"In the 1640s, people searched for the devil’s followers”: hunting witches in the Civil War

Marion Gibson speaks to Charlotte Vosper about her new book exploring the epidemic of witch trials that ravaged Britain during the 17th century

A person with light hair and glasses sits in a garden beside a stone wall, surrounded by blooming red roses and green plants. They wear a brown dress with white polka dots and rest one arm on their knee while the other hand supports their chin, giving a relaxed, contemplative pose.

Published: September 14, 2026 at 4:20 PM

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Charlotte Vosper: You open your book with the story of a man called Meggs who was hanged for witchcraft in 1645. Why did you choose to start with him?

Marion Gibson: I found Meggs’s name in an account by the witchfinder Matthew Hopkins, who writes, flippantly, words to the effect that: “This man Meggs, a baker, voluntarily came to be tested for witchcraft, and we hanged him for his trouble – ha ha ha!”

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It’s such a horrible way to be remembered. So I set out to find the real Meggs – actually called Henry Maggs – and to tell his story with dignity and respect, to give him back his voice. Throughout the book I’ve looked for the victims of the 1640s British witch trials and tried to tell their stories as they might have wanted them to be told. I want my readers to hear from the victims themselves – for the first time, in many cases – rather than the sneering voices of witchfinders that often dominate accounts.

Can you set the scene for these mid-17th-century witch trials?

The context is pretty horrible. The Civil War was raging and Britain was tearing itself apart. Not only were there battles being fought but there was economic dislocation and there were refugees moving around, many needing immediate charity. People were anxious, miserable and frightened – and all of those emotions fed into witch trials and witch accusations. It’s also important to note that this Britain was a very religious and very magical place. People were steeped in the idea there were angels and devils in the world, and tended to think in quite a binary way: if you were not on God’s side, you must be on the devil’s. This belief system predisposed people to believe that witches might be living among them.

How did that 1640s witch-hunting epidemic start?

Witch hunting had been ongoing in Britain for quite some time, but the temperature rose in the 1640s. One of the first cases was that of a nameless water-witch who was killed on a Civil War battlefield at Newbury in Berkshire in 1643. A group of soldiers, foraging for food after a long march, spotted a woman floating on a plank on a nearby river, and thought: “She’s walking on water – she must be a witch.” They dragged her off to their commander who, after an interrogation, had her shot. After that, interest in witchcraft swept across Britain.

A woodcut‑style illustration showing people gathered beside a river. Several figures in old-fashioned clothing stand on the bank, watching or assisting individuals in the water. One person pulls someone toward shore using a rope, while another sits in a round tub floating on the water.

A 1613 illustration shows a water test on Mary Sutton of Bedford, who, accused of being a witch, was tied up and flung into the river. As she floated, she was found guilty and executed | Credit: Getty Images

What sort of things were these ‘witches’ accused of having done?

Initially, claims often grew out of something simple, like a neighbourly dispute: “You did this to me, then my cow died, so I don’t like you.” But in the 1640s, authorities actively went looking for people they suspected of working with the devil by offering their soul, body or allegiance in return for some sort of power. Some ‘witches’ were accused of having a little demonic familiar, supposedly feeding it with their blood to seal their pact with the devil. This was thought to leave a ‘witch mark’ on the accused’s body, so during interrogation the accused might be strip-searched to look for physical evidence.

Many of the accused confessed. Why?

A lot of pressure was put on these people. In addition to a physical bodily search – in itself, an invasive, terrifying process – these ‘witches’ would be kept awake and told to balance on a stool for hours on end while being questioned. These sound like torture techniques, and they broke down people’s resistance.

Social context also played into procuring these confessions. Against the backdrop of war and fear, local church ministers preached that British people must have sinned to bring about such hardship, and that they must do penance and be wary of the devil.

This combination of context and interrogation prompted a lot of people to confess. Maybe some of them were users of magic – perhaps they’d practised healing rituals. Either way, these ‘witches’ were often apt to agree with the interrogating minister or magistrate and say: “Well, yes, actually I think I am a witch.”

’Witches’ were often apt to agree with the interrogating minister or magistrate and say: ‘Well, yes, actually I think I am a witch’

When did the phenomenon develop into a mass witch hunt?

It really kicked off in Essex in 1645. In Manningtree, a young man called Matthew Hopkins and his slightly older friend, John Stearne, together started to suspect that there were witches in the area. In nearby Lawford, a clergyman called John Edes also began questioning women from his community, including mother and daughter Anne and Rebecca West.

Anne was a widow who had been tried for witchcraft a few years earlier, accused of killing a sow owned by Thomas and Prudence Hart, but had been acquitted and allowed back to Lawford. You can imagine the Harts’ horror: the woman they believed to be a witch was again in their village. So when Hopkins and Stearne started asking questions in Essex, the Harts again accused Anne, believing her responsible when Prudence suffered a miscarriage in the churchyard. They also turned on Anne’s daughter, Rebecca – who, according to the records, seems to have fallen out with Prudence.

An old-fashioned illustration of Matthew Hopkins, the 17th‑century “Witch Finder General,” standing outdoors between two seated women. Hopkins wears a wide‑brimmed hat, a red cloak, green trousers, and black boots, and holds a long staff. Behind him is a simple building with two windows and an open doorway

A colourised frontispiece illustration from The Discovery of Witches, a 1647 pamphlet by self-styled ‘Witchfinder General’ Matthew Hopkins | Credit: Topfoto

Rebecca was probably about 30 years old, unmarried and, like her mother, pretty poor. Interestingly, both Anne and Rebecca seem to have been quite religious. Despite this, John Edes questioned Rebecca, and she confessed that both herself and her mother were witches who’d met with others in Manningtree. They were all rounded up, sent to the assize court and imprisoned in Colchester Castle while awaiting trial. There they were questioned further as Hopkins continued to build evidence against them.

Anne was found guilty and executed. The records about Rebecca aren’t clear, though: either she wasn’t put on trial or she was acquitted. Historians have long suspected that, because Rebecca chose to give evidence against other people, she was spared. Either way, as far as we know, she wasn’t executed.

By this time, the witch-hunting campaign reached far across Essex. Some 28 or 29 people from other villages, all of them women, were put on trial alongside Anne West; 19 of them were convicted. Soon the phenomenon spread across eastern England, with the witchfinders moving onto Suffolk, Norfolk and the Midland counties.

How did Matthew Hopkins and John Stearne come to wield such authority?

Hopkins was the son of a Suffolk vicar, but moved to Manningtree when his widowed mother married a clergyman there. He was a religious young man, and his family seems to have been afflicted by illness. His brother John died very young, probably from tuberculosis or another lung condition.

Hopkins had a burning conviction that his destiny was to be a witchfinder, and started thinking that people were meeting near his house for witches’ sabbaths with their animal familiars.

Stearne was another Suffolk man, married and with a family – in many ways a more conventional and seemingly stable figure. But he, too, seems to have been excited by the idea there were witches in his community, and he had a range of methods for testing them.

Together, Hopkins and Stearne deprived the suspects of sleep, keeping them in constant motion and waiting for their animal familiars to come, all the time bullying, questioning and watching them. These men roped in other villagers from Manningtree and Lawford, and that’s what really kicked off the trials and got stories flowing from the suspects.

The men didn’t have official positions and weren’t recognised by the government, but were self-appointed moral police. Hopkins gave himself the rank of ‘Witchfinder General’. I suspect he was an egotistical, difficult young man.

Stearne was keen on ‘ducking’, in other words throwing suspects into water. If they floated, they were pulled out and interrogated. Essex magistrates told him not to do it but, as he moved through Suffolk, Norfolk, Northamptonshire, Cambridgeshire, Huntingdonshire and some of the Midland counties, he did use this test.

Of course, if you’d been partly tied up and thrown into water wearing very little, maybe a sort of undergarment, and everybody was standing around pointing and shouting, and you’ve been drowning in front of them, it’s likely that if you were pulled out you’d be terrified and physically under a lot of stress, so much more likely to confess.

Why were women and poor people so much more likely to be accused?

Across the history of witch trials in Europe from the 15th to the 18th century, the accused were women in about 75 per cent of known cases. That seems to be because women tended to be more associated with the devil, perhaps because, in the Bible, Eve commits the first sin.

In the 1640s, society came under tremendous strain and people reached for old beliefs. Believing Satan must be behind their problems, they searched for the devil’s followers, or witches. Of course, at that time almost everything was run by men, which made women vulnerable. In some cases, 100 per cent of the accused people in a particular town – Framlingham in Suffolk, for example – were women.

A lot of these people were also poor, not well educated or in positions of influence in their society. Imagine if a powerful man came to see you in his velvets, silks and ruff, and was writing things down, and maybe you already knew him as an important figure in your community – a magistrate or a minister, perhaps – and he said: “You know, Margery, you’re a witch,” you might well have replied: “Well, yes, sir, if you say so I must be a witch.” There was a tendency to simply say what the authorities wanted you to say.

Many ‘witches’ show up in parish charity records, too; in times of war and economic crisis, people tend to get angry with those they see as a drain on their taxes and community.

But not all ‘witches’ were female or poor, were they?

The stereotype is broadly true, but other people did get caught up. One victim from the Suffolk village of Brandeston was a clergyman, which is quite astonishing. The Reverend John Lowes seems to have been a turbulent fellow who often quarrelled with parishioners over many years, taking them to court, fighting them over land and buildings, and accusing them of moral crimes. Back in 1615, he had defended a woman accused of witchcraft, which proved to be a fatal mistake.

When the panic reached his village, Lowes was accused, thrown into water, deprived of sleep, effectively tortured – and he confessed. By the time he was in court, he had recovered and recanted his confession, but it was too late. He was convicted and hanged on 27 August 1645 at Bury St Edmunds, along with 17 other convicted people.

Similarly, Henry Maggs was quite a respectable figure in his Norfolk community – a churchwarden, chosen to be part of the religious leadership. But by the time Hopkins and Stearne arrived in Norfolk,
the idea that anybody might be a witch had become widespread, and Maggs was accused, searched for witch marks and hanged.

Were there people who were accused but acquitted, and what was life like for them afterwards?

The experience of Anne West, who was tried but not executed in the early 1640s, then accused again in 1645, suggests that the accused were not readily accepted back into their communities even if found not guilty.

The case of Ann Jefferies is also fascinating. A young woman living in Cornwall, she was 19 or in her early twenties when accused, so in that sense not a stereotypical ‘witch’. She claimed that she had started seeing fairies who gave her prophecies and healing abilities. She probably thought that she could make a living from this and that it would make her valuable in the community.

Maybe Jefferies did have visions; she certainly seems to have seen herself as a kind of religious mystic, believing that the fairies were associated with God. But in the climate of the 1640s, that was a dangerous claim. During questioning, the magistrates and clergymen said to her that the fairies were really evil spirits, and that she was a witch. However, she seems to have been acquitted at the assizes, and lived to a ripe old age.

I think that there was a higher tolerance of magical belief in the west of England than in the east where most cases were recorded. Jefferies’ age probably helped, too: some juries were reluctant to convict younger people if they could make a good case for themselves, and Jefferies was an articulate young woman. It seems that she was accepted back into her community more easily than Anne West, but I’m sure suspicions continued to dog her. Even later in life, Jefferies was very reluctant to talk about her witch trial because she assumed that people would turn on her again.

How and when did this spate of witch hunting in Britain decline?

The big witch trials of eastern England and the Midlands seem to have petered out by late 1647, for a variety of reasons. One might have been simply that people started questioning the vast numbers accused. John Stearne wrote in his account of the trials, A Confirmation and Discovery of Witchcraft, published in 1648, that he was responsible for having about 200 people executed – an astonishing figure. If you consider all those accused, questioned or charged but not executed, there were many hundreds and hundreds of people. Understandably, people who were not as convinced as Stearne and Hopkins that the world is full of witches started asking questions. Are these people really all witches? Can there possibly be so many in Britain?

Questions also arose about the motives of the witchfinders, especially Hopkins and Stearne, who charged for their services. They asked to be put up in a hotel, given money to feed their horses and themselves, and funds to pay people to search suspects for witch marks. So the costs for communities racked up – and people with an eye on their taxes started to think: maybe a witch trial is not such a good investment.

John Stearne wrote in his account of the trials that he was responsible for having about 200 people executed – an astonishing figure

In 1647, Hopkins fell ill and died. He was still young – probably in his mid-twenties – and it seems likely that he succumbed to the same disease that killed his brother, perhaps tuberculosis. That helped to bring to a decisive end that wave of witch hunts in which he and Stearne were involved, though they continued elsewhere in Britain. There was another big campaign in Scotland in the 1650s, for example. Ripples carried on across the period of the Civil War and beyond. Hundreds more people were accused and executed, and their cases were often undocumented.

How did the legacy of these witch hunts spread beyond Europe?

Most famously, during witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692 and 1693, some 30 people were found guilty and 19 were hanged; others died under torture or in jail. So events in England and Scotland had impacts more than 3,000 miles away.

A dramatic courtroom scene set during the Salem witch trials. A woman in a white dress stands on a raised platform with her arms lifted toward a tall arched window, where bright yellow light streams into the dark wooden room. People around her react with alarm and awe: some reach out toward the light, others recoil. A man lies collapsed on the floor in front of her.

A 19th-century lithograph depicting one of the 1692 witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts, which followed in the wake of British witch hunts | Credit: Bridgeman

That’s because colonists in the New World – many of them Puritans seeking religious freedom – travelled from communities in Britain where witch trials had been held earlier that century. We have specific examples of people from Framlingham and Great Yarmouth carrying with them to New England the idea that the world is full of witches who need to be hunted. Witch trials were also held in Connecticut and Virginia, in colonies where settlers or their descendants recalled stories of witches they’d heard in Suffolk, Essex, Northamptonshire, Newcastle or Cornwall.

Are there any modern parallels to those 17th-century witch trials?

When people are scapegoated and blamed for problems in our communities today, there is an echo of the witch trials: it’s often poorer people and perceived outsiders who are picked upon. And, of course, we still have problems with misogyny – any woman in public life will tell you what it’s like to be on the receiving end of accusations from conspiracy theorists or others who think that women are generally a problem.

For example, the QAnon conspiracy theory holds that satanists wield power in American politics, particularly Democratic women, offering a close parallel with the witch trials of the 1640s.

There’s a legacy of suspicion and finger-pointing that isn’t justified but which is easy to whip up into hysteria, particularly in times of economic crisis and war. So I think we still live in a society where, in a sense, we hold witch trials.

Marion Gibson is emerita professor of Renaissance and magical literatures at the University of Exeter. Her previous books include Witchcraft: A History in Thirteen Trials (Simon & Schuster, 2023)

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This article was first published in the September 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine

Authors

Charlotte VosperContent producer

Charlotte Vosper is a content producer at HistoryExtra

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