Original subtitles

400 years ago, one man launched a

crusade against the forces of darkness.

To people who believe literally in

magic, these are murder weapons and

they're terrifyingly effective.

>> That man was King James, the first ruler

of both Scotland and England. He

believed that Satan and a conspiracy of

witches were trying to kill him.

>> I do not know Satan, sir.

>> What powers did Satan offer you?

What diabolical promises did he make to

you?

>> He even wrote a manual on the dangers of

witchcraft.

This is the story of how one man's

paranoia sparked persecution across the

British Isles.

>> The witch hunts have to be one of the

greatest injustices ever seen in British

history. It involved hundreds, if not

thousands of women being put to death

for crimes they could never have

committed.

In this film, we reveal extraordinary

archaeological discoveries showing that

belief in witches survived the King's

Crusade.

>> They knew that it was dangerous, but if

you believe something deeply enough,

then the fact that your your life is in

danger for doing it is not going to stop

you.

In 1590, the British Isles were ruled by

two monarchs, the English Queen

Elizabeth I and King James V 6th of

Scotland.

In May of that year, James was returning

home from Denmark with his new wife,

Anne. But this honeymoon voyage turned

into a nightmare.

As the flatillaa crossed the North Sea,

an enormous storm blew up.

According to a sensational account of

the incident, the king's ship in

particular was buffeted by extreme winds

and huge waves.

>> It said that the ship behaved

differently from all the other ships in

the flatillaa that was coming across

with with the Royal ship itself. that

the winds affected it differently, that

it couldn't be controlled by the sailors

in a natural way, and therefore it was

thought that the storm must have been

caused unnaturally,

that James and Anne must be its target.

The idea that the storm had been

generated specifically to kill the royal

couple seeded a terrible fear in James'

mind.

The young king was already nervous, with

good reason.

He had powerful enemies and he had been

abandoned as a baby when his mother,

Mary, Queen of Scots, was forced to flee

the country.

James grew up in a pretty terrible

context for a young monarch. Uh, he

succeeded a mother who gets her head

hacked off an English jail. His dad's

already dead, strangled after an attempt

to blow him up. There are four guys in

charge of Scotland while James is

growing up. And all of them are either

murdered or executed or driven into

exile. And when James becomes a man,

before he leaves Scotland, there are

apparently two attempts to kidnap or

assassinate him. One of which is foiled

only by him pinning the assassin's head

under an arm and screaming for help. No

wonder he's edgy.

As James brooded on the storm that had

almost killed him, he became convinced

that this was another assassination

attempt. But this time it had been

orchestrated by sorcerers and witches.

His fear of the threat posed by

witchcraft had grown during his stay in

the Danish royal court.

Denmark is one of the intellectual

centers of witch hunting in the age. So

it's probable that he's been discussing

witches and demons with some of the most

interesting minds in Europe and come

back to Scotland interested in putting

this into practice.

There's no doubt that he's simply

reflecting a Europewide trend. This is

the very period in which witch trials

are starting to boom all over the

continent.

Witches were believed to be allies of

Satan and his demons.

In the late 16th century, fear of

Satan's power was at its height because

of hatred between rival factions in the

church. And altogether in Europe, the

period of most witch trials is that in

which Protestant and Catholic are most

at each other's throats, where the

traditional Western Christian Church is

being torn in half between waring creeds

who truly believe that the others

inspired by the devil.

The urge to eradicate evil lit fires of

hatred throughout Western Europe.

In France and Germany, tens of thousands

were sentenced to a terrible death.

>> There's one description that talks about

a forest of stakes where basically

people have just being burnt in vast

numbers. And there's a sense that the

whole thing has got out of control.

A real panic sweep certain parts of

Europe. If you want a quintessence of

horror, go to a small north German town

called Keddlinburg in 1589 where 133

women were burned alive in one day.

It's a horrifyingly painful way to die.

You're lucky if it's quick.

You only need to burn about 20 or 30

people at a time. an averagesized North

European town of the age to create the

impression of a forest of flaming stakes

and to ensure that if there's the

slightest breeze blowing the houses on

the Leewood side of the square opposite

the wind are going to be coated from the

cobblestones, the pavement, the roofs,

the human fat.

In 1590, the full horrors of mass witch

purges had not reached the British

Isles.

But King James was about to change that.

The storm that had almost sunk his ship

convinced James that Satan was trying to

destroy him.

The king now unleashed a war on satanic

terror that would bring persecution and

death to hundreds of his subjects.

His

fear extended to the widespread popular

belief in magic.

This now became a thought crime

punishable by death.

In the 16th century, every village had

folk magicians who used herbs and spells

to cure illnesses, solve people's

problems, or even influence the weather.

These men and women were called wise or

cunning folk.

In the Museum of Witchcraft in Bos

Castle Cornwall, there is remarkable

evidence of the importance of magic in

daily life.

This is a handwritten book of magic

dating from the late 16th century and

it's the personal notebook of a wise

woman or cunning man. And it is

fascinating evidence of the role that

magic played in people's everyday lives.

It's a real mixture of herbal remedies,

love charms, how to obtain magical

objects. So, this is a spell for

obtaining magical stones out of a

swallow. Take him out of the nest and

cut him in the middle, and you shall

find within the belly of it three stones

of diverse colors. The virtue of the

first is if thou wilt give it to any

woman that travileth with child, she

shall be speedily delivered. The virtue

of the redstone is if thou wil put it in

thy mouth, thou shalt obtain anything

thou wilt demand.

Healing magic was particularly important

because doctors were very expensive.

These traditional healers were really

very central people in their communities

right at the heart of people's lives and

magic actually liberated and empowered

ordinary people and helped them to cope

with the challenges that they faced.

>> One of these healers was Agnes Samson

who practiced in Keith in Scotland

during the 1580s.

Her clients included wealthy gentry as

well as the very poorest.

She had won wide respect for her work as

a healer and a midwife

>> over the ruthful rod.

>> But she would soon become ins snared in

one of the biggest witch trials in

Scottish history.

>> The ruthful

force from the flesh.

>> Healing magic could shield people from

illness and misfortune,

but it could also have darker purposes.

It was believed to have the power to

injure as well as cure. This is a very

striking spell because it shows how

protection magic could blur into

cursing. People did use curses, but

generally in retaliation when someone

had done them some wrong. And this is a

spell to make a thief confess.

You make a picture of an eye and then

you drive a nail into the eye. The thief

will then suffer pain in his eye until

he comes and confesses to the theft.

Most of the objects here are for

destructive magic.

They're the classic image of a victim

into which the person making the image

inserts pins or daggers or other means

of destroying their lives.

>> The church made no distinction between

the good and the evil forms of magic.

To people who believe literally in

magic, these are murder weapons and

they're terrifyingly effective.

Orthodox elite Christian belief can't

really believe that magic can come from

anywhere but the devil. The old

practical folk distinction between good

and bad magic with magic being a neutral

force rather like any technology is

completely transformed in established

Christian belief into a part of the

allout war between good and evil.

>> In 1590, James V 6th became a crusader

in that war on evil. He presided over

the arrests of dozens of people who he

suspected had raised the storm that had

almost drowned him.

One of the women caught in this troll

for suspects was Agnes Samson, the

respected healer from Keith in northeast

Scotland.

James' obsession with rooting out evil

drove him to interrogate her himself.

When did Satan first come to you?

>> I do not know Satan, sir.

>> What diabolical promises did he make to

you? What form did his imps take?

>> One of the extraordinary things about

what happens in Scotland in the 1590s is

that James the king gets personally

involved in the interrogation of the

suspected witches and actually himself

conducts the questioning of Agnes

Samson. This is a very strange thing for

a monarch to be doing at this time, but

it's a reflection of how deeply involved

James is with the subject of demonology

and not just with the abstract

intellectual idea of demonology, but the

practical application of witchcraft in

his own kingdom.

He's an academic scholar conducting

research and wants to do it firsthand.

And also he found it fascinating.

>> And where on your body did you suckle

these imps?

>> I know no imps, sir.

>> What powers did Satan offer you? And did

you believe his lies?

>> No, sir.

>> To start with, Agnes says that she's a

healer. She says that she's not a witch.

Um, she doesn't do any of that kind of

thing, but then she's taken away and

tortured.

>> Agnes was subjected to excruciating

pain.

>> She tried to explain to her torturers

the techniques that she had used to

treat the sick.

She even recited a healing prayer.

All kinds of ills that ever may be in

Christ's name I conjure thee. Birth of

the flesh and of the bone and in the

earth and in the stone

I conjure thee in God's name.

>> It combines magic with Christianity

which was a very important part of folk

magic. Most people who practice magic

regarded themselves as devout Christians

and that the magic that they were using

was a gift from God, part of the way

that God's power manifested itself in

the the natural world.

>> For witch hunters, this mixture of

religion and magic suggested that

Christianity had become corrupted by

demonic forces.

With the king's permission, Agnes

Samson's torturers inflicted pain and

sleep deprivation to extract a

confession.

Under this pressure, she accepted that

she had made a pact with the devil.

She was brought back for further

interrogation. Her bizarre confessions

were used as evidence against her.

So, you took this black toad and hung it

by its heels for three days and

collected the venom as it fell into an

oyster shell.

>> Yes, sir.

>> And if you had obtained a piece of linen

cloth that I had worn,

you would have bewitched me to death.

>> Yes, sir.

But Agnes' confessions of spells and

devilry were so extraordinary that James

struggled to believe them.

>> Well, this is so miraculous and strange

that I can only believe that you are an

extreme liar.

>> Come closer, sir.

Then Agnes shared a secret that

convinced James she was indeed guilty of

witchcraft.

>> On your wedding night.

>> She whispered details of James' intimate

conversation with Anne on his wedding

night in Denmark.

>> But at the time, Agnes had been hundreds

of miles away in Scotland. This

revelation seems to have persuaded James

that she must have supernatural powers.

I think that moment is really

significant for James. It's a moment of

of his being convinced that what is

going on is witchcraft and that he's the

target of it.

>> James seems to have ignored the most

obvious explanation for Agnes' knowledge

about his pillow talk with Anne.

>> One of the things I think to remember

about early modern marriages is they

were not as private as modern ones are,

especially if you were a king and a

queen. So, it's quite likely that

perhaps a servant would have overheard

something that was said. Um, there may

have been gossip about what was said.

She might have picked it up that way,

but I don't think she got it from magic.

>> According to a detailed account of the

trial, in a sensational pamphlet called

News from Scotland, Agnes Samson also

confessed that she was part of a demonic

conspiracy of 200 witches summoned by

Satan to worship him in a church.

Witchers would meet the devil, renounce

their Christianity, and pay homage to

him, often in the most gross form

involving kissing the devil's backside.

The devil had even offered this unholy

assembly, an image of the king, to try

to destroy him.

James was convinced that Satan was

leading the witches in an assassination

plot against him.

Agnes Samson and several others were

burned to the stake.

Her death marked the beginning of a

series of witch panics. Scotland

executed a higher proportion of its

population than almost every other

European country.

It's estimated that 2 and a half

thousand women and men were hanged or

burnt at the stake.

The witch hunts came in waves as

suspects under torture incriminated

dozens of others.

But in 1597, Scotland's witch hunting

crusade was thrown into chaos.

It began when Margaret Atkin, a suspect

herself, turned informer. She claimed to

be able to identify witches by a secret

mark in their eyes.

But then Akin destroyed her own

credibility.

>> She was taken around officially for

three or four months and asked to do

this. So she incriminates quite a lot of

people. The problem is that on one

occasion she starts to identify somebody

as a witch and somebody says to her,

"But you've identified this person as

not being a witch before. They've just

got different clothes on."

And at that point, the whole thing

collapses, of course, and there is a a a

worry that all of the witches have not

been witches. All of the trials have

been mistrials.

>> It was a pivotal moment.

The exposure of Margaret Atkin as an

unreliable witness threatened to

discredit the witch trials.

James leapt to defend his belief in the

satanic threat. He published an

extraordinary call to arms against

witchcraft. He called his book

Demonology.

>> The fearful abounding at this time in

this country

of these detestable slaves of the devil.

>> James's book is incredibly short and

incredibly lucid and incredibly well

structured.

It's a good piece of literature,

>> but only to dispel the doubting hearts

of many.

Both that such assaults of Satan are

most readily practiced.

>> James's book, Demonology, really becomes

a handbook for the hunting and the

persecution of witches. It's enormously

influential and remains so for the next

50 to 60 years at least. And there are a

number of very high-profile trials that

draw directly on the influence of

James's book.

>> Demonologyy's influence might have

remained in Scotland, but in6003,

Queen Elizabeth I died, and James V 6th

of Scotland inherited her throne as

James I of England.

He brought his terrifying book with him.

Demonology puts the king himself in the

forefront of witch hunting. As a result,

it makes witch hunting an official part

of the new British state. There is now a

line to be followed. It provides a brief

simple text which all sorts of further

ideas and publications can spring.

In6004,

James passed a new witchcraft act in

both England and Scotland that tightened

penalties for this supernatural crime.

He even ordered the burning of a book

written by an Englishman called Reginald

Scott.

Scott's volume, The Discovery of

Witches, argued that philosophy and

science disproved their powers.

I think that Scott got to James. He

angered him. He was good enough to make

James worried and affronted and came at

just the wrong point, which is when

James himself is trying to convince

everybody of the reality of the evil he

is describing.

James inherited a kingdom crackling with

religious tensions. In6005,

Catholic conspirators including Guy

Forks almost succeeded in assassinating

the king in the gunpowder plot.

To a devout Protestant like James,

Catholic images and rituals could easily

become equated with magic and even

witchcraft.

Catholicism was still widely practiced

in areas like Pendle in Lanasher. This

created a perfect breeding ground for

demonologyy's deadly ideas.

>> This is a county where there is a lot of

political and religious devian.

And that so this is really this is the

kind of powder cake really. And what you

really need on top of this is an

incident that touches the whole thing

off. And you also need crucially you

need a magistrate in this case a man

called Roger Nell who is very keen to

persecute those who are associated with

Catholicism. And this is a situation a

very feverish and fraught situation

where Catholics and witches can be

associated with one another.

>> In this climate of intolerance and

suspicion, it took just one incident to

trigger a witch hunt.

Allison Device, a girl from a poor

family in Pendle, would be at the center

of the nightmare to come.

>> Allison's the granddaughter of somebody

called Elizabeth Demdikeke, who is

thought to be a witch or a cunning

person, and her mother also is thought

to be a witch as well. So, she has this

background where she's part of a family

who are cunning people who are magicians

of one kind or another, and who are also

very poor, so that they often come into

conflict with their local community.

Allison met a peddler called John Law

who was traveling to a nearby town. She

asked him for some pins which had uses

both in white and black magic.

>> There are records from time of people

using an apple or an onion as an image

of the heart of the person who they

wanted to fall in love with them and

sticking pins into it as a form of

sympathetic magic.

As she was a teenage girl, that may well

have been what she and her friends were

particularly interested in.

>> But John Law refused Allison's request.

As he left her, he was stricken by

paralysis on one side of his body.

He later complained that he had been

bewitched.

Allison was brought before the Pendle

magistrate, Roger Nell.

When Allison Devis is interrogated, uh,

she confesses that she did it. She may

be shocked that her magic can have such

power. She may even feel guilty. Um, but

confess she does. And this this mixture

of the misfortune, the accusation of

witchcraft, and the confession, and also

the magistrate who's prepared to take it

seriously is a very kind of toxic mix

which starts this whole witch hunt

going.

Searchers of Allison's home discovered a

human effigy. The family claimed it was

for healing magic, but it was seized on

as physical evidence of witchcraft.

>> I think it's very important

the way that demonology demonized

traditional folk magic. It is really

quite remarkable that someone's healing

charm, a charm that they specifically

said they used to heal the sick, could

be produced in evidence at their trial.

>> Allison's entire family was questioned

in the search for more evidence of

witchcraft,

including her younger sister, Janet

Devis.

But Jennet was just 9 years old and

under English law, child testimony was

inadmissible in a normal trial.

James notoriously

says that special kinds of evidence are

permissible in witch trials because

proof is so hard to find, including, for

example, the evidence of children and

the evidence of a child is absolutely

central to the Pendle trials.

King James's own book, Demonology, had

fed the fear that would consume the

Pendle Witches.

When you look at the record of the

Pendle Witch Trials, point by point,

it's virtually a checklist of James's

main arguments about witchcraft. If

James is the theory, then Pendle is the

practice. James describes the different

kinds of witches, poor and rich, so do

the Pendle trials. James describes the

process by which people become witches.

The Pendle trials tick those off point

by point in the confessions.

Janet Device gave evidence against her

mother and brother. They were hanged

with her sister Allison next to seven

others ins snared in the witch hunt.

But despite James's efforts to stamp out

witchcraft, it still seemed to have the

power to strike close to the king.

In 1618, Francis Manners, the sixth of

Rutland, one of the king's privy

council, accused witches of murdering

his young son, Henry.

Manners was Lord left tenant of

Lincolnshire and frequently entertained

King James in Beaver Castle.

Historian Tracy Borman is investigating

the bizarre tragedy that struck the

Earl's family.

>> I first became aware of the witches of

Beaver through the pages of a novel

actually which I was reading for

pleasure and I was just absolutely

gripped by the story from day one and I

thought this can't be true. I knew it

was loosely based on a real sort of

legend, a local legend. And therefore, I

sort of set out on this quest to find

out more about the witchcraft case.

Francis Manners had traveled in Europe

at the height of the witch hunts when

witchcraft was seen as the terrorism of

its day, striking innocents with deadly

force.

One of the most remarkable elements of

this is that here on this tomb in black

and white is a statement by the himself

saying that my two sons were done to

death by wicked practice and sorcery. It

was incredibly rare to find on any tomb

such an accusation, let alone on one of

the most noble families in the country.

It's a statement and he wanted everybody

in the future to know that this is what

had happened to his sons. And his sons

are also depicted here on this tomb in

rather solemn procession. The eldest of

the sons, Henry holding a skull to

represent um his fate.

>> But behind the sad tale of loss recorded

on the tomb, lies a disturbing mystery.

The Earl blamed witchcraft for the death

of both of his young sons, and he found

suspects close at hand. A single mother,

Joan Flower, and her two daughters had

all been employed as lowly servants at

Beaver Castle.

>> Margaret, the eldest daughter, was found

guilty of stealing provisions from the

castle, and they were all dismissed. And

it was that that supposedly prompted the

mother to set out on a path of revenge

and destruction against the family at

Beaver Castle.

>> The women were arrested in 1618 and

charged with killing young Henry Manners

by witchcraft.

The sensational pamphlet reporting the

case recorded that while Margaret and

Philipper were working in the castle,

they had stolen the boy's glove.

They had given it to their mother who

treated the glove as if it represented

the boy himself. She repeatedly stabbed

it and then she burnt it.

But the boy had died 5 years before

these charges were brought.

So why had the earled so long to accuse

the women of witchcraft?

One clue lies in Mana's close

relationship with the king.

James's book, Demonology, had recently

been republished.

>> It does seem that it was a bit of a

setup and probably I think it was the

Earl of Rutland who was doing his king

James a favor by bringing James's work

demonology back into the public eye

because the pamphlet that describes the

case actually refers to demonology

upfront in the preface. It reminds

people of this king's great work on the

history of witchcraft and exactly how

witches ought to be dealt with.

The pamphlet claimed that the women had

taken wool from a mattress at Beaver

Castle.

Joan Flower then allegedly mixed the

wool with blood and water and boiled it

to curse the earl and his wife with

infertility.

The Flower family were taken to Lincoln

Castle for trial.

The prison where they were held is as

forbidding today as it was 400 years

ago.

>> Coming down into this dungeon, the

atmosphere immediately changes. It's

very cold. There's a real sense still

hundreds of years later of desolation of

the desperation that the prisoners must

have felt down here and still we see

where the chains would have been bolted

back to the walls and the prisoners

tethered there. It really is quite a

miserable wretched place.

The judge who tried Margaret and Philip

Flower and several others caught up in

the Beaver case may have been the same

man who had sent the Pendle witches to

the gallows 6 years earlier.

Even the evidence laid before him

closely matched the claims made in the

Pendle trial.

>> You can see very similar evidence

brought forward. It was very formulaic.

Um there was all the sort of classic

elements of the witchcraft case, the

familiars, the pact with the devil, um

the curses that were uttered by the

accused. They all come out in this case

as they did in several others at around

this time.

>> The chief witness for the prosecution

was King James's close friend and ally,

the Earl of Rutland.

There would have been one witness in the

case of the Beaver Witches and that was

the Earl himself, Francis Manners, who

was um the first up on the witness

stand. And of course, you can imagine

how his evidence was heard by the, you

know, the hush in the courtroom. There

could be only one outcome with such a

high-profile witness as the Earl.

>> Margaret and Philip Flower were

executed. Their mother died in custody.

The Pendle and Beaver trials demonstrate

how demonology had become a handbook for

witch hunting.

>> James' belief in witches very much

flattered his own view of himself as

king because he was setting himself up

as Satan's chief opponent on earth. So

there was very much a political

undertone to his persecution of witches.

It gave him a very powerful role as

king. What he's actually doing as well

is establishing a reputation for a king

who is absolutely certain of his views,

absolutely unyielding upon them, and

thereby in fact going to cause people

who don't entirely agree to make their

views as rigid and flexible and

articulated in return. The stage being

set for a colossal clash between the

monarch and his nation. But by the end

of his reign, James himself was

beginning to question some of the

bizarre evidence and confessions used to

convict witches.

The growing interest in science in the

early 17th century made it harder to

believe in such fantastical tales of

demons and devilry. By the time James

died in 1625,

almost 30 years after demonology was

published, witch hunts in England seemed

to be dying out.

The king had done his best to root out

witchcraft,

but amazing new evidence from an

excavation in Cornwall suggests that his

campaign failed. Archaeologist Jackie

Wood has uncovered a series of pits

which appear to contain disturbing

ritual offerings. The earliest date from

the 1640s,

long after James had died.

>> These three pits are actually grouped

together, and we've actually got a

radiocarbon date for this one. And

what's really amazing about this one,

it's the only one of the only round pits

we've got, as most of them are

rectangular. They've skinned a swan, put

the swan pelt, lined the pit with the

swan pelt. You can actually see the swan

pelt still in here. They put two magpie

birds either side, and then between it

55 eggs, seven with with baby chicks

ready to hatch inside from banttom to

duck egg size. And that's a lot of

commitment.

This was at the time when people were

hunting witches and anybody doing

anything pagan, it was a really

dangerous thing to be doing.

>> Jackie has found further evidence of

magical practices at the same site.

She has discovered a specially dug pool

filled with strange offerings.

>> These are the contents of a votive pool.

We've got an incredible selection of

textiles,

heather branches, cherry stones, human

fingernail pairings. Usually when they

throw pins into votive pools, they bend

them and then make a wish. This seems to

be a traditional thing. But all our pins

are straight. So, we think that possibly

the pins have been actually used as a

pin by pinning things like the human

fingernail pairings and the human hair

to the textile and throwing it in,

therefore throwing a part of themselves

into this pool.

>> This wishing well seems to have been

destroyed in the 1640s,

probably as part of a crackdown on magic

and witchcraft.

The pit was dug from the medieval period

and the thing is it was capped. It was

purposely filled in.

>> The evidence suggests that it was filled

in during the English Civil War. This

exploded in 1642 when Parliament took up

arms against King James's son Charles.

>> There was a parliamentarian called Major

Celely based in St. times during the

Civil War and he employed local men to

fill in all these ritual pools um these

pagan pools and we think this was

actually filled in then because we've

got ceramics from the top dating from

that period.

>> In the chaos caused by the war, witch

hunts burst out again in England and

Scotland claiming hundreds more lives.

The legal system broke down so that

experienced judges who might have

dismissed witchcraft cases could no

longer tour the country on circuit.

Into this vacuum in East Anglia steps a

nobody, a minor gentleman who isn't a

judge, isn't even a professional lawyer

called Matthew Hopkins who's dying of

tuberculosis probably. He's certainly

dying. He's raised his consciousness by

reading continental stuff on witchcraft,

and he is determined before he dies to

purge his region of evil.

Hopkins lived in Manningree in Essex. In

1645,

one of the most murderous witch hunts in

British history began here when he

teamed up with another Puritan gentleman

called John Stern.

There's something incredibly evocative

about this foreshore in Manning Tree. As

you can see, this is kind of was once a

port. You can see there's still boats

here today. But it was once an

incredibly thriving place where there

was trade being brought in from the

North Sea and the continent, but also

ideas, too. radical ideas, political

ideas, religious ideas, which partly

explains why this in the Stauer Valley

was a hotbed of Puritanism in the first

half of the 17th century and exactly the

sort of place where witchfinders like

Hopkins and Stern could have played out

some of their demonic fantasies.

>> Matthew Hopkins even claimed that he had

heard witches gathering in Manningree.

Some seven or eight of that horrible

sect of witches had their meeting close

by his house and had several solemn

sacrifices

there offered to the devil.

He left a record of his actions starting

with a chilling verse from the Bible.

>> Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.

Hopkins and Stern harnessed existing

grievances and fears of witchcraft

between neighbors. The witch hunters

brought these disputes before Essex

magistrates as full-blown criminal

charges.

One of the most shocking occurred in the

nearby parish of Lorford.

One Sunday morning in the spring of

1645, Prudence Heart, a pregnant woman

of the parish, uh was worshiping here in

the church behind us and experienced

severe abdominal pain. She staggered

from the church in agony and collapsed

somewhere out in the lane over there,

immediately went into labor and gave

birth to a stillborn child.

Now, this was incredibly powerful

evidence that the hearts had been

bewitched. A local widow, Anne West, and

her daughter, Rebecca, were blamed for

causing the miscarriage. They were

arrested and charged with witchcraft.

Hopkins and Stern now tooured other

towns in the east of England, looking

for more suspects.

Their accusations became wilder as they

were bewitched by their own fears.

The modus operandi would be to get the

suspect isolated, to keep them awake for

as long as three days, three nights, to

march them up and down, to use a form of

brutal leading questioning, which didn't

leave much room for denials and for

protestations of innocence.

>> Matthew Hopkins recorded some of these

interrogations in an account he wrote

soon afterwards.

In it, he claims to have witnessed the

monstrous creatures summoned by the

suspected witches.

>> Elizabeth Clark, this old woman,

disabled woman, is interrogated

personally by Hopkins. And after the

period of 3 days, she cracks and she

says, "I'm ready for my imps to come."

And she gives them names. They're called

things like Sack and Sugar and Grizzle

Greedy Gut and Pywacket.

The accounts basically say that this

parade of animals comes into the room,

but they are obviously not natural

animals, which seems to confirm that

finally this old woman is a witch and

that these are the creatures through

which she commits her crimes.

>> Hopkins pamphlet shows how victim and

accuser could share the delusion that

their hallucinations were demonically

real.

There are these watchers who are

watching day and night, possibly by

candle light, who are expecting that

something is going to happen.

They are actually very afraid.

Maybe then when a a mouse walks into the

room or a dog or a cat, their minds play

tricks with them. And I think that there

are reasons for thinking that the

descriptions of these weird creatures

are honest and sincere, even if it was

nothing other than a cat casting a long

shadow or something.

The self-styled witchfinder general

arrested and tortured as many as 300

women across eastern England. About 100

were executed.

But in the late 17th century, the witch

panics fueled by demonology began to

burn out. The last execution for

witchcraft in England was in 1682,

almost a century after James's book was

published.

But the remarkable finds in Savio

Cornwall show that the king's fanatical

crusade failed.

>> The site proves that magical beliefs

lived on for centuries afterwards.

I believe that this is a really unique

site and from the archaeology there

doesn't seem to be any more pits found

like this in Britain or in Europe as far

as we know but they give us a a brief

insight a a special insight into

somebody's belief system that's been

very private and very sort of secret

until now

>> over the last 12 years Jackie has

discovered more than 40 pits lined with

the skins of different birds and animals

They are all within yards of the one

containing swan feathers that dates from

1640.

>> And this is a 100 years later than that

one. It's dated to 1740s. And it's lined

with fur, not feathers. And when we

actually analyzed it, it's lined with

cat fur. So, they've skinned a cat,

lined the pit with this black cat fur,

um put a piece of quartz 2/ird of the

way up, and extraordinarily

above the quartz was 22 eggs, and every

single egg had a baby chick in it ready

to hatch. I do believe that that it is

some kind of witchcraft.

These bizarre ritual burials appear to

span 350 years from the 17th century

right up until remarkably recent times.

>> This is the latest one we had. And this

is really exciting cuz this one is

actually lined with different colored

brown and black fur all the way around

the outside of it. And then it's got the

legs of a goat put around the inside of

the base of it. and then the head of the

goat with its teeth and around its head

under its head was a piece of plastic

and a piece of orange ba twine. Now the

thing is ba twine is invented in the 60s

and basically it didn't come to Cormal

to the 1970s. So we've got 1970s pit. So

we've got we're dating from the civil

war of 1640 to 1970 of people putting

these pits in this valley.

The animals and birds buried in the

Savio pits seem to be part of a lost

tradition of belief.

But none of the finds on the site show

any association with satanic rituals.

They were a terrible myth that cost

thousands of lives.

There is no evidence whatsoever that

anybody who was tried for witchcraft in

early modern England actually worshiped

the devil. There's a fair amount of

evidence that some of the people who

were put on trial did practice magic in

a folky kind of way. Some of them almost

certainly did curse their neighbors in

fits of ill temper and for purposes of

revenge. But the satanic conspiracy, the

anti- relligion imagined by witch

hunters was purely a fantasy.

One of the great ironies of the witch

hunt is that the demonological

descriptions of what witches do at the

Sabbath, of all these terrible things of

killing children, of a world being

disturbed and turned on its head,

actually those things are do really

happen, but they happen in those

episodes of witch hunting. So that the

fantasy of the Witcher's Sabbath never

existed. But actually in a strange way

it is projected onto the Witchers and

that these scenes of the mass burnings

are actually visions of hell made real

on earth.

The horror of what was done to women

like Agnes Samson has given us the term

witch hunt as a shockingly vivid

description of the worst kind of

injustice. This really was such an

unjustified persecution of these poor

women who really had done no wrong other

than being slightly different to their

neighbors. They may be um older. They

were often poorer or single unmarried

women and they were seen as a threat

therefore because they didn't quite

conform to the usual pattern of society.

King James's book, Demonology, provoked

an ideological war that swept up

thousands of innocents.

It's a warning from history that we dare

not ignore.