What do we know about witches?
The woman with magical powers and spells,
in a pointy hat, with a broomstick and a black cat.
But behind this stereotype
is a long, dark history of torture and persecution.
Much of what we think we know
comes from the 16th and 17th centuries,
and especially the work of the witchfinder Matthew Hopkins.
It led to the deaths
of around 100 people,
and still has echoes
in our lives today.
In the 16th and 17th Century,
people in Europe were living in what historians call a magical universe -
a realm where it was implicitly accepted
that God and the Devil were real.
Life was hard in England at the time.
People were often hungry, angry, and fearful.
Most people lived in small rural communities,
and between 1530 and 1630, the population doubled.
There were plague outbreaks,
and a “Little Ice Age”, causing harvests to fail.
Everyday misfortunes could be interpreted
as either a punishment from God, bad luck, or the act of a witch.
It was widely believed witches could raise storms,
destroy livestock, drive people mad, or even kill them.
Witch trials followed legal process,
and acquittal rates were actually relatively high.
Only 22% of those tried in South East England were executed.
While burning at the stake was common across Europe,
in England, witches were usually hanged.
In the 1640s, during the chaos of the English Civil War,
the witch-hunter Matthew Hopkins appeared on the scene,
along with his associate, John Stearne.
Known as the Witchfinder General,
Hopkins would ride into villages in East Anglia,
often invited by concerned citizens,
and listen to their suspicions.
With his assistants, he would search for the "witch's mark"
or "teat" where familiars were thought to suck blood.
Familiars were thought to be a witch’s companion,
half-animal, half-demon.
They included toads, ferrets and cats.
He had suspect witches watched for days,
to see if their animal familiar would come to them.
In reality, this was sleep deprivation,
designed to break suspects into confessing.
Hopkins also used the swimming test.
A suspected witch’s toes and thumbs were tied together
and they were submerged in water.
It was thought a witch would float, rejected by the pure water,
but the innocent would sink.
Women were considered at the time to be more vulnerable
to temptation from the Devil.
Some women were particularly vulnerable to accusations,
due a lack of protection in a patriarchal society.
And although most of the witches
accused during the Hopkins witch-hunt were women,
in other parts of Europe,
greater numbers of men were persecuted as witches,
and men were caught up in the Hopkins witch-hunt too.
The elderly clergyman, John Lowes,
was accused of witchcraft in his town of Brandeston in Suffolk.
He was examined by Hopkins
who "found" two teats on his head and one beneath his tongue.
Under torture, he confessed to having six familiars
which he had allegedly ordered to sink a ship, killing 14 men.
Although he later retracted this confession,
on August 27, 1645, he was hanged in Bury St Edmunds.
Yet opposition to Hopkins’ witch-hunt was growing.
People began to condemn his methods.
His influence waned and, after an illness,
he died at home in August 1647.
Overall, around 250 people were investigated for witchcraft
during the Hopkins witch-hunt,
and about 100 of these were ultimately condemned.
The Hopkins witch-hunt was a brief and tragic period
in the history of England.
Many people in the 16th and 17th centuries
believed in the necessity of witch-hunts
to protect their communities.
But these persecutions can also be seen
as a case of blaming vulnerable people
for the difficulties of the time.
We live in a very different world today,
but has the witch-hunt mentality gone away?
We still have a tendency to accept easy answers to complex problems.
Social media fuels both conspiracy theories
and the public shaming of others.
Fear and uncertainty is still being used
to scapegoat vulnerable sections of society.
So while the context may be different,
witch-hunts, it seems, are alive and well.