An interview with Malcolm Gaskill
This interview with Malcolm Gaskill (MG) was carried out by October Films (OF) for the Channel 4 programme Secret History: The Witchfinders. Dr Gaskill is a fellow and director of studies at Churchill College, Cambridge, specialising in British social and cultural history, especially the history of witchcraft and popular beliefs. He is the author of Crime and Mentalities in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2000) and Hellish Nell: The last of England's witches (Fourth Estate, 2001).
Contents
• Enter Hopkins and Stearne
• Witches and the early modern mindset
• The campaign spreads
• The typical victim
• The worst witch hunt
• Infamy and criticism
OF: How did Matthew Hopkins and John Stearne get involved in the story?
MG: For a man like John Rivett to make a formal accusation of witchcraft in the 17th century was not in itself unusual. What makes it unusual on this occasion is that he's backed by a number of local gentlemen, two of whom stand out from the crowd.
Now, these are intriguing, historically mysterious figures. John Stearne is in his 30s, a settled householder, married, with property in East Anglia. Matthew Hopkins is younger, in his early 20s, son of a Suffolk clergyman, possibly with some legal training.
But what is really unusual on this occasion is that this appearance before the magistrates in March 1645 actually marks the debut of these two men's short but vicious career in professional witchfinding.
OF: From the evidence, what conclusions can we draw about the kind of people Hopkins and Stearne were?
MG: Well, the evidence for Hopkins' and Stearne's personalities is very sketchy. But from reading the records that survive, we do gain fleeting impressions of their characters. Hopkins, a physically slight man, was a hothead – edgy, impetuous, devious, but charismatic and persuasive. He was also very energetic, arrogant, and ostentatious in his manner and dress. John Stearne, by contrast, is more dogged and bookish and usually content to play Dr Watson to Hopkins' Sherlock Holmes.
So while Hopkins led – negotiating, planning, interrogating – Stearne was recording and articulating the paranoia that would fuel later events.
Witches and the early modern mindset
OF: When you read all these depositions, all witnessing the fact that a group of people claim to have seen very bizarre things, how can we understand what is going on?
MG: One of the problems when you study the documents and records of witchcraft is that the modern mind finds these things rather fantastic. And so there's a tendency, I think, for people today to think that these were just complete fabrications, just excuses for getting rid of people they didn't like, or that somehow these people were gripped by some kind of collective hysteria.
So these are two possible options. But I think that the way to cut through this is to recognise that, in the 1640s, the sincere belief in harmful witchcraft was endemic. And so these people who were making the accusations might have been hysterics, or they might have been malicious plotters. But these beliefs were part of people's mindset. It was actually much more natural for ordinary villagers in the 17th century to assume that there were people out there who could use harmful magic to damage their livestock, to kill their children or to actually kill them themselves.
Hopkins himself is not so much afraid of witches as disgusted by the covenant that he believes they form with Satan. This is a sort of a diabolical mirror image of the very positive covenant that good Protestants are supposed to form with Christ.
And so evidence of this covenant is what Hopkins thought that he'd discovered from Elizabeth Clark, and from that, he was actually spurred on to uncover the network of witches that he believed existed at Manningtree [Essex]. And to do this, he put Elizabeth Clark under pressure in order to implicate another woman, Anne West, a poor widow from a neighbouring village.
OF: How did the witchcraft accusations spread out of Manningtree and into the neighbouring areas?
MG: News of the exposure of the witches at Manningtree quickly spreads in early 1645. This is taking place against a background of momentous events on the national stage. Cromwell's armies are hammering the Royalists and one town is falling after another.
With victory perhaps in sight, the processes of religious and moral cleansing take place in earnest. Now, in the predominantly Parliamentarian and Puritan villages of eastern Essex, awash with righteous anger and a sense of heightened suspicion, this means that the villagers can really get stuck in. And, for them, this moral cleansing includes a purge of witches.
The campaign spreads
OF: How did they extend their operations from Essex into Suffolk? Moving across a county boundary was a sort of milestone, I suppose.
MG: Within three months, there are 36 women in the jail cells of Colchester and Chelmsford. And from here, without any official remit, Hopkins and Stearne decide to extend their operation north across the River Stour into Suffolk, a county with even stronger Puritan traditions than Essex.
Already in 1643, Essex and Suffolk have started to root out their undesirable clergy. And the following year, a zealous Puritan farmer is appointed to smash the decorative images – superstitious and therefore devilish images – in all the churches throughout Suffolk, and is meticulous in destroying stained glass and defacing religious pictures. And so the people there, the villagers, are ripe for the next phase of religious cleansing – which is where Hopkins and Stearne come in, ready to launch their godly crusade against witches.
OF: Hopkins and Stearne are obviously very good at getting confessions out of people. But they develop their techniques?
MG: Hopkins is certainly a skilled interrogator. He knows how to use leading questions to make suspected witches incriminate themselves. Whether he does this through natural guile or through his legal training, we don't know. But he's certainly good at getting confessions.
And to make this even more effective, Hopkins and Stearne start putting suspects under intense physical and psychological pressure: depriving them of sleep, watching them for hours on end, walking them up and down until they're exhausted.
This pushes against the boundaries of what's acceptable in English law, and because of this, Hopkins is very careful about how he describes his techniques. When he arrives at a village, he's very careful, very reticent in the way that he sells this as an interrogation technique – before people actually start to accept that the ends will justify the means.
OF: Hopkins and Stearne split up, didn't they?
MG: By this stage in the operation, Hopkins and Stearne are, within their own terms, very successful, and they're thinking of new ways of covering more ground.
From what we can piece together from their movements, it seems that they split up at this point. Stearne covered the western part of Suffolk and Hopkins went east and concentrated on the region close to the coast. And it seems that they did this simply to make their operation more efficient.
The typical victim
OF: You've obviously studied a tremendous number of court depositions and so on. Do you get a sense of who a typical victim might be?
MG: Looking through all the records of the witch trials of the 16th and 17th centuries, a typical kind of accused person does tend to emerge. And this holds pretty true for the Hopkins accusations as well.
Typically an accused person would be marginal, of poor reputation, of
low social status. The kind of person, in fact, who'd be most likely to
succumb to diabolical temptation in order to improve their lot – or so
people would think.
Predominantly these are women, but what one finds among the dozens of
suspects who are crammed into Suffolk's jail cells at this time is a surprising
number of men.
OF: Can you explain what the swimming of witches involved and how it worked?
MG: Swimming witches was not a punishment – no one was supposed to drown. It was a judicial trial or ordeal. A rope would be attached round the body and the person put into the water. The idea was that, if you sank, you were innocent, and if you floated, you were guilty. The swimming was not intended to drown witches but was actually to expose their guilt through a symbolic rejection of their bodies from the water – a kind of inversion of Christian baptism.
Now, this dates back to the Dark Ages, and by the 1640s, it has long been outlawed as a superstitious and disorderly practice. But it lingers on in the decision-making processes of rural communities and brings people together in a kind of collective ritual.
The worst witch hunt
OF: Late in 1645, suddenly there seems to be a hope over the horizon for the people in prison in Suffolk. What was this?
MG: By late 1645, the 150-odd men and women in Suffolk's jail cells win a temporary reprieve. Cromwell's forces undoubtedly have the upper hand, but they can't afford to be complacent. So when news arrives in East Anglia of an approaching Royalist army, there's a sudden alert, a sudden panic, and the witch trials are suspended.
Now, we can imagine that, for the men and women in the jail cells, this must have given them hope that perhaps that they were actually going to escape the noose. But the alarm was short-lived and their hopes were dashed.
OF: After this temporary reprieve came the high-water mark of witch hunting?
MG: Towards the end of 1645, the witch hunt in Suffolk is going at full steam. What we have to realise is that all sorts of different types of people – the judiciary, constables, accusers, jailors – are working together to make these trials and executions possible. We have records of perhaps as many as 40 or 50 people being executed in one go. This is the beginning of the most intense phase of the East Anglian witch hunts.
Now we have to put this into perspective. Typically, English witchcraft prosecutions happened once a year or once every other year – a very low rate of prosecution. What we've got here is something quite unique: dozens and dozens of people who are being tried and executed. Without any doubt, this is the worst witch hunt in English history.
Infamy and criticism
OF: At this point, Hopkins and Stearne had achieved a certain degree of infamy or fame, depending on your perspective. Can you describe how this spread throughout East Anglia?
MG: By the autumn of 1646, Hopkins and Stearne have taken their war against witches out of Essex and Suffolk and into the surrounding shires: Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Huntingdonshire, Northamptonshire and, most prominently, Norfolk. It's 18 months since the witch hunt began, and with 150-odd hangings against his name, Hopkins has achieved a degree of notoriety throughout East Anglia.
But at the same time, there are many hundreds of ordinary men and women who detest the witches that they believe live in their midst, for whom Hopkins is a respectable man, even a kind of hero.
So when he arrives in the Norfolk port of King's Lynn in September 1646, he's welcomed as a kind of a godly liberator who's going to deliver them from the scourge of their witches.
OF: What opposition was there to Hopkins?
MG: During their campaign, Hopkins and Stearne have alienated various people and accumulated a certain amount of criticism. But they press on regardless.
The turning point in Hopkins' fortunes – when the criticism really coalesces – comes when a withering critique of his witch hunt is laid before the judges at the Norfolk Assizes, possibly in late 1646 or early 1647. This is probably based on John Gaul's indictment of what Hopkins and Stearne were doing.
Hopkins may himself have actually been present at the assizes, because his reply to the critique – a short pamphlet entitled The Discovery of Witches, which he wrote in May 1647 – was first published at Norwich and then subsequently in London. This very pedantic, point-by-point answer to the indictment chops logic, is full of lies and is very devious. Perhaps more than anything else, it reveals Hopkins' true colours.
The pamphlet was illustrated by a specially commissioned woodcut of Hopkins resplendent in his Geneva cloak and his stovepipe hat, his staff of authority, his flashy spurred riding boots. And there he is, interrogating witches with their various bizarre familiars cavorting before them.
The picture is headed 'MATTHEW HOPKINS, WITCHFINDER GENERAL'. This may have been a title that Hopkins invented for himself. But despite this, by this stage, behind the bombast, Hopkins was very much on the defensive.
