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Her Sister was a Witch: The History of Witches in the Early Modern Era
19 Plays13 days ago
In this week's episode, Grace delves into the intriguing world of witchcraft. Explore the historical context of witchcraft trials, the influence of demonology, and the societal upheavals that fueled these infamous events!
Sources used: Witchcraft: A History in 13 Trials
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Transcript
Introduction to Witchcraft Series
00:00:15
Speaker
Hey everyone, welcome back to another episode of Harlots and Hurses. It's me, your host, Grace Artis. This episode is going to be a fun one. It's about all things witchcraft, and I think I'm going to kind of like start at a little witchcraft series. So in this episode, I'm going to give a little bit of context behind witchcraft, witchcraft trials, how it came to be, give two trials, for example, and then I'm going to do another episode over the whole concept of demon knowledge you and winch hunting books. And then the third episode that I want to do is going to be another witchcraft trial. It's about Salem, but taking Salem in a different perspective than that's usually taken. So without further ado, I know that was a short intro. We are going to dive into it. So lot of what I'm focusing on on this episode and what i'm a lot of what I'm using to reference is coming from the historian Marian Gibson in the book Witchcraft, A History in 13 Trials. It's an amazing book. you
00:01:12
Speaker
It's 300 pages, but you read it so fast. It's so beautifully and well written. And it perfectly encapsulates everything that I myself am looking to do as a historian. know, shine light and give these women their voice back and be a voice to the voice
Historical Beliefs and Persecution of Women
00:01:27
Speaker
list. at the very beginning we have to first ask the question well what is a witch and if we go back to the ancient greeks and ancient romans like they believed that magic was neither inherently good or inherently bad it was a blurred notion between the two however in europe this would very much change when a new theological science was established aka it was called demonology or the study of devils or demons and with this witchcraft got brought up and these demonologists argued that witchcraft it was not good magic gone bad it was a life that was committed to evil and wickedness There was no between shades of gray with the demonology. Everything was black or in white. There was no in between. And because of this, this is kind of like a huge shakeup at the time where magic, like I said, was kind of viewed as something that just was. It wasn't inherently good and it wasn't inherently evil. Here with demonology, it's like, oh no, there is a good and there is a evil. And if you are with the side of evil, you're witch and you deserve to be punished for.
00:02:34
Speaker
Now, a lot of this is also in regards and why this all gets stirred up is because of the Protestant reformation that was happening in Europe during this period. You're starting to see people start develop their own forms of belief and their own forts from of religion and are separating from the standard that is the Catholic Church. And this is also where you have a lot of like heretics coming in. of like if if you're not a catholic you're a heretic and heretics you burn so thus if you are something that is practicing something that is sinful and something that is blasphemous to god which a lot of the time these men believe that that's what witchcraft was it was the worshiping of satan then you yourself deserved to be burned for your beliefs and art during this period Most of the witches who were accused were women. It's estimated that during this time of the accused, 90% of them were women. So it's not to say that men weren't, it's saying that witchcraft is very much so a woman's crime. And so what also permeates this belief of women being tied to witchcraft and women then being evil is very much so the myth of Eve.
00:03:54
Speaker
And that gets thrown around a lot in a lot of these demonology books and the beliefs from these clergymen and these witch hunters is that Eve herself, it was believed, was kind of, if you will, the first original witch.
00:04:07
Speaker
Because Eve had everything was going fine in the Garden Eden, and then Eve succumbed to seduction by Satan. and thus led men astray and it was believed because eve was a woman therefore all women are able and are more easily seduced by satan himself and therefore more likely to practice witchcraft and there was one demonologist called henrik kramer and he was one of the big ones He, in his book titled The Hammer of Witches, he explained how every evil is small compared to the evil of a woman. Women are defective in all the power of both soul and body, and an evil woman is more carnal than a man, lying in speech and unwilling to be ruled. This kind of gets, this notion of the evil women gets brought up even more by the preachings and beliefs of king james the first of scotland and then king james the first of england he himself was a huge demonologist and kind of a known not liker of women really didn't like women
00:05:16
Speaker
but in him and his book and what he wrote in his demonology is that women are of the weaker sex so it's easier to be entrapped by the gross snares of the devil he himself even ties and mentions you know the serpent discerned and seduced eve and therefore eve was the first witch and the first seducer This led in the church to lead to a massive distrust of women.
00:05:41
Speaker
They could be dangerous rebels. They could be heretics. And, you know, women's mind were easily confused by demonic lies and thus could be talked into joining Satan. So that's bad. And then we take it a step forward. It says, well, these women, just like Eve, are natural seducers. So they could seduce their fellow men to fall for this. And so like just had Eve had been corrupted by Satan, so too were these 15th century women being so linked to and being able to say they were seduced by Satan. And it wasn't enough to just be a woman to be accused of witchcraft. Obviously, that was a huge, huge proponent, but it kind of followed a little bit of a checklist.
00:06:24
Speaker
If a woman was poor, had a higher risk of being accused. If a woman was religious, but she was of the wrong religion, also high risk if a woman was single or a single had a child out of wedlock huge um huge because if you're if you're that easy to be seduced by a man you're so much easier to be seduced by the devil also women healers women midwives women any woman who had a practical knowledge of the human body and how to help that in understanding of health because remember during this period women did not have
00:07:00
Speaker
essentially any or all access to the schools of theology the schools of law the schools of medicine so these men found it highly suspect that these women knew that if granted these women knew that through generational knowledge knowledge that's passed down from mother to daughter and then the family itself but still it was very highly scrutinized during this period now like then kind of what happens when you are accused of witchcraft so sign of the series of events was often similar So a lot of the times there was no compelling evidence that the person accused of witchcraft was a witch. If that was the case, then torture was often done upon them to try and elicit a confession. But just like we know in today's era,
00:07:43
Speaker
A tortured confession is not a trustworthy confession because the person being tortured is one that's willing at a certain point to say anything to make the torture and the pain stop. And it was also during like a torture and this interrogator torturers own bias can be seen and the questions that they are asking the person, the answers that they are eliciting from the person. It all has a perceived notion of violence and influence.
00:08:09
Speaker
and bias. And it's also important to note that in this period specifically, witches is one of the few categories that women were allowed to exist and be found in, in the historical record, the pre-feminist history era. Because pre-feminist history, anything above that, it was a huge concept of, you know, the big man following important men throughout history and studying them or following key events. And so women, because of this, they often fall behind and don't get talked about. They get pushed to the side. Well, the one exempt is witches because big men like King James, like Kramer, they were pursuing these witches. So it allows them to exist in the archive.
00:08:56
Speaker
However, it's important to know that it's largely filtered. What we have of them and the records that we have of them is largely filtered and controlled by the men at the time.
00:09:08
Speaker
It's controlled by the men of the court, both church and state, church and local. And then it's in charge of the men witnesses and the scribes who are writing all of this down. Because a lot of the time in these court sessions that these women's disposition, so anything that either they talked about or another woman accusing the the supposed witch They would all, for the most part, be given by women who were illiterate and could not read. So they were copied down by a court clerk or a scribe that was always male. And this removes the woman from the individual source.
00:09:48
Speaker
It's not her words that are being recorded. It's her words through the eyes of a man. And so that's really important when we're looking through all of these trials and all of these records and all of these documents of trying to read against the archives, understanding the bias that is there and knowing it's there and working around it to understand and to try and paint a fuller picture of who these women were. Now, evidence of witchcraft was accumulated in one of three ways.
00:10:18
Speaker
The first was by confession. The second was the searching of a witch mark. And then the third was a confession of testimonies and accusations.
Witch Trials Across Regions: Catholic vs. Protestant
00:10:27
Speaker
So essentially, if you were found to have the two, if you had the first two down, a confession and a witch mark, you were pretty much like found guilty, just like...
00:10:36
Speaker
just But it's also important to note that in this court system and what we had, it's a court system that is going through flux and it's going through change. Once again, thanks to the Protestant Reformation and the internal change of the church. so In Catholic areas where it was the official faith, which is more so around Middle, Southern, Eastern Europe at the time, the church officials were the inquisitors, were the ones running the trials, were the ones doing the investigation, if you will. And then in Protestant areas, so mainly the north and the west and large parts of England, depending on the time, that is state authorities. So no longer is the church involved. Now instead, it's the state.
00:11:23
Speaker
It is essentially at this point, you know, ordinary people who are running it, low level officials or amateur investigators. And this kind of switch really is reflective in the cases as you go on. And it's why I picked the two cases that I did, because it it kind of just shows how much the court system had changed into what it was of being one that was originally done by the church to now one done by the state and local affairs. And so you see by kind of like the 1600s, how demonology was in essential knowledge for a lot of a national regions.
00:12:04
Speaker
And there were around like 45 demonologies in print across Western Europe. And as it gained popularity, more trials became common. Now, even though the Catholicism trials were done by the church and Protestant trials were done by the state, they all had a very similar trial experience and how they were run.
00:12:27
Speaker
To show a like why this is so important, ah Gibson in her book notes that like which which trials never died, they just essentially changed names and changed practices. So like the best example that she gave, and I think it's very like applicant of especially in today's time and being a woman and you hear all about and you see like the male loneliness epidemic going on of men blaming women for almost everything under the sun. But then at the same time, they complain about being lonely. And that was still like ties of that can be seen in witchcraft. It was done by clergymen who were often
00:13:04
Speaker
celibate. They had no real interactions with women, but they were at the same time fascinated with women in the controlling and policing of those women. And so Gibson, she says, you know, like the incel culture that has grown up in our digital age, some medieval churchmen sought ways to blame women for their sexuality while simultaneously expressing their own fascination with it. And she says how witches were often seen as unwomanly women.
00:13:32
Speaker
They were child haters, anti-mothers, anti-housewives. It was an aversion of the knowledge that was traditionally deemed a woman's role. And then it also targeted, like I said, nursery, midwife, and giving domestic advice instead of and of helping people come to suspect these women.
00:13:52
Speaker
of murdering babies and children and instead of cooking wholesome food and raising the family and i think that can be very much seen in and today's age and why it's still matter and important to acknowledge that these still theme these themes that women were facing all the way back in the fifteen hundreds Like, yes, it has changed, but a lot of the the undergoing the undergoing current hasn't. Women are still facing this, especially by the right wing. If a woman, like, believe it was Taylor Swift. There was one politician who called her a childless cat woman and how that's not a woman's role. But it's like a woman's role can be anything. a woman's role is what the woman decides, not what a man decides for her. So with all that
00:14:38
Speaker
i am going to get into the two trials to show kind of like how witchcraft was handled in the colonies and then how witchcraft was handled in england at this time and kind of as we're starting to see a decline in demonology in the ruling so the first trial is a trial of joan wright and for this for her we are going back to a place that i have covered I think two or three times now.
The Trial of Joan Wright: An Early American Witch Trial
00:15:05
Speaker
Jamestown. Good old Jamestown. What's actually not known, and I didn't know this until reading this book, is that Jamestown was actually home to one of the first trials of witchcraft. Way before, like 70 years before the Salem witch trials even took place, there was one in Jamestown. And that happened in 1626. So Joan, Joan Wright, we know that she was born in an English city of Kingston-upon-the-hill sometime around 1580 to 1590. Now in her youth, Jane did have a firsthand kind of experience with witchcraft.
00:15:41
Speaker
way back when she was living in England. We're the age of refrigeration and milk was prone to curdling. That was just what happen. And if it curdled, you couldn't turn or make the milk into anything. You could work for hours on it and nothing would happen. Well, one of the superstitions at the time was to not blame milk curdling on nature, but to blame it on, though the reason it didn't curdle is that someone put, a witch put a hex or a curse on you. And that's why the milk is not curdling. Well, this kind of situation happened to Joan. So she was working at her mistress house and all of a sudden a woman came to the door, a woman who was accused of witchcraft.
00:16:19
Speaker
So her mistress instructed Joan, hey, like the mistress told Joan, like clap the churn staff to the bottle of the churn and then keep your hands upon that and don't let it rest until I tell you otherwise. And the mistress left, went to go talk to the woman accused of witchcraft, essentially like casted her out and touched the woman's hand.
00:16:37
Speaker
And then the mistress came rushing back into the turning room. And then at that point, she's like, I've removed the witch. I removed the curse. Proceed to go back to turning. And lo and behold, it worked. Butter and milk were able to be had. And...
00:16:53
Speaker
This kind of like really stuck with Joan because even when she made it to the Americas, she would still tell of this story of witchcraft, which is really funny and kind of not a smart move if you really think about it.
00:17:07
Speaker
Sometime before 1610, Joan had left Hull to make the travel to America and to Jamestown. We don't really know much about how she got there, but it's very heavily believed that was probably something having to do with andton indentured servitude. have to remember in the 1608, 1610 period of Jamestown, when it's in its early, early phases, so there were not a lot of women, so women were heavily prized. We do know that...
00:17:34
Speaker
By 1610, she had arrived in Virginia and she had married a tobacco plant planter named Robert Wright. And he was an ancient planter. Slashback to that episode, if you were an ancient planter in Jamestown, that just meant you were there since essentially the colony started. And so he was pretty well-to-do, pretty affluent. And we know that they prospered. um They worked for other families on plantations and, you know, they built side-by-side businesses.
00:18:04
Speaker
Come 1620s, we find them living in Elizabeth city, which is like a town village, very close to Jamestown, kind of like an offshoot of it. And if we remember this is the period, the 1620s, when there was the massacre done by the native American tribes at this period.
00:18:23
Speaker
And because of this massacre, it had totally wrecked Jamestown and the surrounding colonies. And then when the Virginia Company went bust in 1624, more militiant force took place. And this militiant force was essentially creating a tighter grip.
00:18:41
Speaker
on colonial life so colonists now stockpiled weapons they practiced military drills movements were restricted and there were religious changes as well so now daily prayer was mandated and there was now a stricter conformity to protestantism during this time And so now the colonists' private lives were no longer private. And the spotlight fell strictly and heavily on women as several women were prosecuted for drunkenness, whoredom, and adultery. And Joan, because Joan at this time, she was also practicing a midwife and she was a fortune teller.
00:19:21
Speaker
And keep in mind, she had told people that she had experienced witchcraft before in the past. So all of that is just accumulating and kind of creating one big catalyst. And Virginia at this time, it was still like following King James's Witchcraft Act of 1604. And essentially what this act is, is it banned any invocation or conjuring of any evil or wicked spirit and further interactions with such spirit and how no one should consult, convent with, entertain, employ, feed or award any evil or wicked spirit for any intensive purposes. And if anyone was found of using any type of witchcraft that did so or to kill or harm a person, they would be executed. And so this was kind of like the ruling that Jamestown was still following at this period. And then we also have to remember that witchcraft and accusations of witchcraft are heavily influenced by upheaval in society. So things not going good. Someone needs a scrape goat.
00:20:29
Speaker
have to remember in Jamestown Jamestown is the town of things not going like how they should. It's a town of when it's bad, it's really fucking bad. And this was kind of like the situation where Joan finds herself.
00:20:43
Speaker
So remember, Jamestown was dealing with famine. It was dealing with disease. It was dealing with native American attacks and financial collapse. and all of this is making the men on edge in jamestown about the success of it and some of the men who first accused joan of witchcraft they were military men kind of very much worried about the state of jamestown and it's it is success so the first of jones accusers was a lieutenant giles arlington and it was the summer of 1626. like her husband he was an ancient planter and he came from a very wealthy english family and he was building a very successful life in
00:21:24
Speaker
Virginia. Now, some of the first two accusations put against Joan were that she was causing the hunting to be bad in Jamestown. She was causing the animals to be skittish and not plentiful. So he explained how, you know, him and his fellow officers, they had experienced poor hunting recently. Even though they had very fair game to shoot at, apparently they had been unable to hit anything for over a year.
00:21:53
Speaker
and instead of blaming his own shooting abilities he blamed joan and this accusation was enforced by another man who seconded this and it was pretty unusual to blame witches for disrupting hunting but joan's neighbors those men were Pretty much saying like, it's the only explanation for why we couldn't hit anything. It has to be witchcraft. Next Guile made another accusation over Joan. Cause remember Joan was a midwife. So Guiles had made another accusation and this one is following the longs of Joan put a curse or hex on my family.
00:22:30
Speaker
so guile states how his wife was very heavily pregnant and he was very concerned about her pregnancy and he wanted the best midwife so he originally sent for joan however when his wife heard about this she didn't want joan because it was known that Joan was left-handed and left-handedness at the time was something thought to be unlucky or sinister. And so because of his wife's unexpected fears surrounding this, Giles like withdrew his invitation to Joan to be the midwife.
00:23:03
Speaker
The thing is like he didn't tell her about it. He just kind of avoided her. So Joan, hearing about this, not through Giles, but through third party, she she kind of like lost her mind a little bit. She exploded, if you will. She went to the Giles' farm the day after their baby's birth.
00:23:24
Speaker
And Giles recounted how she went away from his house very much discontented in regard to the other midwife that they had used. and now joan kind of finds herself being in the position of the witch just like the so-called witch who visited her mistress's house back in england she is the one who is now disgruntled at the doorstep spewing curses and being upset and guiles recounts that you know joan marched away so angrily
00:23:55
Speaker
and his wife would fall ill with an absence on her breast she recovered but then giles himself fell sick and then their baby got sick and died at just four months old so because all this and because giles was like Well, Joan came to my house and she was upset and she already has talked about witchcraft before in the past. She is a witch. She was the one who did this to me and my family. Additionally, Joan was known to tell fortunes. It's kind of something that she did on the side. This would go to haunt her in the butt because after the accusation brought forth by Gil, she would start to get ah more accusations regarding the fortunes. And sadly, a lot of her fortunes and predictions concerned death, in predicting death and who would die. And one of her accusers explained that Jo had told her by just looking at this woman that her husband was going to die and that this woman would have to bury her husband. And how Joan had said something similar about another planter and how he lost his wife and Joan knew about that and predicted it.
00:24:59
Speaker
And then how Joan had also been able to tell another man that his wife was going to die. so Because things are getting hot and heavy here in Jamestown, Joan and Robert would decide, you know, they needed to move. So they tried moving to a noose and to a new town. However, they were not welcome at all. One of their new neighbors gave evidence that, you know,
00:25:23
Speaker
Joan had spoke unkindly to a farmer about how he had given a gift of chickens to this girl, and Joan kind of like condemned him. She's like, why would you do that? That girl's going to be dead soon enough anyways. You're just wasting the gift of chickens. And then they'd also heard more, the town had heard more about Joan and kind of how she had a slight temper. how she was a midwife, she practiced fortunes, and they wanted nothing to do to her. So essentially, like, like they kicked them out of town. And so because she had just so many suspicions that, you know, she possessed, you know, magical skills for many years, and because of that, it led her to turn to wi witchcraft.
00:25:58
Speaker
Joan was taken to the Virginia General Court and denounced to the magistrate as a witch. And three men would assemble to hear her court case. All these men would become future governors of the town. And all these judges, you know, they heard the evidence against Joan.
00:26:15
Speaker
There was no jury during this period because, once again, we're in military rule. And these men decided, you know, it seemed like a solid case. It was driven by, like, genuine emotions, mainly fear, grief, and anger. And the accusers of this trial were very prominent figures in society. However, no churchmen ever intervened and none, no work of demonology was ever put forth in this case, which I think is really interesting because it's not so much focusing on Satan and the demon aspect of it. It's how is Joan making the community feel? And so for the case with Joan and in Jamestown at this type time, torture was not allowed in the law.
00:26:58
Speaker
And she was not expected to confess about any satanic visions that she had. She had no lawyer, but her husband was allowed to speak on her behalf, which is huge. And he said essentially that, you know, she, he had been married to his wife for 16 years, but he knew nothing of the crime that she's being accused of. He's like,
00:27:18
Speaker
I know my wife for a long time. She's not guilty of what you're saying. We don't have anything about what Joan herself said. There's nothing courted. There's nothing written down about whether she took a plea of guilty or not guilty.
00:27:31
Speaker
All we know is a when they were discussing like Joan's attack on this woman, Joan was asked, you know, like, why didn't you sue your accuser for slander? If you know yourself and you know what you said, like, and you know that's not the truth, then why didn't you say anything? And Joan responded of like, God forgive them and kind of like making it seem like this is in God's hands. I'm a good Christian woman, so God will help me and see me through it. And we know there's no record of the plea, but Joan herself had said, you know, she's not a witch. And she was like in that statement, she claimed moral high ground as a good Christian woman. So she was not immediately judged, a clear and present satanic danger. And her case was adjourned until the next court setting. Then on September 18th, two witnesses confirmed at another hearing that the stories of the accused placed against Joan and they were heard, but no verdict. was recorded and that's where Joan's story really ends and it's kind of like showing how in the 17th century at least that the lives of the witchcraft suspects were often really not much valued like we don't know what happens to Joan we don't even have her court testimony written down and
00:28:44
Speaker
And because of like things are changing in the world with reformation, it's kind of like stripping the church of legal powers, which meant that, you know, the the women were no longer being investigated by church courts. So then it went to, you know, the state and local colonial justices. And they really only spent as much time on a with witchcraft accusation as they would a minor threat. And most of the trials only took 15 to 20 minutes. So in here, you're starting to see that like Witch trials are no longer being viewed as like new and shocking and like no longer special.
00:29:19
Speaker
It's kind of you're starting to see the decline of witch trials. And while we're seeing the decline of witch trials, it doesn't mean that they're not happening. Because back across the Atlantic in Europe, specifically UK, witchcraft trials are about to...
00:29:35
Speaker
about to start revving up. And we see this best shown in the case of Bess Clark. The English Civil War is breaking out. it was called the Great Rebellion. And essentially what this war is, is between the royalists who are supporting the right of kind of like sovereignty following James I and Charles I. Charles was actually ended up being executed. And then we're seeing the rise of parliamentarians who are more so on the protestant side of things and they're saying that the people should have a right rule not the crown and with this is a stricter puritan aspect of religion and so with this with like i said great turmoil coming along in the country there's political strife there's religious strife
00:30:25
Speaker
Everything's going on. And so essentially what this led for, once again, just like with Jamestown and Joan, here is another perfect example of how all the social, economic, and religious aspects can create a perfect catalyst for witch
Witch Trials During the English Civil War
00:30:40
Speaker
hunting. 1645 to 1647, there was a huge increase of witch hunting.
00:30:48
Speaker
And, you know, dozens, it was said, were executed without even record of their names surviving today. And kind of Gibson goes along in this of how the people of this period, the English investigators, you know, they were amateur witch finders. You know, they were lower level church and state officials, but they were joined by enthusiastic citizens who kind of were more so met with you general fears about witchcraft rather than professional demonologists. Kind of like what allowed for this is like I was talking about. The English church and state had effectively collapsed.
00:31:25
Speaker
The king, even though he was executed, he was beheaded, he could no longer authorize witch trials. And then the Anglican church, you know, had also lost its head. So kind of a lot of governance in parts of England resembled that of like a colonial authority. And so these people were areas that was essentially being run by either military governors, clergymen, or private citizens. And those people were left to kind of discover their own priorities and invent their own practical court seat hearings.
00:31:55
Speaker
So the witch hunters, you know, they were broadly aligned with the insurgent in the victorious side of the Civil War, the Puritans, if you will. So these Puritans, they were very, very pious, fundamental Protestants.
00:32:08
Speaker
And they felt that the Reformation had not gone far enough in sweeping away Catholic rituals from the English church and services and believers' lives. essentially stating like the church of england was not pure enough for them and it should be reformed further in society and so they wanted to end sin such as swearing drunkenness fornification and end to frivolity of any kind so wearing fine clothes dancing many forms of art music literature they would close down pubs they would close down taverns they would close down the theater And this this was not met greatly. um It pissed off a lot of people, but that was just the time.
00:32:45
Speaker
And so these witch trials in this period, they were seen as kind of like a revolutionary thing of seeking out those who polluted their communities with sin. The Puritans found that by hosting these witch trials, they were actually able to help them succeed more in the war. um because it essentially allowed them to establish what they viewed as a pure form of government. And these witch trials, too, were in a way for these people to learn more about their enemy. Through torturing, through surveillance, through confessions, they're able to, at least in their minds, feel like they're understanding how to defeat the devil himself and thereby create a better England. Now, one of these troubled which witch hunters um was a young man by the name of Matthew Hopkins. He was the son of a clergyman, and his primary focus in 1645 was a young disabled mother by the name of Elizabeth Clark.
00:33:48
Speaker
Now, Elizabeth, you know, she was known as Bess. She grew up in the village of Bradfield in Essex um with her father. Now, during the time between 1642 and 1645, the fighting of the Civil War is getting a lot closer to Matthew and Elizabeth's hometown. It's getting closer. The traditional forms of government control are and like the court criminal court cases were disrupted. Judge and magistrates, you know, lost their jobs.
00:34:17
Speaker
And in some places like court sessions cease totally. However, just because the court system is going up in flames, that did not mean that people did not stop accusing their neighbors of witchcraft. It just means that the trials were no longer overseen by legal experts. It was court cases are now overseen over one political faction or the other, and this allowed for groupthink to occur.
00:34:41
Speaker
Now, Matthew Hopkins, he was pretty much placed in a really good part of circumstances of the Civil War. His family was not too close to the old regime, but they did benefit from many of the advantages of it.
00:34:55
Speaker
He was the son of a wealthy rector from a wealthy parish. He was well-educated, and like he knew that he was going to have a good, prosperous career. He was also fortunate that he had no financial or geographical need to become a soldier. So even though he had no technical formal power, he lived in like greatly changing times.
00:35:18
Speaker
And so because of this, he was kind of able to kind of like walk, if you will, into a seat of power at his local community, church and establishment. He kind of took the reins from his stepfather's local community church in Manningtree. And Matthew was very much convinced that in Manningtree, it was being overrun by witches. Matthew, he was not the only villager to suspect witchcraft in that area, but he was just the leading member of this group.
00:35:48
Speaker
The first accusation made against Elizabeth. would come March 21st, 1645, when a tailor the name of John Rivett, he went to go see the local magistrates and he told them his story. And he said, you know, his wife was having very violent fits. So John himself thought,
00:36:08
Speaker
This is not something of a natural order. Someone has cursed you. So John himself, he went to go visit a cunning woman, which was like a diviner with magical knowledge. John didn't thank this person as a witch.
00:36:21
Speaker
She was kind of the answer to witchcraft, a person who could use it to overturn it. And the diviner confirmed John's fears that two women had bewitched his wife. One lived on the hill above their house in Manningtree and one in the town below. And John immediately knew that one of the women was Elizabeth Clark. He was so sure of his conviction that he told the magistrates her name.
00:36:44
Speaker
And so a warrant was issued for her arrest and Elizabeth was detained at her cottage and she was marched to be questioned. Now, John goes even further in this. So not only accusing Elizabeth of witchcraft, but taking it one step further and saying that Elizabeth's mother and in some other of Elizabeth's family were convicted of witchcraft.
00:37:07
Speaker
And so Elizabeth not only is a witch, but worse, she's the daughter of a witch. And so we got one accusation down. The next is kind of like looking for the witch mark, if you will.
00:37:18
Speaker
And what really was very unfortunate is that Elizabeth's body was very much scarred and she was marked out. She only had one leg. and it's known that one-legged women were very rare in this period and due to elizabeth's status it was also that she probably didn't have enough to have a good prosthetic walking would have been really painful and she would have lint really badly and walked with a cane slash crutch And this is further hurts Elizabeth more because in society, disability at this time was kind of viewed as a deformity and often presented as God's punishment for sin. Now, because she's been arrested, all of her neighbors think, well, that's what she gets. She has the limp and only one leg because she's a witch and she's being punished for her sins. We know that her records, that she was a young woman of childbearing age, so most likely mid-30s.
00:38:18
Speaker
and elizabeth too her second her third or fourth strike against her if you will is that she had an illegitimate daughter everything kind of was working against her you know she had an ill-aminated child she came from a poor family so she was living in poverty her mother was a witch and her physical appearance so everything was working against elizabeth during this And so four days after John had made his accusations against Elizabeth, Matthew Hopkins comes coming in and he's adding to his own story too.
00:38:51
Speaker
So he had already had prejudices against Elizabeth. And he also said that and identified her as one woman in a group of witches who had awoken him by holding meetings near his house every six weeks for several months. And he said he overheard strange conversations with and about animals. He said, so these meetings are not just meetings. They're the witch's Sabbath. And these animals must be familiars. And he went as far as even going far as stating too that like he overheard one woman telling her animals to go see and go to Elizabeth's house. And so with all of this, Matthew was like, yeah, she's definitely a witch.
00:39:31
Speaker
You hear all the accusations and i saw her. She's a witch. And so Elizabeth was arrested on March 21st and Matthew spent a good section of the next three days and nights keeping her under observation with a group of neighbors. And Matthew called these observations, if you will, the trying ways to gain experience and knowledge over wench hunting and over Elizabeth. be One person suggested that they should throw Elizabeth into the water, but it was vetoed as an unusual practice. So they essentially kept her like locked up in a single room by herself for three days.
00:40:08
Speaker
And they did this because they hypothesized that, you know, the witch's familiar spirits might arrive to catch up with her and help her escape. So that the witch hunting crew was like, well, if that happens, we'll have definite admission of guilt by seeing the familiar spirits. But then there was also a team of four women who checked Elizabeth's body for demon marks.
00:40:30
Speaker
Because while they believed these familiar spirits may appear to Elizabeth, they were also like, well, they may be invisible. So if we can't see them, we have to check for witch's marks, which they believed is how the familiar spirits used to get fed and bonded with the witch. So like not only was she locked in a room by herself for three days being forced to undergo very invasive strip searches, but also what these people were doing to her is she was to be kept in constant motion for three days.
00:41:03
Speaker
in a process that became known as watching and walking. um So by keeping her awake this long, it proved that like they wouldn't miss anything if she was asleep. And also what we know is sleep deprivation can really, really mess with a person's conscious and subconscious and what they're willing to do. And it makes you can make you so out of it. because she's not only being sleep deprived she's also being forced to walk constantly across this room so it disorients the victim and it induces despair and scattering of thoughts and it also prompts a confession which is what would end up happening with elizabeth when matthew came into the room that third day elizabeth exclaimed to them if you stay i will show you my imps which means like she would summon her her familiars if you will and then best confessed to the story that the people wanted to hear and according to matthew elizabeth says she had carnal copulation with the devil and that the devil had been her lover for six or seven years and he had been in her bed three to four times a week
00:42:05
Speaker
And apparently the devil was a proper gentleman with a lace band, which meant a lace collar. And he was a tall, proper, black-haired gentleman. and And then we best would go on to essentially call her her familiars. She did so with a smacking noise with her mouth.
00:42:23
Speaker
And then according to Matthew and the people there, within a quarter of an hour, there appeared an imp like onto a dog. However, all of the Matthew and the other watchers, they would all give very different accounts of the appearances of Bess's familiars. And keep in mind, too, Elizabeth was not allowed any sort of representation. She was by herself in all of this. So her accusers were free to essentially report just about anything. So they at one point said a greyhound with long legs appeared to them, but then that was followed by two black rabbits called Sac and Sugar. And then another said, oh no, a polecat is what appeared. So very different.
00:43:07
Speaker
takes on the familiars provided. And the watchers, if you will, the accusers, asked be like Elizabeth, you know, how many children she had. And she said she had five and she shared two of them with another witch in that these spirits tormented her and would never let her rest or be quiet. And Elizabeth would go on and to tell the accusers that like her familiars had harassed her. It until she agreed to let them kill some pigs that belonged to a man in town she would also be charged with killing matthew's nephew and a horse that belonged to a shopkeeper in town elizabeth then would go on to list other women who were also witches with her Another accusation against Elizabeth from one of these women went even further and accused her of earlier of hosting the Sabbath. and Because a one woman spoke against Elizabeth saying that they would go and meet at Elizabeth's cottage and they would read a book that would belong to Elizabeth, every one of them.
00:44:07
Speaker
And through that book, they would make several propositions to those familiars. asking for things that they wanted and this formal meeting as it was described had prayers books argumentative propositions kind of like a form of theological debate it was made to sound like an ordinary church service gathering but they viewed it as a parody of a church service So Elizabeth, along with all of these other women that were eventually brought to the court and accused, they were sent to a prison in Colchester Castle to await their trial.
00:44:39
Speaker
They were kept in the castle's dungeon that was stone-paved and iron-barred cells. It was cold, it was dark, and it was damp, and it was deep underground. And here Matthew would visit them. Now, Matthew himself, it's very interesting. He had no official role in the trial, but he just couldn't let it go. Like he had to watch and observe everything. Now, Elizabeth, along with the other accused, they were sent to trial for the, for breaking essentially the 1604 Witchcraft Act. And the court met in a huge market hall and the hall was open-sided. So townspeople could cram inside and speculate from the surrounding streets and windows. So it was a huge deal and drew a huge crowd.
00:45:21
Speaker
now the earl of warwick would preside as the chief judge there would be two juries a grand jury and a petty jury totaling 36 men what's really interesting though is the earl of warwick robert he was not a qualified judge he was just a nobleman and a military commander who fought for the puritan side and he was used to making bold unscrupulous decisions fast and pursuing enemies with murderous figure like i said No defense lawyers were allowed, so the judicial system relied upon these judges to analyze the accuser's stories, and they would weigh them in the light of their long experience and take into account the circumstances of all of this. Then those judges would advise the juries, steering the decision-making. The jurors of this approved two indictments towards Elizabeth Clark. First, she was charged with feeding familiar spirits, a crime that was heavily forbidden by the law. And she was also charged with killing a John Edwards in the summer 1644. Six people would stand before the judge and list and make their accusations. against elizabeth and the earl and all the jury accepted what the witnesses says the jury conferred briefly and with just a few minutes bess was found guilty now the outcome of this trial was very disastrous for the accused women and for the communities of essex from which they came Four women died in jail before they came in trial.
00:46:49
Speaker
And at least 36 women had been imprisoned, which was very high compared to past and previous witch trials in this period. And according to Matthew, 29 of them were sentenced to death. So of the 36, 29 would be sentenced to death. But we also have to keep in mind that four had already died. So essentially all that's left were sentenced to death.
00:47:09
Speaker
Now, it would come July 18th, 1645, that most of these women would walk out of the town, past the church, through rows of shops, to where the gallows stood. And one of the people in attendance of this, and who was being walked and marched down, was Elizabeth. The woman had to be cued to be killed, and during the wait, one woman died of fear.
00:47:30
Speaker
It's guessed that she either suffered a heart attack or a stroke just because of the fear. And then after this, on the orders of the court, several of the convicted women were taken from Kelmsford to Manningtree to be hayed as an example to the village. Now, because of the success that they had with this, Matthew Hopkins would actually appoint himself as Eastern England's unofficial witch hunter. And by the time Matthew had finished his rampage that he was on in 1647, it's estimated that 200 people had been executed in the name of witchcraft. Now, Matthew would not go on to live much longer. He actually died in the summer of 1647. And with his death, helped halt a lot of the witch hunting that was going on.
00:48:18
Speaker
And he actually, by 1647 as well, he started making many and enemies, mainly from those claiming that he profited from his line of work because he would charge all of the towns to host him. And he would actually go on to, before he died, write his own book of demonology called The Discovery of Witches. It was not taken great by society. It looked needy and it looked arrogant because in the whole book, Hopkins kind of put himself as the discoverer and a witch finder general and kind of was like,
00:48:51
Speaker
It was a thing of self-defense explaining what he did. Now, but because of this and because of his death and everything and the kind of the backlash that they were facing, witch hunting was dealt a very severe blow.
Legacy and Impact of Witch Hunts
00:49:03
Speaker
But even though slackened, slack and did not end because Matthew's book was sold across Britain and the British colonies, still keeping that theme of demonology and witch hunting.
00:49:15
Speaker
It didn't end. It just slowed down. And with that, that is the story of witchcraft I am doing today. Probably going to dive deeper next week into more so demonology because i think it's very interesting. And I think it's also just interesting in all this of like remembering like witchcraft is not a new thing and witchcraft will never stop.
00:49:34
Speaker
People will always be accused. Poor communities and minorities will always be accused of being demonized and villainized just like we see now with the immigrant immigrant population, a lot with women. It's important to remember who you are and to remember to hear all sides of the story.
00:49:51
Speaker
and to take account where you can. All right. That is this week's episode. Thank you so much. I hope you guys all have a good holiday season. if you liked it, like, subscribe, rate it, leave a comment, leave a like.
00:50:04
Speaker
Love seeing them. And I hope you have a good one. Bye.