Witchfinders by Gaskill Malcolm

Author:Gaskill, Malcolm [Gaskill, Malcolm]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781444726923
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Published: 2006-04-23T23:00:00+00:00

Women hanged, women grieving, and others looking on from the gaol. To the left two sergeants and a bellman oversee proceedings, and to the right a witchfinder is paid his fee

The intense cold held throughout January. The Thames froze over, and when the witches were being hanged at Aldeburgh, Londoners were able to walk from one side to the other of their river. In provincial towns the streets were heaped up with soiled snow, and the price of wheat escalated in the markets. The rivers that carried food to the towns were impassable, and stores of rye became a staple for many, especially the poorest.64 Conditions had been ideal for the growth of the toxic ergot fungus, and ergot poisoning may explain some symptoms of bewitchment, if by no means all; but it is not a more convincing explanation for witch-hysteria than the power of belief and fear.65

Ten months into his work, Matthew Hopkins had dealt with dozens of cases of bewitchment, all of them demonstrating just that: belief in the devil, and fear of those who tapped his strength for malevolent ends. To stop the spread of evil involved ruinous costs, of a magnitude that was beginning to make the godliest communities think twice about prosecution, and Hopkins had cut legal corners in a way that raised eyebrows in Westminster. Whether news of the east-coast trials reached London is unknown. The recorder of Yarmouth, Miles Corbett, resumed his inquisitorial work at the Committee of Examinations, and Parliament redoubled its efforts to make peace, thereby ‘putting an end to the bleeding calamities of these nations’.66 The witchfinder, meanwhile, had almost finished his work in Suffolk and by the middle of the month was riding inland, wending his way through the rutted lanes, all narrow passes and blind corners, hemmed in by thicket. On the 13th a poor labourer, William Payne, was tried for witchcraft at Beccles quarter sessions; but the north-easterly location suggests that Hopkins’ influence must have been indirect.67

Thirty miles west of Aldeburgh lay the town of Stowmarket, one of the largest in Suffolk and a model of the Reformation. The church of St Peter and St Mary had been cleared of images in the 1540s, and its sister foundation demolished because of its associations with the abbey at St Osyth. As in most godly towns, pockets of Catholicism invigorated the reformers; puritanism by its very nature thrived on opposition. William Manning, churchwarden, and Thomas Young, vicar (and sometime tutor to John Milton), had welcomed William Dowsing in 1644 and were pleased to erase an inscription from the monument recently erected by the recusant Tyrell family.68 John Stearne visited a year later and testified in person at the assizes that two men accused by their neighbours were witches, but the grand jury rejected the charges; Elizabeth Hubbard, who had confessed to maleficium within her own family, was probably hanged. William Manning and another parish officer, John Heywood, had been active in the interrogations, and reported having heard Widow Hubbard tell of her pact with the devil and a promise of money that came to nothing.

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