Review : Witchfinders

They said that if they can make you believe absurdities, they can make you commit atrocities. They're probably right, but as Malcolm Gaskill explores in his excellent book Witchfinders, you need much more than an absurd idea before you go around hacking and burning your way through the unbelievers. Otherwise the entire cast of Teletubbies would surely be long dead...

Besides general interest, two things persuaded me to give this go. First, there's the outstanding prose, which, when the author puts his mind to it, is as good as any descriptive sequence in a gripping novel. Second there was a quote in the introduction which caught my attention :

This is a book that reaches beyond monstrous stereotypes to a constituency of unremarkable people, who, through their eager cooperation with Hopkins and Stearne, themselves became witchfinders. In this they resemble the provincial nobodies of the twentieth century who engaged in genocide, demonstrating to the world the banality of evil.

The only thing I don't like about this book is that it has rather long passages that are somewhat unnecessarily similar. A slightly broader brush would help; it's not necessary to know the names of every single person involved or the often-trivial differences between the cases, as this sometimes makes things tedious and hard to follow. I'm still giving it 8/10 for being generally excellent though.


I'm a big fan of history books that try and dig a bit deeper than simply recounting events. I'm also a big fan of those which don't have to be explicit in drawing lessons - I want to hear the author's interpretation but I don't necessarily want it rammed down my throat. This book does things perfectly. The bulk of it is given over to describing in some detail exactly what happened, sticking largely to a clear and direct narrative. It only deviates from this to dispel the occasional popular myth (e.g. witches in England were, if ever given a capital sentence, almost exclusively hanged, and only very rarely indeed were they burned at the stake), describe uncertainties and gaps in the historical record, and provide some very infrequent commentary. Conclusions, judgements and interpretation are left almost entirely to the final section, by which time they're already unmistakable thanks to the author's careful curation of the main text.

Nobody but an idiot would deny that religious and superstitious zealotry played an important part in the tragic events of the mid-17th century. It undeniably did. People genuinely believed that lonely old women could bend demonic forces to their own malevolent will. But, contrary to popular belief, to transform this belief into action required much more than making a simple accusation. In virtually all situations, this would fail. Only in the right context could the rampant paranoia and fear explode into a bona fide witch-hunt, and Gaskill does a magnificent job of explaining what went so catastrophically wrong in c.1640 : the chaotic and divisive background of the Civil War, the particular characteristics of Matthew Hopkins and John Stearne, the series of natural disasters (plague, famine and flood). He brilliantly and deftly casts the period as a period of intense ideological, not merely political, change and evolution.

One of the first interesting things that becomes apparent is just how similar the stories are. Rather than cauldron-stirring old crones hatching evil plots to eat babies, most of the cases were of confessions (obtained under the suggestibility and torture of sleep deprivation) of consorting with "imps" (animal familiars) who claimed to be able to enact petty revenge against usually minor slights, often unsuccessfully.

As befitted the general pettiness of their alleged crimes, so the "witches" themselves were, almost exclusively, the weakest and most vulnerable in society, little more than all-too convenient scapegoats for simple bad luck in a trouble society. Satan ? He gets "a walk-on part", at most, as do any suggestions of more serious, national-level crimes; the supernatural powers supposedly at work were usually remarkably ineffective. Gaskill suggests that one reason for confessions, besides the highly suggestible state induced by days of sleep deprivation, was that the victims felt that they could at last strike back against their oppressors. Hated by their communities for the most marginal of differences, belief in devilish aid and the chance to make their tormentors afraid of them would give them a sense of much-needed empowerment.

Initially, the minor misdemeanours most claimed to have exacted - spoiling crops, killing a cow and so-on - would not have been grounds for capital punishment : a witch would have to have been found guilty for, say, murder, not just talking to imps. Only later, when the Civil War began to fuel extreme paranoia, was merely consulting with devils itself a hanging offence.

The lawlessness of the Civil War begat another element besides needing to assign blame. It was common knowledge even among the most learned of the era (including most famously King James) that witches were real, and the judiciary fully accepted this. The reality of witches was never in doubt. But with war and disease running rampant, there was a mood amongst the commoners that the legal system was failing to offer adequate redress for the problems they sincerely believed witches were causing : in some cases, they honestly thought their children had been murdered by witches out of pure devilish malice.

So this is the realm where witch-hunting flourished. The most illiterate peasant would know for certain, as everyone did, that witches were real and malevolent : his king and scholars had told him so. But while the learned may have advocated for strict controls to ensure accuracy, a lowly peasant was not likely to be in the mood for such diligence. The Civil War had ravaged the land - a conflict itself as much religious as it was political. Crops had failed and the world grew darker. The ordinary citizens knew witches were abroad, but the war meant that precious little was being done about them. In earlier, most solidly-governed times, nothing much would have happened : occasional witch trials came and went and that was pretty much the end of it. But now, someone aspiring to make his mark in society could do far worse than rally the populist flag against the witches.

This is the final element that made the terrible events of c.1645-1647  possible : the witchfinders themselves. Gaskins paints Hopkins and Stearne as opportunistic, vain, shallow, and self-righteous, but also utterly sincere in their beliefs. Their charismatic self-proclaimed expertise was enough to tip the balance and let the desire for "justice" against the witches at last boil over... at least somewhat. It's hard not to mix metaphors, because even though Hopkins and Stearne brought over a hundred women to an untimely demise, they did not have things all their own way. Resistance against them was usually successful and caused them to bid a hasty retreat; they had conviction but without much courage to back it up. Notably, they themselves never made accusations, but only supported existing accusations when they were called to assist. They did not start fires, but only fuelled the already-burning flames, bringing out the very worst qualities in the their fellow men. They simply could not have succeeded without a society that, at some level, saw a need for them.

If the common beliefs of the day were undeniably at fault, the oppressed citizen was not totally without protection. Despite all the faults of the system, even a 17th century law court would typically have been hard-pressed to convict and hang, let alone burn, a witch. It was only through this peculiar combination of circumstances that witch hunting briefly exploded : in more normal times, the beliefs of the commoners could be successfully held in check. When the tide began to turn against the witchfinders, their efforts were soon thwarted. Ironically, Hopkin's very success was seen as evidence that he himself must be in league with the devil to find so many witches. He issued a rebuttal against his detractors, but it backfired horribly. He met an ignominious end and escaped justice by dying of illness as his campaign sputtered to a halt; his compatriot Stearne largely faded into obscurity when it was clear the public mood had shifted. Witch-hunting was, arguably, as much a consequence of horror than a cause of it. Gaskill concludes with a warning :

It was a terrible tragedy, but it needs to be seen as part of something even more terrible, a civil war characterised by bigotry, brutality and bloodshed. The conflict killed 190,000 Englishmen out of a population of five million... If one discounts the sensational, the particular and the judgemental, one is left with a different kind of Matthew Hopkins : an intransigent and dangerous figure, for sure, but a charismatic man of his time, no more ruthless than his contemporaries and, above all, driven by a messianic desire to purify.

How different are we in mentality from our seventeenth-century ancestors ? - a question that becomes even more taxing if "seventeenth-century ancestors" is replaced with "fellow human beings in Africa and India". The truth that many find unpalatable, even inconceivable, is that in our ideas, instincts and emotions we are not very different at all. Without peace and prosperity, liberty and welfare, and the political and economic stability on which those things depend, the thinking of the next generation in the West might swerve off in an altogether more mystical and malevolent direction... the seventeenth-century tragedy is only partially that of Matthew Hopkins, the flawed protagonist, and the harrowing deaths of his victims. It is at least as much a tale about feeling anxious and vulnerable in an indifferent world - a sensation of humanity.

Witchfinders

Witchfinders book. Read 58 reviews from the world's largest community for readers. By spring 1645, two years of civil war had exacted a dreadful toll upo...