Puritans, Witches & Kings and the Ousted Minister’s Flight to Concord
W Winter is here. Come in from the cold, sit by the fire, and let me tell you a story of an ousted Puritan who sailed across the ocean to what would become Concord, Massachusetts. His name was Peter Bulkeley and he traveled hither in the black garb of the Puritans, bearing with him his rigid beliefs in man’s inherent wickedness thrust for eternity upon them by the sins of Adam and Eve, and in a God whose mercy was reserved for only a chosen few. Tucked away in the back of his mind, were centuries of folklore and superstitions leached into the ground of old England, passed down by generations of storytellers. 16
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| Winter 2020
Hailing from Odell in County Bedfordshire, Bulkeley most likely knew the ancient tales of beautiful, shapeshifting women such as the swan bride with the magic golden necklace who enchanted a fine lord in the woods, married him, and was followed by a curse. Or stories of children who disobediently played in the churchyard, summoning the devil who seized and flew them high into the air before plunging them into a cavernous pit in the earth that swallowed them whole, leaving only one stone behind as a reminder of those who laughed at religion. And most likely, in the forefront of his mind, the Reverend Peter Bulkeley was aware of witches!
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BY JAIMEE LEIGH JOROFF
600 years before, around 900 A.D. the Church had formally declared witchcraft, sorcery, and the like to be unreal, simply illusions imagined by those serving the devil instead of God. But, in the century before Bulkeley was born, German clergyman Heinrich Kramer wrote and published “The Malleus Maleficarum” (“The Hammer of the Witches”), declaring that witchcraft was indeed real. Witch hysteria began to spread across Europe, taking root in England around the time Peter Bulkeley was born in 1583. A son of Odell’s Puritan minister, at age 16, Bulkeley entered Saint John’s College at Cambridge, England. Around that time, King James VI of Scotland wrote Daemonology,
