Original subtitles

[music]

[Malcom Gaskill] July 1645, it's a hot summer's day,

middle of a market town of Chelmsford in Essex.

There's always a kind of carnivalesque atmosphere,

people selling souvenirs and food and drink.

And this is the day of the Assizes,

so this is where the judges arrive from London.

There are 50 counts of witchcraft

which are going to be heard.

This is going to be England's largest ever witch trial

up to this date.

The witches have actually been brought there in shackles

through the jeering crowd.

These are women who are going to be dirty

and ragged and terrified.

They will resemble the crowd's expectations

of what a witch might look like.

[Marion Gibson] And the courtroom is an open space.

It's full of spectators, it's full of people who

might be shouting things.

It will be noisy, it will be hot, it will be smelly,

it will be a vile place to be.

And at the centre of this terrible maelstrom

of accusation and cruelty is Bess Clark

on trial for her life.

[Malcom Gaskill] She's a middle-aged woman, a

single mother, a woman who is disabled.

It's said she only has one leg, so she'd be leaning on a crutch.

[Andrew Sneddon] Elizabeth Clark, a pitiful figure,

watching her are Matthew Hopkins and John Stearne,

self-made witch finders, the men who brought her there.

[PEOPLE SHOUTING]

The interrogation of a

woman called Elizabeth Clark really kick-starts the

investigation of witchcraft that Matthew Hopkins

is associated with.

[Narrator] March 1645.

Rumours spread through the town of Manningtree

that a disabled woman, Elizabeth Clark,

has used witchcraft to harm the wife of a local tailor.

Magistrates decide to investigate

and send interrogators to her home.

They search Elizabeth's body for strange and unnatural marks.

[Diane Purkiss] The idea of searching women's bodies

was the idea of searching them for a witch mark.

What they were looking for was a mark on the body of the woman

which indicated the point at which the woman's familiar demon

had suckled her blood like a breastfeeding baby,

but blood, not milk.

[Malcom Gaskill] So they search Elizabeth Clark's body

and they find three teats which they consider to be unnatural.

So Elizabeth Clark is held under house arrest.

There are watchers, local people who are appointed,

who will just sit and stare at her as she

sits there on her chair, and what they're really

waiting for is for her imps to come and visit her.

[Darren Oldridge] Ordinary people associated bad magic

with the activities of nasty spirits

that were variously described as puckles or imps or sprites,

and in the biblical language of English Protestants,

became known as familiar spirits.

[Malcom Gaskill] The watchers will take Elizabeth Clark

and walk her up and down until she's exhausted,

because it would be an exceptionally cruel and

unpleasant thing to do to somebody who was disabled.

[Nimisha Patel] So I think with these whole combinations of

methods clearly intended to break her,

and by that I mean for

her to lose any sense of control or agency,

and I think these methods create extreme emotional stress,

physical stress and exhaustion.

All of these together have the impact that torture

is designed to have, which is to make people say what

the torturers need them to say or to confess to things

that are not true.

[Malcom Gaskill] So there's this incredibly dramatic scene taking

place in this room with the watchers,

Elizabeth Clark, who hasn't really said

or done very much.

So then on the fourth night of Tuesday 24th,

Hopkins and Stearne arrive and take over this interrogation

of Elizabeth Clark.

[WALKING ON GRAVEL]

So Hopkins is probably in his early 20s,

Stearne a little bit older, maybe in his mid-30s.

He's got young children.

Hopkins is a rather more kind of impetuous young man in a hurry,

eager to prove himself, less established in society.

They are minor gentlemen that have come from

the port of Manningtree where Elizabeth Clark lives,

and they have followed some of the suspicions

that have been voiced to them by the townsmen of Manningtree,

who then ask them to do something about it.

The thing about Hopkins and Stearne,

they're not professional witch-finders.

They've only really just started out.

But what they profess is that they have

experience in witchcraft.

They start interrogating her, seems quite unforthcoming,

and they're just about to leave, and as they leave,

Elizabeth Clark suddenly makes this extremely

dramatic announcement, which is, "I will show

you my imps, for they be ready to come."

That then changes the situation in the room.

[Marion Gibson] If you're there in the dark, alone with a witch,

and she says she's going to bring demons into the room,

naturally enough, if you were a good Christian

in the 17th century, you were scared.

[MUSIC PLAYS]

[Malcom Gaskill] So once Elizabeth Clark says,

"I'll show you my children, they be ready to come,"

then this parade of animals enter the room.

So first of all, you get Holt, who is a cat,

and then you get Jamara, who is a white dog,

then Vinegar Tom, who is a strange kind of hybrid

between a greyhound and seemingly an ox or a bull,

and then various other creatures that then follow on,

and this leading up to the rabbit or a toad,

which Elizabeth Clark says is going to leap

down John Stearne's throat and lay toads in his belly.

We're not really clear what's happening here.

Is this Elizabeth describing the familiars that she sees?

Did people in the room really see something?

If so, what?

Did an animal run through the room?

Was it shadows?

What was it?

[Malcom Gaskill]So this is a witch who's really kind of

warming to her own theme, because now she's

presenting this picture of absolute

phantasmagorical terror, which is probably more than

Hopkins and Stearne want to hear, because they're no longer just

the disinterested bystanders, she is actually

threatening them directly.

So that then Hopkins and Stearne start asking

more questions about, "Are you not afraid

of these creatures?"

And she says, "Why would I be afraid of them?

These are my children."

So then, you know, if these are her children, who is the father?

Well, of course, the father, she says, is Satan.

She says that, you know, he's a fine gentleman,

he wears a lace collar, that, you know, their

lovemaking takes place regularly and lasts half the night.

You know, this sounds like this kind of sexual fantasy

of a lonely woman who doesn't have a husband,

doesn't have a lover.

And, you know, whether she believes this or not,

she's certainly saying the kinds of things that

Hopkins wants to hear, because, of course, these

are deeply horrific, terrifying things

for a woman actually to have had sex with the devil.

[Marion Gibson Elizabeth says not only that she is a witch,

but that some of her neighbours are witches as well.

By the time her confessions have finished,

and she's subjected to several rounds of questioning,

she's known four or five other people from surrounding

villages as witches.

It's difficult to say why she accused the people that she did.

In some cases, they do already have a bad

reputation for witchcraft.

I think one of the horrifying things about witch trials

is that you feel it could happen to anybody.

Some of these people come across as being actually quite pious.

[Malcom Gaskill] So all these women will soon be interrogated

and will start confessing to such crimes as

causing harm to livestock, to consorting with

familiars, and to taking the devil as a lover.

The trial comes round in Chelmsford.

It's been four months since Hopkins and Stearne first

interrogated Elizabeth Clark.

And by this time, we've got at least 30 women being

held in Colchester Castle.

[Marion Gibson] The women are all brought before magistrates.

That's the first step in an English witch

trial in this period.

And then you, and the statement that you have made,

whether it's a confession or not,

are sent off for trial at a court called the Assizes,

which is the court for serious crimes in the period.

[Malcom Gaskill] In front of the whole gathered court, the

jurors, the witnesses, the magistrates, the

ministers, everyone present, Elizabeth Clark is found

guilty of witchcraft and sentenced to be hanged

by the neck until dead.

[Marion Gibson] After Elizabeth and the other

women have been sentenced,

they're marched through the town of Chelmsford to their death.

[Malcom Gaskill] 14 women are taken up to the gallows,

led up to the ladder

and choked there before this great jeering, excited crowd.

[Marion Gibson] Hopkins and Stearne would have been very

pleased with this outcome.

They'd got a number of people executed as witches.

[Malcom Gaskill] Hopkins and Stearne, whatever they intended

to do, they're now actually a witch-finding duo,

and people look to them as professional witch-finders.

They believe that they're on a mission,

and their mission is to root out devilry in the community.

So they are zealous, they are also ruthless,

because they believe that the stakes are incredibly high.

This is the godly future of their community

and the region of the country which they believe is at stake.

[Narrator] After their recent success, Hopkins and Stearne

travel farther into Essex with plans to hunt

the evil witches they believe are

terrorizing the country.

But travel across England is dangerous.

The country is deeply divided as a brutal civil war rages.

[Marion Gibson] What the civil war does is break down

structures of authority.

The courts stop working as they normally do,

magistrates and judges can't travel to courts,

and therefore it becomes a bit of a free-for-all

in English justice.

[Darren Oldridge] It became possible for men like

John Stearne and Matthew Hopkins

to some extent take matters into their own hands

and to set themselves up as witch-finders.

[Malcom Gaskill] So the English civil war breaks out in 1642

and this is the battle between Crown and Parliament.

So Charles I is the king, he's claimed that he

is an absolute monarch, he doesn't need Parliament,

Parliament think otherwise.

But this is, like all civil wars, turns the

country upside down.

It is, of course, the most dramatic constitutional crisis.

[Darren Oldridge] In that context, there was

much talk of the devil

because the devil for both sides was the secret instigator

of the mischief.

[Malcom Gaskill] The political tumult of the

civil war made many people think

that this was the start of Armageddon,

and that in that context of fear,

you get all sorts of strange omens and apparitions

and miracles and happenings.

So the London pressers pour out all kinds of pamphlets

and weird and wonderful stories of things that

people have experienced, such as a one-eyed kitten

with the hands of a child, which seem like evidence that

the world is coming to an end.

That's the kind of world in which one would

expect witches to appear.

brutally extracting confessions from accused

brutally extracting confessions from accused

witches in welcoming towns.

[Malcom Gaskill] You've got to understand exactly what Hopkins

and Stearne are doing in these communities.

They don't convict anybody, they don't execute anybody,

they don't even really accuse anybody.

What they do is that they are facilitators

who listen to the suspicions of local people

and then encourage those people to come forward

and to tell their story.

[Alison Rowlands] And then what they do is they develop methods

for gathering pre-trial evidence,

and it's in that capacity that they question suspects

and torture suspects.

[Malcom Gaskill] They are not averse at all to physical

violence, particularly to starving people of sleep.

[Marion Gibson] Hopkins and Stearne travelled

around the country

with a team of women employed to search the naked bodies

of witchcraft suspects to see if they had demonic marks on them.

[Alison Rowlands] They also prick various marks with needles

to see if they bleed or to see if they're

insensitive to pain.

[Marion Gibson] I think they were obsessed

with the idea of women's bodies.

I think they were troubled by women's sexuality.

The number of times that they find demonic marks

in what they call the secret parts of a woman

is quite striking.

[Alison Rowlands] We're dealing with

very, very patriarchal societies,

societies which see women as inferior, as more sinful,

and also women have less legal power,

they have less economic power, and so they are less

able to defend themselves if they do get

suspected or accused.

[Nimisha Patel] I think that kind of dehumanising

allows all sorts of public shaming, public blaming.

It's easy to demonise women and justify torture.

[Malcom Gaskill] Hopkins and Stearne are actually very brutal.

I think they see themselves like soldiers,

and of course there are untold acts of brutality

which are being committed in the name of both

the side of Parliament and the Crown during

the ongoing civil war.

They start using methods which are really illegal,

and torture is only used in English law in very

exceptional circumstances.

They're not permitted to do this,

but again, the Hopkins and Stearne feel that the

ends justify the means.

Hopkins and Stearne, their fame spreads accordingly,

particularly amongst communities which have been,

some of them, waiting for a generation

in order to have the confidence to get rid of

the people in their midst who they sincerely

believe to be witches.

[Narrator] July 1645.

Hopkins and Stearne leave Essex and push north into Suffolk.

[Marion Gibson] People would have received Hopkins and Stearne

as authoritative figures, so they would have

brought letters with them, perhaps from magistrates,

perhaps from other people saying that their work was good

and that the village or town they'd come to should help them.

[Malcom Gaskill] When Hopkins and Stearne go into Suffolk,

they hear confessions that are similar to those

that they've heard in Essex, but if anything, they're

even more fantastical.

Some of these Suffolk confessions give us a sense

that they are part of the fantasy of rather

lonely, love-starved women.

[Marion Gibson] Stories like Margaret Wyard's.

Margaret lived in Framlingham in Suffolk,

and she confessed that many years before

she had met the devil in the form of a calf.

Surprisingly, the calf could speak

and he asked Margaret to have sex with him.

[Malcom Gaskill] And there are even more men accused as well.

Men tell rather similar stories to women

about the way that they met with the devil

and that they formed the blood pact with Satan

and then familiars came to them and that they sent the familiars

out after their enemies.

[Nsrrstor] Suffolk is a triumph for Hopkins and Stearne.

Their reputation as formidable witch-finders continues to grow.

They separate to cover more ground.

[Malcom Gaskill] This parting of the ways reflects their

different character and their different

circumstances. Stearne is a slightly

older family man, he wants to go back

to his young children, whereas Hopkins has this

real sense of himself as the witch-finder,

this charismatic witch-finder who can ride out,

and he does, on this great lonely trek,

probably around 300 miles as he goes up into Suffolk,

into Norfolk, down the east coast of England

and then back round again in a great circuit.

One of the reasons he becomes a witch-finder in 1645

I think lies in his upbringing and his childhood.

So he's born in around about 1620.

His father, James Hopkins, is a university-educated minister.

And so Hopkins is growing up in this sense of Puritanism

and the things that threaten Puritanism.

[Alison Rowlands] His father dies in the mid-1630s

and his widowed mother,

Marie, moves to Manningtree and she marries the minister

of Mistley and Manningtree.

[Malcom Gaskill] So I think he would have grown up

with a very strong sense

that there were things that threatened godliness

and that godliness needed to be protected at all costs,

and even if that meant actually a kind of an

aggressive counterattack against the things which

threatened that sense of purity in English religious life.

And witches were certainly a part of that.

In fact, witches were really the standout emblem.

I think people respect Matthew Hopkins

when he arrives in their communities

because he has this swagger, he has this charisma.

He is able to persuade people that he does have authority

and particularly he has experience which

they don't have.

He's quite skilled at psychologically understanding

what is in the minds of accusers and possibly what's in the

minds of the accused as well.

[Marion Gibson] He must have created a climate of enormous

fear in those communities that were waiting for him,

having told him to come to their town and search for witches.

[Malcom Gaskill] The scale of the witch hunt that Hopkins and

Stearne are fomenting, jails absolutely crammed.

We have reports that there are as many as 150

witches are in the jails and witnesses coming forward,

all these bizarre stories.

They do cause concern in Parliament

that justice is possibly not being done.

This isn't scepticism about witchcraft,

but it is scepticism about correct legal procedure.

And so witch-finding does raise some eyebrows.

One of the key concerns that's voiced in

Parliament at this time is word that an ordained

clergyman has been arrested for witchcraft.

[Marion Gibson] It still surprises me that John Lowes,

the vicar of Brandistown in Suffolk, becomes

a witchcraft suspect.

He's a Church of England clergyman.

He's not an ex-clergyman, he's not a member

of some obscure sect.

He's the clergyman who's served that community for 50 years

and yet he's still a victim of witchcraft.

He's a victim of witchcraft.

He's the clergyman who's served that community for 50 years

and yet he's still accused of witchcraft.

[Alison Rowlands] John Lowes is aged about 80 at this point.

He is deeply disliked by some members of his congregation.

Some of his parishioners absolutely hate him.

They've been in court cases with him.

They feel he's a very litigious, a very problematic minister.

Some of the parishioners of John Lowe's think they've got this

opportunity now because of the witch-finding to finally get rid

of this minister who they really don't like at all.

[Malcom Gaskill] I think Hopkins rather

assumes John Lowes' guilt.

He certainly sees him as a disreputable person.

[Alison Rowlands] He's subjected to the same

cruel methods of interrogation

by Matthew Hopkins as any of the other suspects,

so his age and his gender and his status don't protect him.

[Marion Gibson] Hopkins and others come to him and question

him and they watch him and they walk him,

as they have done with the other suspects.

Their special method of torture, which they

don't consider torture, but which, of course, is.

[Alison Rowlands] And he's famously swum

in the moat of Framlingham

Castle in Suffolk and this was a method

by which alleged witches or suspected witches

were put into some body of water to see if they sank or swam

and if they sank, they were innocent.

If they swam, the idea was the water was sort

of spitting them out and saying they were guilty.

[Diane Purkiss] It was yet another of the

random and monumentally silly efforts

to provide actual forensic evidence for witchcraft.

[Malcom Gaskill] People often think there's

a kind of catch-22 here

that meant that you died either way.

We know that people were tied to a rope,

so the idea that if you were innocent and you sank,

you could be pulled out of the water.

It's a bit like being waterboarded,

like literally half drowned in the water and

then dragged up again.

And, in fact, actually, nobody wanted the witches to drown

because that would have been murder.

What they really wanted to do was to have this

piece of public theatre where somebody was either, you

know, proved to be innocent or, more often, that they

were shown to be guilty.

But, again, it becomes part of the theatre of an investigation

against a suspect which will get people behind the accusation,

even if that actual test itself is not officially sanctioned.

It was really one of the most shocking and

brutal interrogations that Hopkins oversees

during the campaign.

[SHOUTING]

[MUSIC PLAYING]

John Lowes floats, and therefore it

seems like he's guilty because the element of

water is rejecting him.

One of the strange things about the swimming of John Lowes

is that in order to underline his guilt,

some other people jump in and show that they

actually sink to the bottom.

It's a sort of a kind of control experiment, really,

to show that actually it isn't just a case that

everybody would float, and this really is a way of

underlining John Lowes' guilt.

[Nimisha Patel] People are enduring pain

that carries on for a long time

may say whatever they need to for that to stop.

[Alison Rowlands] So, he admits he's a witch

under this pressure.

[Malcom Gaskill] He lifts up his tongue and he shows that there

is a teat under there, that's what's reported,

and that's where he feeds his familiars.

And he says he sends his familiars to cause

all sorts of havoc and destruction, mayhem.

A ship sailing off the coast is sunk, and all the

sailors on it have drowned.

And this, he says, he rejoices in.

There will now be a reckoning for him.

[Narrator] After his wild confession,

extracted under brutal torture,

John Lowes is dragged to a jail,

filled with others accused of witchcraft.

News of the vast numbers awaiting trial

reaches Parliament.

They intervene, keen to ensure the prosecutions are handled

in accordance with English law.

[Malcom Gaskill] The end of July 1645, and Parliament sends

a special commission, a special court of Oyer

and Terminer, it's called, which will go out to Suffolk

to oversee the trials there.

It's a measure that's put in place by Parliament

to meet this emergency situation of this unprecedented number

of witch suspects, because the courts normally

are just not set up to deal with this

incredibly high number of accused individuals.

Parliament's probably also trying to get control

of the situation as well.

I think they feel that the witchfinders are perhaps

getting a little bit out of hand in their efforts.

Trials are set for August 26th to deal with the cases,

it's said, of as many as 150 witches,

and, of course, the star witnesses will

be Hopkins and Stearne.

I think there's always going to be a point at which

Hopkins and Stearne's methods are going to hit against

what is actually permitted procedure.

[Alison Rowlands] The court does try to limit some of their more

excessive activities, so, for example, it says you

mustn't swim witches any longer.

[Malcom Gaskill] Confessions mustn't be forced, there mustn't

be these superstitious extra-legal methods,

and that also the communities that are

producing these accusations are going to actually have

to cover some of the costs.

So this serves as a kind of rebuke against Hopkins and Stearne

for everything that they've been doing,

and particularly the way in which they've been doing it.

Inevitably, they're going to come to the attention of those

who don't agree with them, and therefore that

they are going to find that there'll be enemies who are

throwing rocks in their path.

[Narrator] Despite murmurs of opposition to

the witch-finders' methods,

John Lowes is still brought to the stand to

face trial as a witch.

[Malcom Gaskill] The thing about the court of Oyer and Terminator

is that it's not skeptical of witchcraft,

it's only skeptical about certain methods,

and, of course, there is evidence against John Lowes.

Villagers have sort of dirt on John Lowes going back for years,

so this does become very convincing to the jury,

even if some of the methods are disapproved by the judge.

In the end, it's the jury that is going to decide.

And the jury decide that the evidence is sufficient

to find John Lowes guilty of witchcraft.

So I think we can imagine that John Lowes must be in a state

of utter exhaustion and despair.

The judge passed the sentence of death upon him,

which he has, of course, he has to do.

And then August 27th, John Lowes mounts the

ladder up to the gallows.

But John Lowes, as a minister, asks that he can conduct

his own funeral service.

An act of defiance against the witch-finders

who had brought him to his death.

[Alison Rowlands] I think he was showing that he was still a

minister of the cloth, that he wasn't a witch, that he

was trying to sort of consign his own soul and the

soul of the other people being executed with him.

He's not giving in to the court's guilty verdict.

He's saying, "No, I'm not guilty, I'm not a witch.

"I'm still a minister of God who can perform this sort of

necessary ritual as I am dying."

[ROPE STRETCHING]

[Malcom Gaskill] So there's a tremendous amount of public

interest in these witch trials.

Some of it is enthusiastic and supportive,

some of it's rather skeptical.

But a lot of this is passing through the London presses,

so there are pamphlets, there are printed ballads,

which are in fact about witches, and there are also what they

would have called news sheets.

This is spreading the news of the witch hunts.

[Narrator] As his fame increases, Hopkins continues his

hunt, stopping in the coastal town of Aldborough

before pushing into Norfolk.

[Malcom Gaskill] All towns in England, including Aldborough,

are under very significant economic pressure,

because of the war.

High taxes have been levied, horses have been requisitioned,

all sorts of property has been requisitioned

by the parliamentary forces, so that everybody is

strapped for cash.

This is bubbling under at the time of increasing convictions,

increasing witch trials, increasing numbers of

witches in the jails.

It's just this sense of, "Can we afford this?

"We should pay for it," and is this money being well spent?

[Narrator] In Aldborough, seven people

are accused of witchcraft.

At their trial, five months later, all

seven are found guilty.

But the executions and Hopkins' fees cost a staggering £40,

one-seventh of the town's entire annual budget.

[Malcom Gaskill] So the evidence we have

is that Hopkins stays in local inns,

he runs up a tab, not excessively, just really

for bed and board, but, you know, still

costs that someone is going to have to meet,

and that will always be the local authority,

and the local authority will pass it on to the local people.

It becomes an expensive procedure,

just the execution of a witch costs a pound,

which is a lot of money in those days.

These costs do start to build up.

I think there's not really actually very much evidence

that he was extracting huge amounts of money

from local people.

[Marion Gibson] I don't think he's really even

doing it for glory.

I think he's doing it because he feels it's his religious duty.

He was put on this earth to go after witches.

[Malcom Gaskill] Hopkins, to some extent,

is the victim of his own success.

The more he does, the more his fame grows,

the more work he gets, but this inevitably is going

to attract adverse comment about the things that he does.

You start to feel that Hopkins is going to run out of time

and political support.

[Alison Rowlands] As Hopkins and Stearne move further away from

Essex and Suffolk, people are a bit less

keen on their methods, they're a bit less keen

on their intervention.

So by 1646, their efforts are being met with less enthusiasm,

and this is particularly the case with a man

called John Gaul.

He's also a Puritan minister, and basically John Gaul

is very, very critical of the witch-finders.

He doesn't want them coming to his parish,

he doesn't want them encouraging his parishioners

to name witches.

He thinks they're uneducated upstarts

who have no authority or training to do

what they're doing, which is kind of actually true.

[Malcom Gaskill] By 1646, John Gaul

is one of many men in England

who wants this world turned upside down

that England's become during the Civil War to be righted again.

So he wants proper procedure, proper social relationships,

proper law and order.

Witch-finding to John Gaul represents the

worst kind of example of men exploiting the

breakdown of law and order for their own ends.

[Alison Rowlands] So what John Gaul does is he preaches

against the witch-finders and against witch-finding,

and then he publishes the sermons that he's preached

against the witch-finders in a book called Cases of Conscience,

and it's really a very impassioned criticism.

He never names them as Hopkins and Stearne,

but, of course, everybody knew who he was talking about.

And he basically says they're whipping up popular fanaticism,

they have no real expertise, no warrant for what they're doing,

they're acting illegally.

[Malcom Gaskill] By this point in 1646,

there's a lot of adverse opinion

which is being spoken of in gossip networks,

but some of it is also finding its way to print,

not just John Gaul, but there are also

comments made by others about the fact that

witch-finding is out of control.

So the First Civil War ends in June 1646.

[Marion Gibson] The Civil War ends with a

parliamentarian victory,

meaning that Parliament has assumed authority in the country

and it no longer rests with the king, as it has done

in all the previous centuries that people can remember.

[Malcom Gaskill] Soldiers start returning, the economy's been

severely disrupted, there is great poverty

and dislocation, there's disease

spreading as well, and so England is still

in a considerable state.

Things become more dangerous, in a sense, than they were before.

Soldiers come home from the front,

they find their families have been disrupted,

some will find their relatives have been executed.

Hopkins and Stearne are in a pretty difficult position

as the Civil War comes to an end.

So Hopkins is invited into the town of Kings Lynn.

It seems that he is actually welcomed there

like some kind of conquering godly hero

and feted in the streets.

But there are eight who tried and six of them acquitted.

It's very difficult to know exactly what happened.

It may well be that the jury themselves were skeptical,

not of witchcraft, but of the methods and the

evidence which were used.

So this is deeply humiliating for Hopkins.

[Alison Rowlands] And then in 1647, some

of the magistrates in Norfolk

begin to question what Hopkins and Stearne are doing as well.

[Malcom Gaskill] There are even more acquittals.

This is a sign that the magic, the glamour,

that he has in getting convictions seems

to be running out.

[Marion Gibson] Things have become very

difficult for him indeed.

Some local gentlemen, he says, have drawn up a

list of questions for him, which they present

to him at the assize.

So one of the questions, for example, asks if

he is a witch himself.

It says, "Well, if you know so much about witches,

"surely you are a witch too."

A lot of the questions he's asked are about his methods.

People say to him, "Are these people not just confessing

"because you've put words into their mouths?

"Are you not just confessing because you

keep them awake all night?

"Is this not incredibly cruel?

What are you trying to do?"

And he does find it very hard to answer those questions.

He just restates over and over again the thing

that he's been saying, presumably for months,

which is that these are effective methods,

they've been authorised by justices of the peace,

by the magistrates.

He's asked very specific questions

about why there is this particular sexualised obsession,

why there is this particular obsession with motherhood.

What is it that Hopkins and Stearne are fretting about

when they strip women naked and get other women to examine

them for demonic marks?

That's quite a dangerous thing to be asked in front of a court,

which is holding a witch trial.

What if, heaven forbid, they start walking and watching him?

[Malcom Gaskill] This is the beginning of the end for them.

Not only are his days as a witchfinder coming to an end,

but so is his life.

By the time that Hopkins writes a self-defensive pamphlet

against the charges that have been put to him

by the gentlemen of Norwich, he's probably dying.

Probably from the start of the witch hunt,

he's almost certainly been suffering from

consumption of the lungs.

There's always a possibility that Hopkins already knew

that he was dying and that there was an added

urgency to his work.

He's in kind of legacy mode, he's already realising

that his time is up and he needs to actually make

this his lasting statement about the sincerity of

his motives and what he was trying to achieve.

[Marion Gibson] I think it really got to him, those

questions, and he wrote the book as a response to that.

It's called A Discovery Of Witches.

It has a lovely woodcut of Matthew Hopkins

and the witches and their familiars,

and it's really that that cements his reputation

as an important man of his time.

It's that book and it's that one picture

that makes us remember him the way we do.

[Alison Rowlands] It was organised in a sort of

a Q&A method.

It's sort of a criticism and then his response to it.

So it's very clearly structured.

This is what they said about me and this is how I'm responding.

[Malcom Gaskill] The tone of the book

is extremely self-defensive,

rather embittered, I think, that such things

should be said against him when actually Hopkins

believed that he was a sincere godly warrior

whose only motivation really was to root out wicked witches

from East Anglia's communities.

[coughing]

We simply don't know how

many copies were printed or how many copies were sold,

but with the subject matter and with this garish illustration,

I think we can assume that it was actually

a bit of a bestseller.

[Marion Gibson] Shortly after he publishes his book,

Matthew Hopkins dies.

He dies very young, probably still in his 20s.

It's a very quiet end to a very noisy career,

a quiet death of a young man, tragic in its own way,

in a small village, but it does bring to an end

the witch hunt that he and others had started in 1645.

[Malcolm Gaskill] Matthew Hopkins, after his death,

becomes a kind of a folk devil.

Partly, I think, because of that famous woodcut on his book,

The Discovery Of Witches.

Hopkins has been called many things over the years -

the Napoleon of Witch-Finding, the Foulest Of Foul Parasites,

the Grand Inquisitor.

But the name with which he will be associated for all time

is the name that he gave himself, and that was

Witchfinder General.

[Marion Gibson] After Matthew Hopkins' death,

he was quite widely mocked.

Many people did not agree with what he had done,

and even to his supporters, it must have seemed that his

crusade had ended in failure.

John Stearne outlives Matthew Hopkins,

even though he's probably an older man, and he goes home.

And he certainly felt he'd been hard done by,

and he felt under threat as a result of his death.

He felt under threat as a result of his

witch-finding activities.

He regards himself as somebody who's been

cancelled and silenced, and that's the last that

we hear of him protesting from his village home.

[Diane Purkiss] There never are again persecutions in

East Anglia on the scale of the Hopkins trials.

In that sense, it does kind of go away.

Hopkins is a one-off.

[Malcom Gaskill] What you find is that across the whole of the

16th and 17th centuries in England, we know about

1,000 trials happened and probably around

about 500 executions.

But the extraordinary thing is that a quarter of those trials

happened in East Anglia in the years 1645-7.

So in East Anglia, which amounted to 300,

people are interrogated and questioned,

and 100 of them are executed.

We always know the names of Matthew Hopkins and John Stearne,

but it's also really important to remember

the names of the people whose deaths they orchestrated.

So names of people like Margaret Moore of Sutton

or Rose Hallibred from St Osith in Essex.

[Marion Gibson] Ellen Driver, Mary Scrutton, Margaret Wyard,

Mary Vervey, Priscilla Collett and Elizabeth Clark.

[music]