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person.” Hale follows that story immediately with another tale, of a woman he was “called to pray with, being under sore fits and vexations of Satan,” who had “tryed the same charm,” and whom his prayers released from “those bonds of Satan.” 30
    Nothing in Hale’s account links the two stories except for both women’s experimenting with the same common form of fortune-telling, yet authors have conflated them to create group activity by the afflicted girls. Hale himself seems to have regarded them as separate incidents: the first he was only “credibly informed” about, the second he participated in; the first involved one of the youthful “Afflicted persons,” the subject of the second could have been any woman of any age; the first occurred in 1692, the second is undated. Even if both incidents occurred in 1692, the second could easily refer to someone like the accused witch Sarah Cole (of Lynn) who claimed to be afflicted, and who confessed at her examination that years earlier, before her marriage, “she & some others toyed with a Venus glase & an Egg what trade their sweet harts should be of.” 31
    Hale’s
Modest Enquiry,
in short, provides evidence that
one
of the afflicted girls—someone who died single before 1697 (when Hale himself died, although his book was not published for another five years)— engaged in fortune-telling of a rather ordinary sort, probably although not necessarily prior to her affliction in 1692. 32 That Hale regarded this story as irrelevant to the development of the crisis, and that careful scholars today should regard it as equally irrelevant, is indicated by the fact that he failed to include it in his central narrative, which occupies pages 1–40 of his book. It appears instead much later, in the middle of a discussion of Satan’s various relationships with human beings. Hale states that he intends it as a warning “to take heed of handling the Devils weapons,” never identifying the tale in any way as a cause of the witchcraft crisis.
    THE FIRST EXAMINATIONS
    With four afflicted and three accused now among them, Villagers decided to take action. On February 29, Thomas Putnam, his brother Edward, and two men unrelated to any of the afflicted—Joseph Hutchinson and Thomas Preston—filed formal complaints with the Salem magistrates, John Hathorne and Jonathan Corwin, charging the three women with “Witchcraft, by them Committed and thereby much injury don” to the three children and Betty Hubbard. The accusations thus moved from the religious to the legal realm, and out of the three affected households into the wider community. That Hutchinson and Preston (both of whom later became skeptics) joined in the initial complaints reveals the extent of Villagers’ concern over the condition of the tormented children in their midst. Ann Jr.’s complaints of new tortures that very night, and Betty Hubbard’s early the following day, must have confirmed Villagers in their belief that legal steps had to be taken. 33
    Hathorne and Corwin were in their early fifties and related by marriage. Members of prosperous families that had settled in Salem early in the town’s history, they both also had extensive links to the northern frontier. (Hathorne speculated in large tracts of Maine land, and Corwin owned valuable sawmills at Cape Porpoise, which he had acquired in 1676 by marrying the wealthy widow Elizabeth Sheafe Gibbs, who inherited them from her first husband.) 34 Experienced justices of the peace who had handled hundreds of cases previously, they soon made a crucial decision with immense consequences. Rather than following the customary procedure of conducting preliminary examinations in private, they would interrogate suspects in public. Moreover, in addition to preparing their own summaries of the evidence, they would ask that detailed transcripts be kept.
    Nowhere did they record the rationale for these actions, but they were probably responding to intense