Matthew Hopkins

The Witchfinder General

Few names in the history of English witchcraft carry the darkness of Matthew Hopkins, the self-styled Witchfinder General whose brief career helped unleash the most savage witch-hunt England ever experienced. For little more than a year, during the chaos of the English Civil War, Hopkins and his associate John Stearne travelled through East Anglia searching for those they believed had entered into covenants with the Devil. Behind them came accusation, imprisonment, forced confession and the gallows. By the time the panic subsided, hundreds had been investigated and more than a hundred men and women may have died within the wider witch-hunt they helped create.

Hopkins remains an unsettling figure because he was neither an inquisitor sent from Rome nor an official executioner armed with extraordinary legal powers. His campaign was never formally sanctioned by Parliament. He operated instead in the confused territory between popular fear and lawful authority, invited into communities by magistrates and local officials who believed that witches were living among them. The title by which history remembers him, Witchfinder General, gave an impression of national authority that he did not actually possess. What he did possess was something potentially more dangerous: the confidence of frightened communities convinced that Satan had concealed his servants among their neighbours.

The Obscure Man from Suffolk

Very little can be established with certainty about Hopkins before the witch-hunts. He was the son of James Hopkins, a minister at Great Wenham in Suffolk. Older accounts describe Matthew as a lawyer who practised unsuccessfully at Ipswich before moving to Manningtree in Essex, although firm evidence for a legal career is lacking. By the winter of 1644 and 1645 he was living at Manningtree, a small settlement close to the Suffolk border, and it was there that his name suddenly emerged from obscurity.

England was then tearing itself apart. The Civil War had divided communities politically and religiously, traditional structures of authority had been disrupted, disease and poverty were widespread, and the struggle between Parliament and the Crown was interpreted by intensely religious minds as part of a much greater war between God and Satan. East Anglia was strongly associated with the Parliamentarian and Puritan cause, and the atmosphere proved extraordinarily receptive to fears that the Devil was working through secret enemies hidden inside ordinary villages.

Witchcraft accusations were not invented by Hopkins. They had existed in England for generations and usually grew from personal relationships in which illness, death, failed charity, quarrels and unexplained misfortune gradually became interpreted as supernatural attack. What Hopkins provided was a mechanism capable of turning those old suspicions into something much larger. Once one accused person began naming others, the hunt could spread from house to house and village to village.

Elizabeth Clarke and the Familiars

The first great outbreak centred upon Elizabeth Clarke of Manningtree, a disabled woman who had lost the use of one leg and was already vulnerable within her community. In 1645 she was accused of causing supernatural harm and fell into the hands of Hopkins, Stearne and the local authorities. Surviving Essex records show that Clarke was eventually indicted for bewitching a child, found guilty and hanged.

Her interrogation created the pattern that would follow. Clarke was subjected to prolonged watching and deprivation of sleep while her investigators waited for the appearance of the supernatural beings believed to serve her. Eventually she confessed, and an extraordinary menagerie of spirits entered the written record. Hopkins described familiars appearing under names such as Holt, Jarmara, Vinegar Tom, Sack and Sugar, and Newes, assuming forms that resembled cats, dogs, rabbits and other creatures. Further examinations produced even stranger names, including Pyewacket, Ilemauzar, Pecke in the Crowne and Griezzell Greedigutt.

To Hopkins these were not fantasies, animals or hallucinations. They were manifestations of the Devil’s kingdom.

The familiar was central to the English conception of witchcraft. Unlike the enormous continental mythology of nocturnal Sabbaths and airborne armies of witches, English accusations often concentrated upon intimate spirits that supposedly entered the witch’s household and performed malicious tasks in return for blood. Cats, dogs, rabbits and strange composite creatures became evidence of an invisible infernal world existing beside ordinary domestic life.

Clarke began naming other women. They named still others, and the circle expanded with terrifying speed. At the Essex assizes in the summer of 1645, thirty-six women were tried for witchcraft. Nineteen were executed, nine died in prison, and others remained incarcerated years afterwards. What had begun as suspicion surrounding a handful of people in Manningtree had become an epidemic of accusation.

Searching for the Devil’s Mark

Hopkins believed that a covenant with Satan could leave physical evidence upon the human body. Suspects were therefore stripped and searched for unusual growths, scars, insensitive areas and other blemishes that might be interpreted as the place from which a familiar spirit sucked blood.

His own Discovery of Witches reveals the sinister logic behind the examination. Hopkins argued that certain marks could be distinguished from ordinary physical abnormalities because of their location, appearance and supposed insensitivity. A pin, needle or awl might be thrust into a suspected mark, and the absence of pain or blood could be treated as evidence that the mark was unnatural. Women were commonly examined by female searchers or matrons, while men could be searched in the presence of other men.

The procedure transformed the body into a map upon which guilt could always be discovered. A mole, scar, haemorrhoid, skin tag, nipple or unexplained blemish could acquire a demonic meaning once investigators had already decided that Satan had touched the person before them.

The horror of Hopkins’s system lay partly in its circularity. A witch was expected to possess a Devil’s mark because demonological theory said witches bore such marks. Once something resembling a mark was discovered, its existence was taken as confirmation that the theory had been correct.

Watching, Walking and the Denial of Sleep

Hopkins’s most effective weapon may not have been the needle but exhaustion. Accused witches were subjected to watching, during which they were prevented from sleeping while observers waited for their familiars to appear. When suspects attempted to rest, they could be forced to sit upright or made to walk around the room.

Hopkins later tried to minimise the brutality of this practice, claiming that excessive abuses had been committed by others and that the method was eventually abandoned after magistrates and judges objected. Yet his own defence acknowledges that suspects had indeed been kept awake and walked during the early hunts. One contemporary accusation against the witchfinders was brutally specific: victims had been walked until their feet blistered and then driven into confession.

Sleep deprivation destroys concentration, judgement and resistance. After nights without proper rest, surrounded by people demanding descriptions of demons, pacts and familiars, an accused person could enter precisely the altered mental condition most likely to produce the extraordinary confession the interrogators expected.

Hopkins could then point to the confession as proof.

Swimming the Witch

Even more notorious was the swimming test. A suspect could be bound and lowered or thrown into water. According to the supernatural reasoning behind the ordeal, a witch had renounced Christian baptism and therefore the sacred element of water would refuse to receive the guilty person. Floating could thus be interpreted as evidence of witchcraft.

Hopkins invoked the authority of King James VI and I’s Daemonologie in defence of the belief. Yet opposition grew rapidly, and even Hopkins eventually conceded that the practice had been condemned by divines and claimed that it would no longer be used. His pamphlet nevertheless admits that accused witches had been swum and that some floated while others sank.

The test contained a cruel absurdity. To sink was to risk drowning; to float was to become more deeply suspected of serving Satan.

The Witchfinder’s Business

Hopkins insisted that he was not roaming the countryside looking for employment but travelled only when communities summoned him. There is truth in the fact that local authorities invited the witchfinders. Great Yarmouth, for example, formally sought Hopkins’s services to discover suspected witches within the town. His success therefore cannot be explained by one predatory individual alone. Magistrates, clergy, constables, neighbours, witnesses and juries all participated in creating the machinery of persecution.

Nevertheless, money followed the witchfinders wherever they went. Hopkins defended himself by claiming that he demanded only twenty shillings from a town to maintain himself, his company and three horses. Surviving records tell a less modest story. Stowmarket paid £23 for his services and travelling expenses, an enormous sum at a time when an ordinary labourer’s daily earnings could be counted in pence. Financial accusations consequently became part of the growing hostility towards him.

There was an unavoidable corruption within the arrangement. Communities were paying a man to discover witches. Returning from a town having discovered none could hardly demonstrate the extraordinary expertise upon which his reputation depended.

John Lowes

Not all of Hopkins’s victims fitted the stereotype of an impoverished elderly woman. Among the most disturbing cases was John Lowes, the elderly clergyman of Brandeston in Suffolk who had served his parish for decades.

Lowes was subjected to watching and prolonged exhaustion before confessing to extraordinary acts of witchcraft. He was said to have admitted possessing familiar spirits and sending one of them to destroy a ship at sea. He was eventually hanged. Later accounts remembered him reading the Anglican burial service for himself before his execution, one final act of a clergyman walking towards a grave created by accusations of communion with the Devil.

The case exposes the machinery of the panic particularly clearly. Once exhausted prisoners began confessing, their statements produced precisely the supernatural world the interrogators already believed existed. Familiars appeared, Devil’s pacts were remembered, animals were bewitched, children sickened through magic and neighbours were named as fellow servants of Satan.

The confessions then became evidence that the hunt had been necessary.

The Devil’s Secret Book

By 1647, Hopkins himself had begun to acquire something resembling a supernatural reputation.

One rumour claimed that no ordinary man could possibly recognise witches with such success. Hopkins must therefore be a sorcerer himself. According to an even stranger accusation, he had encountered the Devil and stolen a secret book in which Satan had written the names of all the witches in England.

The story became famous enough that Hopkins addressed it directly in The Discovery of Witches. He denied possessing any supernatural ability to identify witches and insisted that his knowledge came from experience rather than sorcery. The accusation is nevertheless revealing. The witchfinder had entered the same imaginative world that he had helped create. If hidden diabolical conspiracies explained inexplicable events, then the apparently supernatural success of the man discovering them also demanded an explanation.

The hunter was beginning to resemble the hunted.

Opposition to Hopkins

Resistance intensified during 1646. The clergyman John Gaule, minister of Great Staughton in Huntingdonshire, attacked irresponsible witchfinding in his Select Cases of Conscience Touching Witches and Witchcrafts. Judges and other authorities became increasingly suspicious of techniques such as swimming and coerced confession. Hopkins was also confronted with accusations that he tortured vulnerable people and enriched himself from the panic.

His Discovery of Witches, published in 1647, reads partly as a handbook of witchfinding but also as a defence mounted by a man whose methods had become difficult to justify. He denied that confessions obtained directly through torture should be considered valid while simultaneously acknowledging that watching, walking and swimming had occurred during the investigations.

By then, the great East Anglian panic was collapsing. The courts were becoming less receptive, local opposition was growing and the extraordinary momentum that had carried accusations from Manningtree across several counties could no longer be sustained.

How Many Died?

The exact number will probably never be known because the surviving records are incomplete. Modern research indicates that somewhere between approximately 250 and 300 people were caught up in the East Anglian persecutions associated with Hopkins and Stearne, while around one hundred or somewhat more were executed.

That number needs to be understood in the context of English witch-hunting as a whole. England executed far fewer alleged witches than some territories on the European continent, and historians commonly estimate roughly 500 executions for witchcraft across the entire English witch-hunting period. Hopkins’s brief campaign may therefore have contributed to around one fifth or even one quarter of the English total.

His career was terrifying not merely because of how many died, but because of how quickly it happened. A wave of accusation that began around Manningtree moved through Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk, Cambridgeshire, Huntingdonshire and neighbouring areas before burning itself out almost as rapidly as it had begun.

The Death of the Witchfinder

The historical Matthew Hopkins did not suffer the spectacular punishment that later generations wanted for him. He was buried at Mistley on 12 August 1647, and his associate John Stearne subsequently stated:

“I am certain (notwithstanding whatsoever hath been said of him) he died peacefully at manningtree, after a long sickensse of a consumption, as many of his generation had done before him, without any trouble of conscience for what he had done, as was falsely reported of him.”

The burial register survives and confirms that Matthew Hopkins, son of James Hopkins, minister of Wenham, was buried at Mistley on that date. The evidence therefore strongly favours death from illness rather than execution.

Folklore refused to grant him such an ordinary ending.

Stories soon claimed that Hopkins had finally been accused of witchcraft himself. In the most satisfying version of the legend, an angry crowd bound him exactly as he had bound his victims and subjected him to the swimming test. Some versions claimed he drowned, while others said that he floated, thereby condemning himself according to his own method. Another tradition returned to the mysterious Devil’s Book, claiming that Hopkins had obtained the secret roll of England’s witches through sorcery and was finally exposed as one of Satan’s servants himself.

There is no reliable evidence that any of this happened. The legend survives because it supplies something the historical record does not: supernatural revenge.

The Ghost of Matthew Hopkins

The folklore surrounding Hopkins did not end with his supposed ordeal. Local tradition maintains that his ghost still wanders around Mistley Pond, appearing in seventeenth-century clothing near the water where legend says he once endured the same test he imposed upon others. Other traditions place his apparition elsewhere around Mistley and Manningtree.

Whether anyone has ever encountered such an apparition belongs to the uncertain territory between folklore, memory and haunting. Yet the story possesses a grim appropriateness. Matthew Hopkins spent his short career insisting that invisible beings could cross into the ordinary world, that spirits could appear in houses, that animals might conceal demons and that unseen evil left traces upon human flesh. Centuries later, folklore transformed Hopkins himself into one of those restless presences.

The Witchfinder General became a ghost.

The Dark Legacy of the Witchfinder General

Matthew Hopkins did not create England’s belief in witchcraft, nor did he possess the power to condemn or execute people entirely by himself. His success required magistrates willing to issue warrants, communities willing to accuse their neighbours, witnesses prepared to testify, searchers willing to inspect bodies, gaolers willing to hold prisoners and courts willing to convict them. This wider participation makes the story more disturbing, not less.

Hopkins understood how fear could be organised. Once a village accepted the premise that servants of Satan were concealed within it, almost anything could become evidence. A blemish became a Devil’s mark, a pet became a familiar, a quarrel became a curse, an illness became maleficium, exhaustion became confession and confession produced further names.

The true darkness of the Hopkins witch-hunts therefore lies beyond one man. It lies in the moment when an entire community begins interpreting ordinary human beings through a mythology of hidden evil and finds, with every new accusation, exactly the monsters it has been taught to expect.

Enter the World Behind the Witch Trials

Matthew Hopkins hunted for witches, familiars, Devil’s marks and infernal pacts because he believed an invisible world existed behind ordinary reality. The tragedy is that people died because of how that world was interpreted. If you want to understand the actual traditions of witchcraft, demonology, spirit contact, grimoires, magical practice and the beliefs that terrified generations of our ancestors, superficial history is not enough. Enter the Occult World Mystery School and study the material that lies beneath the myths, from historical witchcraft and demonology to ritual magic, spirits and forbidden magical texts. Stop standing outside the door reading fragments while others go deeper. There are thousands of spirits, gods, demons, magical systems, grimoires and forgotten traditions waiting beyond it, and if the hidden history of figures like Hopkins fascinates you, then you have already found the threshold.