An ABC of Witchcraft Past and Present by Doreen Valiente

Author:Doreen Valiente
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780719826917
Publisher: Crowood

HOPKINS, MATTHEW

The name of Matthew Hopkins is the most ill-famed in the story of English witchcraft. Although his career as self-appointed ‘Witch-Finder General’ lasted only for about two years, from 1644 to 1646, he was responsible for more executions than are recorded of any other person.

What made Hopkins particularly odious is that his witch-hunting was conducted for money, and his victims were the old, the poor and the most feeble and defenceless members of the community. In one instance, using his pretended commission from Parliament, he actually directed the citizens of Stowmarket, in Suffolk, to levy a special rate in order to pay the expenses of himself and his assistants. The sum of £28.0s.3d. (worth a good deal more in those days that it would be today) is recorded as having been extorted from the people of Stowmarket in this way.

The disordered state of the country, in consequence of the Civil War then in progress between the Royalists and the supporters of Cromwell, gave Hopkins and other rogues like him their chance to impose upon the disturbed minds of the people. The place, too, where Hopkins carried out his campaign, namely Essex and East Anglia, is an area of Britain where belief in witchcraft has always been strong and still lingers to this day.

Matthew Hopkins was the son of a Puritan minister, James Hopkins of Wenham in Suffolk. In his earlier years he had been a lawyer, and practised at Ipswich and later at Manningtree; without, however, making any particular figure in the world, until he found his real career in witch hunting.

He commenced his rise to fame while living at Manningtree, Essex. Here, as he tells us in his book The Discovery of Witches (London, 1647), “In March, 1644, he had some seven or eight of that horrible sect of Witches living in the Towne where he lived, a Towne in Essex called Manningtree, with diverse other adjacent Witches of other towns, who every six weeks in the night (being always on the Friday night) had their meeting close to his house, and had their several solemn sacrifices there offered to the Devil, one of whom this Discoverer heard speaking to her imps and bid them go to another Witch, who was thereupon apprehended.”

Hopkins seems to imply that he daringly acted as eavesdropper upon one of these meeetings. At any rate, a poor old one-legged woman called Elizabeth Clarke, whose mother had been hanged as a witch, was arrested at Hopkins’ instigation. After being searched for witches’ marks, and kept from sleep for three nights, upon the fourth night she started to ‘confess’ what was required of her and to name others as her accomplices. Hopkins avers that five familiar spirits, upon being named and called by her, then came one after another into the room, “there being ten of us in the room”, after which these apparitions vanished.

By the time Hopkins and his friends had finished their investigation no less than thirty-two people from various parts of Essex had been arrested and remanded to the county sessions at Chelmsford.

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