16-month duration of the Salem witch trials phenomenon, 19 persons were hanged, and one, Giles Corey, was pressed to death. During a 1692 sermon, Parris declared that "as in our text John 6:10 there was one devil among the 12 disciples… so in our churches, God knows how many Devils there are," encouraging antagonistic villagers to locate and destroy "witches" who, as it happened, were frequently individuals with whom Parris and his key allies, the Putnam family, had taken umbrage. As Parris had been an active prosecutor in the witchcraft cases, in 1693, his parish brought charges against Parris for his part in the trials. Parris apologized in his essay Meditations for Peace, which he presented in November 1694. Increase Mather led a church council which then vindicated him. Parris was then involved in a dispute with his congregation over parsonage land he had seized to compensate himself for the salary he was owed. The dispute found its way to an Ipswich court, which, in 1697, ordered his salary to be paid and the land to be returned. By 1696, however, he had found his situation untenable. He resigned that year and left Salem. Records in the Suffolk Deeds indicate it likely he returned to business in Boston in 1697. His wife Elizabeth died in 1696. In 1699, he remarried, to Dorothy Noyes, in Sudbury. He preached two or three years at Stow. He then moved to Concord (1704/05). He also preached six months in Dunstable in 1711. He died on February 27, 1720, in Sudbury. Fiction Parris features in Arthur Miller's 1953 play The Crucible, set against the backdrop of the witch trials. In the play, his daughter Elizabeth Parris is the first to become ill because of supposed witchcraft, of which she is accused. In the 1957 and 1996 film adaptations of Miller's play, he was portrayed by Jean Debucourt and Bruce Davison, respectively. Author John Neal made Parris a character in Rachel Dyer (1828), which is the first bound novel about the witch trials. In this version of the story his name is Matthew Paris, a socially isolated man who is threatened by Tituba's relationship with John Indian and accuses her out of sexual frustration. Parris is also a character in the 1964 novel Tituba of Salem Village by Ann Petry and the 1986 novel I, Tituba: Black Witch of Salem by Maryse Condé, both books depicting