An ABC of Witchcraft Past and Present - Doreen Valiente 2018

Hopkins, Matthew

The name of Matthew Hopkins is the most ill-famed in the story of English witchcraft. Although his career as self-appointed ’Witch-Finder General’ lasted only for about two years, from 1644 to 1646, he was responsible for more executions than are recorded of any other person.

What made Hopkins particularly odious is that his witch-hunting was conducted for money, and his victims were the old, the poor and the most feeble and defenceless members of the community. In one instance, using his pretended commission from Parliament, he actually directed the citizens of Stowmarket, in Suffolk, to levy a special rate in order to pay the expenses of himself and his assistants. The sum of £28.0s.3d. (worth a good deal more in those days that it would be today) is recorded as having been extorted from the people of Stowmarket in this way.

The disordered state of the country, in consequence of the Civil War then in progress between the Royalists and the supporters of Cromwell, gave Hopkins and other rogues like him their chance to impose upon the disturbed minds of the people. The place, too, where Hopkins carried out his campaign, namely Essex and East Anglia, is an area of Britain where belief in witchcraft has always been strong and still lingers to this day.

Matthew Hopkins was the son of a Puritan minister, James Hopkins of Wenham in Suffolk. In his earlier years he had been a lawyer, and practised at Ipswich and later at Manningtree; without, however, making any particular figure in the world, until he found his real career in witch hunting.

He commenced his rise to fame while living at Manningtree, Essex. Here, as he tells us in his book The Discovery of Witches (London, 1647), “In March, 1644, he had some seven or eight of that horrible sect of Witches living in the Towne where he lived, a Towne in Essex called Manningtree, with diverse other adjacent Witches of other towns, who every six weeks in the night (being always on the Friday night) had their meeting close to his house, and had their several solemn sacrifices there offered to the Devil, one of whom this Discoverer heard speaking to her imps and bid them go to another Witch, who was thereupon apprehended.”

Hopkins seems to imply that he daringly acted as eavesdropper upon one of these meeetings. At any rate, a poor old one-legged woman called Elizabeth Clarke, whose mother had been hanged as a witch, was arrested at Hopkins’ instigation. After being searched for witches’ marks, and kept from sleep for three nights, upon the fourth night she started to ’confess’ what was required of her and to name others as her accomplices. Hopkins avers that five familiar spirits, upon being named and called by her, then came one after another into the room, “there being ten of us in the room”, after which these apparitions vanished.

By the time Hopkins and his friends had finished their investigation no less than thirty-two people from various parts of Essex had been arrested and remanded to the county sessions at Chelmsford. Hopkins’ career as Witch-Finder General was fairly launched. So also were the careers of his assistants, John Stearne, Mary Phillipps, Edward Parsley and Frances Mills, all of whom swore that they had witnessed the appearance of the familiar spirits aforesaid. After this, of course, the assistants became indispensable as Hopkins’ ’company’, which was later extended to six.

As a result of this first essay in witch-hunting by Hopkins, nineteen people were hanged and four died in prison. As a lawyer, Hopkins knew that torture in England was illegal; but his evil ingenuity had found various means of extracting ’confessions’ by cruelty and browbeating, which did not legally rank as torture.

These methods included firstly, the pain and humiliation of being stripped and searched for witches’ marks; then, of being made to sit upon a stool or table, cross-legged, and bound in this posture with cords, sometimes for as much as twenty-four hours, without food or sleep. Alternatively, the accused were kept walking without respite, up and down the room, until their feet were blistered; and this treatment is recorded as having been kept up for more than three days in some instances, until the victims broke down and ’confessed’. Hopkins piously protested that he never called anyone a witch, “only after her trial by search and their own confession”.

Another favourite method of trial used by Hopkins, and one which provided an edifying public spectacle, was the ’swimming’ or ’fleeting’ of witches; that is, putting them into water to see if they would float. This idea had in fact been current for many years, and was based upon the belief that, as the witches had rejected the water of baptism, even so the element of water would reject them, and they would float thereon in an unnatural manner. It had been given more importance by being recommended by King James I in his book Daemonologie (Edinburgh, 1597), as a test of witchcraft guilt.

The method of applying the test, however, as used by Hopkins, was not merely to throw the person into some pond or stream. Hopkins was more careful and detailed than that. The accused had to be bound in a special manner, with their arms crossed, and their thumbs tied to their big toes. Then a rope was tied around their waist, and held by a man on either side. This was ostensibly to prevent the accused from drowning, if they started to sink; but it is obvious that whether or not the person sank would depend very much on the men who handled the rope.

Hopkins did not, however, originate this technique. It is depicted on the title-page of a pamphlet Witches Apprehended, Examined and Executed(London, 1613), in an old woodcut which shows the swimming of a woman called Mary Sutton in 1612. She is not only tied in this manner, but is also wearing a voluminous shift or underclothing which would help to keep her afloat for a few moments at any rate.

If a certain relic which I have seen in the Museum of Magic and Witchcraft at Castletown, Isle of Man, is authentic, then it is evidence of another money-making racket worked by Hopkins and his company. This relic consists of an example of a preventive charm supposed to have been sold by Hopkins, to protect people’s households from witchcraft.

The charm consists of a wooden box, lined with cloth and with a pane of glass on the top so that the contents can be seen. Inside is a bizarre collection of odds and ends, among which is the finger bone of a child. The idea was that the purchaser kept the box in his house, to prevent the spells of witches from harming him and his family. Of course, no one had to buy these boxes, when they were offered to them; but if anyone refused, they would come under suspicion of favouring witchcraft.

This practice of selling witch boxes was carried on by other members of the witch-hunting fraternity. I have seen another such box, in the collection of a friend of mine in London, which was sold by a ’cunning man’ a couple of centuries or so ago, to protect people from witches. It is very similar to the one in the museum at Castletown, containing bits of long-dried and faded herbs, rowan-wood and so on. It has a similar glass front, also. One can picture some superstitious countryman, many years ago, sitting in his cottage on a dark winter’s night, listening to the wind howling outside, and looking for reassurance towards the shelf or chimney-piece, where the glass-fronted witch box stood, with its weird contents. No wonder there were so many fearful tales told, of the evils and dangers of witchcraft; there were so many people making money out of them!

Matthew Hopkins’ successful beginning in Essex set the pattern which he followed throughout East Anglia. How many people’s deaths he procured in all, or how much money he and his followers amassed in the process, will probably never be known precisely. These were troubled times; and the records are incomplete or have been lost. Hopkins visited Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridgeshire, Huntingdonshire, Northamptonshire and Bedfordshire, as well as Essex. From such records as we do possess, we may guess that the final total of executions ran into several hundreds.

Eventually, however, the tide began to turn against Hopkins. Not all magistrates were as cruel and credulous as those of Manningtree in those days. In 1645 a special “Commission of Oyer and Terminer”, formed to deal with witchcraft trials, told Hopkins to stop his practice of swimming witches; but they did not stop his other brutal proceedings, and one wonders just how much authenticity there was in Hopkins’ claim that he had a Commission from Parliament, on the strength of which he called himself the Witch-Finder General. This has been generally regarded as being a fabrication. Yet it was on the strength of this pretended commission that Hopkins required the authorities of the towns he ’visited’ to pay him and his company handsomely, for their professional services. Did no magistrate ever ask to see proof of this commission? Or is the truth of the matter that Hopkins did in fact possess some sort of official status; but when the scandal of his cruelty, brutality and fraud was exposed, the authorities found it prudent to disown him?

Samuel Butler, in his satire Hudibras, twitted the Parliamentarians with the Hopkins scandal:

Hath not this present Parliament

A Lieger to the Devil sent,

Fully impowered to treat about

Finding revolted Witches out?

And has he not within a year

Hanged threescore of them in one Shire?

Some only for not being drowned,

And some for sitting above ground

Whole days and nights upon their Breeches,

And feeling pain, were hanged for Witches.

And some for putting knavish Tricks

Upon green Geese or Turkey Chicks;

Or Pigs that suddenly deceast

Of griefs unnatural, as he guesst;

Who after proved himself a Witch,

And made a rod for his own Breech.

The last two lines of Butler’s verse refer to a tradition that Hopkins was eventually publicly discredited by a group of people, disgusted at his cruelties, who seized him and submitted him to his own test of “swimming”—and he floated! According to another version, Hopkins was drowned on this occasion. Bishop Hutchinson, in his Historical Essay Concerning Witchcraft (London, 1718), accepted this tradition as factual: “That clear’d the Country of him; and it was a great deal of Pity that they did not think of the Experiment sooner.” But again, this is one of those matters we shall probably never know the precise truth about.

What is a matter of certain record, however, is the courage of an old country parson, John Gaule, the Vicar of Great Staughton, Huntingdonshire, who took a stand against the Witch-Finder General which played a big part in restoring sanity in East Anglia. John Gaule preached outspokenly against Hopkins, who was proposing to visit his part of the country. Hopkins retaliated with a blustering letter, full of veiled threats, addressed to one of Gaule’s parishioners. But he prudently avoided visiting Great Staughton.

John Gaule, who meanwhile had been collecting evidence about Hopkins’ proceedings, then published a book, Select Cases of Conscience Touching Witches and Witchcraft (London, 1646). It was well-written and convincing, and public opinion was aroused against the abuses it exposed.

The Witch-Finder General was forced on the defensive; and in 1647 Hopkins’ book The Discovery of Witchcraft appeared in an attempt to counteract the accusations brought against him. But by this time Hopkins was a spent force. He had retired to the town where he started his career, Manningtree in Essex; and in 1647 he died in the nearby village of Mistley. The Church Registers record his burial, on the 12th August 1647. He did not live long to enjoy his ill-gotten gains, whatever was the actual cause of his death.

His associate John Stearne wrote that Hopkins died “after a long sickness of a Consumption . . . without any trouble of conscience for what he had done, as was falsely reported of him.”

Hopkins was not the only villain to ply the trade of witch-finder in England. In 1649 or 1650 a Scottish witch-finder was invited by the magistrates to Newcastle, to search men and women for the Devil’s mark. His fees were twenty shillings for every witch discovered, and his expenses for his journey to and from Scotland, where pricking suspected witches to find the Devil’s mark had now become a regular profession. His trip to Newcastle proved lucrative; as a result of it fourteen women and one man were hanged.

However, this rogue too met his downfall. He was eventually indicted for his activities, and himself sentenced to be hanged. “And upon the Gallows he confessed he had been the death of above two hundred and twenty women in England and Scotland, for the gain of twenty shillings a piece, and beseeched forgiveness. And was executed.”

So says Ralph Gardiner, in his book England’s Grievance Discovered in Relation to the Coal Trade (London, 1655). This book is illustrated by a significant and terrible picture. It shows four women hanging from a mass gallows, while three more below wait their turn to die. The executioner, standing on a ladder, is in the act of adjusting the rope round one woman’s neck. Mounted sergeants and foot-soldiers look on, while a bellman shouts a proclamation; and in the corner of the picture, a well-dressed man, the witch-finder, is holding out his hand and having money counted into it.