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years after first settlement in each case, although the regions of the Chesapeake and New England otherwise followed very different patterns. Virginia was characterized by high mortality and male-dominated migration for most of the seventeenth century. New England was settled between 1630 and 1642 in a big wave called the Great Migration, and families predominated. The colonists tended to be Puritans.107 In New England, moreover, witchcraft emerged as a permanent fixture of colonial life, unlike Virginia. In New England, the accused witch was likely to be a woman (79 percent of accused witches between 1620 and 1725 were female, and women represented 80 percent of all executed witches), but she was no longer certain to be poor, as was still the case in England. Poor and elderly women were still overrepresented among New England’s accused witches, but they were joined by wealthier neighbors, in a pattern distinctive to the region.108 The execution of Ann Hibbens in 1656 was a case in point.

Ann Hibbens lived in Boston and was the widow of a prominent New England merchant named William Hibbens. William had only recently died, and Ann Hibbens found herself called before the magistrates in May to face accusations of witchcraft. She was alleged to have unnatural knowledge, a sure clue that someone was a witch. In Hibbens’s case, she had the misfortune to guess—correctly—that two neighbors she spied talking in the street were talking about her. Although a search of her body revealed no telltale witches’ marks, and her home yielded no poppets (or dolls) with which she might work her magic, Hibbens went to trial. She was a woman of considerable wealth. She was not the type of woman who often found herself accused of the crime of witchcraft in England—poor, alone, on the margins of society, perhaps with a reputation as a healer. She was, however, like other accused women, perceived as prone to discontent. She had been embroiled in a case before the Boston church in 1640 over disagreements with some carpenters about their charges for some home repairs. Unable to come to a harmonious agreement with the tradesmen or to satisfy church elders who required her to submit to their authority, Hibbens was expelled from the church. Still, her high status should have protected her in 1656. Her husband had been a magistrate of the colony, a position awarded to very few men. The magistrates afforded her the respect due her station, giving her the honorific of “Mrs.” Indeed, they recoiled at the first verdict, and sent the case back for retrial, but to no avail. The second verdict came back guilty as well, and Hibbens was hanged in Boston in June.109

Why were wealthy, prominent women in New England accused of witchcraft, in stark contrast to the poor, marginal women who were usually the targets of such accusations in England (and Europe generally)? The historian Carol F. Karlsen examined New England inheritance practices and detected an intriguing pattern. Women who were accused of witchcraft were often women who had inherited land from husbands, fathers, or brothers in the absence of male heirs. The normal English pattern was for male heirs to receive and control property. But 61 percent of accused female witches had no brothers or sons to inherit their property, and such women were more likely to be prosecuted (64 percent), found guilty (76 percent) and executed (89 percent).110 It is an interesting correlation, and Karlsen does not suggest that the accusations were conscious or deliberate, but it is difficult to know what to make of it. Men, after all, wrote wills, and they could leave land to whomever they wished. If women’s inheritance was so disruptive, why did so many men leave land to women?

Karlsen links these fears of propertied women to larger issues in seventeenth-century New England about power and control over resources. By the middle of the seventeenth century, the imbalanced sex ratios of the first decades had evened out. New England’s large families, a departure from typical English family size, put great pressure on parental