More Weight: The Pressing of Giles Corey

“More weight.” These were the last words of farmer Giles Corey, one of six men tried and executed during the 1692 Salem witch trials. While George Burroughs, George Jacobs Sr., John Proctor, Samuel Wardwell, and John Willard were sentenced to death by hanging, Corey faced a different fate. 

Accused by Abigail Hobbs, another alleged witch, Corey was arrested just one month after his wife, Martha, against whom he testified. While his attempts to recant that testimony may have helped seal his fate due to the stigma around committing perjury, his own history would not have helped. His many run-ins with the law included a fine for severely beating one of his indentured farm workers with a stick, delivering up to 100 blows after the man had been accused of stealing apples. The man, Jacob Goodell, succumbed to his injuries; Giles waited an astonishing ten days before allowing him to seek medical attention.

Unlike the other accused witches who entered their pleas to Salem’s Court of Oyer and Terminer, Corey refused to participate in his trial. As a consequence, he was sentenced to be pressed to death at the age of 81, on September 19, 1692—an excruciating execution that stretched out over two days. 

Pressing, or peine forte et dure, is a grim form of torture that has been used around the world. It arose in England during Edward I’s reign, as a way to force confessions out of prisoners who, like Corey, would refuse to provide a confession or a plea. At the time, defendants who would not plead could not be tried, so prisoners would withhold pleas in an attempt to derail the trial process, as a conviction would result in the seizure of their family’s property and belongings.

Pressing, or the threat of it, could compel confessions from those who would otherwise remain silent and had political utility as a particularly grisly deterrent. In 1293, fourteen Englishmen were accused of slaughtering Dutch sailors and robbing their ships, a crime that could have detrimental implications for English-Dutch trade. When one of the men refused to plead, the court decided that

“he should sit naked save for a linen garment, on the bare ground, and he should be loaded with irons from the hands to the elbows, and from feet to the knees, until he should make his submission.”

Corey was not alone in his determination to thwart an unjust system. In 1586, during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, Margaret Clitherow was arrested for sheltering Roman Catholic priests in a secret room in her home, a crime made punishable by death just a few years earlier. Clitherow had faced multiple imprisonments in the past for her ties to Roman Catholic clergy and refusal to attend Anglican services after her conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1574. Like Corey, Clitherow refused to acquiesce even as the heavy stones were placed upon her. Unlike Corey’s heinous days-long torture, Clitherow’s suffering lasted fifteen minutes (still an eternity for those beneath the weights and the loved ones forced to witness). She was canonized in 1970.

The Salem authorities may well have expected a swift confession once the first weights had been applied to Corey’s elderly body. Certainly, they would not have anticipated the grueling ordeal that followed. And while Corey may have lost his life, he won his battle: his estate was not forfeited and was passed down to his heirs in full.

Corey was the first and last person in the United States to be sentenced to death by pressing. Though he was not the last to be accused of—or executed for—the crime of witchcraft, witnessing his terrible end may have helped shift public sentiment regarding the trials. Charles Osgood and Henry Morrill Batchelder, in An Historical Sketch of Salem, 1626-1879, wrote:

“This man was eighty-one years old; and the barbarous death penalty inflicted on him by the officers of the law, tended to awaken the people to a realization of the grave responsibility resting on them as a Christian community. Doubts began to be felt in the public mind as to the justice of the prosecutions, and the inevitable sentence and execution.” (p. 35)

Corey’s name was officially cleared in 1711 through a Reversal of Attainder from the Massachusetts legislature. 61 years later, England abolished the practice of pressing.

Your Accursed Librarian,

Valeska