God's Fury, England's Fire_ A New History of the English Civil Wars - Michael J. Braddick [257]
One of the most dramatic forms of purgation for the Christian community was the prosecution of witches and in 1645 East Anglia saw the largest witch-hunt in English history. At the Essex assizes held on 17 July 1645, three days after Naseby, thirty-six witches were put on trial. Nineteen were executed, nine died in prison and a further six were still in gaol in 1648. Only one was acquitted. Not only was this an unusually large number of trials in such a short space of time; it was also a prelude to a much wider prosecution across East Anglia. In Norfolk forty trials probably led to twenty executions. There were trials in Huntingdonshire, Cambridgeshire, the Isle of Ely and some boroughs (Yarmouth, Kings Lynn, Stowmarket and Aldeburgh). One contemporary observer, who was close to events, thought that perhaps 200 had been executed; probably an exaggerated, but not completely incredible, estimate: it is likely that 250 people were tried and that at least 100 were executed. A significant proportion of all executions for witchcraft in English history came during this single summer.61
Of course, many more people died in battle – even in Essex, where 800 died in the siege of Colchester in 164862 – but the real significance of witch trials lies in the social tensions that they reveal. The Essex prosecutions are particularly well-documented, and many of the patterns they reveal are familiar from the longer history of witchcraft prosecutions. Nearly 90 per cent of the accused were women, predominantly of lower social status. Their crimes were ones familiar from many other witchcraft trials – causing illness in adults, children and livestock, or blighting crops or other foodstuffs. An influential interpretation of such prosecutions is that they were a means of dealing with misfortune. An explanation for misfortune was found in the behaviour of individuals thought difficult by their neighbours – the stereotype is of an older woman, spinster or widow, of relatively low status, who was unwilling to accept her place in life with due humility. Rather than blame bad luck, or accept a providential judgement on their own lives, the argument goes, substantial villagers found it easier to blame the malice of the poor and marginal. But other tensions were also clearly present, about the proper role of women, something which women themselves were keen to police: women frequently appeared as accusers and witnesses, establishing their own authority as respectable women by denouncing others.63
It is usually presumed that witches did not commit the crimes of which they were accused: although witchcraft can be effective on believers, it seems to modern observers unlikely that witches can successfully harm infants, animals or foodstuffs. Some witches did apparently think that they had done these things, and there is no real reason to doubt the sincerity of the accusations. It does, however, seem likely that these things tell us more about the anxieties of village life than about the actual behaviour of witches. The East Anglian witches seem to fit this pattern – witnessed against by their neighbours, for minor acts of malice achieved by terrifying means, they were denounced by neighbours with whom they had fallen out.64
Prior to the civil war the trend of prosecutions in Essex had been falling, and the great peak of 1645 can make it seem as if Matthew Hopkins and John Stearne, energetic ‘witchfinders’, were wholly responsible. But although these trials took place in an area of the country which saw relatively little military action, it is still tempting to see here the effects of the civil war: it may be the war, rather than these men, that was really to blame. Anxieties were increased, and the authorities more receptive to prosecutions, with the result that longstanding tensions were openly expressed. Most immediately, the war created the opportunity for Matthew Hopkins to