ON THE PROWL

Hunting witches was a lucrative profession, giving plucky vigilantes the opportunity to earn high wages and gain social standing within communities gripped by fear and worry

- ELINOR EVANS

In 1645, John Lowes, the roughly 80-year-old vicar of Brandeston in Suffolk, admitted to causing a shipwreck off the coast of Harwich in Essex. The confession was not gleefully given, but drawn from Lowes by keeping him awake for several days and nights, running him up and down a room for hours, and tying his thumbs to his toes and tossing him into a moat. It was only after such treatment that the clergyman 'admitted that, with the help of six imps, he had committed "most heinous, wicked and accursed acts".

Lowes was one of 18 people convicted of witchcraft (16 of whom were women) hanged in Bury St Edmunds in a single day. The prosecutor was the notorious witch-hunter Matthew Hopkins.

Giving himself the title 'witchfinder general', Hopkins and another hunter named John Stearne swept through East Anglia between 1645 and 1647, amid the turbulence of the Civil Wars, prosecuting around 200 people for witchcraft. detailed his belief in the evils of witches, and his desire that they be persecuted. By the 1640s, it was a commonly held belief that England was awash with witches, and hunters like Hopkins readily took up such a mantle.

But while King James' Daemonologie is certainly one of the most well-known treatises, it was by no means the first. The truth was that the practice of witch-hunting had already received royal or papal assent for centuries.

SPREADING THE WORD