Witchfinder General

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Witchfinder General Essay, Research Paper

“Thou must not suffer a witch to live.” This single phrase justified the death of thousands of victims throughout Europe and North America. Matthew Hopkins was an English witchfinder who was responsible for the ruthless persecution of scores of alleged witches during the witchcraft mania that swept parts of England under the Puritans.

Born in c.1621 Hopkins was a son of a minister and raised in Essex, which had a long tradition persecuting witches. Hopkins studied law and had a variety of careers before he hit upon the idea of establishing his career as a witchfinder in the Essex parish of Manningtree and Mistley around 1644. It must be noted that his timing was brilliant. The Civil War was wreaking havoc on England and creating tension throughout Puritan society. Anyone who suggested a reason for the nation’s trouble was going to get a hearing.

Hopkins at the age of 24 made his first charge against a one-legged crone called Elizabeth Clarke, claiming she was a member of a coven in the Manningtree area. Clarke was arrested and questioned in Chelmsford. As a result of her “confessions” roughly 31 other women were brought before the Assizes, nineteen of whom were hanged. This was the beginning of Hopkins’ “reign of terror.”

After adopting the self-styled title of Witchfinder-General Hopkins acquired two assistants, John Stearne and Mary Phillips, who searched for the “Devil’s Mark” on the accused. Apparently obsessed by his mission to obtain confessions of witchcraft, the three began a tour of the eastern counties of England. To those who questioned his qualifications for such work, pointing out that he had never studied the subject, he replied that his expertise issued “from experience, which though it be meanly esteemed of, yet surest and safest way to judge by.” Such was the demand of his services that he made an extraordinary profit from his work considering that the average daily wages of the time was as little as 2.5 pence. Hopkins charged 40 shillings for each investigation that he was asked to undertake and 9 pence for each witch he found. When the proceeding from a single town was over, the bill was usually between ?15 and ?23.

In the space of little more than a year Hopkins brought over a hundred women, typically old, poor and unattractive, to the gallows in Essex alone. He extracted his confessions by various means such as `pricking’, `swimming’, and `watching and waking’. Since tortures were not allowed in England unlike the conventional manners of the continent, Hopkins had to employ tortures that shed little or no blood.

`Pricking’ was the job of his assistants so that no blood was ever on his hands. The “Devil’s Mark” that was associated with witches supposedly when pricked would feel no pain. To insure that such a spot was found the pricking often went on for hours, especially if the victim was a good-looking young female, sometimes pricking to the bone. Hopkins however often employed a spring-loaded retractable blade on the bodkins his assistants used.

Another popular test was `swimming’ where the accused hands where tied to the opposite foot and then thrown into a local pond. James Is theory was that a witch who had renounced the sacred water of Baptism would never be received by the water into which they were thrown. James I so feared witches that he had his translators change to words of Exodus 22:18 from “Thou must not suffer a poisoner to live” to “?a witch to live.” Even though English law forbade witchfinders from using torture, local justices often turned a blind eye to the swimming of witches even condoning the practice as a useful first step to prosecution. Hopkins was notorious in the use of this ordeal excluding no one on the grounds of age or health, mental or physical.

Hopkins final torture, watching and waking, was used to induce a delirium caused by sleep deprivation and starvation. In this delirium the victim would often confess to anything in the hopes that they would be allowed to sleep or eat. The formal procedure would be to make the victim sit cross-legged on a stool and kept there for 24 hours, tightly bound.

“Do but imagine a poor old creature, under all the weakness and infirmities of old age, set like a fool in the middle of a room, with a rabble of ten towns round about her house; then her legs tied cross, that all the weight of her body might rest upon her seat. By that means, after some hours, that the circulation of the blood would be much stopped, her sitting would be as painful as the wooden horse. Then she must continue in her pain four and twenty hours, without either sleep or meat, and since this was their ungodly way of trials, what wonder was it, if when they were weary of their lives, they confessed any tales that would please them, and many times they knew not what.”

Hopkins involvement in the Bury St. Edmunds witch trials was particularly notorious. He accused nearly 200 individuals of which eighteen were hung including an eighty-year-old Royalist clergyman John Lowes, who made the mistake of irritating his parishioners in Suffolk. Lowes was hung on the gallows after being accused by Hopkins of sinking a ship by magic, even though motives for doing so were never found and no one ascertained that a ship had in fact been lost on the day concerned.

Hopkins’ motives remain obscure since he was not a government or church official, but one theory is that he was acting out of religious zeal. Although he may have been attracted by the prospect of becoming one of the most feared men in the country and also by the fortune waiting to be had out of such revelations. Whatever his motives it appears that he wholly believed in witches, going so far as to saying that a coven had released a bear with orders to kill him. Hopkins even had a “Devil’s List,” a document that supposedly contained every name of every witch in England.

Fortunately Hopkins’ horrendous career was mercifully brief. Doubts about his methods led to the setting up of parliamentary commission to watch over each trial and to restrict the use of torture by the investigators. Hopkins was forced to give up the swimming torture but he continued to torment victims with sleep deprivation, starvation, and other mild tortures. A more serious impediment was implemented by the Reverend John Gaule in Huntingdonshire when he objected to Hopkins presence in his county and delivered a powerful tirade against their investigations. Gaule condemned the duress applied by Hopkins and stated that “every old woman with a wrinkled face, a furrowed brow, a hairy lip, a gobber tooth, a squint eye, a squeaking voice or a scolding tongue” was likely to be pronounced a witch under the current circumstances. Gaule even wrote a pamphlet called Select Cases of Conscience Toward Witches and Witchcraft, which told of Hopkins’ methods, such as the retractable blade used in Pricking. In the pulpit Gaule not only preached against Hopkins’ brutality, but he hinted that Hopkins himself was a witch.

In May 1646 Hopkins was forced to take a “sabbatical” either because of mounting opposition to his campaign or because of ill health. In 1647 he published an account of his methods in a pamphlet known as The Discovery of Witches in order to counter criticism by those who had misgivings about his activities and who questioned his integrity.

There are several theories surrounding Hopkins death. According to legend Hopkins became a victim of the hysteria he helped stir up. He arrived in a new town and set about his usual business of charging local women. The town council realizing they could cut their overhead by eliminating the middleman accused Hopkins himself of being a witch. They bound him thumbs to toes and tried him by his own methods, using the ordeal of swimming. Hopkins accordingly failed to sink and was sent to the gallows. A much more mundane account of his death is that he died in his home in Manningtree “of a consumption”, probably tuberculosis, according to John Stearne in 1647. The precise location of Hopkins’ grave is unknown although his burial is recorded on the Manningtree parish register. There is also speculation that Hopkins went into hiding with the help of sympathizers. One apocryphal tale is that he fled to New England where some suggest he had a hand in the Salem witch trials.

Hopkins in a period of just fourteen months is thought to have facilitated in the deaths of between 200 and 400 people. Matthew Hopkins, the Witchfinder-General of Essex certainly led an auspicious career. He went from destitution to prosperity in a remarkably short time. In a very sick sense Hopkins was a pure capitalist, but in a very real sense Hopkins was a fanatical zealot who made a profit by promoting fear and hatred, and through the suffering of others.

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