Hopkins · 1646
Matthew Hopkins, Witch-Finder General
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.
It is twenty past three on the afternoon of an unrecorded day in August 1646, in the upper-room of the Thorn Inn at Mistley near Manningtree in Essex, in heavy summer light through the west-facing casement. He is twenty-six years old (by the best estimate of his birth-year as 1620 from the Manningtree parish register). He is Matthew Hopkins, son of James Hopkins, the Puritan vicar of the Manningtree-Wenden Lofts parish, in the third year of his witch-finding circuit across East Anglia.
On the table in front of him are: a small printed copy of the 1604 Witchcraft Act of James I (which made the crime of witchcraft a capital felony of the first degree); a printed broadsheet of his tariff (twenty shillings per parish, plus board for himself and his two assistants, plus expenses; the equivalent of about £180 a parish in 2025 money); and a pricker (a three-inch sharpened steel needle in a leather sheath, which is the instrument of his trade, used to look for the witch's mark of insensible flesh on the body of an accused).
He thinks: the Wenden Lofts parish has sent for me. The parish has the list of four women accused by the village constable of the fortnight before.
He thinks: the rate of acquittal in my previous sessions has been about twenty per cent. The rate of execution has been about sixty per cent. The remaining twenty per cent have been pilloried, banished, or remanded for further examination.
He thinks: I have, on the East Anglian circuit since March 1644, examined about three hundred and twenty women on the accusation of witchcraft. The campaign has produced, on the parish-register counts, about two hundred executions by hanging at the parish assize-or-borough courts. The political climate of the Civil War has, since the collapse of the Assize-circuit in 1642, given the local sessions the free hand they have not had for sixty years and will not have again.
He thinks: the pamphlet by John Gaule of Great Staughton last month has attacked the methods. The methods, in plain reading, are not the methods of the 1604 Act. The methods are the methods of Renaissance-Continental Catholic-inquisitorial witch-trial. The English common law has not previously authorised them.
He thinks: the Assize-circuit is, by Cromwell's victory at Naseby last summer and the surrender at Oxford last month, coming back. The Norfolk Assize is, by the court calendar, in session at Bury St Edmunds next August. The Norfolk Assize is going to look at my methods and is going to find them irregular.
He thinks: I have about a year. I will work the remaining East Anglian circuit through this winter and the spring, retire to Manningtree by the summer of 1647, and write the defensive pamphlet that gives the public-record version of the campaign.
The East Anglian campaign continued through the winter of 1646-47. The Norfolk Assize sat at Bury St Edmunds in August 1647 under the Chief Justice Sir Matthew Hale and the Lord Chief Baron Edmund Wyndham. The Bury sessions of August 1647 prosecuted about fifty further East Anglian women on the Hopkins evidence, of whom about sixteen were executed. Hopkins himself did not appear at the sessions; he had retired to Mistley near Manningtree in the late spring of 1647 with what the Manningtree parish-register entry of August would record as a consumption of the lungs.
He wrote his defensive pamphlet, The Discovery of Witches: in Answer to several Queries, lately Delivered to the Judges of Assize for the County of Norfolk, in the summer of 1647 at Manningtree. The pamphlet was printed in London in August 1647 by Richard Royston. The self-defence was largely procedural: that the methods (the swimming of accused women, the watching for the familiar-spirit, the pricking for the witch's mark) were within the 1604 Act's evidentiary practice and were not, as Gaule had charged, inquisitorial innovations.
Matthew Hopkins died at his father's house at Mistley on the twelfth of August 1647, twenty-seven years old, of tuberculosis. He is buried in the Mistley parish churchyard (the church of St Mary the Virgin, demolished in 1735; the churchyard remains, and the Hopkins grave-site is, by the parish-register entry, in the south-east corner; no surviving headstone). The English witch-hunting tradition substantially closed within a generation of his death. The Witchcraft Act of 1736 (repealing the 1604 Act) made witchcraft no longer a capital crime; the last English execution under the 1604 Act was Alice Molland at Exeter in 1685, thirty-eight years after the Hopkins campaign. By the modern historian Malcolm Gaskill's standing 2005 study Witchfinders, Hopkins was directly or indirectly responsible for between three and four hundred executions, the largest single witch-finding campaign in English history.