Matthew Hopkins: Witchfinder General
18th October 2025 by | UncategorizedMatthew Hopkins: Witchfinder General
The night deepens. Candlelight trembles, and beyond the walls the country is alive with sound — the hoot of an owl, the bark of a fox, the sigh of the wind through the hedgerows. Such a night belongs to shadows, and it was in such shadows that Matthew Hopkins, Witchfinder General, rose to power.
Between 1645 and 1647, during the turmoil of the English Civil War, Hopkins and his associate John Stearne moved through East Anglia in a frenzy of accusation. The war had unsettled village life, crops failed, sickness spread, and the Devil was said to walk abroad. Hopkins offered himself as God’s instrument of cleansing.
He claimed to discover the Devil’s mark on the skin of women — a blemish or mole said to be proof of a pact. He forced confessions by the “watching” of suspects, keeping them awake for days, or by the infamous “swimming test”: bound and cast into water, the innocent would sink, the guilty float.
Communities paid him handsomely, each village desperate to be rid of suspected witches. But his work was swift and merciless. In two years alone, over a hundred were sent to the gallows — more than in the previous century combined.
Hopkins died in 1647, aged only twenty-seven. Some whispered that he himself was tried by the very “swimming” he had inflicted upon others, though records say he succumbed to tuberculosis.
What remains certain is that his legacy was one of fear — a fever that spread across East Anglia, claiming lives in the name of righteousness, but leaving only tragedy in its wake.
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The past is never silent.