Matthew Hopkins

Matthew Hopkins began his career as a witch-hunter in March 1644 from his base in Manningtree, Essex, and rapidly expanded his reach across Suffolk, Norfolk, Cambridgeshire, and Huntingdonshire. He held no formal parliamentary appointment — the title 'Witchfinder General' was entirely his own invention — but he exploited the chaos of the English Civil War, when normal legal safeguards had collapsed and local magistrates welcomed any authority willing to act. Working alongside his associate John Stearne and a team of female 'searchers', Hopkins employed three principal methods: sleep deprivation to extract confessions, bodily pricking with a needle to find the Devil's mark (a spot of insensible flesh), and the notorious swimming test, in which the bound suspect was dropped into water — floating indicated guilt, sinking innocence. Between 1644 and 1647 he was responsible for the deaths of perhaps 230 people, more than all other English witch trials of the previous century and a half combined. He charged each town a fee for his services, growing genuinely wealthy from the trade in accusation and fear.

His death in August 1647, almost certainly from tuberculosis, came swiftly after his last documented expedition. Almost immediately a counter-legend formed: the 19th-century Essex folklorist William Andrews described a tradition in which Hopkins had been seized by villagers, forced to undergo his own swimming test, floated — proving his guilt — and then hanged. The story is almost certainly apocryphal, but its persistence reveals how deeply he had made himself hated. Hopkins has since become one of the defining bogeymen of English history, his mythology amplified by the 1968 horror film Witchfinder General (starring Vincent Price) and by the continuing dark tourism of his home county. For historians, he remains a case study in how legal and moral authority can collapse under wartime stress — and how quickly individuals can monetise that collapse.