Of all the men who hunted witches during the early modern period, Matthew Hopkins, the self-appointed ‘Witch-finder General’, is perhaps the most well-known worldwide. This is certainly true in England, in any case. Historian Wallace Notestein observed: ‘In the annals of English witchcraft Matthew Hopkins occupies a place by himself.’
There are several reasons why Hopkins is singled out from the other European men who persecuted witches at this time, and all of these reasons will be addressed in future blogs. This short blog focuses on what I consider to be the man’s primary motivation for pulling on his bucket-top boots each day and stomping around East Anglia in search of satanic-witches, during the middle of a war. (The English Civil War – the one where the King got his block knocked off.)
We know that Hopkins was the son of a minister and had trained as a lawyer (or so he claimed). But, it was not religious zeal which drove him to instigate the prosecution of an estimated 100 – 300 people as witches during his fourteen-month reign of terror. The whole campaign, as his chief opponent, John Gaule, the vicar of Great Staughton, saw it, had been devised as a money-making racket.
Hopkins saw witch-hunting as an opportunity to make a quick buck. Where there was blame, there was a claim.
In the summer of 1647 Hopkins was eventually called upon to defend his actions, accused of using methods akin to illegal torture to extract confessions from his victims and of ‘fleecing the country for his own profit’. Hopkins responded by publishing a book in which he denied the charge of profiteering, arguing that the money he took from each town he visited – a fee of twenty shillings to rid the town of its troublemakers – went towards his assistants’ travel costs. (Or as he put it, ‘to maintaine his companie with three horses’.) He also told the bare-faced lie that he did not make a profit from his work, but, as Notestein points out, ‘That this was untrue is sufficiently proved by the records of Stowmarket where he received twenty-three pounds and his travelling expenses.’
To put this into perspective, just from this one town alone, Hopkins made the equivalent of around £2400 today. This was enough to buy three horses at the time and was more than 300 times the daily income of a skilled worker.
Witch-hunting proved to be a lucrative business for the man who had no real expertise or authority. But his greed would eventually contribute to his downfall.
Source: Wallace Notestein, A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 (London, 1911), ch. 9.