Even the stir and tumult of the Civil War did not suspend the persecuting activity of a degraded superstition. In 1644 eight witches of Manningtree, in Essex, were accused of holding witches’ meetings every Friday night; were searched for teats and devils’ marks, convicted, and, with twenty-nine of their fellows, hung. In the following year there were more hangings in Essex; and in Norfolk a score of witches suffered. In 1650 a woman was hung at the Old Bailey as a witch. ‘She was found to have under her armpits those marks by which witches are discovered to entertain their familiars.’ In April, 1652, Jean Peterson, the witch of Wapping, was hung at Tyburn; and in July of the same year six witches perished at Maidstone.

In 1653 Alice Bodenham, a domestic servant, was tried at Salisbury before Chief Justice Wilde, and convicted. It is not certain, however, that she was executed.

In 1658 Jane Brooks was executed for practising witchcraft on a boy of twelve, named Henry James, at Chard, in Somersetshire; in 1663 Julian Cox, at Taunton, for a similar offence.

FOOTNOTE

[43] Potts, ‘Wonderful Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster’ (1613).

THE WITCH-FINDER: MATTHEW HOPKINS.

The severe legislation against witchcraft had thus the effect—which invariably attends legislation when it becomes unduly repressive—of increasing the offence it had been designed to exterminate. It was attended, also, by another result, which is equally common—bringing to the front a number of informers who, at the cost of many innocent lives, turned it to their personal advantage. Of these witch-finders, the most notorious was Matthew Hopkins, of Manningtree, in Essex. When he first started his infamous trade, I cannot ascertain, but his success would seem to have been immediate. His earliest victims he found in his own neighbourhood. But, as his reputation grew, he extended his operations over the whole of Essex; and in a very short time, if any case of supposed witchcraft occurred, the neighbours sent for Matthew Hopkins as an acknowledged expert, whose skill would infallibly detect the guilty person.

His first appearance at the assizes was in the spring of 1645, when he accused an unfortunate old woman, named Elizabeth Clarke. To collect evidence against her, he watched her by night in a room in a Mr. Edwards’s house, in which she was illegally detained. At her trial he had the audacity to affirm that, on the third night of his watching, after he had refused her the society of one of her imps, she confessed to him that, some six or seven years before, she had given herself over to the devil, who visited her in the form of ‘a proper gentleman, with a hazel beard.’ Soon after this, he said, a little dog came in—fat, short-legged, and with sandy spots besprinkled on the white ground-colour of its tub-like body. When he prevented it from approaching the woman—who declared it was Jacmara, one of her imps—it straightway vanished. Next came a greyhound, which she called Vinegar Tom; and next a polecat. Improving in fluent and fertile mendacity, Hopkins went on to assert that, on returning home that night, about ten of the clock, accompanied by his own greyhound, he saw his dog give a leap and a bound, and hark away as if hunting a hare; and on following him, he espied a little white animal, about the size of a kitten, and observed that his greyhound stood aloof from it in fright; and by-and-by this imp or kitten danced about the dog, and, as he supposed, bit a piece from its shoulder, for the greyhound came to him shrieking and crying, and bleeding from a great wound. Hopkins further stated that, going into his yard that same night, he saw a Black Thing, shaped like a cat, but thrice as big, sitting in a strawberry-bed, with its eyes fixed upon him. When he approached it, the Thing leaped over the pale towards him, as he thought, but, on the contrary, ran quite through the yard, with his greyhound after it, to a great gate, which was underset ‘with a pair of tumbril strings,’ threw it wide open, and then vanished, while his dog returned to him, shaking and trembling exceedingly.

In these unholy vigils of his, Hopkins was accompanied by one ‘John Sterne, of Manningtree, gentleman,’ who, as a matter of course, confirmed all his statements, and added the interesting detail that the third imp was called Sack-and-Sugar. The two wretches forced their way into the house of another woman, named Rebecca West, from whom they extracted a confession that the first time she saw the devil, he came to her at night, told her he must be her husband, and finally married her! The cruel tortures to which these and so many other unhappy females were exposed must undoubtedly have told on their nervous systems, producing a condition of hysteria, and filling their minds with hallucinations, which, perhaps, may partly have been suggested by the ‘leading questions’ of the witch-finders themselves. It is to be observed that their confessions wore a striking similarity, and that all the names mentioned of the so-called imps or familiars were of a ludicrous character, such as Prick-ear, Frog, Robin, and Sparrow. Then the excitement caused by these trials so wrought on the public mind that witnesses were easily found to testify—apparently in good faith—to the evil things done by the accused, and even to swear that they had seen their familiars. Thus one man declared that, passing at daybreak by the house of a certain Anne West, he was surprised to find her door open. Looking in, he descried three or four Things, like black rabbits, one of which ran after him. He seized and tried to kill him, but in his hands the Thing seemed a mere piece of wool, which extended lengthwise without any apparent injury. Full speed he made for a neighbouring spring, in which he tried to drown him, but as soon as he put the Thing in the water, he vanished from his sight. Returning to the house, he saw Anne West standing at the door ‘in her smock,’ and asked her why she sent her imp to trouble him, but received no answer.