
(03:36):
in dispute um they would officially complain so that that
was all on record and they really were very detailed about,
you know, including all of these arguments over property, money,
legal claims as part of the town history. Right. I
sort of imagine it is is like a a long
ago version of today's homeowner associations and all the squabbling
(03:58):
that can go on there with a different it's being
that normally the home Miners Association is not going to
put you to death if you were found guilty of
not paying your door the right color. Uh. And so
Goody Garlic was the wife of Joshua Garlic. Her name
was actually Elizabeth. Goody is actually a term similar to
the way we would use mrs today. Uh. It's short
(04:20):
for good wife, and it kind of is a way
that was often used to refer to normally married women, um,
the wife of the good wife part being the clue
there who were not particularly high status. It's not necessarily
a derogative term, but it was just a very common
way to refer to any woman. So as we go
(04:40):
through this storreal here a lot of people being referred
to as Goody and that is what that means. And
she was about fifty when this whole event took place, right,
and it all sort of was catalyzed by one tragic event,
and it's interesting and we'll talk about it a little
bit more later that this event actually doesn't always show
(05:03):
up in the tellings of the Goody Garlic story. One
of the historians in particular that I read a lot
of her work around it, mentions that she gotten interested
because she had gone on a tour and heard sort
of the really glossy version of it, and then she
knew it seemed like two sort of easy and packaged,
(05:24):
and so she started looking at various historians accounts of
this entire episode and how it played out, and they
there's really a lot of variety to it. And she
draws some interesting conclusions and will link to her research
in the show notes about why this particular event that
really catalyzed it kind of gets lost. But so it
(05:47):
starts out with a young girl by the name of
Elizabeth Gardner Howell. She was married to Arthur Howell, and
she was only sixteen, and she had recently become a mother.
She had had a daughter, and in the days following
the child's birth, she became quite ill um She in
(06:08):
fact had a fevered episode in which she cried out
a witch. A witch. Now you are come to torture
me because I spoke two or three words against you.
In the morning, you will come fawning. And that all
sounded very odd and sort of awkward to the modern ear,
but that's actually recorded. It's part of the That quote
is part of the transcripts from the hearings that eventually happened.
(06:32):
So a neighbor thought as happened. Yes, he had come
to check on her, she was home alone with the child.
He had actually come to speak to her husband, Arthur.
But who was out and happened to witness this episode. Yes,
so his name was Samuel Parson. He saw it has
happened and became worried that she was bewitched. Yes. Uh.
And in the meantime, Elizabeth's mother, Mary Gardner, who lived
(06:54):
very nearby. Again, tiny community, so everyone kind of lives
very close. It was basically a street with a row
of houses on either side. So when it boils down
to yes, and most accounts will sort of mention the
elder Gardener's home as being just across the street, so
she was very close. So Mary Gardner was ill at
the time, and Elizabeth's father, Lion Gardner, who was very
(07:14):
prominent man in the town, and he factors in a
lot as this story develops, left his wife's bedside to
go to his daughter's house because he had been sent
for and he was so worried about her the behavior
that was being described, and he witnessed the frantic behavior
and her claims of witchcraft, and Elizabeth Gardner Howell actually
claimed to have seen Goody Garlic, her neighbor, and a
(07:38):
black figure in her room, which if you were to
hear somebody say that that would be troubling, that they
are seeing these visions of a person and a specter
that the person has brought with them to torment you
in a room, that would be troubling. So eventually her mother,
Mary was well enough to visit. She crossed the street
and started trying to come her daughter, saying that she
(08:01):
was having bad dreams. But Elizabeth really insisted that Goody
Garlic had bewitched her. She was quite sincere on this point,
but that was what was going on. She was adamant,
completely believed that that was happening, and that evening or
an evening related to that, three women of the town
(08:21):
were watching over Elizabeth, and Elizabeth started to address Goody Garlic,
who was not with them physically as though she were
in the room. Yes, and she says, Ah, Garlic, you
jeered me when I came to your house to call
my husband home. You laughed and jeered me, and I
went crying away. Oh you are a pretty one send
for Garlic and his wife. I would tear her in
(08:42):
pieces and leave the birds to pick her bones. Uh.
And she went on because the women that were there
with her watching over her, uh, questioned this outburst and
asked her, you know why is she saying these things?
And she replied to them, did you not see her
last night stand by my bedside, ready to pull me
to pieces? She pricked me with pins, and she brought
a black thing to the foot of my bed. So
(09:05):
she thought not only was she bringing a black specter
into the room that no one else was seeing, but
that she and the specter were actually pricking her with pins.
So slightly troubling again and very adamant, I mean, she
really felt strongly that this was actually happening to her. Right.
She later had a coughing fit, which the women who
(09:27):
were looking after her tried to calm using oil and sugar,
which was an alleged treatment for witchcraft, and at that
point Elizabeth allegedly coughed up a pin. Two different women
witnessed that a pin fell out of her mouth after
she had this coughing fit. Yes, and that does come
up later on. Again, they testified that they saw this happen.
(09:49):
There is no clear, definitive account of how that actually happened,
if it happened for real, if it was slight of hand,
if the women were fibbing later on, but there is
testimony on the record that they saw this pin come
out of her mouth. So that night, Goody Simon's stayed
the night with Elizabeth. They they she slept there in
(10:10):
the bed with her to watch over her, and at
the same time, Arthur Howell, the husband of Elizabeth, another neighbor,
William Russell, and the gardener's slave, her parents slave watched
over the sleeping women. And they kept hearing weird sounds
throughout the night that we're not explained. There was one
in a fireplace, there was one that was under the bed,
but they could never locate the source of the noise.
(10:31):
And Elizabeth would wake up periodically and claim that she
was being pricked with pins. Uh and Unfortunately, Elizabeth did
not recover. Ever, she got worse and worse, her fever
horson and she passed away on February sixteen fifty seven. Again,
if we're going by the Julian calendar, her baby, though, survived,
even without her mother there to breastfeed her. Which, uh
(10:54):
did you find whether they were able to find a
wet nurse or I never saw any account of how
the baby was taken care of in that regard. I
know she did legally. The documents were quickly drawn up
to say that she was staying with her father. Uh.
It would be unusual for a baby without a mother
to survive at the time, but she did, and she
went on to lead, by all accounts, a pretty standard
(11:15):
normal life. But yeah, I wondered too, and I didn't
find any any hard evidence or accounts one way or
the other of how the baby was nourished from that
point on. It seems most likely that probably they found
someone else in the community who also either had a
child or had had a child, which was very common,
and that will actually come up later in the story
(11:37):
regarding someone else. Yes, Uh, so a hearing was underway
pretty much immediately and by some accounts. The calendar gets
a little weird because I did see some that suggests
the hearing had actually started even before Elizabeth had passed,
but verifying that was a little bit tricky. The date
stone always match up, but it was within a couple
(11:57):
of days. So it is conceivedable that they could have
started investigating these allegations since um claims were already being
made about Goody yardlic being implicated in the illness of Elizabeth.
But so the investigation had already begun by the time
Elizabeth had passed and really kicked in a high gear,
and they wanted to determine at that point if she
(12:19):
had been murdered, and if so, if witchcraft had been involved,
because both of those things were punishable by death. And
I feel like we should do a quick side note
and mentioned again in modern times we talked about witchcraft,
and we look at it as a quaint belief of
times past, but it was a very real fear for
this community at this time, and it was not uncommon
(12:39):
for people in general to be afraid of the dark arts,
so we used the dark arts to explain otherwise unexplainable
things correct, So it it really was something that was
taken very very seriously. When someone was accused of something
like that, it was investigated just as we would investigate
any UH legation today of a criminal nature. So this hearing, though,
(13:06):
was interesting because it was the first witchcraft hearing in
East Hampton. There had been others in New England already,
but East Hampton had never dealt with this subject before
on a legal level. UH. And a hearing began and
three village justices presided over it. They were John Wolford,
John Hand and Thomas Baker. And there is also some
discrepancy about how many witnesses actually testified. Most sources site eleven,
(13:30):
but the New York Archives telling of the story does
mention thirteen witnesses, so just keep that in mind. I
just in terms of volume, it seems like eleven is
the more accurate, but the archivists are usually very careful
with their numbers, so it could just be a matter
of someone accounting differently in historical records. And that's a
(13:50):
pretty significant portion of the population of the town at
that time. Yeah, either way, you're close to a third
whichever number happens. UH. And according to UH one text,
like I said, there were eleven, but most interesting are
that three people that never testified that we're very very involved.
(14:12):
One is Lying Gardner, the deceased father. One is Goody Garlic.
She never came forward to defend herself. She didn't speak
up to do so. I wonder if she was given
the options to do so. It seemed like she was
and she just wasn't interested in addressing any of these accusations. Uh.
And the other is a woman named Goody Davis, who
(14:32):
will come up again as we go forward. The only
person who wanted to defend Goody Garlic was her husband,
which is interesting you know that no one would come
forward to speak on her behalf because there are some
accounts also that say that she had friends in very
high places, which will figure into the lore as we
go forward and how this kind of gets absolved later on.
(14:55):
But if that were the case, you would think more
people would come forward to defend her. But again, dealing
with a very fearful subject that was not always easily explainable.
So going into this hearing, they used a seven point
system of criteria for determining the presence of witchcraft. And
this list is so intriguing to me because so many
(15:19):
of them are are really, what we've sort of mentioned
a couple of times, is something tragic happens that you
can't really explain witchcraft? Yeah, it's like, is it unexplainable witchcraft?
It must be which So point one, for example, when
a healthful body shall be suddenly taken without probable reason
or apparent natural cause. So basically, when someone dies without
(15:41):
an obvious cause it was previously healthy, right, And Samuel
Parsons testimony of Elizabeth's the sudden onset of Elizabeth's illness
easily met this requirement. The next one is when the
afflicted party in his fit tells truly what the witch
or other absent parties are doing or saying or the like.
So again, kind of odd because it's basically, at that
(16:05):
point there's no way to verify right there, just saying
it's what someone said, right, you're taking someone's word for it,
who may or may not be ill from fever at
that point or some other affliction. And several witnesses had
heard Elizabeth mentioned the black specters being pricked with pins,
goody garlic being in the room when she wasn't actually
there physically for other people to see, So that was
(16:26):
met very easily. The third was when there was a
supernatural strength such that a strong man or two shall
not be able to keep down a child or a
weak person upon a bed. Arthur Howell described the ways
that Elizabeth would try to strike out at the black figures,
and how he couldn't hold her in his grasp when
she tried to do this. So, even though she was
(16:48):
very ill when she was trying to fight back against
these specters that she saw, her strength appeared to be
more than it should have been considering her physical condition
at that point. The fourth one is the parties shall
do strange things or say strange things, and yet, when
out of their fits, know nothing of what they did
or said. So there was plenty of strange behavior in
(17:09):
all of the witness accounts. But according to one scholar,
she makes an interesting point that nevertheless, and I'm quoting
at this point, Nevertheless, none of the testimony clarifies whether
her delirium was punctuated by moments of clarity in which
she was unaware of what she had said or done.
So we're not sure if that part of the criteria
(17:30):
was actually really focused on at that point, um, but
we do know that she definitely had fits. The fifth
point when a party doth the found it up crooked pins, needles, nails, coal, lead, straw,
hair or the like. Lots of foreign objects in that list.
(17:50):
And we had the two women who we spoke about
previously testifying that they saw a pin fall out of
Elizabeth's mouth after she had a coughing fit. The sixth
is when the party shall see visitly some apparition, and
shortly after some mischiefel shall befall him. Goody Simon's testified
about Elizabeth's visions of black things in the room and
her rapid decline in health was already well established since
(18:12):
many people had witnessed her going from fairly okay to
really really ill in a very brief period of time.
The seventh point was when two or more are similarly
taken in strange fits, so basically, when more than one
person in the community is having the same experience. There
were two witnesses who backed Goody Simon's claimed that she
had had fits after seeing specters, and the garlic black
(18:36):
Cat was implicated as a specter figure. Yes, so Goody
Simmons had said she had seen the black Cat and
shortly after either had fits or her fits had gotten
worse after seeing the animal. So all seven of those
criteria were meant easily during testimony and then in the
in the midst of all of that testimony, there were
additional accusations made against Goodye Garlic. So in addition of
(19:00):
those seven criteria having been met by witness testimony easily,
additional accusations were made as part of that testimony, and
they sort of formed a bigger dossier of what people
perceived to be witchcraft behavior around Goody Garlic. Uh. It
was claimed that she caused four other deaths, one an
unidentified man, one a black child, and two infants. They
(19:25):
said that at one point she poisoned an infant with
cursed milk. Uh. As we had just mentioned, Goody Simon's
claimed that she had fits because of Goody Garlic. There
was a litter of piglets that died after the sow
had a very unusual birth which was attributed to her,
and at one point an ox had broken its legs
(19:46):
suddenly and her husband. Goody Garlic's husband, Joshua, is also
implicated here because he had apparently uttered some threats in
a disagreement with Lyon Gardner, who owned the ox, and
was the father of Elizabeth, who had just died shortly
before it happened, so they had had a verbal dispute
and then suddenly the ox's leg was broken. So once
(20:06):
witchcraft was established to have been involved, the next section
of the hearing is um meeting the criteria to prove
that the accused was the perpetrator of that witchcraft. So
there are three rules. Three criteria that that the accused
had appeared to the sick party and his or her fits,
(20:27):
that the afflicted was able to name the suspected witch,
and that the afflicted could describe the which is actions,
all of which has happened in what we've described so far. Right,
So the existing testimony that meant the first seven criteria
also pretty cleanly wrap up this portion of it as well.
So at that point, uh, things are not looking great
(20:48):
for Goody Garlic. Um. So one thing that's interesting is
historian Loretta Orian, who I've mentioned some of her work
previously in this in this episode, is that many of
the histories of the Easthampton area mentioned the trial of
Goody Garlic, but Elizabeth Gardner Howell's death is really not
part of it. The charges tend to be pretty general
(21:11):
about goody bewitching neighbors with herbs, ruining crops, sending her
spector cat after people. They're kind of more what we
would think of today is pretty standard witchy behaviors of
the time, you know, the things that we think of
historically is what people were accused of. And somehow Elizabeth's
death is really not is focused on as the catalyst
(21:33):
for this trial as it was. And Oriyan postulates that
part of that is because the Gardener family was very,
very important in the area and they really laid down
a lot of the groundwork for the community, and that
they maybe didn't want their family name associated with all
(21:53):
of this, and that some because there are still members
that Gardner family descendants there that you know, give to
hers that are part of this and right, so Ryan
is postulating that they just kind of want to keep
the family name out of it. And well, it was
one of those tours where as we talked about earlier
about you know, hearing the story while on a tour
like it was one of those tours of of one
(22:14):
of the old family properties that uh that she heard
about this story for the first time. Yeah, that really
catalyzed her interest in it and really sessing out the
truth in all of the various histories. And because the
community was very, very small, the Garlics had dealings with everyone,
and some of them, you know, involved disagreements, but all
(22:35):
of them of course came into focus at this time.
And because there is at that point so much information
about it, that's kind of what informs a lot of
the historical writings about it that that give Goody Garlic
more of a general witchcraft accusation rather than the specificity
of a murder. One thing that comes out that's very
interesting as you read this is there is an alternate
(22:58):
villain in this story as we look at it kind
of from our perspective, and that's Goody Davis, who was
this woman who clearly did not like Goody Garlic and
she felt that she had been personally wronged by her,
and much of the testimony against Goody Garlic, even though
Goody Davis never testified, it kind of came to light
that it could all be tracked back to stories that
(23:20):
Goody Davis had told people. So Goody Davis had lost
her own baby after what she claimed was Goody Garlic
casting the evil eye on it. Uh. The story is
that Goody Garlic had noted that the baby was ill,
saying the child is not well for it growne And
later after she said those words, the baby didn't open
(23:41):
its eyes or make noise ever again, and it died
five days later. H and Goody Davis. Her point of
view was that this was an active of witchcraft or
the evil eye from Goody Garlic. So an interesting element
comes into the story here regarding the Gardener family because
allegedly the day that this testimony came up in the
East Hampton hearing involving Goody Davis believing that her child
(24:04):
had been cursed by Goodye Garlic, servants of Lion Gardner,
a good Man Veil and his spouse claimed to have
heard Lyon Gardner say and remember this is the father
of the girl who has just died, and I quote
Goody Davis had taken an Indian child to nurse for
a little wampum and had starved her own child to death.
(24:24):
So someone with a pretty serious stake in seeing justice
done or vengeance if he really believed this woman had
killed his daughter, was actually speaking out against the women
that were accusing Goody Garlic and saying, oh no, you
brought that on yourself, although again he did not officially
testify in the trial. These are things that his servants
(24:45):
overheard him saying, and they reported back to other people.
So it establishes Lion is very even tempered and being
a voice of reason, even in you know, the depths
of grief, grief over losing his daughter, and in some
versions of history it's even suggested that Lyon Gardner is
actually a friend of Goody Garlic and that they have
a pretty good relationship and he actually wants to protect her.
(25:07):
We do know that Goody Garlic worked for him at
one point, but there's no real clear documentation that they
were really any more than that, you know, neighbors and friends.
I mean, there are even disputes in that long public
record that I mentioned earlier between the Garlics and the Gardeners,
But really there are disputes amongst almost every single family,
(25:28):
like you could do all of the possible permutations of
family to family amongst the thirty four that lived there,
and each of them have had some argument at some
point in time that was documented. So right, and I
still keep imagining it is as a seventeenth century condo association,
and everyone's squabbling with everyone all the time. It did
appear to have a lot of squabbles. And at this
(25:48):
point there is an another interesting development, which is that
the case moves on it the judgment is not handed
down there in East Hampton. Now they decided to send
it to Hartford, which had more experience in dealing with
charges like this. There was some trepidation on the parts
of the magistrates about ruling in a case that had
such serious consequences for the accused, which, considering the lore
(26:13):
of witch hunts, is pretty level headed. Like when you
read transcripts of witch trials and sort of read accounts
of uh towns in which a big witch trial became
the central focus, there tended to be a lot of
hysteria and a lot of rush to judgment, And this
is really like, we need to give this case to
someone else who has more experience considering the ramifications that
(26:39):
might come down. Yes, and it it does make me
wonder if some of that is just based on the
fact that it is such a small community and they
do all know each other, like if they have a
sense of the level of import of each person in
that community, or if they just rude that level headed generally,
and we don't know so uh Baker in hand were
then dispatched to Conecticut. They were two of the magistrates
(27:01):
that had heard the hearing there in East Hampton, and
they were bringing Goody Garlic to her trial there in
Hampton there in the Hartford rather, they were also finishing
up negotiations to make East Hampton part of the Connecticut colony.
So there was a double intent there in their travels,
and Lyon Gardner was actually part of the party, but
(27:23):
records indicate he did not have any involvement in the
Garlic case at that point. He was just there to
assist with the Connecticut negotiations. So there's some haziness and
some inconsistency at this point. There are accounts that claimed
there was no Hartford trial at all, and that Gardner
used his influence to spare the Garlics from that what
was likely to happen, which was that Goody Garlic would
(27:45):
be executed. But there are also records of the case
being heard by Governor John Winthrop Jr. And his six
other magistrates, as well as a twelve manajury. So we
mentioned that mostly because I mean, there really are government documents.
Govern records that indicate that this trial did happen. But
again it goes back to that sort of desire to
do very glossy versions of history. There are many accounts
(28:08):
that really seem to firmly believe that that trial never happened,
which kind of interesting. And so the indictment against Goody
Garlic that accompanied her to Hartford reads Elizabeth Garlic, thou
art indicated by the name of Elizabeth Garlic, the wife
of Joshua Garlic of East Hampton, that, not having the
fear of God before thine eyes, thou hast entertained Satan,
(28:29):
the great enemy of God and mankind, And by his help,
since the year sixteen fifty hath done works above the
course of nature, to the loss of lives of several persons,
with several other sorceries, and in particular the wife of
Arthur Howell, for which according to the laws of God
and the established law of the Commonwealth, thou deservest to die. Yeah,
so we we don't really have a lot of record
(28:49):
of what actually transpired in this court, So we don't
know what really happened in the courtroom. We don't really
know if Goody Garlic testified We just know that an
event happened at which there was a trial. Yes, there
has also never been any record of whether a witch
is mark was ever found on her. Which was pretty
(29:10):
common for women who were jailed as witches to have
their bodies searched pretty thoroughly for such a thing. Uh,
And there's never any record of one of those having
been found. We don't know if that ever happened to her,
but it is. It was such a common practice that
it would have been more unusual if it had not happened,
for her to have been pretty thoroughly examined. But here's
(29:35):
the interesting thing. The findings of the court are as such.
This was actually the judgment that they sent to the
town of East Hampton, along with some other documents which
we will talk about in just a moment, and it reads,
the jury doth not find Elizabeth, the wife of Joshua
Garlic guilty according to the indictment Joshua Garlic of East
(29:58):
Hampton for himself and wife Elizabeth, doth acknowledge himself bound
to this Commonwealth in a recognization of thirty eleven. We'll
come back to what that is, Uh, that he and
his wife shall carry good behavior to all the members
of this jurisdiction until the Court at East Hampton in
September or October next and that they will then and
there personally appear if he till that time continues his
(30:20):
habitation upon the island, but if he shall remove his
dwelling to the main within this jurisdiction, then they here
shall personally appear at the Quarter Court in Hartford on
the first Thursday of September next. So what that actually
means is that um Joshua actually had to pay a
bond to ensure that his wife would behave going forward. Like,
(30:40):
they didn't find her guilty, but they also found her
still suspicious, so not guilty but still suspicious kind of
like they have to do parole hearings even though she
was never in prison. Found great uh and that they
had to check in with the court either in East
Hampton or if they moved off of that island to
(31:01):
the mainland, they would have to go to Hartford from
time to time. Uh. So, Yeah, they didn't find her
guilty but also not quite not guilty. But this was
a surprisingly conservative approach. There had already been which is
tried in Hartford, that had been found guilty and had
been put to death. So it's very very interesting that
(31:22):
this happened, and the absence of testimony and the accounts
of what actually happened at the trial has kind of
created this nice little hotbed for speculation, right. I really
wish that we had those because many people really wish
that we had Like when you look at the criteria
and what went on in uh in East Hampton, it
(31:42):
seems like, from the point of view of witchcraft trials
at the time, to be almost an open inch at case. Yeah,
but generally went down. The deck was definitely stacked against
her at that point. So that's one of the reasons
kind of this mythology around Lyon Gardner has grown up
through the years, is that people have filled in those
(32:03):
blanks with him, you know, kind of swooping in almost
a D. S X. Makina like and doing some wonderful
thing that spared her at that point. But we don't know.
What we do know is that Governor John Winthrop sent
a letter to East Hampton along with that verdict, commending
the community for their Christian care and prudence, and that's
(32:24):
a quote in examining and handling the case, And he
also included in that letter the declaration of acceptance of
the town into the Connecticut government, so the two things
that were happening at the same time got lumped in
one letter together. He also included a bill for the
cost of jaling and trying Goody Garlic, which is kind
of funny. Uh if you read the letter, he's kind
of like and by the way, find attached you owe
(32:47):
us a little bit of money. Uh. Now, in the meantime,
Joshua Garlic actually filed a suit for defamation against Getty Davis, who,
as we mentioned, a lot of the testimony that came
up was tracked back to gossip and rumors she may
have started. It is worth noting that defamation suits were
pretty common when it came to settling differences at the time.
(33:07):
Like I mentioned, all possible permutations of family to family
had at some point in time had some disagreement or
argument that is recorded in the the the town records,
so it's not completely uncommon. But what sort of an
interesting coda is that Goodie Davis actually died shortly after this,
(33:27):
like within a couple of weeks. Uh, So she was
never really brought to any sort of accountability for any
of her actions, and I you know, don't think the
defamation suit really went anywhere. And then it's sort of
become a legend now, as many things do, a local
legend in which this story that people tell sort of
(33:47):
have a kind of glossy finish of what originally happened,
but skips over a lot of pertinent details, and the
legend based tellings of the storyline. Gardner gives the garlic
S a cottage john his own land for them to
live the rest of their lives in. And we know
that the Garlics did return to East Hampton and they
did live out their lives there, but there's a record
(34:10):
of one cottage on Gardner's island where Goody Simon actually lived,
but there is no such record of a Garlic house. Uh. However,
they did live there in East Hampton, Goody and Joshua
into their nineties, which is so old for the time.
There is a record of Joshua's death, but there's no
written account of his wife's passing, so we're not sure
(34:32):
exactly when she died. I have seen written that one
died at ninety two and one died at ninety four,
but I wasn't able to verify that, but most historians
agree that they did live into ripe old age and
presumably died of natural causes there. So that's the story
of Goody Garlic. She's one of the few people who
was tried as a witch and sort of lived to
(34:54):
tell the tale, although she didn't seem to say much
about it, but she did survive it and go on
to lea more or less a normal life for the
rest of her days. Yeah, it's just so unusual, really
extremely unusual. But part of that again, she probably benefited
from having been on the early part of the wave
of witchcraft fear and having been in a small enough
(35:17):
community that they really were trying to take their time
with the hearing and and the decision of it right well,
And a lot of the sort of big name witchcraft
trials in the United States happened a little further about
thirty five years later, and a little bit north north
of there, and a little bit later, Hi, you went
(35:37):
down a rabbit hole of of like archival records with
this episode, I went down a rabbit hole of trying
to find out for sure whether Goody Garlic is the
namesake of Magrat Garlic in the Discworld books by Terry Pratchett.
She is a witch who uh factors heavily into many
of the books that they're known as the Witch books.
That there's sort of several plot lines that the Discworld
(36:00):
books follows, and one of them is about a trio
of witches, and Magrat Garlic is one of them. I
love her. I would not be surprised if there were
some inspiration. And he definitely names a lot of his
characters after either historical figures or sort of a lampooning
way of coming up with neat names. For somebody cut
me own throat. Dibbler is the like a shuckster who
(36:22):
sells bad stuff, for example. So I went hunting for
whether Goodye Garlic is the source of Magrat Garlics name
and did not find a weird authoritative source on that.
But I'm going to now believe that she is. And
she's a fascinating story. H So that is the tale
of Getty Garlic and her trial that went much better
than most it. I believe you also have a listener
(36:46):
mail do. This is from listener Beth, and this is
actually from a podcast before you and I were doing it.
But it's really good information for people to have. She says, Hello,
I just listened to the Unearthed and podcast. As a
pre Columbian art historian, I just couldn't let two things go,
especially two things I try to beat into my students heads.
(37:07):
The first is about the temples. You said that the
Maya tore down and covered their temples. That is incorrect.
The Maya rarely tore down a temple. They simply built
over old ones, often protecting the earlier temple with some
sort of film. I describe it to my students as
the layers of an onion. The second point is about
the word Mayan. It is frequently misused. Mayan with the
N on the end only should be used when referring
(37:29):
to the language example Mayan hieroglyphics. Any other time you
talk about the Maya, whether it be the people, culture, religion, architecture, art,
et cetera, use the word Maya. This misuse of the
word is one of my biggest pet peeves. That being said,
I really enjoy the podcast, especially for long runs. Thank you,
But that's really good information. It's people to have because
I know I have done it before, I'm sure many
(37:49):
many other people have. Right, I need to go on
a quest on the website to make sure the website
uses it correctly and all times. Yes, ah, that could
be tricky. We're gonna have some work ahead of maybe so,
but that's cool. We can edit, which is one of
the wonderful things about online content. If you would like
to write to us with insights and knowledge you may
know things about goody garlic that we did not uncover,
(38:12):
you can do so at History Podcast at Discovery dot com.
You can also follow us on Twitter at missed in
History or on Facebook at facebook dot com slash history
class stuff. If you want to learn a little bit
more related to the topics we talked about today, you
can go to our website and type in the words
Salem in the search bar, and one of the articles
that comes up is worth the American Colonists drug during
(38:35):
the Salem which trial, and it's a really fascinating examination
of I believe it's called ergot poisoning, which is this
fungus that can grow on wheat and can cause some
very irrational behavior can and it's a really cool article.
So if you would like to learn about that or
anything else, you can do so at our website, which
is how Stuff Works dot com. For more on this
(39:00):
and thousands of other topics. Is it how to works
dot com? Netflix streams TV shows and movies directly to
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(39:23):
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