Matthew Hopkins, Witch-Finder General

There are moments in the life of a state when its central courts fall silent and the work of judgement is left to whoever in a small town is willing to pick it up. The men who step forward at such times are not the trained jurists; the trained jurists are away at the war. They are clerks, half-lawyers, sons of the local clergy, men in their early twenties whose authority has not been earned and will not be tested while the war lasts. What they choose to do with the empty bench is on the parish for a generation; what they choose to write down about it is on the surname forever.

THE MANNINGTREE LAWYER

Matthew Hopkins was the son of James Hopkins, Puritan vicar of the joint parishes around Wenden Lofts, raised in the long quiet shadow of an Essex pulpit. He read law without taking the bar, kept rooms at Manningtree on the Stour estuary, and was, in the spring of 1644, twenty-three years old. The Assize-circuit had not sat in East Anglia for two years. The county sheriffs and the borough sessions were running felony cases on their own warrant under the Witchcraft Act of 1604, which made the offence a capital felony in the first degree. In March of that year a knot of women near the Thorn Inn at Mistley were heard, by his own later account, to speak of meetings with the Devil. Hopkins reported them to the Manningtree constable, gave evidence at the Chelmsford sessions, and saw four of them hanged. He came back to Manningtree with a tariff and a title: Witch-Finder General, twenty shillings the parish, board for himself and his two assistants, expenses on top.

THE METHOD

By the summer of 1645 the circuit was running. John Stearne of Lawshall carried the pricker, a three-inch sharpened steel needle in a leather sheath, looking on the body of the accused for the mark which, in Hopkins's own later pamphlet, would be defined as flesh which are insensible, and feele neither pin, needle, aule, &c. thrust through them. Mary Phillips searched the women in chambers from which the men withdrew. The swimming test, bound thumb to opposite toe, was offered as proof when the parish would pay for the river. The watching, by relays of villagers through the night, looked for the familiar spirit that was said to suckle at the witch's mark. Through 1645 and into 1646 the team moved through Chelmsford, Bury St Edmunds, Aldeburgh, Yarmouth, King's Lynn, Ely, Huntingdon, Stowmarket, and twenty smaller market towns, examining, by the modern parish-register count of the historian Malcolm Gaskill, something close to three hundred and twenty women, and producing on the borough gallows about two hundred deaths.

A ROOM AT MISTLEY

Late August, 1646, the upper room of the Thorn Inn at Mistley. The west casement is open. The light is heavy and slow on the boards. On the deal table in front of him are three printed things: a small octavo copy of the 1604 Act, his own broadsheet tariff at twenty shillings the parish, and a new pamphlet just down from London by John Gaule, vicar at Great Staughton in Huntingdonshire, who has not named him but has named the method. He reads the Gaule passage twice. Every old woman, with a wrinkled face, a furr'd brow, a hairy lip, a gobber tooth, a squint eye, a squeaking voice, or a scolding tongue, having a rugged coat on her back, a skull-cap on her head, a spindle in her hand, and a dog or cat by her side, is not only suspected, but pronounced for a witch. The vicar has named the method without naming him, which is the form courteous men in print use when they mean to break a man's livelihood. He looks at the tariff and counts. Three hundred and twenty women examined. Two hundred hanged. Acquittals running one in five. The Manningtree news-sheet has Cromwell in the field, the King surrendered at Oxford in June, the Assize-circuit by the court calendar returning to Bury for the August session next year. He does the arithmetic of the year he has left. A man in his position may do one of two things. He may push the circuit through the winter at the same rate and meet the returning judges in open court at Bury and be called to answer for the pricker and the swimming-stool; or he may take the year, work the smaller parishes only, retire to Manningtree by spring, and put the methods on the page in his own ink before another man does it in his. The pricker, in its leather sheath, goes back into the bag. The Gaule pamphlet stays on the table.

THE DISCOVERY OF WITCHES

He worked the smaller parishes through the autumn of 1646 and the winter, taking fewer accusations, settling fewer fees, and by April of 1647 he was at his father's house at Mistley with the cough that would be put down to a consumption of the lungs. He wrote the defence there over the late spring. The Discovery of Witches: in Answer to severall Queries, Lately Delivered to the Judges of Assize for the County of Norfolk was printed in London in August 1647 by Richard Royston, eighteen quarto pages, the title-page styled By Matthew Hopkins, Witch-finder, For the Benefit of the whole Kingdome. The argument was procedural throughout: the pricker, the watching for the familiar spirit, the swimming, all of it sat, he wrote, within the evidentiary practice the 1604 Act had always permitted. He named no woman in defence of himself.

THE ASSIZE AT BURY

The Bury St Edmunds Assize sat in August 1647. About fifty East Anglian women were called on the Hopkins evidence; sixteen were hanged. The clerks' indictments named the familiar spirits by the names the searchers had recorded in the previous year's parish examinations: Pyewacket, Vinegar Tom, Sack-and-Sugar, Newes, Grizzel-Greedigut. A widow from Stowmarket, hearing her imp read out by a clerk in a London accent who had never set foot in her village, would have understood that the names she had given on the third night of Mary Phillips's watching had travelled now from her own kitchen into the printed indictment of the Crown. The pricker was not in the courtroom. The man who carried it was sixty miles to the south-east in a sick-bed at Mistley. The court did not call him. The court did not need to. The evidence he had built into the parish books over thirty-one months walked into Bury without him, and walked sixteen women out to the rope.

THE SOUTH-EAST CORNER

Matthew Hopkins died at Mistley on the twelfth of August 1647, twenty-seven years old. He was buried in the churchyard of St Mary the Virgin at Mistley Heath. The church itself was pulled down in 1735 and a new one built down the lane; the old churchyard was kept. No headstone survives. The witch-hunting tradition closed within a generation of his death. The Assize-circuit, once restored, prosecuted witchcraft with the older English caution. The last execution under the 1604 Act was Alice Molland at Exeter in 1685, thirty-eight years on. The Witchcraft Act of 1736 repealed the capital statute and made the crime no longer a hanging matter. The Hopkins campaign stands, by Gaskill's count, at between three and four hundred women dead, the largest single witch-finding in English history, conducted in twenty-six months by a Manningtree lawyer in his early twenties, in a country whose central courts were not sitting. There is no plaque. There is the old churchyard at Mistley Heath, unmarked, taking the summer light off the Stour estuary, the same casement light he wrote the pamphlet by.