The rise and fall of Matthew Hopkins, Witchfinder General

Folklore Reimagined

This 10-Minute Talk is part of our Folklore Reimagined season, which explores the connections folklore forges between us and communities of the past, and how these customs and cultures are presented today.

See more from Folklore Reimagined

Transcript

The witch-hunt held by the so-called Witchfinder General, Matthew Hopkins, is not only the subject of one of the great Witchfinder General, but the most notorious witch-hunt in English history.

We don't know how many people died, it's round about hundred, most of them in the first three months of a year-long hunt. As many as a possible quarter of all the people executed for the alleged crime of witchcraft in early modern England may have died in that first summer of Hopkins hunt.

So why did it happen? Where did it happen? Why did it stop?

To go broad on that first question of why, witch-hunting in England was the result of two greats combining forces. One was a prehistoric fear among the English of bad magic. The belief, which is found worldwide, that evil human beings can use magic, that is, the use of uncanny power to achieve physical change, to inflict actual harm on other human beings that have been around since before history. It was damped down during the Christian centuries when there was no urge, among the authorities to encourage it.

But from the 1560s in England, it hit the second force, which was a completely new belief, which had appeared in southern Europe first in the 1420s in a Satanic conspiracy by which God had licensed Satan to tempt evil human beings by giving them the power to work bad magic witchcraft, using demons as the instruments by which they did it.

This was a totally new idea. It hadn't been around before. And what was new about it was the idea that a crusade had been launched by Satan, involving larger and larger numbers of people who were given the power to work magic evil-y in return for worshipping the devil.

This idea really crossed into England in the mid-16th century, and in 1563 witchcraft was criminalised by law and it became possible to accuse other people of it and if they were convicted, to get them hanged. But the results were very uneven, and Sussex and the whole couple of hundred years in which those laws were enforced. 13 people were accused of witchcraft and one got executed. By contrast, in Essex, which is not that far away, even in those days, there were at least 84 executions and hundreds of trials.

And that's where Matthew Hopkins got started. The reason why Essex, and more broadly, East Anglia, was such a bad area for witch-hunting is that it was run in this period by a bunch of exceptionally godly, radical, justices the peace. Local magistrates who were out to clean up their area and make it purified of evil and as godly as possible, so as many people as possible could get to heaven. As a result, they campaigned not just to eradicate witchcraft, but to get rid of Roman Catholics who had the wrong kind of Christianity. Vagrants. Pubs. Village entertainments. And anything that might conduce people to loose living because they were so set on removing every kind of misbehaviour.

Prosecution for all sorts of crimes in Essex and the surrounding counties was particularly severe. The good news is, if you were accused of witchcraft and you kept your nerve, you had a pretty good chance of being found not guilty. On the whole, across England, probably about three quarters of the people actually dragged into court and accused of being witches were acquitted in order to be convicted and hanged. You really needed to be either senile or mad or terrified or to have an entire village lined up against you.

But these are normal circumstances, and the reason why acquittal rates are so high is the normal circumstances consisted of royal courts known as assizes, and these consisted of professional judges literally riding out from London to hold courts in main local centres, mostly county towns, mostly in town halls, by which the people who'd been thrown into jail by the local justices, the peace, were brought before the court, and the verdicts on them decided by a panel of complete amateurs, a jury, drawn from all over the area. But the judge would often direct the jury, using his considerable training and experience, and because there was a professional judge in charge who would have had no personal knowledge of the accused, and because the verdicts were decided on his advice by people drawn from all over the county, the verdicts would not have been influenced by the kind of local hatreds and fears that produced the accusations because these witch trials were driven by fear by people, ordinary people in villages who really believe that the people they were accusing of witchcraft had hurt them, often by causing their children to die, almost as often by ruining their livelihood, causing their cattle, sheep or poultry to die, their machinery not to work, destroying their means of making a living.

But the assize system damped down the effects until in the 1640s it ceased to work. It did so because the English Civil War broke out in 1642,and in the course of the next three years reduced England to utter chaos with armies rampaging up and down the country, fighting going on almost every area and England divided into mutually hostile war zones. The judges couldn't go out. Assizes could not be held, criminals could not be tried, and local fears and hatreds could not be worked out.

It was a vacuum, and after three years of war in 1645, into this vacuum stepped a complete nobody from the Essex coast called Matthew Hopkins. Who was he? Well, we hardly know. He was on the very edge of gentility. He was the son of a country parson, and the stepson of another, who had a couple of livings on the Essex coast, where Matthew grew up. He grew up as a stepson of this local vicar, and he came into an inheritance which enabled him to buy a pub, which he didn't run, but he could cream off some of the profits from it. And so just about have the genteel existence in which he didn't have to work.

In early 1645, he became swept up on a witch-hunt in his little town of Manningtree, whereby a lame single mother living on the edge of poverty was accused of witchcraft by a hysterical family who believed that this 30-something woman was causing their daughter to have fits. Most of the town turned against the young woman, and one of that town was Matthew Hopkins, who learned from the interrogation of this wretched young woman, Bessie Clark, how to break a victim and how to ask leading questions. And he emerged from that first trial a fully-fledged witch-hunter with a group of followers and a programme. And they then set out together first through the local area and then through Essex, and then through Suffolk and Norfolk, calling on the local communities to hand over their suspected witches. Hopkins and his team then tortured them into confession by depriving them of sleep, tying them in postures until their muscles screamed, and reducing them to a condition in which they would break and agree to confess to anything that he and his team wanted, and once their confessions were written down, they and the confessions were handed over to a hastily converted amateur court, a kangaroo court in modern parlance, which tried them and usually sentenced them to death.

And that's why so many people died in such a short space of time. But Hopkins’s hunt waned as the Civil War waned. Within a few months, opposition was growing to what they were doing, and pamphlets were published to criticise Hopkins methods and views. Hopkins and his team wrote some in return, which is one of our main sources of information on him and them.

But it was he who lost. When the war was ended, the regular courts were brought back, and by then he was thoroughly discredited. He was still in his 20s of age, but dying of tuberculosis, coughing up his life into handkerchiefs. He had probably been very ill with it before he began his hunt, so the biggest witch-hunt in English history was the result of a semi-demented young man who knew he didn't have long to live and wanted to get to heaven when he died by removing as many truly evil people as possible.

And once the assizes were back, they were never gone again. Within another 20 years, scepticism about the ability to recognise and try and define witches was growing massively in England. Witch trials began declining very fast. The last one was held in 1712, and the laws which permitted hunts like Hopkins were repealed in 1736. So his hunt is a moment in time. The result not of an unscrupulous chancer, nor of an inquisitor trained by a church to go out and take out Satan’s servants, but of a maverick, a loner, a young man on the edge, the edge of gentility, the edge of society, the edge of life. Only a situation as traumatic and as extraordinary as civil war could have pitched him into that kind of power. And it's an absolute mercy that's only happened to us once.

Ronald Hutton FBA is Professor of History at the University of Bristol.

This talk is part of the series The British Academy 10-Minute Talks, where the world’s leading professors explain the latest thinking in the humanities and social sciences in just 10 minutes.