Grace Sherwood

Grace Sherwood was a woman tried and convicted of witchcraft in the Princess Anne County court of the U.S. state of Virginia in 1705–1706, in one of the most notable witch trials in the folklore of Virginia. She was also the subject of several fanciful oral and written stories surrounding the actual historical events.

Sherwood was accused of witchcraft and eventually tried by means of "swimming"—one of several types of trial by water—an ordeal that she failed. She was not executed, but was instead imprisoned, and later released, living to be 80 years old. That she was jailed and released indicated a change, or at least a difference, in the attitudes of Virginians to alleged witchcraft as compared to cases elsewhere. Folklorist Thomas E. Barden, professor of English at the University of Toledo, observes that in both the folk tales of Sherwood's story and the official accounts there is lacking "he deep sense of malevolence and complicity with Satan that permeates the witch legends of New England, where a few years before Sherwood's trial nineteen women were hanged and one man was pressed to death" (see Salem witch trials). Oliver Chitwood of Johns Hopkins University hypothesized that since official records of the proceedings against Sherwood stop after her ducking and (second) examination for marks of witchcraft, it is quite likely that the case against her was simply dropped by the Virginian authorities. Barden observes that the magistrates apparently "lost their taste for the whole business".