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By Root 1296 0

exercise an authority that in less disrupted times would have been denied to him. He was the younger son of a provincial clergyman, probably in his twenties, and probably lacking legal training. In the winter of 1644–5 his concerns about the activities of a number of local witches were acute, and when they were arrested in March 1645 he gave detailed evidence against a number of them. In other times this would probably not have launched a career. Like William Dowsing, he was a man who before the war would have had little prospect of overseeing such important business. Moreover, there was an overlap between the areas in which Dowsing had been active and those in which Hopkins’s activities resonated.65 It is not fanciful to see these two efforts at purgation as somehow related.

Hopkins clearly played a leading role in promoting the prosecutions, and earned money from them. Hopkins and Stearne resorted to methods which, while legal, were unusual in England. Suspects were stripped naked and searched for the witches” mark – the unusual teat from which their familiar spirits would feed. In Essex a number of women searchers clearly did this work on the basis of some expertise – their names recur in the trial records. The accused were then placed on a stool in the middle of a room, with their feet off the ground, and watched for up to three days without food or sleep. It was hoped that in this time their familiars might come to them. At the end of this ‘watching’ they might be asked leading questions by Hopkins or Stearne, and were also interrogated by other interested parties.66

This process – torture, watching and leading questions – undoubtedly made the accused suggestible. Escalation followed, as networks of witches were ‘revealed’. Although this allowed Hopkins to inflect the prosecutions with his own views, he clearly also drew on the beliefs and participation of many others. At the initial trials, in fact, he was just one of ninety-two witnesses. This is not to deny the importance of the role of the witchfinders, but to suggest that local communities, galvanized by debate about Christian purity, and subject to providential stories of the moral message of fortune and misfortune in this world, were plainly primed for the purging of witches from their midst.67 There was a similar outbreak in Kent in the same years, perhaps significantly in the quarter sessions, a lower court without full-time judges, in the absence of assizes.68 The restraining hand of county administration was absent or limited. Arthur Wilson, star witness of the Stour Valley riots in 1642, was also a sceptical observer at the Essex assizes, and such scepticism seems to have restrained prosecutions in Lancashire in 1633.69 But in 1645 Hopkins and Stearne went out to look for witches and, apparently shocked by what they found, provided a service taken up with some enthusiasm by local authorities (the boroughs of the Suffolk coast paid £20 for witch prosecutions in these months) and the neighbours of suspects.70

Accepting that the accused witches were not guilty as charged, the stories told about them (since they were not actually true) attract psychological analysis – what anxieties were being expressed in these fantasies? The stories about witches in the 1640s reflect anxieties common to other periods of witch-hunting, but also anxieties arising from the war. One pamphlet told how soldiers searching for food on the eve of the battle of Newbury came across an old woman who was able to make a boat move against the current in a way that clearly suggested supernatural power. They tried to kill her, placing a carbine against her chest, but the bullet just bounced off. Another soldier, enraged, tried to run her through, but the sword could not penetrate her body. Only once they had taken a traditional remedy against the power of the Devil – letting blood from the veins crossing her temples – did she become vulnerable. At that point her fate seems to have been connected with anxiety about the war: ‘is it come to pass that I must die indeed? Why then his excellency