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The 1970s Witchcraft Trial and Other Oddities in Witch History

Khalid Elhassan March 15, 2022 25 min

7. This Conman’s Malign Legacy Helped Fuel the Salem Witchcraft Craze

Matthew Hopkins, Witch Finder General. From a broadside published by Hopkins before 1650. Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain

Matthew Hopkins’ terrible flim-flam bore its grisliest results on August 27^th, 1645, in the small town of Bury St. Edmunds. That day, thanks to the machinations of the self-anointed “Witch Finder Generall”, eighteen men and women were hanged together for witchcraft. It was England’s biggest mass execution of witches. Hopkins retired in 1646, after he had earned a small fortune – and also because his activities had started to attract unwelcome attention from Parliament.

In 1647 he published The Discovery of Witches, an instructional manual, and died shortly thereafter of tuberculosis. His malign legacy lived on, however. A year later, executions for witchcraft and sorcery began in New England, where authorities used The Discovery of Witches as a roadmap. The Salem Witch Trials of 1692-1693 also used the methods outlined in Hopkins’ book.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.