JK Rowling introduces new villains to the Harry Potter universe: the North American Scourers

She explains how they played a part in the Salem Witch Trials

The illustration that accompanies the piece

Via Pottermore, JK Rowling has been releasing her latest wizarding story History of Magic in North America, based in the same fictional world as Harry Potter.

In the second part, titled Seventeenth Century and Beyond, the author introduces a new set of magical villains, the Scourers.

Described as the “most dangerous problem encountered by wizards newly arrived in North America”, the Scourers were the original form of law enforcement throughout the American wizarding community.

They started just hunting known criminals, but soon became corrupt, abusing their authority, some going as far as to traffic other wizards.

"The numbers of Scourers multiplied across America in the late seventeenth century and there is evidence that they were not above passing off innocent No-Majs as wizards, to collect rewards from gullible non-magic members of the community.”

Scourers played a part in the Salem Witch Trials, a real-life series of prosecutions in which people were accused of witchcraft. Apparently there were are least two Scourers among the judges, both of whom helped sentence innocent witches and No-Majs (the American term for Muggle) to die.

“Its immediate effect was to cause many witches and wizards to flee America, and many more to decide against locating there. This led to interesting variations in the magical population of North America, compared to the populations of Europe, Asia and Africa.”

Accordingly, there were far fewer witches and wizards living in North America, and in 1963 the Magical Congress of the United States of America was formed.

Many of the Scourers went into hiding, attempting to fall off the radar by marrying No-Maj, and giving their children "an absolute conviction that magic was real, and the belief that witches and wizards ought to be exterminated wherever they were found.”

So, why are we being given all this information by Rowling? Well, the chances are that Eddie Redmayne’s character in Fantastic Beasts, Newt Scamander, will likely meet a Scourer of some form as he travels to North America. Plus, she concludes that these events have had “far-reaching repercussions on the way the American wizarding community is governed.”

We’ve already seen in the trailer that Scamander had to deal with American wizarding law enforcement, so the chances are these events will take some toll on the upcoming Harry Potter spin-off.