Boteå, Ångermanland

The Boteå Accusations

The same year the fear crossed into Boteå, and stayed longer. Between 1674 and 1675 the commission worked its way through the villages along the river. The pattern was always the same: a child spoke, a name followed, and a woman was fetched from her own kitchen. Boteå had known trouble before — the parish had risen against the crown a century earlier — but this was a different kind of trouble, the kind that comes from inside a community rather than from outside it. When it ended there was no reckoning and no apology. The court records were closed, and the river went on the way rivers do.