ABSTRACT
Some thirty-six suspects, all women, were imprisoned or tried for witchcraft at the 1645 Essex Assizes. Of these, nineteen were almost certainly executed, nine died of gaol fever, six were still in prison in 1648, and only one, a woman from another part of Essex, was acquitted and escaped free. Another woman, Rebecca West, was also released after acting as the Crown’s chief witness. Compared to other trials, the percentage of the accused who were executed was abnormally high. Another marked contrast to earlier trials (except that of 1582) was the geographical concentration of the prosecutions. Thirty-five of the suspects came from twelve villages, all within fifteen miles of Manningtree.7 The witnesses against the witches included men and women from all levels of society; in all, the indictments and pamphlet name some ninety-two such witnesses, fifty-eight male and
thirty-four female. The two ‘witch-finders’, Matthew Hopkins and John Stearne, obviously found ready support for their accusations. Among the witnesses were three clergymen, John Edes, George Eatoney, and Joseph Longe.8 They witnessed to the appearance of familiars and corroborated Hopkins and Stearne. One clergyman, however, helped to procure a reprieve for a suspect.9 A special group were the women searchers, a panel of professed experts whose names appear with regularity in different indictments and who witnessed, as the pamphlet shows, to the presence of suspicious lumps or other marks on witches.10 Otherwise, as far as we can tell, the witnesses were normal citizens, many of whom can be traced in
FIGURE 3: Inter-accusation between suspected witches in 1645. (An arrow represents an accusation made by one suspected witch against
another All except Margaret Moone lived in Manningtree.)
contemporary wills, Ship Money assessments, or lists of Presbyterian elders.11 Different groups of individuals acted as witnesses in different villages. Hopkins and Stearne, for example, only appeared as witnesses against suspects from four of the twelve neighbouring villages involved: Langham, Mistley, Ramsey, and Manningtree. In other villages, other groups of inhabitants supported and formulated the accusations.
