Matthew Hopkins and the witch-hunts of 1645–47
A Country at War
In 1645 England was midway through the Civil War between King Charles I and Parliament. Local government was shaken; many Justices of the Peace had been driven from their posts; ordinary travel was disrupted by armies marching, requisitioning food and pressing men into service. In the eastern counties — Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk and Cambridgeshire — Parliament’s authority was strongest, and the local population was overwhelmingly Puritan. It was in this combustible mixture — war, weakened authority, hardline Protestant belief — that the largest English witch-hunt of the early modern period broke out.
Witchcraft itself had been a capital crime in England since the 1542 Witchcraft Act, with stiffer Acts following in 1563 and 1604. James I’s own book Daemonologie (1597) treated witches as a real and active threat, ordered by the Devil. By the 1640s the legal framework, the religious anxiety and the cheap printed pamphlet press were all in place. What was missing — until 1645 — was a determined witch-finder willing to travel from village to village.
The 1645–47 witch-hunts were concentrated in East Anglia because three conditions overlapped there: the chaos of the Civil War weakened normal court oversight, Puritan belief was strong, and Matthew Hopkins was a private witch-finder willing to travel across counties for payment.
Matthew Hopkins, ‘Witchfinder General’
Matthew Hopkins was the son of a Suffolk minister, in his mid-twenties, with no formal legal or religious training. From the spring of 1645 he and his colleague John Stearne began travelling the towns of Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk and Cambridgeshire, offering their services as witch-finders to local magistrates and town corporations. They styled themselves ‘Witchfinder General’, but this was a self-given title, not an official appointment. No king and no Parliament ever named Hopkins to any post.
Hopkins was paid by the towns that hired him, sometimes well over £20 per visit — many times a labourer’s annual wage. The economic incentive was therefore considerable: the more ‘witches’ were found, the more towns paid. In just over two years Hopkins and Stearne were responsible for the prosecution of around 250 women and men, of whom roughly 100 were executed by hanging. This was more witchcraft executions than England had seen in the whole previous century.
Students often describe Hopkins as if he held a royal or parliamentary commission. He did not. The title ‘Witchfinder General’ was Hopkins’s own invention. He worked as a private contractor, paid by individual towns and sometimes by Justices of the Peace. The fact that he could operate at all reflects how weak central oversight had become during the Civil War. As the war ended and judicial authority was restored, Hopkins’s methods came under sceptical scrutiny and he was driven out of business. Locate Hopkins in his Civil War context; he never held a state post.
Methods: Watching, Pricking and the Swimming Test
Hopkins’s methods were designed to extract a confession or to manufacture ‘evidence’ that a jury would accept. Three were especially common. The first was watching: a suspect was tied cross-legged on a stool and kept awake for several days while observers watched for the arrival of an ‘imp’ or familiar (a small animal believed to be the Devil’s servant). Sleep deprivation eroded resistance and produced confessions that satisfied the court.
The second was pricking. Witch-finders pushed pins into moles, scars or birthmarks on the suspect’s body looking for the Devil’s mark — a spot that supposedly felt no pain or did not bleed. Some witch-finders used pins with retractable tips that gave the appearance of painless prodding. The third was the swimming test: a suspect was tied with the right thumb to the left big toe and dropped into water. Floating was guilt (the water rejected the witch); sinking was innocence (sometimes too late). All three methods were defended at the time by Hopkins and Stearne in printed books, but were attacked even by contemporaries as unreliable.
A common error is to picture English witches dying at the stake. They did not. In England, witches convicted under the 1542, 1563 and 1604 Acts were hanged like other felons. Burning was reserved for heresy and for women guilty of certain forms of treason. It was Scotland and Continental Europe that burnt witches. Get this exactly right: in England, hanging; on the Continent and in Scotland, burning. The two systems were genuinely different.
Why the Hunts Targeted Poor, Older Women
Most of the accused were women, most over fifty, and most poor — widows or single women living alone, often dependent on their neighbours’ charity. Several factors converged on this group. Religious belief blamed the Devil for misfortune, and women were widely regarded by Puritan ministers as more open to his temptation. Economic stress meant villagers resented the demands of poor neighbours; refusing alms and then suffering misfortune (a sick child, dead cattle) made it tempting to blame the woman one had refused.
The printing press amplified all of this. Cheap pamphlets — sometimes printed within days of a trial — carried sensational stories of witches who killed cattle, raised storms or made men impotent. A villager who never met a witch could buy a pamphlet describing one. By 1645 there was a ready-made template that fed into accusations and shaped what magistrates expected to find.
Why the Hunts Ended
By 1647 the hunts were collapsing. Three reasons stand out. First, cost: towns balked at the bills Hopkins ran up — food, lodging, fees and the expense of trials. Second, scepticism: educated observers, including the minister John Gaule of Great Staughton, denounced Hopkins’s methods in print. Gaule’s 1646 sermons argued that watching, pricking and swimming proved nothing in law and that anyone could be made to confess by enough sleep deprivation. Third, the personal collapse of Hopkins himself, who was ill and died in 1647, probably of tuberculosis, soon after publishing The Discovery of Witches.
After 1647 English witchcraft prosecutions declined sharply, although the law remained on the statute book. By the late seventeenth century, judges routinely refused to convict on the kinds of evidence Hopkins had produced. The Witchcraft Act was finally repealed in 1736 and replaced with a new Act that punished those claiming to be witches as fraudsters, not capital criminals. Witchcraft was no longer regarded as a real crime in English law.
The 1645–47 hunts produced around 100 hangings — more than England had seen in the previous century. They ended because of cost, growing legal scepticism (notably John Gaule’s 1646 sermons) and the death of Matthew Hopkins himself in 1647.