Bury St Edmunds witch trials

A report was carried to the Parliament that the witch-hunters were extracting confessions through torture; therefore, a special commission of oyer and terminer was formed, to ensure a fair trial.

[13] According to John Stearn(e),[14] known at various times as the witch–hunter,[15][16] and "witch pricker",[17] associate to Matthew Hopkins, in his book A Confirmation and Discovery of Witchcraft, there were one hundred and twenty others in gaol awaiting trial; of these 17 were men.

[20] Following a three-week adjournment made necessary by the advancing King's Army,[21] the second sitting of the court resulted in 68 other "condemnations";[21][22] though reports say "mass executions of sixty or seventy witches".

[23][24] Both Hopkins and Stearne treated the search for witches and their trials as military campaigns, as shown in their choice of language in both seeking support for and reporting their endeavours.

[25] After the trial and execution the Moderate Intelligencer, a parliamentary paper published during the English Civil War, in an editorial of 4–11 September 1645, expressed unease with the affairs in Bury: But whence is it that Devils should choose to be conversant with silly Women that know not their right hands from their left, is the great wonder ...

[28]Decrying the controversial ("so much controverted") nature of views on witchcraft and witch-phobia, even during the 17th century, the original pamphlet about the proceedings in 1662 A Tryal of Witches was only printed anonymously, and not until twenty years later.

The trial began on 10 March 1662,[30] when two elderly widows, Rose Cullender and Amy Duny (or Deny or Denny), living in Lowestoft, were accused of witchcraft by their neighbours and faced 13 charges of the bewitching of several young children between the ages of a few months to 18 years old, resulting in one death.

[33] The charge of witchcraft was first brought against them by a Lowestoft merchant, Samuel Pacy,[34] who claimed that both women had separately called at his house to purchase herring, but had been upset to be turned away.

[36] They were tried at the Assize held in Bury St Edmunds under the auspices of the Witchcraft Act 1603,[37] by a well-respected judge Sir Matthew Hale, Lord Chief Baron of the Exchequer.

[41][42] He had expressed his belief in the existence of witches twenty years earlier,[41] and that only: "they that doubt of these, do not only deny them, but spirits; and are obliquely, and upon consequence a sort not of infidels, but atheists"[43] in his work Religio Medici, published in 1643: ... how so many learned heads should so far forget their metaphysics, and destroy the ladder and scale of creatures, as to question the existence of spirits: for my part, I have ever believed, and do now know, that there are witches;According to the pamphlet, the judge instructed the jury they only "had two things to enquire after.

[53] In a book published in 1718, Francis Hutchinson, a minister at the parish in Bury St Edmunds, re-visits these trials in taking up the cause of the accused.

But they make themselves ridiculous, that they might lay blame upon this poor woman.The last was in 1694 when Lord Chief Justice Sir John Holt, "who did more than any other man in English history to end the prosecution of witches",[58] forced the acquittal of Mother Munnings' of Hartis (Hartest[59]) on charges of prognostications causing death.