♀Sarah Wildes

Sarah Wildes^W (died 19 July 1692) was the wife of John Wildes, a husbandman of Topsfield, Massachusetts. She was one of the accused in the Salem witch trials^W and was hanged at Salem on 19 July 1692, one of five women put to death together that day. She was the eighth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her son Ephraim Wildes.

Arrest and examination

On 21 April 1692 Thomas Putnam and John Buxton of Salem Village complained of witchcraft done on Ann Putnam and Mercy Lewis, and a warrant was issued against several people, among them “Sarah Wilds the wife of John Wilds” of Topsfield. The court papers write her name as Wilds, Wild, Wiles or Willes. The same warrant named Edward Bishop of Salem Village and his wife Sarah; the editors of the court papers identify this Sarah as Sarah Wildes’s stepdaughter.

She was examined at Salem Village on 22 April before the magistrates John Hathorne and Jonathan Corwin. As the afflicted fell into fits, she answered “I am not guilty Sir” and “I thank God I am free”, and when told that she had caused another to sign the book she said she “never saw the book in my life”. Hathorne committed her to the jail at Salem. Her son Ephraim was the constable of Topsfield that year, and the marshal of Salem showed him the warrant when he came “to fetch away my mother”. On 13 May she was among the prisoners sent from Salem to Boston.

Trial and death

She was indicted for witchcraft done on Mercy Lewis on 22 April “and divers other Dayes”, and the grand jury returned the bill as true. Neighbors brought old suspicions to the court. John and Joseph Andrews told of a scythe borrowed at the Wildes house in 1674 and a load of hay that would not stay on the cart. John Gould said that his late sister, Mary Redington, had held to her death that “it was Goodwife Wilds that brought her into yt Condition”, and the minister John Hale^W of Beverly testified that Goody Redington had come to him some fifteen or sixteen years before, saying that “Goody wiles her neighb bewitched her”. Elizabeth Symonds, Thomas Dorman and Humphrey Clark gave further accounts.

John Wildes testified that when Mary, the wife of John Redington, raised “a report yt my wife had Bewitched her”, he told Redington that he “would arest him for his wifes defaming of my wife”, and that he later sent “my Bro: Auerell” to Goodwife Redington, who answered that she “knew no harm mye wife had don her”. Ephraim wrote to the court that he had never seen any harm in his mother, who had always “instructed me well in the cristion religon”.

The death warrant, signed by William Stoughton at Boston on 12 July 1692, records that she was arraigned before the Court of Oyer and Terminer^W at Salem on 29 June, pleaded not guilty, and was found guilty and sentenced to death, with Sarah Good^W, Rebecca Nurse^W, Susannah Martin^W and Elizabeth How^W. It ordered the sheriff to take the five women from the jail at Salem on 19 July and “Cause them & Euery of them to be hanged by ye Necks vntill they be dead”. The sheriff, George Corwin, returned that on 19 July 1692 he had “Caused ye within mentioned persons to be Executed”.

Afterwards

Their son Ephraim wrote in 1710 that she was held in the prisons at Salem, Boston and Ipswich, and that “my father or my self” went “once a wek to see how she deed and what she wanted”. In that petition of 11 September 1710 he wrote that his mother had “soffred” in the trials, that his father was dead and “only my sellf left”, and that he would accept fourteen pounds “considring our nams may be repaired”. In October 1711 the General Court passed an act declaring the convictions of Sarah Wild and the others condemned in 1692 “Null and void”, and in December fourteen pounds was ordered paid for her.

Family

The court papers show John Wildes as a man with children by an earlier marriage: in 1674 “John willes junrs sith” hung in a tree by the house of “John willes senr of Topsfeild”, and John Hale called Sarah “mother in law” to a youth named Jonathan Wiles. A Maine family history published in 1909 records that John Wildes married Sarah, daughter of William Averill of Ipswich, on 23 November 1663, after the death of his first wife, Priscilla Gould; a history of Topsfield published in 1940 also gives her name as Sarah Averill. The same 1909 history makes Ephraim, whom it places at Topsfield in December 1665, the only son of John and Sarah; the Topsfield town record dates his birth to the “12 month, 1665”, which in the calendar then in use was February 1665/66.