As outrageous as this may seem, thanks to the newly invented printing press, the Malleus was widely circulated among ecclesiastical and lay authorities – both of whom Pope Innocent had enjoined to ferret out witches. Initially non-ecclesiastic lawyers balked at the concept of arresting, questioning and torturing people on the strength of unfounded and un-provable accusations, but since anyone who denied the reality of witches was likely to be accused of witchcraft themselves, the lawyers finally knuckled under and began persecuting, and prosecuting, anyone unlucky enough to be accused of witchcraft. Thus was the full force of the legal system brought into play in what was technically a matter for ecclesiastical courts. But Church courts were not authorised to torture, nor execute, people; lay courts were. When a woman in Lausanne was charged with poisoning and attempted kidnap, the inquisitors were called in. Within two days she had confessed not only to the original charges, but to attending Sabbats, having sex with the Devil, creating storms and murdering children.
It seems obvious that the woman mentioned above was condemned on the strength of her forced admission, but when torture failed to extract a confession there were ample alternative methods to confirm guilt. A great enough number of accusations, no matter how outrageous they might be, could easily serve the purpose. If there were not sufficient accusers, physical proof of guilt could be found in the form of ‘Devil’s marks’, the stigmata sagarum mentioned earlier. The Devil’s mark might be no more than a mole, wart or birthmark but it might also be something as blatant as a third nipple; a rarity to be sure, but not unheard of. To search for these signs of a pact with the devil, the accused was stripped naked and had their head shaved before being searched for evidence of their sin. If this failed it was assumed that the Devil’s mark was simply invisible. Invisible marks were believed to be either insensitive to pain or unable to bleed when pierced. To determine whether or not the accused had such a mark, they were ‘pricked’ – that is, jabbed repeatedly with a sharp, heavy needle – until a spot without a nerve-end was found or until shock caused their nervous system to shut down, making them insensitive to continued punctures.
The point of all this torture was not just to elicit a confession of personal guilt. Integral to ferreting-out witches was making them reveal the names of their accomplices – the other members of their coven. In exchange for naming other witches, victims might be promised that their lives would be spared; spared, that is, to spend the rest of their lives in a dungeon or being handed over to a judge who had not been a party to the plea-bargain, leaving them free to condemn the prisoner to the noose or burning post. By getting suspected witches to confess that they were members of an organised coven and to get them to name other supposed satanic conspirators, it gave credence to the Church and State in their claims of the threat to society. These confessions were paramount to the ability of both the Church and State to wield unchallenged power.
The dastardly tools of the witch-pricker. In the hands of a Witchfinder, these devices could prove condemning. With a retractable ‘prick’ the witch-pricker could easily find a place on the body of the accused where a good stab caused no pain or blood, this was taken to be ‘the devil’s mark’ and could well lead to their conviction and execution.
Witch hunting may have originated with the Roman Catholic Church but the Protestant Reformation, which began in 1517, did not list witch burning among its list of grudges against Rome and the Papacy. Even Martin Luther, who instigated the Reformation in Germany, was convinced that the Devil made compacts with anyone and everyone willing to do his bidding, and wrote that: ‘No one need think that the world can be ruled without blood. The civil sword shall, and must, be bloody’. Accordingly, although Luther and his followers may have rejected the pope and many of the precepts of the Catholic Church, they were as quick to latch on to the Malleus Maleficarum as to pick up the Bible.
Here we see a woman, accused of witchcraft, about to be examined and ‘questioned’. Once stripped naked she will be subjected to various tortures until the authorities elicit from her the confessions they desire. Depicted here are the finger pillory, branding irons, fiddle, flail, restraints, pincers and even part of a rack (on the right). The title of this nineteenth-century engraving is ‘You are going to be tortured so much the sun will shine through your body’
By 1530, Catholics and Protestants were competing not only for the hearts and minds of Christian Europe, but also to see who was most efficient at exposing the army of the damned. Undoubtedly this was at least partly an attempt by each side to prove they were more dedicated to carrying out the work of God than the other. After nearly a century of ecclesiastic competition, neither side seemed to have made satisfactory headway so Christian Europe went to war with itself. Between 1618 and 1648 the staunchly Catholic Habsburg rulers of Austria and Spain warred with Protestant Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands and Catholic France. Germany, divided between Catholics in the north and Protestants in the south, went to war with itself. In England, where most of the Catholics had already been persecuted out of existence, the Puritan government took their own little Holy War to staunchly Catholic Ireland where English forces imposed Protestantism at sword point and, in retaliation, the Irish murdered English civilians left and right. In 1642, bands of Irish rebels burned and stoned to death English men and women, forcing children to murder their parents, mothers to kill their own children and men to murder their entire families before they, themselves, were consigned to the burning post.
This image depicts the burning of several heretics in Schwarzenburg, Switzerland. These scenes may have lacked some of the grandeur and spectacle of the Inquisitional auto-de-fe, but the end result was nevertheless just as horrid and brutal.
As part of this campaign of seemingly unending unholy terror, the universal hunt for witches was ratcheted up along with the fighting, and the torture used to extract confessions increased in frequency and ferocity. By the mid-point in Europe’s religious wars – commonly referred to as the Thirty Years War – witches were no longer being burnt a few at a time, but by the dozens and hundreds. In Protestant-controlled Geneva, Switzerland 500 were burned in less than three months; one Catholic Bishop in Bamburg, Germany burned 600 and another in Wirtzburg did away with no less than 900. In Savoy, Italy 800 were condemned to the stake at a single, mass trial. But the record for cruelty is unquestionably held by German theologian Benedict Carpzov who, over the course of his career, is credited with signing death warrants for more than 20,000 women and men. In all fairness it must be considered that witch hunting did not take place everywhere. Some communities, indeed some entire districts, were spared its horrors, but once the mania took hold, it inevitably spread like a virulent cancer.
On 7 April 1611, a seventy-year-old housewife from Ellwangen, Germany, by the name of Barbara Rufin, was arrested on charges of desecrating the Eucharist – the wafers used in the Christian service of Communion. There is no doubt that Frau Rufin was a cantankerous sort; even her husband often referred to her as a witch. Over the days of her incarceration and interrogation more and more of her neighbours came forward to insist that Barbara was, indeed, a witch; among them was her daughter-in-law, with whom she argued frequently and violently. No matter how much evidence piled up against her, Rufin refused to admit to practicing witchcraft. By 12 April the inquisitors decided the only thing left was to torture the ‘truth’ out of her. On the first day of torture she was racked twice, for fifteen minutes at a time. By the end of the third day, after enduring a total of seven rackings, she confessed. On 16 May she was beheaded with a sword – a standard form of execution in Germany at the time – and her body was publicly burnt. But it seems that before she met her end Frau Rufin had offered the names of some of her accomplices. When questioned as to the accuracy of her statements, those who had testified against Rufin were certain that the others were witches as well. The hunt for witches in and around Ellwangen instantly spiralled out of control. By the end of the year more than 100 women and men had been murde
red in seventeen mass executions; the following year an additional 150 fell victim to the Ellwangen hysteria. Every name volunteered by every suspect and informant was written down in the inquisitor’s log book and passed on to the pertinent authorities. One woman volunteered the names of twenty-nine others, another offered up two dozen names. When, joy of joys, a name cropped up more than once it was sufficient cause to order an immediate arrest. Some of those accused found themselves arrested and tried nearly two decades after being named.
The process of interrogating a suspected witch was always the same; the accused was asked questions so leading and cleverly worded that no matter how they answered they appeared guilty. ‘Who seduced you into witchcraft?’ If the answer was ‘no one’ it was concluded that they had willingly volunteered. Written confessions were as conveniently standardised as the questions. All this was formality, of course. There was never any doubt that the accused would be found guilty; we know this because records indicate that inventories of the accused possessions (which would be confiscated by the court or Church after their execution) began almost immediately after the suspects were arrested.
In 1615, three years after the Ellwangen panic began, three priests were arrested, tried and executed on charges of baptising infants and adults in the name of Satan. At least this explained how there came to be so many witches in the Ellwangen area. There were hundreds of similar cases of snowballing witch panics all over Europe in the years between 1525 and 1675, but this one instance should be sufficient to indicate the general course of events.
It is important to note that the Thirty Years War ended in 1648, the same year England’s Puritan Parliament began passing draconian laws against almost everything, and only months before King Charles I was led to the block. It may have taken them a while to get around to dealing with threats as small as putting on theatrical performances and playing cards, but from the earliest days of the Civil War, the Puritans in government had been meting out self-righteous justice to the perceived agents of Satan. As late as 1665, Sir Matthew Hale, Lord Chief Justice would say he had ‘no doubt at all that there were such creatures [as witches]’ and promptly sentenced two women to be hanged solely on the testimony of a third woman who insisted the accused had caused her children to ‘cough extremely and brought up crooked pins and once a big nail with a very broad head’. Seeing a handful of pins and a nail was all the proof Hale needed. But even the forces of good sometimes need a little help, and during the all-encompassing chaos of the English Civil War this help came in the form of the most notorious witch hunter of all time, Matthew Hopkins.
Prior to March 1644 Matthew Hopkins was nothing more than a clerk for a shipping company and part-owner of a tavern in the town of Mistley, Essex. But among the tavern’s regular patrons was John Thurlowe, head of Oliver Cromwell’s spy ring and this gave Hopkins an ‘in’ with the government and allowed him to gauge which way the political wind was blowing. When a lonely, cantankerous, one-legged old woman named Elizabeth Clarke was accused of witchcraft, Hopkins – undoubtedly aware that Mrs Clarke’s mother had been hanged as a witch – ordered her arrest without any real authority to do so. Then, with the help of a local thug named Jack Stearne, he proceeded to question Mrs Clarke. Knowing that torture was illegal, Hopkins stripped the old woman naked, deprived her of food, drink and sleep and forced her to hobble up and down her cell, on her crutch, until she collapsed. According to the written report that Hopkins submitted to the court along with Clarke’s confession: ‘In March 1644, she and some seven or eight of that horrible sect of Witches living in Essex … with diverse Witches of other towns who had their solemn sacrifices and there offered to the Devil’. For good measure, he insisted that the widow Clarke had ‘three teats about her, which honest women do not.’
The frontispiece to Discovery of Witches (1647) by Matthew Hopkins, Witch Finder General of England. He kept Elizabeth Clarke awake in her cell for four days. These are the animal ‘familiars’ which she reported seeing in that time. Based on this testimony, she was executed for witchcraft.
With half a dozen more witches now named, and more names pouring forth with each round of torture, Hopkins added three new members to his team, including Mary ‘Goody’ Phillips, an expert witch-pricker. Unlike most prickers, who had to poke and prod for hours until the victim confessed or failed to feel pain, Hopkins supplied Phillips with a prick with a retractable needle; it was completely painless and appeared as though the needle was being sunk deep into the victim’s flesh. It was a cheap stage trick, but it purchased the lives of dozens of women.
Pricking was not the only way Hopkins could identify a witch; he insisted he could tell just by the way a woman threw her hair over her shoulder or how she interlaced her fingers whether or not she was having sex with the Devil. In a matter of months Hopkins was the talk of southern England and even the reactionary parliamentarian newspaper The Scottish Dove lauded his work, claiming that under Hopkins’ questioning: ‘The witches do confess they had been in the King’s Army and have sent out their hags to serve them … His Majesty’s Army, it seems, is beholding to the Devil’. Other papers ghoulishly reported on the supposed offspring brought about by the Devil’s coupling with witches. Some described limbless Cyclopes while others insisted they were two-headed, eight-limbed cats with human hands. No wonder then that requests poured in from all over East Anglia for the services of Matthew Hopkins, who now styled himself Witch-Finder General of England.
Hopkins not only charged ‘by the head’ for every witch discovered, but in many places he ordered local authorities to levy special taxes to pay his expenses and his helpers’ wages. But it must have seemed like it was worth every penny because everywhere Matthew Hopkins went dozens of witches would be discovered, arrested, tortured into confessing, tried according to law and publicly executed. Of thirty-four women slated for trial at Colchester in July 1645, four died in prison, one (a teenager) was released when she agreed to testify against the others, and the remaining twenty-nine were hanged.
Some of the confessions elicited by Hopkins demonstrate that not only can a person be tortured into confessing to almost anything, but just how willing the public and courts must have been to accept such obviously forced testimony. Margaret Wyard insisted the Devil came to her bed in the guise of a handsome young man with blond hair, but Elizabeth Chandler claimed that when he came to her it was in the shape of ‘roaring things’ that ‘slithered into her bed in a puffing and roaring manner’. Disagreeing with both of these was the testimony of an old woman who said her demonic lover was nothing less monstrous than two gigantic beetles. It is hardly surprising that Hopkins’ victims would confess to anything. In his notes on the torture of the septuagenarian Rev. John Lowes, who at first staunchly denied any wrongdoing, Hopkins wrote: ‘We kept him awake several nights together while running him backwards and forwards about his cell until he was weary of life and scarce sensible of what he said or did’. Hardly surprising then that Rev. Lowes finally confessed to giving birth to, and suckling, four little demons as well as conjuring up a storm that caused a ship to sink, with a loss of fourteen lives. Lowes’ retraction did him no good and no one ever checked to see if a storm, and the associated shipwreck, had taken place. Rev. Lowes was hanged in August 1645.
By late autumn of that year, Hopkins had brought about the executions of nearly 200 people, had an equal number behind bars and no one knows how many had died in prison. When Hopkins offered to visit the village of Great Staunton in Huntingdonshire, however, all did not go as planned. A member of the town council showed Hopkins’ letter to the local vicar, John Gaul, and Gaul promptly denounced Hopkins from the pulpit, and in a pamphlet, where he said: ‘Every old woman with a wrinkled face, a furrowed brow, a hairy lip, a squeaking voice or a scolding tongue, having a ragged coat on her back and a dog or cat by her side is not only suspected but pronounced for a witch’. Soon, even some in Parliament began questioning Hopkins’ tactics, if not his motives. One unbiased London newspaper wro
te: ‘Life is precious and there is need of the greatest inquisition before it be taken away’. By Christmas, Hopkins’ services were no longer being requested and his reign of terror was over. In nineteen months he had judicially taken the lives of more than 230 people.
Samuel Butler’s satire Hudibras commented on Hopkins’s activity, saying:
Has not this present Parliament
A Lieger to the Devil sent,
Fully impowr’d to treat about
Finding revolted witches out
And has not he, within a year,
Hang’d threescore of ’em in one shire?
Some only for not being drown’d,
And some for sitting above ground,
Whole days and nights, upon their breeches,
And feeling pain, were hang’d for witches.
And some for putting knavish tricks
Upon green geese and turky-chicks?
And pigs, that suddenly deceast
Of griefs unnat’ral, as he guest;
Who after prov’d himself a witch
And made a rod for his own breech.
The last line refers to a tradition whereby disgruntled villagers caught Hopkins and subjected him to his own ‘swimming’ test: he floated, and therefore was hanged for witchcraft himself. However, it is believed by most historians that Hopkins actually died of illness (possibly tuberculosis) in his home. The parish records of Manningtree in Essex record his burial in August of 1647.
Matthew Hopkins may have been the most notorious of the witch hunters, but he was neither the first nor the last. Four years later, in 1649, a Scotsman named John Kincaid – the most celebrated witch-pricker of his day – was called to Newcastle-upon-Tyne where he was paid 20s for every person he could get convicted of witchcraft. On his arrival in the city, the town crier walked the streets calling for informers to present their suspicions to Kincaid at the town hall. Of the thirty women accused of practicing the black arts, twenty-seven were convicted and executed.
The Big Book of Pain: Torture & Punishment Through History Page 13