Matthew Hopkins

Witches disclose their familiar spirits to Matthew Hopkins

Matthew Hopkins, d. 1647, was an English witchhunter whose career flourished in the time of the English Civil War. He held, or claimed to hold, the office of "Witch-finder General" as bestowed by the Puritan Parliament, and practiced his witch-finding in Suffolk, Essex, and East Anglia.

Hopkins was a lawyer and the son of James Hopkins, a Puritan clergyman. According to his book The Discovery of Witches (not to be confused with Reginald Scot's book The Discovery of Witchcraft) he began his career as a witch-finder when he allegedly overheard various women discussing their meetings with the Devil in March of 1644, in a village near Colchester. As a result of Hopkins's accusations, nineteen alleged witches were hanged and four more died in prison.

Hopkins was soon travelling over eastern England, claiming truthfully or not to be an official specially commissioned by Parliament to uncover and prosecute witches. His witch-finding career spanned from 1644 to 1646. While torture was technically unlawful in England, he used various methods of browbeating to extract confessions from some of his victims. He used sleep deprivation as a sort of bloodless torture. He also used a "swimming" test to see if the accused would float or sink in water, the theory being that witches had renounced their baptism, so that all water would supernaturally reject them. He also employed "witch prickers" who pricked the accused with knives, looking for the Devil's mark that was supposed to be dead to all feeling and would not bleed.

On the strength of his commission, Hopkins then demanded that the communities he visited pay him for his work. He also sold fetishes he called "witch boxes" that were supposed to protect the households of their owners from sorcery.

Samuel Butler's satire Hudibras commented on Hopkins's activity, saying:

Has not this present Parliament

A Lieger to the Devil sent,

Fully impowr'd to treat about

Finding revolted witches out

And has not he, within a year,

Hang'd threescore of 'em in one shire?

Some only for not being drown'd,

And some for sitting above ground,

Whole days and nights, upon their breeches,

And feeling pain, were hang'd for witches.

And some for putting knavish tricks

Upon green geese and turky-chicks,

And pigs, that suddenly deceast

Of griefs unnat'ral, as he guest;

Who after prov'd himself a witch

And made a rod for his own breech.

The last line refers to a tradition that disgruntled villagers caught Hopkins and subjected him to his own "swimming" test: he floated, and therefore was hanged for witchcraft himself. Unfortunately, the parish records of Manningtree in Essex record his burial in August of 1647.

Links

• [1] links to text of The Discovery of Witches

Referenced By