For over two hundred years Matthew Hopkins has been famous as the “Witch Finder General” from Manningtree in Essex. The basic contours of the horrendous witch finding expeditions conducted by Hopkins and his associate John Stearne in 1645–47 have been fairly well known ever since Wallace Notestein devoted forty judicious pages to these trials in his dissertation, published as A History of Witchcraft in England, 1558–1718 (Washington, DC, 1911). Although Notestein worked with printed works only, he was energetic and careful in his use of contemporary pamphlets. In 1947 R. Trevor Davies provided an account that emphasized (and exaggerated) the role of Puritan beliefs in the trials of the 1640s (Four Centuries of Witch-Beliefs with Special Reference to the Great Rebellion [London]). In 1970 Alan Macfarlane made Essex and the rest of East Anglia the heart of his investigation into the local roots of witchcraft accusations there, devoting much space to unraveling the local rivalries and hatreds that fueled suspicions of witchcraft (Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England: A Regional and Comparative Study [London]). Since then, historians have combed the manuscript records and given ever more detailed accounts of this campaign against the forces of darkness. In 1976 hitherto unknown manuscripts relating to Matthew Hopkins came to light, but the most sensational of them, “The Tendring Witchcraft Revelations,” turned out to be a total fabrication (Richard Deacon, Matthew Hopkins: Witch Finder General [London, 1976]). Until now, however, we have not had a full-scale, reliable history of the witch hunts of the mid-1640s, one based upon a minute examination of all the genuine local evidence. This is what Malcolm Gaskill has now published, and the result is less a work of revelation than a solid demonstration that among many other things, history is the art of context.

On Gaskill's telling, the “tragedy” of these trials depended upon a fatal confluence of several unfortunate conditions: the social and economic distress that afflicted the depressed communities of Essex, East Anglia, and the Eastern Counties more generally; the collapse of central and episcopal authority during the wars between king and Parliament; bitter factionalism on the local level in many of the towns and villages of the Eastern Counties; and the local resurgence of godly Calvinists, who were bent upon eliminating superstition, idolatry, and any surviving hints of Catholicism. Under other conditions, a man like Matthew Hopkins, the son of the Puritan rector of Great Wenham in Suffolk, might well have entered the dissident clergy without undertaking personally to help rid his whole region of witches. Together with his older colleague, John Stearne, Hopkins began in 1645 following a purifying trail through Suffolk that had been blazed just two years before by the iconoclast William Dowsing. And wherever they went they proved wonderfully efficient at provoking confessions from suspected witches. Sometimes sleep deprivation was all that was necessary; the tormentum insomniae could be combined with rough treatment in jail, isolation, and intimidation to produce confusion and emotional breakdown; in many other instances suspects were examined by “search women,” who looked for devil's marks and unnatural teats at which female suspects were thought to have nourished their familiar spirits; in several cases the “swimming test,” or ordeal by water, was used, even though it was illegal and often condemned by the learned. In some of the better-documented cases, moreover, suspects were closely watched for hours on end until small creatures (rabbits, dogs, cats, mice, beetles, and other vermin) were seen to creep under the suspect's skirts, where it was thought they might nurse.

From a Continental point of view, this English fascination with familiar spirits, devil's marks, and the suspicion that witches nursed their spirits with teats hidden in their private parts seems peculiar and might prompt some historians to revert to psychoanalytic explanations, while others might find that such local obsessions confirm Stuart Clark's contention that witchcraft provided a language in which townsmen and villagers could link their sense of the perverse with the demonic. Gaskill does not comment on such interpretive options. And unlike Continental fantasies about the witches’ sabbath, these English attempts to discover the physical marks of demonic activity did at least appeal to empirical data of a sort that was, in principle, open to investigation and verification.

We cannot know how many of the over three hundred women and men interrogated on charges of witchcraft were finally executed during the years of Hopkins and Stearne's campaign, but it is certain that over one hundred were put to death. This was by far the worst witch hunt in English history, but Gaskill reminds us that they came during a civil war that probably killed 190,000, or something approaching 4 percent of the English population. Gaskill is especially good at connecting local tensions to the larger chaos provoked by the breakdown of civil order. Without the restraints once provided by episcopal courts and the Court of Star Chamber, which both had developed a policy of checking false accusations and irregular methods of witch finding, the larger crisis of the English political system unleashed the zealous and the panic stricken to do their own kind of rough justice. Gaskill is also very good at chronicling the growing skepticism among “sticklers” and others, such as the Reverend John Gaule, who loathed the “superstitious” methods of the witch finders and distrusted ordinary laymen to make such findings.

Gaskill recounts these investigations, trials, and executions with skill and imagination. Instead of confining himself narrowly to the written record, he successfully imagines his scenes, evoking the mood and the people, the smells and the clothing, the locale, the poverty, and the weather surrounding the tough business of detecting and punishing witches. As a piece of popular history it would be hard to do a better job with these often reticent sources. Gaskill is also fully aware of the large wave of scholarly work on witchcraft trials in Europe and in the rest of Britain from the past generation. His conjectures, therefore, comport well not only with the evidence but also with the emerging consensus concerning what drove these sorts of trials onward. This book can be recommended as both informative and entertaining and as an excellent introduction to the world of the 1640s.