Introduction
In August 1645, the Great Yarmouth’s town government invited the witchfinder Matthew Hopkins ‘to make search for such wicked p[er]sons if any be here’. Hopkins uncovered ‘Hellish invention’, leading to the conviction of six women as witches at the town’s September borough sessions.[1] The town’s puritan minister, John Brinsley, and one of its MP and recorder Miles Corbet were at the forefront of investigating these accusations, and those accused included an aging spinster Elizabeth Bradwell and the amateur astrologer Mark Prynne. The fear of witchcraft was rooted in personal disagreements in the town’s puritan politics that had brought together the political and religious elite since 1625.
Image: Invitation to Matthew Hopkins from the Great Yarmouth Corporation Assembly Book, NRO, Y/C19/7, f. 71
The fear of witches seems irrational, hardly enough to justify the arrest of eleven people and the hanging of five women. But for the citizens of Great Yarmouth, it was a matter of life and death. For them, witches were the Devil’s fifth column, who sought to harm their neighbours with magic. Sadly, the fear of an enemy within has not disappeared from our society, nor even concern over how individuals can manipulate dark unknown forces to cause harm as part of some cosmic battle between good and evil. The tragedy of individuals at the margins who are seen as dangerous for not fitting in remains. In this blogpost, we examine why the Great Yarmouth corporation hanged five women.
What is the crime of witchcraft?
In England and Wales, the crime of witchcraft was defined by the 1563 witchcraft act. It punished the ‘use, practise, or exercise [of] any Witchcraft, Enchantment, Charm, or Sorcery, whereby any person shall happen to be killed or destroyed’ as a felony punishable by death. The Witchcraft Act of 1604 added the ‘practise or exercise [of] any Invocation or Conjuration of any evill and wicked Spirit to or for any intent or purpose’, a response to a unique part of English witchcraft beliefs, the familiar, a small animal that would provide the devil’s power. The punishment for those found guilty of witchcraft in England, Wales and New England was hanging.
Why was Great Yarmouth affected?
Great Yarmouth was a vital port for North Sea fishing and trade, which made the town prosperous but divided its population. The wealth of Great Yarmouth came from its geographic advantages. It was located at the confluence of three rivers that crossed the fertile East Anglian countryside and was the most easterly haven in England, making it key to both inland and maritime trading networks.[2] The result of Great Yarmouth’s geography was a citizenry divided between wealthy and politically engaged merchant freemen on the one hand and the poorer herring fishermen who made up most of the town’s population on the other. This divide was widened by religious and economic tensions in the town that came to a head in 1645.
Image: engraving from C.J. Palmer’s edition of Manship’s History of Yarmouth depicting a plan of the town and harbour of Great Yarmouth, c. 1570. NRO, Y/C45/16.
Puritanism
One of the biggest divisions within Great Yarmouth was over religion. The town had been a bastion of puritanism since at least 1625. While the puritans called themselves the Godly and sought a closer relationship with God through strict biblical observance, to their enemies, they were joyless and restrictive. For example, the alderman Edward Owner was a leading supporter of Great Yarmouth’s puritans, using his wealth and status to promote reform through both the town’s government and his personal philanthropy. He spent heavily to support the town’s poor, notably in reforming charitable foundations, such as the town’s school and hospital.[3] However, Miles Corbet, the town’s recorder, had a much worse reputation as a ‘most stiffe Cathedrall hater’, a utopian of ‘no religion’, and whose ‘fir’d zeal’ lead to his cruelty to toothless, aged ministers in 1646.[4] This dichotomy between charity to the poor and cruelty toward perceived enemies created the tension inherent in the witch-hunt.
When the town’s puritans took over the choice of the lecturers after 1642, they chose to dismiss the town’s Laudian minister Matthew Brooks and restore the Presbyterian John Brinsley, who had served the town from 1625 to 1630, brought in the puritan Thomas Whitfield, and the Congregationalists William Bridge and John Oxenbridge. However, Bridge and Oxenbridge were removed in 1645 for creating a separate congregation in the town that still survives today.[5] The antinomian John Boggis arrived in 1644, as a member of the town’s garrison, and he disputed with the town’s ministers and publicly taunted the town’s authorities until he was arrested in October 1645.[6] The challenges to Presbyterianism were feared because it broke apart the unity of the parish that had previously worshipped together in St Nicholas’s minister, under the watchful eyes of the town’s puritan elite. The witch-hunt was an extension of that fear; witches were a special kind of heretic threatening the unity of the community.
Poverty
The differences over religion were exaggerated by the divides caused by wealth inequality in the town, with sharp divides between the wealthy and influential puritan merchants and the less godly poor who relied on their charity.
Merchants dominated Great Yarmouth society as both the source of the town’s wealth and making up the town’s political elite. Merchants ranged from chandlers to grocers, brewers, and those selling the herring caught in the town.[7] Merchants could become immensely wealthy. For example, the wealthiest man in town, Edward Owner, ran a shop by the Great Yarmouth market and imported rye, cloth, beer, rape oil, and sold herring. He was able to leave a portfolio of properties in his will in Great Yarmouth, Norwich, and Fritton in Suffolk and spent £1500 on the town’s Bridewell.[8] Thomas Johnson imported ‘pepper, prunes, almonds, spices, salt, wine, and occasionally ‘Holland ropes and barley’ and exported herring.[9] His wealth made him highly influential, becoming bailiff in the year of the witch-hunt.
The poor of Great Yarmouth worked to support the herring fleet and provide labour for the merchants. The fleet left Great Yarmouth annually between mid-March and late August to travel up the North Sea as far as Iceland, before returning in autumn for the rich catches in the seas around Great Yarmouth.[10] The herring fleet supported a network of craftsmen in Great Yarmouth who equipped the vessels, built the casks to hold the preserved fish, and manned the smokehouses needed to preserve Great Yarmouth’s famous red herring.[11] However, the herring fleet was nearly wiped out during the first civil war by royalist privateers and the losses suffered led to the collapse of the town’s poor relief system and popular unrest against the corporation.[12] The crisis caused by civil war poverty exaggerated the divides between the wealthy and the poor, creating tensions that overflowed into witchcraft accusations. This divide was evident in the make-up of the accusers and the accused. The accusers during the 1645 witch-hunt were largely freemen, in contrast to the accused who were generally spinsters or day labourers.[13]
What Happened?
The witch-hunt in Great Yarmouth began with a series of accusations beginning in April 1645 that culminated in trials held as part of the borough sessions in September of that year.
The timeline for the first Great Yarmouth witch-hunt spanned from the first accusations made on 1 April 1645 to the trials ending on 20 September. The earliest accusations were made on 1 April 1645 by John Holmes against Maria Vervy and the Linsteads against Elizabeth Bradwell, and Jacob Lambert made further accusations against Vervy on 10 April. John Howlett made accusations against Mark Prynn on 22 April and Henry Moulton’s accusations against Bradwell following on 1 May.[14] On 5 June Bridget Howard was accused, and accusations against Barbara Wilkinson and Nazareth Fassett were made on 20 June.[15] The corporation’s invitation to the witchfinder Matthew Hopkins was sent out on 15 August.[16] With the announcement of Hopkins’s invitation to Great Yarmouth on 15 August, further accusations against Maria Vervy surfaced on 20 August and Augustine Thrower accused Vervy of bewitching his son on 7 September.[17] The process of investigating those accused of witchcraft occurred between the accusations and the trials. Members of the corporation agreed to pay a group of women led by Elizabeth Howard who ‘searched those p[er]sons that were suspected for witches’ along with ‘watchers’.[18] Matthew Hale’s account of the accusations against Elizabeth Bradwell states that the ministers Brinsley and Whitfield also interrogated the alleged witch.[19] The borough sessions started on 10 September and continued until the twentieth.[20] This was followed by the punishment of those found guilty and payment for the watchers in October.[21] This brief burst of panic followed a series of other witch panics in Essex and Suffolk aided and abetted by the presence of the self-proclaimed witchfinder general, Matthew Hopkins and his assistant John Stearne.
Image: Matthew Hopkins, Witchfinder general, with two supposed witches calling out the names of their demons, some of which are represented by animals. Etching, 1792, after an earlier woodcut from the Wellcome Collection.
Matthew Hopkins
The expert witness during the borough sessions was Matthew Hopkins. Hopkins' speciality was searching for familiars, the demonic imps that empowered the witch’s power to harm. Michael Dalton’s Countrey Justice suggested that the discovery of witch’s marks from which the familiar fed was evidence admissible in court and Hopkins advertised on the frontispiece of his Discovery of Witches his reputation for discovering familiars which.[22] It was these marks that midwives were hired to search for. The evidence provided by Hopkins was intended to reinforce accusations and inform the opinions of the jury.
Hopkins was the son of James Hopkins, vicar of Wenham in Suffolk. Matthew Hopkins was the third son of an orthodox puritan family, literate and well read. Hopkins’s career as a witchfinder began at Manningtree in Essex when he became troubled by the activities of seven or eight supposed witches living in the town. Hopkins alleged that a large black creature looking like a cat sent by one Elizabeth Clarke menaced him on a walk . From March 1645, these and other suspected witches were apprehended and taken to be examined by the local justices of the peace, with Hopkins giving detailed evidence against several of them. Thirty-six suspected witches, all women, were eventually tried at the Essex assizes in July 1645, of whom nineteen were executed. A further nine died of disease in gaol, and six were still in prison in 1648. This provided the basis for Hopkins’s later career as a witchfinder.
Hopkins’s expertise was in gathering evidence, which often crossed the line into torture. The main thing Hopkins sought was evidence of familiars. Hopkins employed midwives to search the alleged witch’s body for an additional teat from which the familiar would feed from the witch’s blood. Elsewhere Hopkins swam the alleged witches, but there is no evidence he did so in Great Yarmouth. Keeping accused witches awake for days on end would inevitably lead to a confession, and visions of familiars, but was an unreliable method of interrogation. This led to criticism, and according to his own book allegations he was engaging in ‘an abominable, inhumane and unmercifull tryall of those poore creatures, by tying them, and heaving them into the water; a tryall not allowable by Law or conscience.’[23] However, Hopkins’s role in Great Yarmouth was as an expert witness rather than inspiring the hunt. The town’s invitation reflected the expertise and reputation for effectiveness he had brought to bear that to reinforce their fears.
Who were the accused and accusers?
Ten of the eleven accused were women, and most lacked either male family members to speak for them or had a history of petty criminal activity. The court records noted that Barbara Wilkinson and Joan Lacey were widows, and Elizabeth Bradwell and Mary Vervy were spinsters.[24] The borough sessions had prosecuted Nazareth Fasset in September 1631 for scolding and scandalous conversation, and the 1639 borough sessions prosecuted her husband John for swearing.[25] Mark Prynn had been tried for using charms to locate the lost goods of one John Sparke in 1638.[26] Low status, a lack of male relatives, or an existing criminal reputation left those accused vulnerable to witchcraft accusations.
The accusers included individuals drawn from the town’s politically powerful merchant elite. Elizabeth and Susanna Linstead, who made accusations against Elizabeth Bradwell, had a cousin William Linstead, who served as an elector in August 1645 and became a councillor in July 1647.[27] Augustine Thrower, a merchant and common councillor since August 1635, accused Mary Vervy of practising ‘witchcraft and sorcery’ against his infant son, leading to his son’s body becoming ‘consumed and languishing’.[28] Vervy was also accused of bewitching Bridget, wife of John Wade a hosier, and Lucy, the infant daughter of the cordwainer James Lambert, as well as Elizabeth, the wife of the sailor John Holmes. The goldsmith John Howlett accused Mark Prynn of bewitching him and his son John.[29] The social divide between the accuser and accused meant that the accused faced an uphill battle to convince the court of their innocence.
The trials
The borough sessions began on September 10, 1645. The justices and jurors were drawn from among the town’s merchant elite, so likely to be more sympathetic to the accusers. Miles Corbet, in his role as recorder, presided as a judge at the borough sessions. The fifteen jurors were serving common councillors, including the accuser, Henry Moulton.
Elizabeth Bradwell
Sir Matthew Hale provided a detailed account of Elizabeth Bradwell’s confession as part of his A Collection of Modern Relations of Matter of Fact Concerning Witches & Witchcraft based on the account of an eyewitness, the son of Thomas Whitfield, whom he had met at university. Hale built a picture of the relationship between the accused and the accusers, illustrating the malignity of witches, their power over the godly, and the role of ministers in defeating witchcraft. His account of Bradwell’s confession aligns with both the details of the court records and John Stearne’s account.[30] The narrative of the successful pursuit of Moulton’s accusations had meaning and resonance not just in the context of Great Yarmouth but more broadly as an example of the godly defeating the demonic that could be applied throughout the kingdom.[31] Bradwell’s confession provided clear proof of the existence of witchcraft, while her wax poppet was evidence of ‘Hellish Invention’.[32]
Hale explained that there was ‘an Old Woman’, Elizabeth Bradwell, who confessed to the minister Thomas Whitfield that she had previously worked for the stocking merchant Henry Moulton. However, when she went to Moulton’s house for work, Moulton was absent, and ‘his Man’ and ‘the Maid’ turned Bradwell away without giving her any knitting work. Bradwell left in ‘great discontent and anger against them both’, and that night a 'tall black man' came to her and offered Bradwell ‘that she should never want either work or any thing else’. The man confirmed their agreement by nicking her hand with a knife and using her blood in a pen, then had her print her name in a book from his pocket. The man then asked what she wanted, and she answered with revenge on Moulton’s man, and the man in black left her with some money. The man returned the next night and claimed he could not harm Moulton’s man ‘for he went constantly to Church to hear Whitfeild and Brinsly, and said his Prayers Morning and Evening’, and so Bradwell asked him to harm the maid, but the man returned the next night unable to hurt her too. Instead, he suggested that she turn her attention to ‘a young Child in the House’, returning the following night with an ‘Image of Wax’ which they buried in the churchyard, and as it wasted away so did the child. Hale noted that Moulton’s son languished for eighteen months and was near death when the minister sent Bradwell to confess to him, at which point the child rose and instantly began to recover. While those investigating could not recover the wax image, Hale reported that the court convicted Bradwell because of her confession. He also noted that all witches had their familiars and that Bradwell's was normally a blackbird.[33] The evidence from the court records supports this account. Henry Moulton made his accusation that Elizabeth Bradwell had used diabolical witchcraft to harm his infant son John Moulton on 1 May 1645.[34] This narrative provides a basis for examining Moulton and Bradwell’s experience of the witch-hunt.
Moulton belonged to Great Yarmouth’s elite; he was a hosiery merchant who had become a common councillor on the town’s corporation in July 1640.[35] Moulton believed that the defeat and confession of the witch who had bewitched his son could restore his son’s health.
Elizabeth Bradwell’s economically precarious position caused her enmity to the Moulton household that lay behind her alleged diabolical magic. She was variously described as ‘an old woman’ or spinster and seems to have lacked any relatives to speak in her defence.[36] The town’s charity was not enough to provide for Bradwell and she received support from both the town’s ministers and wealthy merchants like Moulton.[37] Puritan ministers in the later sixteenth and early seventeenth century argued that charitable giving was both a sign of election and ‘the surest, and most Christian remedy against witchcraft’, and so Moulton’s inability to provide charity here invited a demonic attack.[38] This tension between the expectation of charity and its refusal leading to misfortune has led to these kinds of accusations being labelled ‘charity refused’. Magic offered the witch the means of revenging a perceived slight, but town’s ministers resisted Bradwell’s magic.
The puritan ministers Thomas Whitfield and John Brinsley played a vital role both in taking Bradwell’s confession and in breaking the bewitchment placed on John Moulton. Bradwell’s inability to gain magical retribution was due to attendance at the ministers’ sermons and prayers, which showed the power of the town's puritan ministry to defeat demonic subversion.[39] The ministers’ success in examining the accused and gaining confessions demonstrated their inviolability in the face of demonic magic.[40] The ministers were the lead agents in breaking Bradwell’s power over the victim through her confession and curing the victim.[41] This was an affirmation of their authority and that of the magistrates.
The successful accusation against Elizabeth Bradwell shows some common features of convictions of witchcraft. The story of a refusal of charity leading the alleged witch toward Satan was common and pointed to the difference in status between the accused and accuser. The role of faith in defending against witchcraft and the consequent vulnerability of children was also an expected part of witchcraft accusations. That leaves us with Bradwell’s confession. Was it something she had come up with and believed after being kept awake, or something her accusers had shaped for her? Unfortunately, we will never know what caused her fatal confession.
Mark Prynn
The trial of the astrologer Mark Prynn shows the limits of the town’s political elite’s ability to influence the trials as Miles Corbet failed to convince the jury of Prynn’s guilt. The accusation became part of John Taylor’s satirical poem which criticised Corbet showing how witchcraft accusations were politicised. The accusations of witchcraft against Prynn dates back to the 1630s, showing the deeper roots of witchcraft fears back into the Caroline period.
Miles Corbet’s attempt to convict Prynn was infamous enough to be included as part of John Taylor’s broadside A Briefe Relation of the Idiotismes and Absurdities of Miles Corbet, Esquire, Councellor at Law, Reorder and Burgesse for Great Yarmouth published in 1646. Taylor had been ill-disposed towards Corbet ever since the MP the Lord Mayor of London had arrested and interrogated Taylor in November 1642 for seditious words against parliament.[42]
A Briefe Relation of the Idiotismes and Absurdities of Miles Corbet, Esquire, Councellor at Law, Reorder and Burgesse for Great Yarmouth is an eighteen-page pamphlet poem that lists eleven ‘idiotisms’, of which Corbet’s prosecution of Mark Prynne is the sixth. Taylor initially describes Miles Corbet’s character and his religious views, and makes allegations of political corruption.[43] Taylor’s list of Corbet’s ‘idiotisms’ ranged from Corbet having a dog presented to the sessions to accusing a man of stealing his own goods.[44] Corbet’s attack on Mark Prynne provided an example of the recorder’s supposed injustice, credulity, and ignorance that Taylor deployed to make the MP look ridiculous.
In his attempt to convict Mark Prynn, Taylor relates how Corbet led efforts to convict the astrologer. Taylor believed that Corbet personally committed Prynn to jail ahead of the borough sessions and sought out evidence of Prynn’s guilt through a search of Prynne’s study.[45] When the searchers discovered a copy of Moulsons Almanack, ‘A Book of merry fortune telling, with the formes of Dice, Starres, etc.’ they brought it to Corbet. According to Taylor, Corbet declared that ‘this is the Book the knave doth conjure by, this wicked book shall help him to a check, that at this Sessions now will break his neck’. Corbet described regular astrological terms including ‘each Celestiall House’ and ‘pictures of the Bull, Beare, Goat and Lyon’ and the ‘names of Lucifer, and of Oryon’ as damnable. More controversial were the ‘names Albumazer, Copernicus, Rombombonax, and Mephostophilus’, which mixed Abumazer, the Persian astrologer Abu Ma'shar, Copernicus the noted astronomer, with the devil Mephistopheles, to create the image of a ‘conjurer’.[46] Corbet brought the almanac before the jury, describing it as ‘enough to hang Mark Prime’.[47] Prynn’s astrological knowledge was now a threat to his survival as Corbet sought to use it to prove that Prynn was conjuring.
Corbet’s argument was refuted by ‘an understanding man’, the minister Thomas Cheshire, who ‘the substance of the book did strait explaine’ and appealed to the jury to find Prynn innocent.[48] Thomas Cheshire had been the dismissed anti-Puritan minister Matthew Brooks’s assistant during the 1630s, and both had suffered ‘contempt and disgrace’ from the town’s puritan ‘Bailiffes and Governo[urs]’.[49] Taylor said that Cheshire showed that ‘the substance of the book… to be as farre from Maister Corbets talke as Oatmeale is from egges, or cheese from chalk’, a description of astrology rather than a conjuring tool.[50] As a result Prynn was found not guilty and ‘escap’s a Popham Check’ and Taylor sarcastically remarked that ‘there the learn’d Recorder gain’d much credit’.
Image: NRO, Y/S/1/2, Court records from the 1645 Witchcraft accusations where Mark Prynn is accused of Diabolical arts and incantations.
This case shows how a man could survive an accusation through education, the ability to speak for him, and their own education, despite the ire of the recorder. It also showed the danger of failed accusations, as John Taylor used the trial’s failure to attack Miles Corbet and show up the recorder’s perceived ignorance.
The result
There were only six convictions out of those eleven accused of witchcraft, and only five of the accusations ended in executions. Status, friendly witnesses, and male relatives could all supply protection against conviction. Mark Prynn had brought a minister to speak on his behalf. Fasset’s marriage gave her a connection to a man who would speak on her behalf, which the other accused women lacked. Barbara Wilkinson’s acquittal and Joanna Lacey’s reprieve from execution is unexplained in the sources but points to the jury’s scruples. While the jury was convinced of the guilt of six of the accused, they were not blindly following a witch panic, but the panic also points to how the crisis of 1645 led to undue pressure on juries from a concerned elite and the perceived skills of the witchfinder.
Image: The apprehension and confession of three notorious witches, Lambeth Palace.
The second witch-hunt and end of the hunts
At the borough sessions in April 1646, the court tried a further six women accused of witchcraft, but the jury found them all innocent, showing how support for witch-hunting had collapsed within half a year. The religious and political consensus that justified the witch-hunt had ended, as local and national religious unity and conformity became unenforceable. Nationally, the influence of the Presbyterians over the New Model Army, the Westminster Assembly of Divines, and Parliament was becoming more tenuous. In January 1646, members of the Great Yarmouth corporation agreed to tolerate the Congregationalist church in the town following a series of conversions amongst common councillors. The puritan councillors now accepted a church they had previously declared a danger to the town’s peace. The distracted and divided members of the corporation were unwilling to support the witch-hunt as they had in 1645, with no evidence of the employment of the witchfinder or searchers. Support for the witch-hunt disappeared gradually because it had failed to unite the town’s puritans. The combination of political instability, religious uncertainty, and poverty that had fed the witch-hunt now dampened the desire to prosecute it further.[51]
What does this tell us?
The Great Yarmouth witch-hunt shows how political and religious divisions have made personal fears and enmities into deadly contests, part of a much wider cataclysmic battle between the godly and Satan’s agents. Neighbours who had been supporting one another now feared for their lives, stoked by ministers and judges. This moment, however, was brief and deadly for five women. Despite this, beliefs continued as witchcraft accusations continued to be made in desultory fashion for the next decade before dying out.
[1] Norfolk Record Office (NRO), Y/C19/7, f. 71; John Stearne, A Confirmation and Discovery of Witchcraft (London, 1648), p. 54.
[2] Perry Gauci, Politics and Society in Great Yarmouth, 1660-1722 (Oxford, 1996), p. 94
[3] NRO, Y/C19/6, ff. 490, 506; NRO, Y/C19/7, ff. 79, 81.
[4] Anthony Roily [John Taylor], A Briefe Relation of the Gleanings of The Idiotismes and Absurdities of Miles Corbet Esquire, Councellor at Law, Reorder and Burgesse for Great Yarmouth (London, 1646), pp. 2,7, 14.
[5] NRO, Y/C19/7, ff. 69, 78; see below in chapter six, p. 206.
[6] Thomas Edwards, Gangraena, or, A Catalogue and Discovery of Many of the Errors, Heresies, Blasphemies and Pernicious Practices of the Sectaries of This Time (London, 1646), ii, pp. 134, 161-2.
[7] Adrian Marsden, 17th Century Norfolk Tokens in Norwich Castle Museum (Norwich, 2016), pp. 87-97.
[8] The National Archives (TNA), Prob. 11/218, f. 296; NRO, Y/C19/7, f. 79.
[9] Chris Kyle, ‘Johnson, Thomas (1586-1660), of Great Yarmouth, Norf,’ History of Parliament Online, ed. Andrew Thrush and John P. Ferris, https://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1604-1629/member/johnson-thomas-1586-1660 (2010).
[10] Tittler, Robert, “The English Fishing Industry in the Sixteenth Century: The Case of Great Yarmouth,” Albion, 9 (1977), pp. 41-2.
[11] Thomas Nash, Nash’s Lenten Stuff Containing the Description and First Procreation and Increase of the Town of Great Yarmouth, in Norfolk: With a New Play, Never Played before, of the Praise of the Red-Herring (London, 1599); Tittler, ‘The English Fishing Industry in the Sixteenth Century’, pp. 40-60.
[12] NRO, Y/C19/7, f. 116; 121; TNA, SP 21/24, f. 243.
[13] A Calendar of the Freemen of Great Yarmouth, 1429-1800: Compiled from the Records of the Corporation (Norwich, 1910), pp. 60-82, NRO, Y/S/1/2, pp. 195-201.
[14] NRO, Y/S1/2, ff. 195, 197, 199-200.
[15] Ibid, ff. 196, 199.
[16] NRO, Y/C19/7, f. 71.
[17] Ibid, f. 198.
[18] Ibid, f. 76.
[19] Sir Matthew Hale, A Collection of Modern Relations of Matter of Fact, Concerning Witches & Witchcraft (London, 1693), p. 47.
[20] NRO, Y/S/1/2, pp. 191-203.
[21] NRO, Y/C19/7, f. 76.
[22] Michael Dalton, The Countrey Justice (London, 1619), pp. 250-1; Malcolm Gaskill, Witchfinders: A Seventeenth-Century English Tragedy (London, 2005), pp. 44, 107-8; Darren Oldridge, The Devil in Early Modern England (Stroud, 2000), pp. 35-8.
[23] Matthew Hopkins, The Discovery of Witches (London, 1647).
[24] NRO, Y/S/1/2, ff. 196-201.
[25] Ibid, ff. 5, 132.
[26] Ibid, pp. 91-5.
[27] NRO, Y/C19/7, ff. 73, 104; NRO, Y/S1/2, ff. 199-200.
[28] NRO, Y/C19/6, f. 331; NRO, Y/C19/7, f. 1; NRO, Y/S1/2, f. 198.
[29] NRO, Y/S1/2, f. 197.
[30] Hale, Modern Relations, pp. 46-8; Stearne, Confirmation, pp. 53-4; Y/S1/2, pp. 199-200.
[31] Stearne, Confirmation, pp. 53-4.
[32] Peter Elmer, Witchcraft, Witch-Hunting, and Politics in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2016), p. 45; Stearne, Confirmation, p. 54.
[33] Hale, Modern Relations, pp. 46-8.
[34] NRO, Y/S/1/2, p. 199.
[35] NRO, MF 416, f. 19; Y/C19/6, f. 462; Hale, Modern Relations, p. 46.
[36] NRO, Y/S1/2, f. 199; Hale, Modern Relations, p. 46.
[37] Paul Slack, Poverty and Policy in Tudor and Stuart England (London, 1988); Idem, The English Poor Law 1531-1782 (Basingstoke, 1990).
[38] Elmer, Witchcraft, Witch-Hunting, and Politics, p. 32; Francis Tigge, A Godly and Fruitfull Sermon Preached at Grantham. Anno Dom. 1592 (Oxford, 1594), pp. 3-4.
[39] Hale, Modern Relations, p. 47.
[40] Ibid, p. 46.
[41] Hale, Modern Relations, p. 47.
[42] Bernard Capp, The World of John Taylor the Water-Poet, 1578-1653 (Oxford, 2002) 150.
[43] Taylor, Brief Relation, 2-4.
[44] Ibid, 4, 6.
[45] Ibid, 8.
[46] Taylor, Brief Relation, 9; Clark, Thinking with Demons, 459.
[47]Taylor, Brief Relation, 9.
[48] Ibid, 9.
[49] House of Lords Record Office, London [Hereafter the HLRO], HL/PO/JO/10/1/60, f. 104.
[50] Taylor, Briefe Relation, 7-9.
[51] Gaskill, Witchfinders, pp. 75-6; Elmer Witchcraft, Witch-Hunting, and Politics, pp. 131-2
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