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Hopkins, Matthew, -1647We have 1 book for this author.
 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", though this was not a title ever bestowed by Parliament, conducting witch-hunts in the counties of Suffolk, Essex, Norfolk and other eastern counties of England. Matthew Hopkins, born in Great Wenham, Suffolk, was a lawyer or lawyer's clerk, 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 overheard various women discussing their meetings with the Devil in March 1644 in Manningtree, a village near Colchester, where he was living at the time. 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 and special needles, looking for the Devil's mark that was supposed to be dead to all feeling and would not bleed. It was believed that the witch's familiar would drink their blood from the mark as milk from a teat. Hopkins and his co-worker John Stearne, together with female assistants, were well paid for their work, earning £20 from one visit to Stowmarket, Suffolk, which was then more than a year's wages for most people. Samuel Butler's satire Hudibras commented on Hopkins's activity, saying:
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. However, it is believed by most historians that Hopkins actually died of illness (possibly tuberculosis) in his home. The parish records of Manningtree in Essex record his burial in August of 1647. Cultural depictions
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This biographical information was gathered from the Matthew_Hopkins page, courtesy of the Wikipedia project. BooksThe Discovery of Witches |
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