drawing me in. Although I could see it, I was not ‘in’ it. It was an odd sensation – like I was eavesdropping on someone else’s daydream. But I went with it, tapping the keys of my laptop with haste, trying to capture what was unfolding in my head. This could be good.
‘He stood up looking into the clouds, watching it coming down. Whatever it was,’ I wrote. ‘It was large now, more than nine feet high. Then, a few feet away, just as its claws touched the tops of the grass shoots, it metamorphosed before my eyes into a giant bear rising up on his two hind legs. Its eyes glowed red and it screamed, high and shrill, like a pig having its throat cut.’
Euch. Where had that come from? I had never witnessed an animal’s slaughter. Well, the simile was certainly evocative.
I stopped typing and read back.
‘“Before my eyes”?’ I murmured to myself and changed ‘my’ to ‘his’.
I’d almost entirely filled up that page. It was good, strong. But there was no place for it in my chapter. It was the stories of the witches I wanted to bring out. The real tragedy and horror of that time. Not this; this was fiction. His fiction. I cut and pasted it onto a document entitled ‘Weird Bits’.
Then I moved on to the witches. Poor, unfortunate women living on the outskirts of society. They were epitomised by Hopkins’ first victim, Elizabeth Clarke. She was a one-legged octogenarian, and when arrested the old dear was strip-searched by the witch hunters looking for the Devil’s Mark. This was a place on the body where the witch’s ‘imps’ (familiars and demon spirits given to her by Satan) came and sucked. Sometimes the mark was a deformity. Mostly it was as commonplace as a birthmark, a scar, flea-bite, spot or blemish. When it had been located, Hopkins and his Witchfinders would then ‘test’ the spot, the theory being that as this ‘teat’ nourished non-human imps, it was also inhuman and would not bleed.
The witch would be pricked all over with a ‘witchpricker’ – a knife with a retractable blade that discreetly went back into the handle when required. Witnesses would then watch with horror as the witch screamed and bled from her wounds yet did not react when her ‘Devil’s Mark’ was pierced (and these monsters, Hopkins and his sidekick John Stearne, usually found these marks in the ‘privvy parts’). The absence of pain would confirm the witch’s guilt. If she continued to protest her innocence she would be ‘swum’. Right thumb tied to left toe, she would be hurled into a body of water. If she floated, she would be declared a witch. If she drowned her name would be cleared.
I think they call that Sod’s Law.
Seventeenth-century law, doing its best to seem ‘fair’, insisted that for a conviction the witch should also volunteer a confession.
I’m not sure any of Hopkins’ victims volunteered their confessions freely. To ensure that they did ‘fess up’ to something, anything, the Witchfinder deprived them of food, water, sleep and ‘walked’ the accused up and down rooms for days on end. This had most inventing fantastical stories just to bring a halt to their torment. At other times the ‘witch’ was tied cross-legged to a stool for twenty-four hours, denied food, water or access to the toilet. During this time they were constantly watched, and if any insect or animal of any kind entered the room these were deemed to be the witch’s familiars or imps and her guilt was proven. Like the ‘walking’ exercise he employed, the cramping, degradation, humiliation and pain that this inflicted on (mostly) old women had them confessing to all sorts, just to be untied. Though of course there were some who came up with the goods pretty quickly. I looked at a few of those confessions and thought almost straight away – dementia. But Hopkins would still ‘prick’ them.
Utter bastard.
On March the 4th, 1645, after applying these methods to the women accused, Hopkins sent Elizabeth Clarke, Anne Leech, Helen Clarke, Anne West and her daughter Rebecca to a preliminary court charged with witchcraft. They were found guilty and thrown into gaol at Colchester Castle.
Delighted by this success, Hopkins and Stearne then set off to roam neighbouring villages, searching for more witches. They pulled in a huge haul; Margaret Moone got done in for spoiling someone’s beer and Elizabeth Gooding for being refused a piece of cheese (talk about transference of guilt). One