Background Research
Witchfinder is an historical drama and we wanted to be as accurate as we could as far as Hopkins and the social history of the time was concerned.
Dr Malcolm Gaskill, a fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge had written a book called ‘Witchfinders’ which had been published in 2005 and when it arrived in bookshops was the Mail on Sunday’s ‘Book of the week’. Ronald Hutton from the Independent reported that: “Gaskill tells the story of the witch-hunt in full and accurate detail, for the first time, and with uncommon skill...Better than anyone before, he demonstrates that the Civil War was England’s experience of the horrors that have beset parts of the continent until the 1990s”.
We were extremely fortunate that Malcolm Gaskill did all he could to support the project. He allowed us to use any material from his book that was appropriate to record the “chilling history of our time”.Malcolm also came along to the film set and the premiere and was delighted at the end result, seeing parts of his book ‘come to life’. We are deeply indebted to him and if you wish to study this dark episode of our history then we would thoroughly recommend that you read his book.
Witchfinders- A Seventeenth-Century English Tragedy by Malcolm Gaskill published by John Murray. ISBN 0-7195-6121-3 £8.99 (Paperback)
Dr Malcolm Gaskill’s website: http://www.malcolmgaskill.net
Another useful website to gain some insight to this particular period in history is: http://www.channel4.com/history
Below is an excerpt of the type of information you will find on this site.
The East Anglian witch hunt
In the spring of 1645, during the agony and anxiety of the English Civil Wars, fears about the malevolence of witches boiled over in Essex and soon spread into Suffolk. Mass trials in these two counties the same year resulted in nearly 40 executions, and there were more to come in Norfolk and in other counties further to the west. In all, perhaps 250 women and men were accused, imprisoned and interrogated, of whom it is safe to say over 100 were hanged – five times as many as would perish at Salem.
Like Salem in the American experience, the East Anglian witch hunt of 1645-7 was a unique event in English history. There had been regular witch trials after the passing of the Witchcraft Acts of 1563 and 1604, many of them in Essex. But in the first half of the 17th century, several well-publicised frauds, growing legal scepticism and the changing policies of crown and Church had all contributed to a general decline.
That the East Anglian trials happened at all was due mostly to the self-appointed minor gentlemen, Matthew Hopkins and John Stearne, who travelled around the eastern counties, exploiting pre-existing tensions and suspicions among villagers by initiating interrogations and setting the wheels of justice in motion.
Disquiet about Hopkins’ and Stearne’s methods (they used torture, contrary to common law) numbered their days as witchfinders even before Hopkins' death in 1647. And yet the godly zeal of the next 12 years – with the execution of the king and the establishment of the Puritan Commonwealth – meant that trials continued to occur, albeit conducted in a more regulated manner.
