9 - The Witch Finders and Their Ways

In his famous Demonology, which first appeared in 1597, King James of Scotland proclaimed:

The fearful abounding at this time and in this country of those detestable slaves of the Devil, the witches and enchanters, hath moved me, beloved reader, to despatch in post, this following treatise of mine, not in any wise to serve as a show of my own learning and ingenuity, but only to resolve the doubting hearts of many, both that such assaults of Satan are most certainly practiced and that the instrument thereof merits most severely to be punished. ...

Witches ought to be put to death, according to the law of God, the civil and imperial law and the municipal law of all Christian nations; yea, to spare the life and not strike when God bids strike and so severely punish in so odious a treason against God, is not only unlawful, but doubtless as great a sin in the magistrate as was Saul's sparing Agag.

That made it open season on witches throughout all Scotland. But James had his eye on far greater territory and he achieved his aim in 1603, when he became King of England as well. Though he could not order witches burned in England, James did the next best thing. He ordered all available copies of Scot's Discovery of Witchcraft to be seized and burned, at the same time arranging for new editions of his own Demonology to be printed, so that the public would be limited to a one-sided and thoroughly prejudiced view of the subject. James also induced parliament to supplant the old Elizabethan Act against witchcraft with a new statute, passed in 1604, making it a capital offense to attempt to injure anyone by witchcraft, regardless of whether it succeeded; and a pact with the Devil came under that general head.

Opinions varied as to the effect of the edict. Some felt that King James injected new life into a dying superstition; for although there was a decline in death sentences during his reign, they might have dropped off faster. Others, however, attributed the decline to the severity of the statute itself, proving that it discouraged witchcraft more strongly than before and thereby accomplished its main aim. In any case, the high mark of his regime was reached in 1612, when a feud broke out between two ancient witches, Mother Demdike and Mother Chattox, each of whom had taught their craft to various members of their families, who in turn operated as a combined coven which held Sabbats at a place called Malking Tower in the Pendle Forest of Lancashire. Each apparently began blaming acts of witchcraft on the others, with the result that both old crones and a few of their offspring were put in jail to await trial.

That brought about a reconciliation among the rest, who held a sabbat at the tower to plan the rescue of the prisoners, by demolishing the local jail. Whether they planned to do it by witchcraft or gunpowder was never proven, because the law gained wind of it before they got around to it. Practically the whole coven was arrested on charges and countercharges of varying degrees of witchcraft. From the complex welter sprang a surprise witness, Jennet Device, age nine, whose mother, Elizabeth Device, was the daughter of Old Mother Demdike.

Too young to have been taken into the coven, but old enough to be allowed to stand around and listen, Jennet came through with enough juicy reports to undermine the whole Demdike-Chattox setup better than they could have done with the Lancashire jail. Little Jennet told how a familiar called "Ball" had appeared as a brown dog to help her mother kill people, whose names she presumably gave. Her evidence was supported by her brother James, who was in his twenties, and apparently the retarded member of the family.

James believed in about anything, for he had not only seen the dog named Ball, he had watched his mother make clay images that Jennet mentioned; and he talked about a mysterious hare that accosted him on his way home from church, but vanished on command. The judges checked that back with Jennet, who, rather than be outdone, told them that James had a dog of his own named "Dandy" who helped him bewitch people to death, so James, just for trying to be too smart, wound up in the bullpen with the rest of the suspects.

The net result: Out of about twenty prisoners put on trial, ten were hanged. Mother Demdike escaped by dying in jail, but Elizabeth Device went the rope route, along with her stupid son James and her eleven-year-old daughter Alison, who must have been a little dumber or not quite as smart as her nine-year-old sister Jennet, who had turned state's evidence and was accordingly exonerated.

From then on, smart children spoke their piece at witchcraft trials and King James, to his credit, began to doubt them along with his own opinions until he died in 1625, leaving the field wide open for further frauds. Among those was another case in the Pendle Forest, which occured in 1633, and was triggered by a boy named Edmund Robertson, whose father was a woodcutter. Possibly young Edmund had heard tales of earlier witchery; in any case, he decided that an old woman called Mother Dickenson rated as a witch.

So Edmund told the local magistrates that while roaming through the woods, he met two greyhounds, which he tried to excite into chasing a rabbit; but both refused to stir. So he struck one with a switch and it promptly turned itself into the form of Mother Dickenson, while the other became a little boy whom Edmund did not recognize. Mother Dickenson offered Edmund money if he would sell his soul to the Devil, but he stoutly refused, so she took a bridle from her pocket and shook it above the little boy who had been a greyhound and turned him into a horse.

Mother Dickenson then snatched up Edmund, sprang upon the horse and galloped with the speed of wind through forests, fields, bogs and rivers, to a large barn, where Edmund saw seven old women pulling at seven halters and bringing down meat, butter, bread, milk and puddings on which they feasted, along with other witches who crowded into the barn - as many as sixty in all. During the festivities, the boy managed to slip out unnoticed and run home.

Young Edmund was taken from church to church, so he could point out women whom he had seen at the sabbat. He identified some thirty in all, and among them was none other than Jennet Device, who as a little girl, had called the turn on the Malking Tower coven some twenty-two years before. Seventeen were condemned, but escaped the hangman when a local bishop persuaded King Charles I to conduct a fuller investigation of the flimsy case. Edmund's story was exploded and it was generally conceded that the boy's father had encouraged him in the hoax. The elder Robinson had planned to collect blackmail money from well-to-do women by telling them that Edmund would point them out if they didn't pay.

In short, this case and others show that witchcraft was developing into a lucrative racket, which reached its peak in 1645, when Oliver Cromwell and his Puritan forces gained their decisive victory over the Royalists in England's Civil War. An opportunist named Matthew Hopkins, recognizing that a new regime was due, appointed himself Witch Finder General and set out through Essex and adjacent counties with a retinue of assistants skilled in the art of recognizing and rounding up witches. Each town was charged a varying fee, plus expenses, for such services; and for each executed witch, Hopkins and his helpers received a bonus of twenty shillings.

Hopkins knew all the accepted methods of proving suspects to be witches, such as demanding them to recite the Lord's Prayer without stumbling over a syllable; or by weighing the accused against the church bible. But he favored a system specially recommended by King James in his Demonology - that of "swimming" a witch, by tossing her into a pool of water. If she floated, she was guilty and was duly executed; if she sank, she was innocent, but was apt to drown in the process, which was good riddance in itself.

Looking for witch marks was an old established test that by this time had been greatly improved by shaving a suspect's entire body, so the slightest mark could be detected, even one hidden beneath an eyebrow. The harder to find, the more likely the mark was of the Devil's making. To clinch it, however, Hopkins and his crew specialized in witch-pricking - jabbing witch marks with pins or pointed implements on the theory that if they didn't hurt or bleed, witchery must be responsible.

Since some moles or warts were immune to this, the witch prickers frequently proved their point; but if frustrated, they began jabbing less sensitive parts of the suspect's body, hoping to find invisible marks, which were truly the Devil's work. Here, it is highly probable that Hopkins and others of his ilk had been reading Scot's Discovery of Witchcraft, which by then was back in circulation, and that they were using the trick knives with blades that slid into the handle, so they could apparently jab witches deeply, yet draw no blood.

The Witch Finder General also kept suspects bound without food or water for twenty-four hours at a time, not just to break down their morale, but so that constant watch could be kept to see if any of their imps tried to contact them. Any insect, a wasp, a fly or a moth, could be one of the witch's familiars in disguise; and if the watchers were unable to kill it before it flew away, its fiendish intent was established. Since the watchers were usually members of the Witch Finder's crew, they naturally didn't try; not with twenty shillings riding on the outcome.

Estimates as to the total number of alleged witches executed through the machinations of Matthew Hopkins and his witch finders run from two hundred upward - all within a single year. By dint of his self-established authority, Hopkins could have kept the figures to himself; and wisely. Despite that, the extent of his operations was so appalling that it roused public indignation. And when Hopkins was openly denounced by a clergyman named John Gaul, the Witch Finder General decided to discard his fake title and retire to the hinterlands with his loot.

Within another year, Matthew Hopkins was dead. According to one account, a mob caught up with him and decided that he should take a witch test for himself. So they bound him hand and foot and swam him; but he didn't come up. The story, however, has been doubted, another version being that he died "peaceably" after a long sickness of a consumption. Here, the word "peaceably" is highly questionable. One of the most strongly accepted notions regarding witches was their ability to make their enemies waste away; and anyone who thought he was a victim of such a process was apt to aid and abet it through his own belief.

So Matthew Hopkins, Witch Finder General, may have worried himself into a mysterious malady of his own making, unless the smarter witches who had eluded his devices got together in a secret coven and put a bona fide spell upon him.

Prosecutions for witchcraft persisted during the Puritan period under Oliver Crowell as Lord Protector, but the opposing Royalists were quite as steeped in superstition. They actually believed that Cromwell had personally made a pact with the Devil; otherwise, his dull stupid army of Roundheads could never have defeated their dashing Cavaliers. One harsh critic branded Cromwell as "a brave, bad man, with all the wickedness against which damnation is pronounced and for which hell fire is prepared." So when London was swept by a terrible tempest on September 3, 1658, the day when Cromwell died, his adversaries insisted that it was bringing the Devil to carry away his arch-disciple, as if he really deserved such consideration.

But after King Charles II ascended to the throne in 1660, executions for witchcraft became more scattered under the Restoration; and during the next half century, with the rise of more liberal judges and the improvement of court procedures, trials for witchcraft dwindled. The last hanging in England occured in 1684, though one took place in Scotland as late as 1722.

Oddly, the greatest flare-up in this period of marked decline took place in staid New England, in 1692, where a group of teenaged girls, inspired by the voodoo tales of a West Indian woman named Tituba, began meeting at a parsonage in Salem, Massachusetts. There, they went into convulsive fits that a local physician diagnosed as bewitchment. When asked who tormented them, the teen-agers named three of the most eccentric beldames in the area and added Tituba for good measure. To save themselves, the scared suspects began naming others, while the youthful accusers continued to throw fits and blame still more people for them.

Soon, all Salem was in the act. People not only said they had seen witches flying to Sabbats on broomsticks; they told how they had been carried along with them. They described weird lights, grotesque demons, and feats of strength performed by accused persons that could only have been done through diabolical aid. For example, one man was accused of having thrust his forefinger into the muzzle of a gun and lifting it just that easily. Considering the ponderous muskets of those days, that was not just superhuman, it was supernatural. Others blamed witches for pigs that vanished; oxen that stampeded and swam rivers; cattle that danced, talked and finally dropped dead; along with other phenomena.

They only wished that witches would dance and drop dead, which nineteen out of the 150 accused obligingly did, each at the end of a rope, before this travesty of justice completed its brief run of idiotic delight in 1693.

By the 1700's, however, all this was on its way out, not only in England, but throughout Europe and even in America. Yet there is still one rift amid the clouds of gloom. It cannot be said that all these witches died in vain. For witchcraft still lives - and how!