There were slight differences in the persecution of witches from place to place.
Take Salem, for example. The first "witches" accused were three women of low social standing: a female slave, a young woman, and a woman married to a laborer. They were accused by a nine-year-old girl, Betty, and an eleven-year-old girl, Abigail. Under ordinary circumstances, no one would have believed two children, but people did then. One of the accused women even confessed to her "crime." After all, anyone "in the know" understood that if they did not confess, they would surely be beaten into confessing or subjected to the "water ordeal." So confessing was easier.
Then there were unpleasant women, such as a landlady who constantly threatened to evict her tenants if they failed to pay rent, without caring in the slightest whether they would end up homeless on the streets. In fact, for a widow whose husband had died, rent was her only source of income.
If starving to death was a threat to survival, then being cast onto the streets was one as well. Jack the Ripper looked for his targets on the streets, and women were safer hiding inside houses with walls. Yet in reality, someone could use survival to threaten you, demanding all your money merely to meet their basic needs, just as food prices rose during famine.
Being held hostage felt awful, but many people could not wake up to it right away. A banker did not truly want to help a borrower achieve the dream of having a family, nor did he really want the house. He merely needed collateral, so that if the borrower could not repay him, he could sell the house to someone else.
What he wanted was money—interest. If the house could not be turned into cash,