Hopkins

Between March 1644 and the spring of 1647, in the small parishes of Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk, Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire, Matthew Hopkins, a Manningtree lawyer in his early twenties, self-styled Witch-Finder General, conducted the largest English witch-hunting campaign in history. Working with a team of assistants (the Manningtree witch-pricker John Stearne, the searcher Mary Phillips, and several others), and at a fee of twenty shillings per parish plus expenses, Hopkins moved through about twenty East Anglian market towns and was directly or indirectly responsible for the executions of, by the careful modern count of the East Anglian witch-trial historian Malcolm Gaskill, between three and four hundred women. The campaign was conducted during the Civil War period when the Assize-circuit machinery had broken down and the local borough sessions were running cases under the 1604 Witchcraft Act with reduced central oversight. The pamphleteering pushback (John Gaule of Great Staughton's Select Cases of Conscience Touching Witches, 1646, was the key counter-text) and the return of the Assize-circuit caught up with Hopkins by the spring of 1647. He retired to Manningtree, wrote a self-defensive pamphlet (The Discovery of Witches, 1647), and died of tuberculosis at Mistley near Manningtree on the twelfth of August 1647, twenty-seven years old. The English witch-hunting tradition substantially closed within a generation of Hopkins's death; the last English witch execution under the 1604 Act was Alice Molland at Exeter in 1685.

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