Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” This verse from Exodus 22:18 was translated into English by commission of King James I in 1604, a king who felt he had much to fear from witchcraft. By the time James’s Bible was published in 1611, the wildfire of witch panic had already been burning its way across Europe for well over a hundred years. The book that kindled this persecution of witches was not James’s Bible, but the Malleus Maleficarum.
Demonology
Written by a German Catholic clergyman called Heinrich Kramer and published in 1486, the Malleus Maleficarum (latin for ’Hammer of Witches’) was a compendium of existing literature on demonology. At a time when European witch trials were increasing rapidly in number, it provided a guide to the crime of witchcraft, suggesting various methods of torture as the best way to obtain confessions and elevating witchcraft to the criminal status of heresy. As a result, the only plausible punishment was the death penalty.
Much like the impact of social media today, the recent invention of the printing press meant that published works could spread more quickly than ever before. In fact, there were twenty-eight editions of the Malleus published between 1486 and 1600. At a time of religious strife, the fact that the book was an authoritative source of information about Satanism was one of the few things Catholics and Protestants agreed on.
The Witch-Hunters
It’s not surprising then that in 1590, when King James almost died in a storm while crossing the North Sea with his Danish bride Anne, his first thought was that he had been the victim of a conspiracy of witches. This idea was apparently confirmed by a woman accused of witchcraft named Agnes Sampson, who, under torture, ‘confessed’ that on Halloween night 1590, two hundred witches had sailed across the sea in sieves to the Scottish coastal town of North Berwick, where the devil had encouraged them to plot against the king.
witches and catholics
From that moment James sanctioned witch trials and made witchcraft the focus of his attention. In 1597, the king wrote his Daemonologie, a compendium on witchcraft lore and a philosophical account of demonology and the methods demons used to provoke men. This book, which provided some of the material for Shakespeare’s description of the Weird Sisters in Macbeth, explained how the devil worked in the world, making pacts with people and giving them harmful magical powers.
In 1603 the kingdoms of Scotland and England unified with James ruling both. Although Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 had the effect of diverting James’s attention away from witchcraft conspiracies and towards Catholic conspiracies, witch panic was already spreading and it got worse in the decades that followed the unification.
the witch-finder general
Enter one Matthew Hopkins, an impoverished lawyer with a strong puritanical background, who, during the chaos and religious upheaval of the English Civil Wars, made it his mission to restore calm by destroying anything to do with the so-called “works of the devil”. The beginnings of his career as a witch-hunter are quite vague, but in 1644 he apparently overheard some women discussing their meetings with the devil in the town of Manningtree, Essex, where he lived. Twenty-three women were accused of witchcraft and of these, nineteen were later convicted and hanged. Hopkins had discovered his vocation. Between the years 1644 and 1646, he and his associates are thought to have been responsible for the deaths of three hundred women. In 1645 he assumed the title of Witch-Finder General and, in 1647, he added to the literature on the subject by publishing a short pamphlet about his witch-hunting methods, The Discovery of Witches.