Matthew Hopkins
[20] Although James Hopkins had died in 1634,[14] when the iconoclast William Dowsing, commissioned in 1643 by the Parliamentarian Earl of Manchester[21] "for the destruction of monuments of idolatry and superstition", visited the parish in 1645 he observed that "there was nothing to reform".
[39] According to his book The Discovery of Witches,[24] Hopkins began his career as a witch-finder after he overheard women discussing their meetings with the Devil in March 1644 in Manningtree.
During this period, excepting Middlesex and chartered towns, no records show any person charged of witchcraft being sentenced to death other than by the judges of the assizes.
[41] Hopkins and Stearne, accompanied by the women who performed the pricking, were soon travelling over eastern England, claiming to be officially commissioned by Parliament to uncover and prosecute witches.
[47] 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.
Methods of investigating witchcraft drew heavy inspiration from the Daemonologie of King James I, which was directly cited in Hopkins's The Discovery of Witches.
Therefore, "witch prickers" were employed, who pricked the accused with knives and special needles looking for such marks, normally after the suspect had been shaved of all body hair.
Hopkins and his company quickly ran into opposition after their work began,[40] but one of his main antagonists was John Gaule, vicar of Great Staughton in Huntingdonshire.
Gaule hearing of this letter wrote his publication Select Cases of Conscience touching Witches and Witchcrafts; London, (1646)[57] – dedicated to Colonel Walton of the House of Commons[54] – and began a programme of Sunday sermons to suppress witch-hunting.
[61] During the year following the publication of Hopkins's book, trials and executions for witchcraft began in the New England colonies with the hanging of Alse Young of Windsor, Connecticut, on May 26, 1647, followed by the conviction of Margaret Jones.
As described in the journal of Governor John Winthrop, the evidence assembled against Margaret Jones was gathered by the use of Hopkins's techniques of "searching" and "watching".
[67] In the words of historian Malcolm Gaskill, Matthew Hopkins "lives on as an anti-hero and bogeyman – utterly ethereal, endlessly malleable".
[68] According to historian Rossell Hope Robbins,[69] Hopkins "acquired an evil reputation which in later days made his name synonymous with fingerman or informer paid by authorities to commit perjury".
[70] What historian James Sharpe has characterised as a "pleasing legend" grew up around the circumstances of Hopkins's death, according to which he was subjected to his own swimming test and executed as a witch, but the parish registry at Mistley confirms his burial there.
