July 1645, it's a
hot summer's day,
middle of a market town
of Chelmsford in Essex.
There's always a kind of
carnivalesque atmosphere,
people selling souvenirs
and food and drink.
And this is the
day of the Assizes,
so this is where the
judges arrive from London.
There are 50
counts of witchcraft
which are going to be heard.
This is going to be England's
largest ever witch trial
up to this date.
The witches have actually
been brought there in shackles
through the jeering crowd.
These are women
who are going to be dirty
and ragged and terrified.
They will resemble
the crowd's expectations
of what a witch might look like.
And the courtroom
is an open space.
It's full of spectators,
it's full of people who
might be shouting things.
It will be noisy, it will
be hot, it will be smelly,
it will be a vile place to be.
And at the centre of
this terrible maelstrom
of accusation and
cruelty is Bess Clark
on trial for her life.
She's a middle-aged woman, a
single mother, a
woman who is disabled.
It's said she only has one leg,
so she'd be leaning on a crutch.
Elizabeth Clark,
a pitiful figure,
watching her are Matthew
Hopkins and John Stearne,
self-made witch finders, the
men who brought her there.
The interrogation of a
woman called Elizabeth
Clark really kick-starts the
investigation of witchcraft
that Matthew Hopkins
is associated with.
March 1645.
Rumours spread through
the town of Manningtree
that a disabled
woman, Elizabeth Clark,
has used witchcraft to
harm the wife of a local tailor.
Magistrates
decide to investigate
and send interrogators
to her home.
They search Elizabeth's body
for strange and unnatural marks.
The idea of searching
women's bodies
was the idea of searching
them for a witch mark.
What they were looking for was
a mark on the body of the woman
which indicated the point at
which the woman's familiar demon
had suckled her blood
like a breastfeeding baby,
but blood, not milk.
So they search
Elizabeth Clark's body
and they find three teats which
they consider to be unnatural.
So Elizabeth Clark is
held under house arrest.
There are watchers, local
people who are appointed,
who will just sit and
stare at her as she
sits there on her chair,
and what they're really
waiting for is for her
imps to come and visit her.
Ordinary people
associated bad magic
with the activities
of nasty spirits
that were variously described
as puckles or imps or sprites,
and in the biblical language
of English Protestants,
became known
as familiar spirits.
The watchers will
take Elizabeth Clark
and walk her up and
down until she's exhausted,
because it would be an
exceptionally cruel and
unpleasant thing to do to
somebody who was disabled.
So I think with these
whole combinations of
methods clearly
intended to break her,
and by that I mean for
her to lose any sense
of control or agency,
and I think these methods
create extreme emotional stress,
physical stress and exhaustion.
All of these together
have the impact that t*rture
is designed to have, which
is to make people say what
the torturers need them to
say or to confess to things
that are not true.
So there's this incredibly
dramatic scene taking
place in this room
with the watchers,
Elizabeth Clark,
who hasn't really said
or done very much.
So then on the fourth
night of Tuesday 24th,
Hopkins and Stearne arrive
and take over this interrogation
of Elizabeth Clark.
So Hopkins is
probably in his early 20s,
Stearne a little bit older,
maybe in his mid-30s.
He's got young children.
Hopkins is a rather more kind of
impetuous young man in a hurry,
eager to prove himself,
less established in society.
They are minor gentlemen
that have come from
the port of Manningtree
where Elizabeth Clark lives,
and they have followed
some of the suspicions
that have been voiced to them
by the townsmen of Manningtree,
who then ask them to
do something about it.
The thing about
Hopkins and Stearne,
they're not professional
witch-finders.
They've only really
just started out.
But what they profess
is that they have
experience in witchcraft.
They start interrogating her,
seems quite unforthcoming,
and they're just about to
leave, and as they leave,
Elizabeth Clark suddenly
makes this extremely
dramatic announcement,
which is, "I will show
you my imps, for they
be ready to come."
That then changes the
situation in the room.
If you're there in the
dark, alone with a witch,
and she says she's going to
bring demons into the room,
naturally enough, if you
were a good Christian
in the 17th century,
you were scared.
So once Elizabeth Clark says,
"I'll show you my children,
they be ready to come,"
then this parade of
animals enter the room.
So first of all, you
get Holt, who is a cat,
and then you get Jamara,
who is a white dog,
then Vinegar Tom, who
is a strange kind of hybrid
between a greyhound and
seemingly an ox or a bull,
and then various other
creatures that then follow on,
and this leading up
to the rabbit or a toad,
which Elizabeth Clark
says is going to leap
down John Stearne's throat
and lay toads in his belly.
We're not really clear
what's happening here.
Is this Elizabeth describing
the familiars that she sees?
Did people in the room
really see something?
If so, what?
Did an animal run
through the room?
Was it shadows?
What was it?
So this is a witch
who's really kind of
warming to her own
theme, because now she's
presenting this
picture of absolute
phantasmagorical terror,
which is probably more than
Hopkins and Stearne want to
hear, because they're no longer just
the disinterested
bystanders, she is actually
threatening them directly.
So that then Hopkins
and Stearne start asking
more questions about,
"Are you not afraid
of these creatures?"
And she says, "Why
would I be afraid of them?
These are my children."
So then, you know, if these are
her children, who is the father?
Well, of course, the
father, she says, is Satan.
She says that, you know,
he's a fine gentleman,
he wears a lace collar,
that, you know, their
lovemaking takes place
regularly and lasts half the night.
You know, this sounds like
this kind of sexual fantasy
of a lonely woman who
doesn't have a husband,
doesn't have a lover.
And, you know, whether
she believes this or not,
she's certainly saying
the kinds of things that
Hopkins wants to hear,
because, of course, these
are deeply horrific,
terrifying things
for a woman actually to
have had sex with the devil.
[Marion Gibson Elizabeth
says not only that she is a witch,
but that some of her
neighbours are witches as well.
By the time her
confessions have finished,
and she's subjected to
several rounds of questioning,
she's known four or five
other people from surrounding
villages as witches.
It's difficult to say why she
accused the people that she did.
In some cases, they
do already have a bad
reputation for witchcraft.
I think one of the horrifying
things about witch trials
is that you feel it could
happen to anybody.
Some of these people come
across as being actually quite pious.
So all these women
will soon be interrogated
and will start confessing
to such crimes as
causing harm to
livestock, to consorting with
familiars, and to taking
the devil as a lover.
The trial comes
round in Chelmsford.
It's been four months since
Hopkins and Stearne first
interrogated Elizabeth Clark.
And by this time, we've
got at least 30 women being
held in Colchester Castle.
The women are all
brought before magistrates.
That's the first step
in an English witch
trial in this period.
And then you, and the
statement that you have made,
whether it's a
confession or not,
are sent off for trial at a
court called the Assizes,
which is the court for
serious crimes in the period.
In front of the whole
gathered court, the
jurors, the witnesses,
the magistrates, the
ministers, everyone present,
Elizabeth Clark is found
guilty of witchcraft and
sentenced to be hanged
by the neck until dead.
After Elizabeth and the other
women have been sentenced,
they're marched through the
town of Chelmsford to their death.
14 women are taken
up to the gallows,
led up to the ladder
and choked there before this
great jeering, excited crowd.
Hopkins and Stearne
would have been very
pleased with this outcome.
They'd got a number of
people ex*cuted as witches.
Hopkins and Stearne,
whatever they intended
to do, they're now
actually a witch-finding duo,
and people look to them
as professional witch-finders.
They believe that
they're on a mission,
and their mission is to root
out devilry in the community.
So they are zealous,
they are also ruthless,
because they believe that
the stakes are incredibly high.
This is the godly future
of their community
and the region of the country
which they believe is at stake.
After their recent success,
Hopkins and Stearne
travel farther into
Essex with plans to hunt
the evil witches
they believe are
terrorizing the country.
But travel across
England is dangerous.
The country is deeply divided
as a brutal civil w*r rages.
What the civil w*r
does is break down
structures of authority.
The courts stop working
as they normally do,
magistrates and judges
can't travel to courts,
and therefore it becomes
a bit of a free-for-all
in English justice.
It became possible for men like
John Stearne and Matthew Hopkins
to some extent take
matters into their own hands
and to set themselves
up as witch-finders.
So the English civil
w*r breaks out in 1642
and this is the battle between
Crown and Parliament.
So Charles I is the
king, he's claimed that he
is an absolute monarch,
he doesn't need Parliament,
Parliament think otherwise.
But this is, like all
civil wars, turns the
country upside down.
It is, of course, the most
dramatic constitutional crisis.
In that context, there was
much talk of the devil
because the devil for both
sides was the secret instigator
of the mischief.
The political tumult of the
civil w*r made many people think
that this was the
start of Armageddon,
and that in that
context of fear,
you get all sorts of strange
omens and apparitions
and miracles and happenings.
So the London pressers
pour out all kinds of pamphlets
and weird and wonderful
stories of things that
people have experienced,
such as a one-eyed kitten
with the hands of a child,
which seem like evidence that
the world is coming to an end.
That's the kind of
world in which one would
expect witches to appear.
brutally extracting
confessions from accused
brutally extracting
confessions from accused
witches in welcoming towns.
You've got to understand
exactly what Hopkins
and Stearne are doing
in these communities.
They don't convict anybody,
they don't execute anybody,
they don't even
really accuse anybody.
What they do is that
they are facilitators
who listen to the
suspicions of local people
and then encourage those
people to come forward
and to tell their story.
And then what they do
is they develop methods
for gathering
pre-trial evidence,
and it's in that capacity
that they question suspects
and t*rture suspects.
They are not averse
at all to physical
violence, particularly to
starving people of sleep.
Hopkins and Stearne travelled
around the country
with a team of women employed
to search the naked bodies
of witchcraft suspects to see if
they had demonic marks on them.
They also prick various
marks with needles
to see if they bleed
or to see if they're
insensitive to pain.
I think they were obsessed
with the idea of women's bodies.
I think they were troubled
by women's sexuality.
The number of times that
they find demonic marks
in what they call the
secret parts of a woman
is quite striking.
We're dealing with
very, very
patriarchal societies,
societies which see women
as inferior, as more sinful,
and also women
have less legal power,
they have less economic
power, and so they are less
able to defend
themselves if they do get
suspected or accused.
I think that kind
of dehumanising
allows all sorts of public
shaming, public blaming.
It's easy to demonise
women and justify t*rture.
Hopkins and Stearne
are actually very brutal.
I think they see
themselves like soldiers,
and of course there are
untold acts of brutality
which are being committed
in the name of both
the side of Parliament
and the Crown during
the ongoing civil w*r.
They start using methods
which are really ill*gal,
and t*rture is only used
in English law in very
exceptional circumstances.
They're not
permitted to do this,
but again, the Hopkins
and Stearne feel that the
ends justify the means.
Hopkins and Stearne, their
fame spreads accordingly,
particularly amongst
communities which have been,
some of them,
waiting for a generation
in order to have the
confidence to get rid of
the people in their
midst who they sincerely
believe to be witches.
July 1645.
Hopkins and Stearne leave
Essex and push north into Suffolk.
People would have
received Hopkins and Stearne
as authoritative figures,
so they would have
brought letters with them,
perhaps from magistrates,
perhaps from other people
saying that their work was good
and that the village or town
they'd come to should help them.
When Hopkins and
Stearne go into Suffolk,
they hear confessions
that are similar to those
that they've heard in
Essex, but if anything, they're
even more fantastical.
Some of these Suffolk
confessions give us a sense
that they are part of
the fantasy of rather
lonely, love-starved women.
Stories like Margaret Wyard's.
Margaret lived in
Framlingham in Suffolk,
and she confessed
that many years before
she had met the devil
in the form of a calf.
Surprisingly, the
calf could speak
and he asked Margaret
to have sex with him.
And there are even more
men accused as well.
Men tell rather similar
stories to women
about the way that
they met with the devil
and that they formed
the blood pact with Satan
and then familiars came to them
and that they sent the familiars
out after their enemies.
Suffolk is a triumph for
Hopkins and Stearne.
Their reputation as formidable
witch-finders continues to grow.
They separate to
cover more ground.
This parting of the
ways reflects their
different character
and their different
circumstances.
Stearne is a slightly
older family man,
he wants to go back
to his young children,
whereas Hopkins has this
real sense of himself
as the witch-finder,
this charismatic
witch-finder who can ride out,
and he does, on
this great lonely trek,
probably around 300 miles
as he goes up into Suffolk,
into Norfolk, down the
east coast of England
and then back round
again in a great circuit.
One of the reasons he
becomes a witch-finder in 1645
I think lies in his
upbringing and his childhood.
So he's born in
around about 1620.
His father, James Hopkins, is
a university-educated minister.
And so Hopkins is growing
up in this sense of Puritanism
and the things that
threaten Puritanism.
His father dies in the mid-1630s
and his widowed mother,
Marie, moves to Manningtree
and she marries the minister
of Mistley and Manningtree.
So I think he would
have grown up
with a very strong sense
that there were things
that threatened godliness
and that godliness needed
to be protected at all costs,
and even if that meant
actually a kind of an
aggressive counterattack
against the things which
threatened that sense of
purity in English religious life.
And witches were
certainly a part of that.
In fact, witches were
really the standout emblem.
I think people respect
Matthew Hopkins
when he arrives
in their communities
because he has this
swagger, he has this charisma.
He is able to persuade people
that he does have authority
and particularly he
has experience which
they don't have.
He's quite skilled at
psychologically understanding
what is in the minds of accusers
and possibly what's in the
minds of the accused as well.
He must have created
a climate of enormous
fear in those communities
that were waiting for him,
having told him to come to
their town and search for witches.
The scale of the witch
hunt that Hopkins and
Stearne are fomenting,
jails absolutely crammed.
We have reports that
there are as many as 150
witches are in the jails and
witnesses coming forward,
all these bizarre stories.
They do cause
concern in Parliament
that justice is possibly
not being done.
This isn't scepticism
about witchcraft,
but it is scepticism about
correct legal procedure.
And so witch-finding
does raise some eyebrows.
One of the key
concerns that's voiced in
Parliament at this time
is word that an ordained
clergyman has been
arrested for witchcraft.
It still surprises me
that John Lowes,
the vicar of Brandistown
in Suffolk, becomes
a witchcraft suspect.
He's a Church of
England clergyman.
He's not an ex-clergyman,
he's not a member
of some obscure sect.
He's the clergyman who's
served that community for 50 years
and yet he's still a
victim of witchcraft.
He's a victim of witchcraft.
He's the clergyman who's
served that community for 50 years
and yet he's still
accused of witchcraft.
John Lowes is aged
about 80 at this point.
He is deeply disliked by some
members of his congregation.
Some of his parishioners
absolutely hate him.
They've been in
court cases with him.
They feel he's a very litigious,
a very problematic minister.
Some of the parishioners of
John Lowe's think they've got this
opportunity now because of
the witch-finding to finally get rid
of this minister who
they really don't like at all.
I think Hopkins rather
assumes John Lowes' guilt.
He certainly sees him
as a disreputable person.
He's subjected to the same
cruel methods of interrogation
by Matthew Hopkins as
any of the other suspects,
so his age and his gender
and his status don't protect him.
Hopkins and others
come to him and question
him and they watch
him and they walk him,
as they have done
with the other suspects.
Their special method
of t*rture, which they
don't consider t*rture,
but which, of course, is.
And he's famously swum
in the moat of Framlingham
Castle in Suffolk
and this was a method
by which alleged witches
or suspected witches
were put into some body of
water to see if they sank or swam
and if they sank,
they were innocent.
If they swam, the idea
was the water was sort
of spitting them out and
saying they were guilty.
It was yet another of the
random and
monumentally silly efforts
to provide actual forensic
evidence for witchcraft.
People often think there's
a kind of catch-22 here
that meant that
you died either way.
We know that people
were tied to a rope,
so the idea that if you
were innocent and you sank,
you could be pulled
out of the water.
It's a bit like being
waterboarded,
like literally half
drowned in the water and
then dragged up again.
And, in fact, actually, nobody
wanted the witches to drown
because that would
have been m*rder.
What they really wanted
to do was to have this
piece of public theatre where
somebody was either, you
know, proved to be innocent
or, more often, that they
were shown to be guilty.
But, again, it becomes part of
the theatre of an investigation
against a suspect which will
get people behind the accusation,
even if that actual test itself
is not officially sanctioned.
It was really one of
the most shocking and
brutal interrogations
that Hopkins oversees
during the campaign.
John Lowes floats,
and therefore it
seems like he's guilty
because the element of
water is rejecting him.
One of the strange things about
the swimming of John Lowes
is that in order to
underline his guilt,
some other people jump
in and show that they
actually sink to the bottom.
It's a sort of a kind of
control experiment, really,
to show that actually
it isn't just a case that
everybody would float,
and this really is a way of
underlining John Lowes' guilt.
People are enduring pain
that carries on for a long time
may say whatever they
need to for that to stop.
So, he admits he's a witch
under this pressure.
He lifts up his tongue
and he shows that there
is a teat under there,
that's what's reported,
and that's where he
feeds his familiars.
And he says he sends
his familiars to cause
all sorts of havoc and
destruction, mayhem.
A ship sailing off the
coast is sunk, and all the
sailors on it have drowned.
And this, he says,
he rejoices in.
There will now be
a reckoning for him.
After his wild confession,
extracted under brutal t*rture,
John Lowes is dragged to a jail,
filled with others
accused of witchcraft.
News of the vast
numbers awaiting trial
reaches Parliament.
They intervene, keen to ensure
the prosecutions are handled
in accordance with English law.
The end of July 1645,
and Parliament sends
a special commission,
a special court of Oyer
and Terminer, it's called,
which will go out to Suffolk
to oversee the trials there.
It's a measure that's
put in place by Parliament
to meet this emergency situation
of this unprecedented number
of witch suspects,
because the courts normally
are just not set
up to deal with this
incredibly high number
of accused individuals.
Parliament's probably
also trying to get control
of the situation as well.
I think they feel that the
witchfinders are perhaps
getting a little bit out
of hand in their efforts.
Trials are set for August
26th to deal with the cases,
it's said, of as many
as 150 witches,
and, of course, the
star witnesses will
be Hopkins and Stearne.
I think there's always
going to be a point at which
Hopkins and Stearne's
methods are going to hit against
what is actually
permitted procedure.
The court does try to
limit some of their more
excessive activities, so,
for example, it says you
mustn't swim witches any longer.
Confessions mustn't
be forced, there mustn't
be these superstitious
extra-legal methods,
and that also the
communities that are
producing these accusations
are going to actually have
to cover some of the costs.
So this serves as a kind of
rebuke against Hopkins and Stearne
for everything that
they've been doing,
and particularly the way in
which they've been doing it.
Inevitably, they're going to
come to the attention of those
who don't agree with
them, and therefore that
they are going to find that
there'll be enemies who are
throwing rocks in their path.
Despite murmurs of opposition to
the witch-finders' methods,
John Lowes is still
brought to the stand to
face trial as a witch.
The thing about the court
of Oyer and Terminator
is that it's not
skeptical of witchcraft,
it's only skeptical
about certain methods,
and, of course, there is
evidence against John Lowes.
Villagers have sort of dirt on
John Lowes going back for years,
so this does become
very convincing to the jury,
even if some of the methods
are disapproved by the judge.
In the end, it's the jury
that is going to decide.
And the jury decide that
the evidence is sufficient
to find John Lowes
guilty of witchcraft.
So I think we can imagine that
John Lowes must be in a state
of utter exhaustion and despair.
The judge passed the
sentence of death upon him,
which he has, of
course, he has to do.
And then August 27th,
John Lowes mounts the
ladder up to the gallows.
But John Lowes, as a minister,
asks that he can conduct
his own funeral service.
An act of defiance
against the witch-finders
who had brought
him to his death.
I think he was showing
that he was still a
minister of the cloth, that
he wasn't a witch, that he
was trying to sort of
consign his own soul and the
soul of the other people
being ex*cuted with him.
He's not giving in to
the court's guilty verdict.
He's saying, "No, I'm
not guilty, I'm not a witch.
"I'm still a minister of God
who can perform this sort of
necessary ritual as I am dying."
So there's a tremendous
amount of public
interest in these witch trials.
Some of it is enthusiastic
and supportive,
some of it's rather skeptical.
But a lot of this is passing
through the London presses,
so there are pamphlets,
there are printed ballads,
which are in fact about witches,
and there are also what they
would have called news sheets.
This is spreading the
news of the witch hunts.
As his fame increases,
Hopkins continues his
hunt, stopping in the
coastal town of Aldborough
before pushing into Norfolk.
All towns in England,
including Aldborough,
are under very significant
economic pressure,
because of the w*r.
High taxes have been levied,
horses have been requisitioned,
all sorts of property
has been requisitioned
by the parliamentary
forces, so that everybody is
strapped for cash.
This is bubbling under at the
time of increasing convictions,
increasing witch trials,
increasing numbers of
witches in the jails.
It's just this sense of,
"Can we afford this?
"We should pay for it," and is
this money being well spent?
In Aldborough, seven people
are accused of witchcraft.
At their trial, five
months later, all
seven are found guilty.
But the executions and Hopkins'
fees cost a staggering £40,
one-seventh of the town's
entire annual budget.
So the evidence we have
is that Hopkins
stays in local inns,
he runs up a tab, not
excessively, just really
for bed and board,
but, you know, still
costs that someone is
going to have to meet,
and that will always
be the local authority,
and the local authority will
pass it on to the local people.
It becomes an
expensive procedure,
just the execution of
a witch costs a pound,
which is a lot of
money in those days.
These costs do
start to build up.
I think there's not really
actually very much evidence
that he was extracting
huge amounts of money
from local people.
I don't think he's really even
doing it for glory.
I think he's doing it because
he feels it's his religious duty.
He was put on this
earth to go after witches.
Hopkins, to some extent,
is the victim of
his own success.
The more he does, the
more his fame grows,
the more work he gets,
but this inevitably is going
to attract adverse comment
about the things that he does.
You start to feel that Hopkins
is going to run out of time
and political support.
As Hopkins and Stearne
move further away from
Essex and Suffolk,
people are a bit less
keen on their methods,
they're a bit less keen
on their intervention.
So by 1646, their efforts are
being met with less enthusiasm,
and this is particularly
the case with a man
called John Gaul.
He's also a Puritan minister,
and basically John Gaul
is very, very critical
of the witch-finders.
He doesn't want them
coming to his parish,
he doesn't want them
encouraging his parishioners
to name witches.
He thinks they're
uneducated upstarts
who have no authority
or training to do
what they're doing, which
is kind of actually true.
By 1646, John Gaul
is one of many men in England
who wants this world
turned upside down
that England's become during
the Civil w*r to be righted again.
So he wants proper procedure,
proper social relationships,
proper law and order.
Witch-finding to John
Gaul represents the
worst kind of example
of men exploiting the
breakdown of law and
order for their own ends.
So what John Gaul
does is he preaches
against the witch-finders
and against witch-finding,
and then he publishes the
sermons that he's preached
against the witch-finders in a
book called Cases of Conscience,
and it's really a very
impassioned criticism.
He never names them
as Hopkins and Stearne,
but, of course, everybody
knew who he was talking about.
And he basically says they're
whipping up popular fanaticism,
they have no real expertise,
no warrant for what they're doing,
they're acting illegally.
By this point in 1646,
there's a lot of adverse opinion
which is being spoken
of in gossip networks,
but some of it is also
finding its way to print,
not just John Gaul,
but there are also
comments made by
others about the fact that
witch-finding is out of control.
So the First Civil w*r
ends in June 1646.
The Civil w*r ends with a
parliamentarian victory,
meaning that Parliament has
assumed authority in the country
and it no longer rests
with the king, as it has done
in all the previous centuries
that people can remember.
Soldiers start returning,
the economy's been
severely disrupted,
there is great poverty
and dislocation, there's disease
spreading as well,
and so England is still
in a considerable state.
Things become more dangerous,
in a sense, than they were before.
Soldiers come
home from the front,
they find their families
have been disrupted,
some will find their
relatives have been ex*cuted.
Hopkins and Stearne are
in a pretty difficult position
as the Civil w*r
comes to an end.
So Hopkins is invited
into the town of Kings Lynn.
It seems that he is
actually welcomed there
like some kind of
conquering godly hero
and feted in the streets.
But there are eight who
tried and six of them acquitted.
It's very difficult to know
exactly what happened.
It may well be that the jury
themselves were skeptical,
not of witchcraft, but
of the methods and the
evidence which were used.
So this is deeply
humiliating for Hopkins.
And then in 1647, some
of the magistrates in Norfolk
begin to question what Hopkins
and Stearne are doing as well.
There are even more acquittals.
This is a sign that the
magic, the glamour,
that he has in getting
convictions seems
to be running out.
Things have become very
difficult for him indeed.
Some local gentlemen,
he says, have drawn up a
list of questions for
him, which they present
to him at the assize.
So one of the questions,
for example, asks if
he is a witch himself.
It says, "Well, if you know
so much about witches,
"surely you are a witch too."
A lot of the questions he's
asked are about his methods.
People say to him, "Are
these people not just confessing
"because you've put
words into their mouths?
"Are you not just
confessing because you
keep them awake all night?
"Is this not incredibly cruel?
What are you trying to do?"
And he does find it very hard
to answer those questions.
He just restates over
and over again the thing
that he's been saying,
presumably for months,
which is that these
are effective methods,
they've been authorised
by justices of the peace,
by the magistrates.
He's asked very
specific questions
about why there is this
particular sexualised obsession,
why there is this particular
obsession with motherhood.
What is it that Hopkins and
Stearne are fretting about
when they strip women naked
and get other women to examine
them for demonic marks?
That's quite a dangerous thing
to be asked in front of a court,
which is holding a witch trial.
What if, heaven forbid, they
start walking and watching him?
This is the beginning
of the end for them.
Not only are his days as a
witchfinder coming to an end,
but so is his life.
By the time that Hopkins
writes a self-defensive pamphlet
against the charges
that have been put to him
by the gentlemen of
Norwich, he's probably dying.
Probably from the
start of the witch hunt,
he's almost certainly
been suffering from
consumption of the lungs.
There's always a possibility
that Hopkins already knew
that he was dying and
that there was an added
urgency to his work.
He's in kind of legacy
mode, he's already realising
that his time is up and
he needs to actually make
this his lasting statement
about the sincerity of
his motives and what
he was trying to achieve.
I think it really
got to him, those
questions, and he wrote the
book as a response to that.
It's called A
Discovery Of Witches.
It has a lovely woodcut
of Matthew Hopkins
and the witches
and their familiars,
and it's really that that
cements his reputation
as an important man of his time.
It's that book and
it's that one picture
that makes us remember
him the way we do.
It was organised in a sort of
a Q&A method.
It's sort of a criticism
and then his response to it.
So it's very clearly structured.
This is what they said about
me and this is how I'm responding.
The tone of the book
is extremely self-defensive,
rather embittered, I
think, that such things
should be said against
him when actually Hopkins
believed that he was
a sincere godly warrior
whose only motivation really
was to root out wicked witches
from East Anglia's communities.
We simply don't know how
many copies were printed or
how many copies were sold,
but with the subject matter
and with this garish illustration,
I think we can assume
that it was actually
a bit of a bestseller.
Shortly after he
publishes his book,
Matthew Hopkins dies.
He dies very young,
probably still in his 20s.
It's a very quiet end
to a very noisy career,
a quiet death of a young
man, tragic in its own way,
in a small village, but
it does bring to an end
the witch hunt that he and
others had started in 1645.
Matthew Hopkins,
after his death,
becomes a kind of a folk devil.
Partly, I think, because of that
famous woodcut on his book,
The Discovery Of Witches.
Hopkins has been called
many things over the years -
the Napoleon of Witch-Finding,
the Foulest Of Foul Parasites,
the Grand Inquisitor.
But the name with which he
will be associated for all time
is the name that he
gave himself, and that was
Witchfinder General.
After Matthew Hopkins' death,
he was quite widely mocked.
Many people did not agree
with what he had done,
and even to his supporters,
it must have seemed that his
crusade had ended in failure.
John Stearne outlives
Matthew Hopkins,
even though he's probably an
older man, and he goes home.
And he certainly felt
he'd been hard done by,
and he felt under threat
as a result of his death.
He felt under threat
as a result of his
witch-finding activities.
He regards himself as
somebody who's been
cancelled and silenced,
and that's the last that
we hear of him protesting
from his village home.
There never are
again persecutions in
East Anglia on the
scale of the Hopkins trials.
In that sense, it
does kind of go away.
Hopkins is a one-off.
What you find is that
across the whole of the
16th and 17th centuries
in England, we know about
1,000 trials happened
and probably around
about 500 executions.
But the extraordinary thing
is that a quarter of those trials
happened in East Anglia
in the years 1645-7.
So in East Anglia,
which amounted to 300,
people are interrogated
and questioned,
and 100 of them are ex*cuted.
We always know the names of
Matthew Hopkins and John Stearne,
but it's also really
important to remember
the names of the people
whose deaths they orchestrated.
So names of people like
Margaret Moore of Sutton
or Rose Hallibred
from St Osith in Essex.
Ellen Driver, Mary
Scrutton, Margaret Wyard,
Mary Vervey, Priscilla
Collett and Elizabeth Clark.
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01x04 - England: The Witchfinders' Cruel Crusade
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Six-part series recreating witch trials from Germany, Scotland, England, Sweden, USA, and Ireland through expert analysis.
Six-part series recreating witch trials from Germany, Scotland, England, Sweden, USA, and Ireland through expert analysis.