Smack My Witch Up:Matthew Hopkins' Tour of East Anglia.

If, in this day and age, a man was to travel around several counties drowning women and burning them to death we might consider that this man has deep and very problematic issues with women. But, during last night's otherwise excellent Matthew Hopkins:The Witchfinder General, this wasn't even touched on and for that I am partially culpable.

I sat thinking about how best I could script a question about gender, misogyny, and abuse and while I ummed and ahhed about getting it right the Q&A session continued under its own steam. I regret it now because I think it would have been a worthwhile contribution to a story that gets bogged down in gore and religious persecution and often overlooks the very real fact that Hopkins' victims, irrespective of whether they were deemed to be witches or not, all seemed to be women.

In the 17th century, or so it seems, this seemed a trifling concern but I can't help thinking Hopkins' murderous misogyny, and society's willingness to indulge it, may hold the key to his, and others at the time's, behaviour. But I didn't ask the question. My bad. Everything else about the evening with SELFS (South East London Folklore Society), temporarily online of course, was, however, excellent.

With George both host and speaker and using Zoom and YouTube we learned how over three hundred 'witches' (I'll stop using the quotes from now on but you get the drift) were executed in the counties of Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk, Cambridgeshire, Bedfordshire, Northamptonshire, and Huntingdonshire during a fourteen month period in the mid-1640s during the English Civil War.

The 1968 Vincent Price film Witchfinder General, our host informs us, is historically inaccurate but does give a realistic sense of what those times were like. To really get the feel, however, we must go back to the Civil War which raged from 1642 to 1651 with the loss of over 200,000 lives as Parliament and the monarchy of King Charles I fought to control the direction of the country.

Matthew Hopkins had been born twenty-two years before the war began. In 1620. In Great Wenham, Suffolk. The son of a vicar. Little is known of his early life but it is understood that he eventually moved to Manningtree in Essex where he is believed to have purchased The Thorn Inn in nearby Mistley for a home.

In 1644 he started witch hunting, or witchfinding, with his less celebrated accomplice John Stearne and in 1647 he retired from the game having been responsible for sending more witches to the gallows in a three year period than had been executed for witchcraft in the previous one hundred and sixty years. 1647 was a busy year for Hopkins. Not only did he retire, he also released his book The Discovery of Witches (the one with my friend Jack's favourite Vinegar Tom in) in which he pronounced himself The Witchfinder General (clearly fed up of waiting for someone else to). His final act of 1647 was to die. Aged just twenty-seven. Probably of tuberculosis. It's not recorded if his death was mourned or celebrated.

Hopkins and Stearne, unlike previous witch hunters, were not aiming to prove the accused had caused harm by witchcraft. No crime needed to have been recorded or committed. They sought simply to prove (and we're using that word very very loosely) that certain women had made a covenant with the devil. Old Roman laws described witchcraft as a crime so foul that it was acceptable, when dealing with cases of it, to suspend normal legal procedures.

This green light for lynchings, kangaroo courts, and extrajudicial murder was juiced for all its worth by Hopkins and Stearne at a time when the Civil War had left the country in chaos, had caused the state to be unable to function, and had resulted in justice being improvised at local levels. Eastern England was fiercely Protestant and Hopkins was astute and skilled at turning gossip and tittle-tattle about neighbours and local rivals into full scale formal accusations of witchcraft.

Many farmers were away from their land fighting in the war so crops rotted in the field and the poor of the time, already dirt poor, were becoming poorer still because of the war. Many of them were angry and somebody had to pay. While many wealthy people were accused of witchcraft the blame also fell, as it so often still does, on those already in parlous circumstances. If you took alms but did not give alms you were highly likely to find yourself under suspicion.

The Calvinist version of Protestantism that many adhered to at the time had it that some folk are simply born pure and others are simply born to sin. God had decided your destiny before you were even born and there was not a single thing you could do to change that. Yours was simply to either enjoy or suffer your predestined fate. It's perhaps no surprise with such a depressing philosophy so dominant and a war raging that many people genuinely believed they were living in the end times.

Sound familiar? Omens underlined these beliefs. The English Civil War was interpreted as a war between Christ and the devil and when, in 1646, a meteorite fell in Swaffham setting a field on fire it was decreed by many that this was proof that judgement day was nigh.

Against this background, Hopkins and Stearne developed their now infamous "swimming test". Women suspected of being witches were tied to chairs and thrown in rivers. If they floated they were witches and would be killed. If they drowned they were deemed innocent. Either way they died.

Inspired by James I of England/James IV of Scotland's Daemonologie and Henricus Institoris' Malleus Maleficarum, Hopkins and Stearne became minor celebrities on the witchfinding circuit and were often invited by towns and villages, and no doubt paid handsomely, to conduct witch hunts (and, more realistically, settle old scores).

Hopkins used sleep deprivation techniques to extract confessions (which all, it was remarked, seemed to be incredibly similar) and he would have his suspected offenders watched for days on end in case an imp should suckle on their blood. This, of course, being absolute proof of witchcraft. He'd also use sharp and unpleasant looking tools to check women for "the devil's mark" while also searching for evidence of familiars (not just cats, but moles, insects, and sometimes even children) who were believed to both drink blood from witches teats and kill livestock, neighbours, and small children.

Not for any particular reason. Just for shits and giggles it seems. Eventually some of Hopkins' 'enchanced interrogation techniques' came under scrutiny. The swimming test was already illegal (and, in fact, deemed to be murder - which, of course it was) but when it came to witch trials the law was rarely enforced. Even less so during a time of conflict.

The Moderate Intelligencer, a snappily titled Parliamentarian publication produced during the Civil War, expressed unease about Hopkins and Stearne's methods and the swimming test was dropped from his repertoire. But the trials, and executions, of suspected witches didn't stop. Quite the opposite. They became both more common and more lethal.

In towns like King's Lynn, Ipswich, Aldeburgh, and Stowmarket those found guilty of being witches were burnt to death on crosses. In 1985 Megadeth chose as a title for their debut album 'Killing Is My Business...and Business is Good'. More than three hundred years earlier Matthew Hopkins could have used that as a slogan but the success of his unorthodox business model eventually proved to be its downfall.

Hopkins began to over extend himself both in zeal and in greed. In 1466 the Puritan cleric John Gaule, then serving as a vicar in Great Staughton, Huntingdonshire, bravely preached openly against Hopkins and his work. Previously many had had misgivings but dared not speak in case they themselves should be accused, and found guilty, and suffered the inevitable consequences, of witchcraft.

Gaule's book Select Cases of Conscience touching Witches and Witchcraft took a legalistic and evidentiary approach to the subject of witchcraft and though Gaule still firmly believed in the existence of witches he was adamant that many, most, of Hopkins' victims had done nothing wrong whatsoever.

The tide began to turn against Hopkins and elsewhere rumours even took hold that if Hopkins knew so well the location of so many witches that could only be because he had a direct line to Satan himself. Perhaps because of this turning tide, perhaps because of ill health, perhaps because he'd made his money and was quitting while he was ahead, and possibly a combination of all three factors in 1647 Hopkins retired to Manningtree, released his book, and, as mentioned earlier, promptly died.

There was, of course, speculation about his death. Speculation about Matthew Hopkins and his activities has not stopped in the intervening four centuries but last night's talk, for me, certainly painted a clearer and more coherent picture of that series of brutal murders than I've been presented with before.

The talk took in Oliver Cromwell, the Battle of Naseby, the Pendle Witch Trials ealier that century, and the theory that witches had the power to make men's penises disappear at will and a fun and informative Q&A after the talk touched on Nicholas Culpepper, Salem, identity politics, Twitter, cancel culture, nationalism, and John Ronson's 2015 book So You've Been Publically Shamed.

Much of which went to highlight how, in many ways, we've not learned so much in the last three hundred and eighty years. We may not burn 'witches' at the stake or throw them in rivers to see if they drown any more but we still hound people for failing to hold orthodox views on a huge and varied range of subjects and people are still mercilessly bullied both online and in real life (which, let's be honest, we really need to start seeing as the same thing) for slights, perceived slights, and even simple honest mistakes. In the case of the TV presenter Caroline Flack, the mob piled on and piled on until she felt she had no choice but to take her own life.

Soon the slogan 'be kind' took hold and, thankfully, many people (and not least those that already were kind) acted upon it rather than just said it. But still too many people, especially in this difficult stage of easing Covid lockdown, are wagging fingers, threatening, and bullying each other. It's hardly a surprise when the country is run by a government of bullies, headed up by a very sinister clown who has journalists beaten up and overseen by the Rasputin figure of Dominic Cummings but we must fight against being dragged down to their level. We must be John Gaule, curious and asking for evidence, far more than we must be Matthew Hopkins and his accomplices, allowing our own blind prejudices and self-interest determine our actions at whatever cost. Even that of people's lives.

A great evening, as ever, from SELFS and one, you can probably gather by my last two paragraphs, that got me thinking not just about the 17c but also about the future. Next month it's an introduction to the Pagan year and a guide to the festivals that make it up. In lieu of being able to attend any other festivals this year I'll be there. Probably in my pajamas again.