Matthew Hopkins: The Witch-finder General

Matthew Hopkins enjoyed his work, he didn’t just design new devices for pricking he also found new ways to bind people so as to maximise the humiliation and multiply the pain. For example, when swimming the women would be bound so they were bent double. A man either side of them would then lower them into the water with rope. If they drowned they were innocent, if they floated or survived, however, they were guilty, for they had rejected the baptismal water and had been saved by their master, the devil. They would then be hanged.

In a very short time people had come to fear Hopkins. Terror spread wherever he went. Anyone who objected to his activities or tried to impede him in any way would in their turn be accused of being a witch. Hopkins, however, was over-reaching himself. He was becoming increasingly greedy and he had begun prosecuting witches on the scantiest of evidence and to order. It took the courage of one man to bring Hopkins reign of terror to an end. John Gaule, the Vicar of Great Staughton in Huntingdonshire, made public his views, he wrote, ” Every old woman with a wrinkled face, a farrowed brow, a hairy lip, a squeaking voice, and a scalding tongue, with a cat or a dog by her side, is not only suspect but pronounced as a witch.” The people, tired of Hopkins, were only willing to support him. Seeing that the tide was turning against him, Hopkins did what all charlatans and fraudsters do, he disappeared.

So what happened to Matthew Hopkins? John Stearne reported that he had died early in 1647 of consumption. If so the illness overtook him quickly. Some believe that he died of natural causes in Manningtree, Essex, on 12 August, 1647. There is a death certificate that reads, ” 1647, Aug 12 Matthew sM: James Hopkings, Minister of Wenham, buried at Mistley.” Is this the death certificate of Matthew Hopkins? There is no known burial site for Hopkins. For a man who terrorised the south-east of England for the best part of 18 months it is strange indeed that so little mention is made of his passing. Did he fabricate his own death, or merely flee? A Matthew Hopkins appears in the records at the time of the Salem Witch Trials in Massachussetts in 1692, Is this our Matthew Hopkins, he had connections with Salem as we know. At the time he would have been an elderly man in his early 70’s.