Budleigh Past and Present

  The statue of Roger Conant in Salem, USA. Image credit: Teresa Conant; www.wikitree.com    Next to Salem Common stands a 9-foot high bronze statue of the Massachusetts city's founder, Roger Conant, born around 1592 in the pretty Devon village of East Budleigh. ‘An imposing, imperious white man,’ is how one of his embarrassed 21 st century American descendants described it recently, at a time when statues of white men have been crashing down both in the USA and in Britain following the Black Lives Matter movement.   Photo credit: John Andrews and  Destination Salem  www.salem.org It doesn’t help that the statue stands outside a former church which has now become Salem’s Witch Museum. Even if you know that the figure most definitely does not represent a witch – ‘rigid and judgemental’ as it has been described by a modern historian of Salem – the statue with its stern Puritan gaze puts one in mind of the cruel witch trials which took place a dozen or ...