Judith Catchpole
Tried for witchcraft in 1656
title: "Judith Catchpole" type: doc version: 1 created: 2026-02-28 author: "Wikipedia contributors" status: active scope: public tags: ["17th-century-american-criminals", "1656-in-law", "17th-century-american-women", "indentured-servants-from-the-thirteen-colonies", "murder-in-the-thirteen-colonies", "people-acquitted-of-witchcraft", "people-from-colonial-maryland", "american-domestic-workers", "history-of-women-in-maryland"] description: "Tried for witchcraft in 1656" topic_path: "law" source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Catchpole" license: "CC BY-SA 4.0" wikipedia_page_id: 0 wikipedia_revision_id: 0
::summary Tried for witchcraft in 1656 ::
Judith Catchpole, a young maidservant in colonial America, was tried in 1656 for witchcraft and infanticide before one of the earliest all-female juries in the Thirteen Colonies. According to popular belief, all-female juries did not occur until much later.{{cite web |author=Laura James |url=http://laurajames.typepad.com/clews/2005/06/a_jury_of_her_p.html |title=A Jury of Her Peers |access-date=2007-11-14 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20061129173232/http://laurajames.typepad.com/clews/2005/06/a_jury_of_her_p.html |archive-date=2006-11-29
Catchpole was an indentured servant in the colony of Maryland, arriving there by boat from the Commonwealth of England in January 1656. Upon her arrival she was accused of several crimes, resulting in a trial on September 22, 1656 in the General Provincial Court in Patuxent County, Maryland. This trial was the first to have an all-female jury in colonial Maryland and one of the earliest in colonial America.
Circumstances
Catchpole was accused of murdering her child and of other bizarre acts, by the indentured servant of William Bramhall, a fellow passenger on the ship "Mary and Francis"; her accuser died after making the accusations. She was accused of killing her child, cutting the throat of a female passenger while the woman was asleep, and stabbing a seaman in the back. Before he died he made known his accusations to other passengers, stating that Catchpole had committed these acts while the other passengers were asleep. No other passengers substantiated these accusations, nor could any account for how Catchpole had hidden a pregnancy during the voyage and given birth on a small ship without others seeing evidence of this. Catchpole claimed she had never been pregnant.{{cite book |url=https://archive.org/details/womenwritersinun0000davi |url-access=registration |page=10 |quote=judith catchpole. |title=Women Writers in the United States: A Timeline |year=1996 |publisher=Oxford University Press |access-date=2007-11-14
It was decided that an all-female jury was needed because the issues of pregnancy and birth required female expertise. Composed of seven married women and four single women, the trial was ordered by the General Provincial Court at Patuxent for September 22, 1656.{{cite web |url=http://www.marylandtheseventhstate.com/article1013.html |title=Maryland's Firsts |access-date=2007-11-14 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=15MBO9kQwDYC&dq=judith+catchpole&pg=PA129 |title=Crime and Punishment in Early Maryland |date=April 1996 |publisher=JHU Press |isbn=9780801854248 |access-date=2007-11-14 Additional hearsay evidence was presented that the male accuser had spoken of witchcraft and told other bizarre stories. He had said that after slitting the woman's throat, she sewed it back up before the woman awoke, and that she rubbed grease on the back of the fatally wounded seaman and he came back to life.
The jury gave little credence to the charges of witchcraft, and seeing no evidence of childbirth, acquitted Catchpole of all charges.{{cite web |url=http://www.wsu.edu/~campbelld/amlit/1651.htm |title=Political and Social History |access-date=2007-11-14
Significance
Judith Catchpole was tried before the first all-woman jury to serve in colonial Maryland. The judicial practices of common law in colonial America often arose from the need to accommodate to practical situations. In the case of Judith Catchpole, the expertise of women was needed to decide whether she had been pregnant and given birth to a child. In general however, women were not allowed to serve on juries in the United States, even after the Nineteenth Amendment was passed in 1920 giving women the right to vote.
Footnotes
References
::callout[type=info title="Wikipedia Source"] This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page. ::