Salem Wtch Trials

I was reading Wikipedia article on Salem Witch Trials where I couldn't understand legal meaning of highlighted paragraph below:

The patriarchal beliefs that Puritans held in the community added further stresses. Women, they believed, should be totally subservient to men. By nature, a woman was more likely to enlist in the Devil's service than was a man, and women were considered lustful by nature. In addition, the small-town atmosphere made secrets difficult to keep and people's opinions about their neighbors were generally accepted as fact. In an age where the philosophy "children should be seen and not heard" was taken at face value, children were at the bottom of the social ladder. Toys and games were seen as idle and playing was discouraged. Girls had additional restrictions heaped upon them. Boys were able to go hunting, fishing, exploring in the forest, and often became apprentices to carpenters and smiths, while girls were trained from a tender age to spin yarn, cook, sew, weave, and be servants to their husbands, mothers, and children.

In accordance with Puritan beliefs, the majority of accused 'witches' were unmarried or recently widowed land-owning women; according to the law of the time, upon the owner's death, title to the land would revert to the previous owner, or (if no previous owner could be determined) to the Church. This made witch-hunting an easy (if exceptionally cruel) method of regaining a profitable piece of arable land.

This was a weird law. Suppose a person A dies who has two sons and a wife. Wouldn't his ownership of land get transferred to his sons automatically? If the law of that time was such that his land wouldn't even transfer to his sons, then the ownership of land would never be transfered to next generation, and ultimately all the land would be owned by the church because the previous owner would also die some day.