What were the motives for accusing Sarah Good of witchcraft?

Question

The Examination of Sarah Good. The accusers were Abigail williams and Betty Parris.

Answer 1

The trouble in Salem began during the cold, dark Massachusetts winter, in January of 1692. Eight young girls began to take ill, begining with 9-year-old Elizabeth Parris, the daughter of Reverend Samuel Parris, and his niece, 11-year-old Abigail Williams. But theirs was a strange sickness: the girls suffered from delirium, violent convulsions, incomprehensible speech, trance-like states, and odd skin sensations. The worried villagers searched desperately for an explanation. Their conclusion: the girls were under a spell, bewitched -- and, worse yet, by members of their own pious community.

And then the finger pointing began. The first to be accused were Tituba, Parris's Caribbean-born slave, along with Sarah Good and Sarah Osburn, two elderly women considered of ill repute. All three were arrested on February 29. Ultimately, more than 150 "witches" were taken into custody; by late September 1692, 20 men and women had been put to death, and five more accused had died in jail. None of the executed confessed to witchcraft. Such a confession would have surely spared their lives, but, they believed, condemned their souls.
On October 29, by order of Massachusetts Governor Sir William Phips, the Salem witch trials officially ended. When the dust cleared, the townsfolk and the accusers were at a loss to explain their own actions. In the centuries since, scholars and historians have struggled as well to explain the madness that overtook Salem.


When Linnda Caporael began nosing into the Salem witch trials as a college student in the early 1970s, she had no idea that a common grain fungus might be responsible for the terrible events of 1692. But then the pieces began to fall into place. Caporael, now a behavioral psychologist at New York's Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, soon noticed a link between the strange symptoms reported by Salem's accusers, chiefly eight young women, and the hallucinogenic effects of drugs like LSD. LSD is a derivative of ergot, a fungus that affects rye grain. Ergotism -- ergot poisoning -- had indeed been implicated in other outbreaks of bizarre behavior, such as the one that afflicted the small French town of Pont-Saint-Esprit in 1951.

Ergotism is caused by the fungus Claviceps purpurea, which affects rye, wheat and other cereal grasses. When first infected, the flowering head of a grain will spew out sweet, yellow-colored mucus, called "honey dew," which contains fungal spores that can spread the disease. Eventually, the fungus invades the developing kernels of grain, taking them over with a network of filaments that turn the grains into purplish-black sclerotia. Sclerotia can be mistaken for large, discolored grains of rye. Within them are potent chemicals: ergot alkaloids, including lysergic acid (from which LSD is made) and ergotamine (now used to treat migraine headaches). The alkaloids affect the central nervous system and cause the contraction of smooth muscle -- the muscles that make up the walls of veins and arteries, as well as the internal organs.

Toxicologists now know that eating ergot-contaminated food can lead to a convulsive disorder characterized by violent muscle spasms, vomiting, delusions, hallucinations, crawling sensations on the skin, and a host of other symptoms -- all of which, Linnda Caporael noted, are present in the records of the Salem witchcraft trials. Ergot thrives in warm, damp, rainy springs and summers. When Caporael examined the diaries of Salem residents, she found that those exact conditions had been present in 1691. Nearly all of the accusers lived in the western section of Salem village, a region of swampy meadows that would have been prime breeding ground for the fungus. At that time, rye was the staple grain of Salem. The rye crop consumed in the winter of 1691-1692 -- when the first unusual symptoms began to be reported -- could easily have been contaminated by large quantities of ergot. The summer of 1692, however, was dry, which could explain the abrupt end of the "bewitchments." These and other clues built up into a circumstantial case against ergot that Caporael found impossible to ignore

This is a great documentary (as is the series "Secrets of the Dead) exporing one of many of the mysteries of history.

Answer 2

The motive was caused by mass hysteria. A witch-hunt was traditionally a search for witches or evidence of witchcraft, which could lead to a witchcraft trial involving the accused person. I visited Salem and absolutely fell into the history. Sarah's husband, William, testified that he was afraid of her, that she was an enemy of God and he also believed she was a witch. Based on this evidence, she was ordered bound over for trial. Good's daughter, Dorcas, then only five, soon joined her mother in jail because the afflicted girls accused the young girl of biting them. Sarah Good was pregnant at the time of her arrest and gave birth in jail. Because of the lack of medical assistance and the unsanitary conditions, her newborn baby died. Dorcas later accused her mother of being a witch later on.

She was executed July 19, 1692, at the trial she told Minister Nicholas Noyes, "You are a liar. I am no more a witch than you are a wizard, and if you take away my life God will give you blood to drink." The tradition has been that 25 years later Noyes died of internal hemorrhage, bleeding profusely at the mouth.

Answer 3

Actually, Tituba pushed the accusation to Sarah Good and Sarah Osbourne. After Abigail Williams and the other girls became "afflicted". Because of a rather sour disposition and lack of standing in the community, Sarah Good was a fine scapegoat. She was sentence to hang, though given a brief stay until her child was born.

Answer 4

Sarah was homeless and she was not well liked. Hope these links help.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Good

http://womenshistory.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?zi=1/XJ&sdn=womenshistory&zu=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.law.umkc.edu%2Ffaculty%2Fprojects%2Fftrials%2Fsalem%2FSAL_BGOO.HTM

Answer 5

they where just too strict with thier "rules"