The Witch-Finder General

...His fame increased considerably when he caused 29 witches to be hanged in a batch...

...the doors of theaters and houses of ill repute were firmly closed...

...He also tells about one of Hopkins's most unfortunate victims, Lowis, the Vicar of Brandeston...

...However, the last time this ceremony was performed in England—at Halsted, in Essex, in the 1860s—the old man who endured it sank and died from shock and exposure the following day...

...Little is known of him before 1644?three years before his death—when he made his name by denouncing seven or eight old women in the Manning-tree neighborhood as witches...

...Parliament appointed a commission, which, after journeying to Suffolk, rebuked a parson who had spoken against the witch-finders and made him retract his statements from the pulpit...

...in lonely country districts, isolated phenomena persisted down to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries...

...Contemporary prints depict him as robust and thick-set, with a mustache and pointed beard, and curling locks falling down to his shoulders...

...An early eighteenth-century writer named Baxter claims that Hopkins cheated the Devil by stealing his memorandum book, in which were written the names of all England's witches...

...while masquerading in the uniform of our ideals, he introduces into the heart of our camp those same inferior moral values that we are striving to combat...

...He replied to the allegation with his pamphlet on The Discoverie of Witches, published in May of that year...

...their principal enemies of the Left, the Puritans, were embarrassed by extremist splinter groups like the anarchistic Diggers and the communistic Levellers...

...Everyone was expected to pass the day in the bosom of his family, singing psalms and reading the Scriptures...

...It has long been the fashion, particularly in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to mock at the ignorance of our unenlightened forebears, and to deplore the cruel, superstitious practice of persecuting witches...

...It is interesting to note that in England, unlike Scotland, witches were usually hung...

...It was thought that during this time her imps must return to her through the keyhole of the door, and that, should she be allowed to lie down, the devil would come to strengthen her and frighten her tormentors...

...allegiances were confused...

...By 1647, public feeling was hardening against Hopkins...

...See reproduction on page 17...

...The majority of the "Suffolk witches" executions took place in 1645 and 1646...

...Although seventeenth-century England and twentieth-century America have more points of difference than of similarity, the comparison is valid insofar as it stresses the figure of a "strong man" using popular emotions and frustrations for his own ends...

...As a final test...

...Edmunds Bury" which resulted in the execution of a great many witches...

...Hopkins's methods were crude and effective...

...It then caused sermons to be preached in the churches of "St...

...Accompanied by a man and a woman who served as his assistants, the lawyer traveled on horseback from town to town in many parts of Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk and Huntingdonshire...

...The magistrates were impressed by his skill in ferreting out subversion, and the witches were duly hung...

...At the Norfolk Assizes, in 1647, Hopkins was himself accused of witchcraft...

...For visiting a town to rid it of witches, or to give it a clean bill of health, he charged 20 shillings, plus travel expenses for himself and his two assistants...

...For fear of appearing to be "Papists," the least religious people sat through sermons which the preachers, themselves anxious to demonstrate their conformity, made extraordinarily long and insipid...

...A Huntingdonshire preacher named Gaul (who was himself a firm believer in witchcraft) led the attack against witch-finding in general and Mathew Hopkins in particular...

...One old woman said that she fed her imp upon oatmeal for a year and a half before she lost it...

...Unfortunately, this did not have the intended effect...

...Hutchinson also mentions a woman of Hoxne...

...One hand is on his hip, and the other grasps a stout staff, as tall as himself...

...The suspect would be stripped and searched for some trace of the "Devil's Mark," the origin of which was the Dianic custom of tattooing a small blue mark—usually on the left shoulder, but frequently elsewhere—as part of the initiation into the cult...

...If the fight for power is inevitable, our creed will still not permit us to believe that in order to gain our ends all is fair...

...The Sacre Coeur church in Paris, for example, topping the Butte of Montmartre, stands on the site of a temple of Diana where the Seine-siders observed the rites...

...He wears a high-crowned hat, cavalier-style boots with spurs, and a cloak thrown back from his shoulders...

...often his victims would come from several miles away to clear themselves of witchcraft charges...

...Banished were maypoles and morris dancers...

...On the right wing, Catholics supported a still undecapitated King Charles...

...He tied their thumbs and Iocs together and dragged them through the water in a sheet...

...The Communist who builds a concentration camp to cleanse the world from selfishness builds a concentration-camp world...

...This part of the body was supposed to be insensitive to pain thereafter, and Christian persecutors would stick pins into the victim to find the place...

...Even as late as 1949, in the secluded and medieval English village of Kettlebaston—in that same Suffolk where Mathew Hopkins hunted down his prey 300 years ago—I myself spoke with many who remembered and believed in the Kettlebaston witches...

...They were eager to affirm their loyalty by demonstrating that, whatever hue of Christianity they might embrace, they were staunchly "anti-witch...

...Patrols ranged the streets on Sunday to close up taverns and public houses...

...The witness's husband grew very indignant when he heard this and, taking his wife with him, rescued the old woman by putting the witch-finders out of doors...

...The unscrupulousness of both should be equally condemned...

...These creatures are called Jarmara, Sacke & Sugar, Newes and Vinegar Tom...

...Francis Hutchinson, in his "Essay on Witchcraft" (1719), writes: "There is one pool, not far from Halsted, which is called the Witches Pool to this day, and where great numbers were swum" I in Hopkins's time...

...The Salem witch trials, Titus Oates's "Catholic Plot" and similar past excesses are often cited...

...In our own day, the clash between Communism and the West lies in the area of power politics rather than metaphysics and therefore—for all the sound and fury?cuts less deep...

...it was practiced widely among country people and nobles alike...

...Not, of course, that this justifies Hopkins, as un-Christian a gentleman as one might hope to meet...

...At any rate, it seems certain that Hopkins did die, for the parish register of Mistley-cum-Manningtree records that on August 12, 1647 the body of Mathew Hopkins was buried at Mistley...

...He published the contents of a month's sermons in a book that did much to turn public opinion against the latter...

...Yet, the old religion died hard...

...All Western Europe is strewn with traces of the witch-cult, which was, in effect, a survival of the pre-Christian Dianic religion...

...If the Christian church had not battled against Dianism with all its strength, it would not have endured...

...They must surely have constituted a practicing coven in the latter part of the last century, though it is doubtful that they knew the origin of whatever lore they possessed...

...This example throws much light upon some of the other confessions that have Seen recorded...

...According to the account of Stearn, his male traveling companion, he died peacefully in his home from a lingering consumption...

...cocks fought and horses ran no more...

...A native of Manningtree, on the borders of Essex and Suffolk, he practiced as a lawyer in Ipswich, the nearby county capital of Suffolk...

...They gave her meat and allowed her to sleep: when she awoke, she remembered nothing of any Nan, except that she sometimes called one of her pullets by that name...

...With his reputation established, Hopkins launched his career as England's first and last "Witch-Finder General...

...Hopkins used to "swim" his victims...

...gone were fiddlers and singers...

...Sometimes, the victim was walked about naked all night until her feet were blistered...

...It was in such regions, deeply stirred by the current excitement but denied the emotional purge of battle, that popular tension was at its highest pitch...

...Nor can it be denied that "witches" did, in fact, exist...

...Unfortunately, there is some divergence of opinion on how Hopkins met his end...

...One is summoning a midget imp whom she calls "Holt...

...No attempt was made to discover if any ship had been sunk on the date in question...

...Particularly against the McCarthyite, however, should we be on our guard...

...who told him the following: The witch-finders arrived at Hoxne and starved an old woman until she confessed to having an imp called Nan...

...Others confessed that their imps had worried sheep or killed lambs...

...Onto this agitated stage stepped Mathew Hopkins...

...When Hopkins arrived in a town, local gossip would make the suspects known...

...It is clear, however, that whatever excesses were provoked in the later stages of suppression of the Dianic religion, a basic philosophical conflict affecting the whole of Western culture was involved...

...Other imps in animal form cavort in the foreground...

...But Sir Walter Scott, who briefly interested himself in Hopkins in his Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft, gives a different account: "Popular opinion was so strongly excited against Hopkins that some gentlemen seized on him, and put him to his own favorite experiment of swimming, on which, as he happened to float, he stood convicted of witchcraft, and so the country was rid of him...

...While military alarums and excursions rang through many provinces, other parts of the country took no direct part in the Civil War...

...An old Reading parson named Lowis, not far from Framlingham, was one that was hanged, who confessed that he had two imps, that one of them was always putting him to do mischief and (he being near the sea) as he saw a ship under sail, it moved him to send him to sink the ship, and he consented, and saw the ship sink before him.' Before this confession was extorted, however, the 80-year-old vicar was "run about until he was breathless" for several nights in succession...

...With the Puritans thus firmly sitting on the lid, the rural populace was ready for any distraction or legalized mischief in which they could release their unexpended emotions...

...he was "swum" and hanged as a "wizzard...

...Those who sank were not, as later writers have sometimes presumed, left to drown, but were hauled to dry land with their reputations unblemished...

...It seems fairly clear that the old women, starved and fainting, confessed to the tricks of their dogs, cats and chickens...

...Samuel Butler provided his epitaph in the poem "Hudibras," when he made reference to Hopkins the witch-finder, "Who after proved himself a witch And made a rod for his own breech" —a couplet which tends to suggest that he did not die peacefully in bed...

...The monarchy was in the process of being overthrown, while Cromwell and his Ironsides were setting up a republic—for the first and only time in British history...

...While they were neither savage nor malicious enough to set witch-hunts afoot of their own accord, a witch-hunt nevertheless provided them with sufficient vicarious satisfaction to make them collaborate with, or at least not hinder,' the persecutors...

...in Suffolk, "of great piety and virtue...

...If they sank, they were innocent...

...if they swam, they were in league with the Devil...

...Yet, these regions were controlled by the Puritans, who sternly put down as ungodly all that had traditionally made Merry England merry...

...Altogether, he is believed to have been responsible for between 80 and 100 deaths...

...The frontispiece shows Hopkins, in his habitual garb, with two old women, both seated in chairs and attended by their imps...

...All parties quoted Holy Writ to prove their cause, and public opinion was inflamed by religious and political strife...

...The 1640s were troubled times in England...

...The latest suggested parallel concerns Mathew Hopkins, the self-styled "Witch-Finder General," who flourished during the English Civil War...

...The father figure of the King, which has always acted as a catalyst not so much upon political life as upon the passions which underlie it, was overthrown...

...contrary to popular belief, no witch was ever legally burned in England, where suppression of witchcraft was notoriously lax...

...Certainly they were credited with extraordinary powers for evil, for Christian believers knew only of their reputed powers of blasting and blight, and—viewing such practices without an anthropological eye—saw in the complementary fertility rites only the last word in pagan obscenity...

...The Witch-Finder General A historical account of Mathew Hopkins, England's seventeenth-century witch-hunter, who played on popular emotions for his own ends By Keith Irvine Comparisons are frequently drawn between what Europeans habitually dub "the Communist witchhunt now sweeping the United States" and persecutions of other minorities in other days and lands...

...The other is evidently in the full flood of confession, for a balloon issuing from her mouth reads: "My imps' names are 1. Ilemauzar, 2. Pyewackett, 3. Pecke in the Crowne [evidently a chicken's name], and 4. Griezzell Greedigutt...

...The ends do not justify the means, because, in the last analysis, ends and means are the same...

...In 1645, remonstrance was made in Parliament against the cruelty of the witch trials, which had broken out chiefly in Suffolk and the adjoining counties, although other parts of the country were similarly affected...

...In seventeenth-century England, therefore, when theological strife was agitating the populace and threatening to tear the community apart, almost all were ready to turn against the half-forgotten group of subversives in their midst...

...The McCarthyite who, to cleanse the world from Communism, acts on suspicion builds a world of suspicion...

...If the victim failed to confess, she was kept without food and forbidden to lie down for 24 hours...

...The contemporary playwright Christopher Fry uses some of the very same names in his play The Lady's Not for Burning...

...Every old woman," wrote Gaul, "with a wrinkled face, a furred brow, a gobber tooth, a squint eye, a squeaking voyce, or a scolding tongue, having a rugged coate on her back, a skull-cap on her head, a spindle in her hand, and a dog or cat by her side, is not only suspected but pronounced for a witch...

...The flames of this long-enduring dionysiac religion were stamped out by the Church in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and the surviving sparks were doused in popular witch-hunts...