Matthew Hopkins

Between 1644 and 1647 Matthew Hopkins and John Stearne travelled through Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk and neighbouring counties offering, for payment, to identify witches. In about three years they produced the largest concentration of witch prosecutions in English history.

The timing is not incidental. England was in civil war. The assize circuits that normally brought experienced central judges into the counties had been disrupted, and local magistrates were acting with less supervision than usual. Into that gap walked two men with a service to sell and a technique that always found something.

The technique had two parts. The first was the search: a suspect was stripped and examined for a mark said to be insensible to pain, where a familiar spirit had fed. On an elderly body, moles, warts, scars and skin tags are not scarce, and a searcher who expects to find one will. The second was watching: the suspect was kept awake, often seated on a stool, sometimes for days, while observers waited for a familiar to appear. Prolonged sleep deprivation produces confusion, suggestibility and hallucination, and eventually the watchers would see something, or the suspect would.

Neither method can produce a negative result. That is the whole of it. Hopkins did not need to be a cynic or a believer, and historians argue about which he was; the procedure returned the answer he was paid for either way.

Hopkins published a short pamphlet in 1647 defending his methods against objections, and it is a primary source of real value, provided it is read beside the surviving assize and gaol records rather than instead of them. Set against those records it does not hold up. The pamphlet presents a careful investigator answering reasonable queries. The records show chains of accusation running out from one confession to the next, whole villages implicated, and defendants held in gaol conditions that killed some of them before they reached a court.

How many died is disputed and should not be quoted as settled. Scholarly estimates run from about a hundred upward, while much higher totals circulate in popular accounts with little behind them. Some assize files are lost, gaol deaths are recorded unevenly, and the surviving papers are incomplete. What is not disputed is the concentration: whatever the true figure, it happened in three years in a few counties.

Resistance grew. Some clergy and magistrates challenged the methods in print and in court, and the campaign wound down under that pressure as much as anything else. Hopkins died in 1647, most probably of consumption, and was buried at Mistley. The popular story that he was himself accused, swum and hanged as a witch is a later legend with no contemporary support.

He also called himself Witchfinder General. No authority ever gave him that title, and no such office existed. It was a piece of self-description that has outlived every correction.