Lore - Episode 70: Familiar

Episode Date: October 2, 2017

There’s a fine line between rationality and madness, but it’s not as easy to avoid as you might think. Throughout history, our world has played host to people who have taken their superstitions too far, but it was the chaos of the English Civil War that helped give birth to one of the worst. * * * Official Lore Website: www.lorepodcast.com Extra member episodes: www.patreon.com/lorepodcast Official Lore Merchandise: www.lorepodcast.com/shop Access premium content!: https://www.lorepodcast.com/support

There's a fine line between belief and obsession. From a distance, that line looks to be a mile wide. After all, no one expects to behave irrationally. But people throughout history have found that line all too easy to cross. Take William Dowsing. He was a parliamentarian soldier during the First English Civil War. And he was a believer. Specifically, he was a Puritan, a Protestant Christian who wanted to purge all remaining

Catholic Church elements from the relatively new Church of England. He believed deeply in this cause. But as I said before, some people take belief too far. Dowsing managed to secure a very special assignment from the Earl of Manchester. In August of 1643, he was given the authority to travel all over Cambridgeshire and Suffolk literally destroying the physical reminders of Old Catholic England, stained glass windows, stone carvings, altars, crosses, and anything else that came remotely close. Dowsing did this for a full year under the self-appointed title of Iconoclast General,

eventually vandalizing over 250 churches. Think about it, a believer so driven by his convictions that he actually destroyed places of worship within his own faith. Like I said, passion shares a very thin, very fragile wall with madness, and it's all too easy to hear its voice on the other side. Our society is built on the unspoken assumption that everyone will behave rationally. The people will make decisions that are based on common sense and logic and wade against their impact on the people around us.

It's a noble assumption, but it doesn't take people like William Dowsing into account. And sadly, he was mild compared to others. Because given the right mix, that perfect sweet spot between politics, religion, and superstition, one person's irrational obsession can lead to a much darker outcome, especially if you're a witch. I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is Lore. King James I had some pretty big shoes to fill. He succeeded Elizabeth I after a long 44-year reign, and when he did, he maintained the

Protestant England that had flourished under her rule. But where Elizabeth was the voice of reason, James leaned more than a little toward the irrational. Most historians think it began on his return trip from Denmark in 1589 when a storm forced his ship to take shelter in Norway, a storm that was so unusual and unexpected that it was blamed on the work of witches. The resulting witch trial left quite the impression on King James. Less than a decade later, he published his own scholarly work titled Demonology, where

he explored the connections between witchcraft, sorcery, demons, and black magic. His source material was a little sketchy, though, consisting mostly of confessions from accused witches, but one paragraph in particular caused most of the problems to come. The fearful abounding, he wrote, of these detestable slaves with the devil, the witches or enchanters, has moved me to resolve the doubting, both that such assaults of Satan aren't most certainly practiced and that the instruments thereof merit most severely to be punished. Translation, witchcraft is real, and if you find a witch, you should punish them.

This was clear, unfiltered permission for violence straight from the mouth of a powerful ruler. And again, while most people prefer to stay comfortably inside the realm of common sense, there are always a few outsiders. It was just as true then as it is today. As I mentioned earlier, the Puritans were sort of an activist group within the Church of England who believed that the Church hadn't gone anti-Catholic enough. It needed purifying, hence the name.

Puritans were extremists, in a sense, with zero tolerance for anything remotely heretical, and they adored the anti-witchcraft message of their king. Then their king died. And when King Charles I took the throne in 1625, he began to slowly move the Church of England back toward Roman Catholic elements. For the Puritans, it was their worst nightmare come true. Rather than being the law of the land, as they had for so long, their worldview was now under attack.

This is the world that Matthew Hopkins was born into. His father, James, was the Puritan vicar of St. John's of Suffolk, right in the heart of Puritan territory. He was one of six children, and all of them were raised to hate heresy. In fact, it's most likely that they had a copy of demonology on hand in their home that would have certainly explained a lot of what was to come. In 1635, Matthew's father passed away suddenly, leaving the family to support themselves on their own.

Matthew stuck around for a while, but in the early 1640s, he took his small inheritance and moved 10 miles west to Manningtree, where he purchased a local inn. And it was there, in the early days of the English Civil War, that something life-changing happened to him. The wife of Richard Edwards, a wealthy landowner and the town's chief constable, had recently given birth, after which she placed the newborn in the care of a wet nurse. But when the baby died unexpectedly after days of unnatural fits, they grew suspicious of Elizabeth Clark, the 80-year-old one-legged woman who lived next door.

Around the same time, some cattle belonging to Edwards were driven past Clark's house, and two of them died suddenly, right there on the trail. That was all the proof the community needed to start whispering. After all, few in town really cared for Elizabeth Clark, and so it was easy to accuse her of using witchcraft to kill the cows and the Edwards child. On Friday, March 21st of 1645, four local women were sent by the magistrates to Clark's house to inspect her for witches' marks. These were markings that all witches were said to have on their skin, evidence of suckling

dark creatures. We don't know whether or not Elizabeth put up a fight, but we do know that when they were done, they claimed to have found not one, but three of those marks, which gave them the authority to keep her under house arrest while they waited for her to confess. All through that weekend, the women sat with Clark in silence, waiting for her to speak. But she refused, and the silence went on for days. On Tuesday, March 24th, two men arrived to help. The older of them was John Stern, a local business owner and a staunch Puritan.

With him was young Matthew Hopkins, and together they set about interrogating Clark with a more direct and deliberate intent. Finally, after hours of working, she gave in and confessed to a whole laundry list of offenses, including a seven-year-long relationship with the devil himself. She also began to call for her familiars, those supernatural creatures who assist witches in their evil efforts. And both men watched as a series of animals entered the room one by one. Elizabeth claimed they were evil spirits and named them as they came in.

Holt, Jamara, Nuis, Sack and Sugar, and Vinegar Tom. The men had seen enough. Later when the local magistrate, Sir Grimstone and Sir Bose, announced that they would be available to hear testimony from anyone willing to share it, Stern approached them and handed over a transcript of Clark's confession. Sir Grimstone had a long history of presiding over trials of accused witches, so he was more than a little impressed by the initiative of the two men. As a result, he issued them a warrant instructing them to go and find the other witches from

Clark's group. Matthew Hopkins, born and raised in a zealous religious home, was in heaven. They were witchfinders now, and England would never be the same. Hopkins and Stern did their job exceedingly well. After conducting an investigation in town, they presented five more names to the magistrates there, including Ann West and her daughter Rebecca, both of whom had been accused of witchcraft in the past, but had managed to escape conviction and execution. Those five women were tortured in the same way Elizabeth Clark was, by depriving them

of sleep and food, and keeping them in isolation until they gave up and handed over names and evidence. Soon, the initial group of five women grew to a crowd of 23. When the trials were done, 18 of the women were sentenced to death by hanging. Four others died in prison before their trials even began, but Rebecca West managed to slip out of her sentence because of how helpful she was in court. This was the moment the light bulb flickered on above the head of Matthew Hopkins. With the law on their side, he and Stern would be able to do this elsewhere.

Witchfinders on the road, seeking out anyone who had dealings with the devil, purging the church of heresy and sin, it was their calling, it was their duty. It's also important to point out the hypocrisy in Hopkins' actions here. This was a man who proclaimed piety, with a mission to bring the English church back to its pure essential roots, yet his official title, Witchfinder General, was a personal fabrication. He even told towns that he had the backing of the parliamentary leadership, which was a lie.

Farce or not, they had a pretty methodical approach to their mission. He and Stern traveled with a handful of women, who were there to inspect anyone accused of witchcraft, for witches' marks. They would then be denied food and sleep, and kept isolated until they confessed. And the craziest part of their operation, I think, is that they charged for this work. It was, in their eyes, a service to the community. Historians estimate that each village paid an average of 20 pounds, equivalent to about $5,000 today.

Witchfinding was apparently a really good way to get rich and fast. When Hopkins and Stern arrived in the Suffolk village of Brandiston, they found a victim in the most unlikely place, right inside the local church. Villagers came forward to tell them about the unlikeable and unsocial nature of their vicar, John Lowe's. The worst yet, they said, he was very fond of all those old, high church rituals that the Catholics were known for. But Lowe's was an 80-year-old man who had served in his church for over five decades.

Of course, he preferred the old traditions of formal Anglicanism, because he'd lived through them. Still, in 1645, that was enough to earn you an accusation as a witch, and so Lowe's was taken into custody by the witchfinders. That's when Hopkins pulled out his usual bag of tricks. Lowe's wasn't allowed to sleep, and the interrogators kept him moving the entire time, wearing him out physically and mentally. For days, they took shifts torturing the old man with sleep deprivation, until he finally

became desperate enough to say anything as long as it ended his suffering. His crime, according to his own confession, was that he ordered his familiars to sink a ship off the coast of Ipswich. He gave a convincing laugh when he told Hopkins he had made 14 widows in a quarter of an hour. Then he named names. More accused witches were brought in. They were examined by Hopkins' female assistants and then subjected to the same torture as John Lowe's.

When they confessed, the process was repeated. Over and over, the list of accused grew exponentially, until at the end, between 150 and 200 people were in jail awaiting trial. But you can't do that sort of thing and not get noticed. Hopkins had walked into town and rounded up hundreds of people, and all of them, he said, were at risk of execution for witchcraft. When parliament caught wind of what he was doing there in Suffolk, they stepped in and took over the trial process.

A special oyer and terminers session, sort of a trial for major crimes, was called for. It would be held in the western county seat of Suffolk, in the town of Barry St. Edmonds. The government felt that Hopkins had generated too many unwilling testimonies and lacked solid legal evidence. For their trial, they said, things would be run more carefully. They would no longer allow for confessions received under torture. What they wanted to see was proof of a pact with the devil or of working with familiars to carry out their dark magic.

That still sounds like fantasy to our modern minds, I know, but it was conservative and reasonable enough that it upset Matthew Hopkins to no end. In August of 1645, John Godbold, a local member of parliament, served as judge over the trial. Evidence was heard and convictions were handed out. In the end, 16 women and two men were sentenced to death for involvement in witchcraft. All of them were imprisoned inside a local barn on the night before their execution. It said that they came to a unanimous decision to confess nothing but their innocence at the gallows.

Then they passed the night in song and in prayer. On the morning of August 27th, all 18 were hanged, and then the court proceedings stopped. It's easy to think that it had ended. The government had stepped in, after all. More common sense had been applied to the panic than Hopkins would ever have allowed himself. But there were still 120 people in jail awaiting trial. The break, it turns out, was simply a byproduct of the ongoing civil war.

It was announced that the king's forces were approaching, so the people of Barry St. Edmonds had to stop and tend to military matters. But when that was over three weeks later, the court reconvened, and the remaining accused were brought before the judge. Of the 120 who remained, 60 more were convicted and sentenced to death by hanging. Among them was the old brandiston vicar, John Lowe's. Long before the executions in Suffolk, Matthew Hopkins had moved on. He'd done his job, gathering all the evidence he could.

He was seen by many in his day as a man of action. He was passionate and driven, and believed he had more work to do than time to do it. By August, he was ready to tackle his next challenge, so he headed elsewhere. But his reputation was beginning to travel out ahead of him. What was spreading about Matthew Hopkins, and of how his arrival in town could signal God's divine justice, or the release of a hate-filled mob looking for someone to blame for their own unhappiness, I suppose it's all in the eye of the beholder. Some towns saw the upside to his work, though.

If there was someone in town that had caused problems, disrupting the social order or wielding too much power, Hopkins represented an opportunity, drawn up enough false testimony, and anyone could be accused of witchcraft. So it's no wonder that almost everywhere they went, villagers eagerly threw neighbors, friends, even family under the proverbial bus. And Hopkins reveled in it. He continued to call himself Witchfinder General, and claimed that he owned a scroll that contained the names of all the witches in England.

The truth was, though, he and John Stern were just sort of making it up as they went along. But they weren't about to tell anyone else that, were they? When he arrived in Ipswich, the people there told him a story. Mary Lakeland, the wife of a prosperous barber, had apparently conspired with another local woman, Alice Denham. Their purpose, according to town gossip, was to harass a local man named William Lawrence. Mary apparently owed Lawrence some money, and rather than paying it back, the two women sent a pair of familiars, in the form of dogs, to attack him.

The trouble was, Mary Lakeland had a spotless reputation. She was known throughout Ipswich as a professor of religion, and was solid in her Christian faith. But this was the 1640s, and no matter how secure someone might have thought they were, all it took was a few suspicious people. Priest or beggar, any reputation was at risk of evaporating over the heat of all that hatred. Mary Lakeland was not immune to that gossip, and that's when a series of unfortunate events struck the household of William Lawrence.

He, his son, and their maid servants all died unexpectedly. Another rumor said Mary had been upset at a sailor named Henry Reed, who had pledged to marry her granddaughter, but then backed out of the arrangement. Mary confessed to sending her familiars to burn Reed's ship off the coast of Ipswich, but things got worse after that. Reed developed a series of large tumors and sores that seemed to consume his body from the outside. One of those tumors was said to be on his leg and had taken a shape that resembled,

of all things, a dog, just like Mary's familiars. The pain from that tumor, they say, was so unbearable that he couldn't even walk upright. But it was one accusation in particular that sets Mary apart from all the other witches Matthew Hopkins hunted down. Town gossip said that Mary had tortured and killed her own husband, which in her day was considered treason and traitors were burned at the stake. Which is how Mary ended up in custody in the hands of Matthew Hopkins, where she endured the same torture he was known so well for.

Days of sleepless nights and growing hunger eventually drove her to fabricate an elaborate tale of taking the devil to bed. He then cut her hand with one of his claws, she said, and scratched out a covenant with her own blood. Her confessions led to the arrest of Alice Denham and four others, and all six of them were moved to jail. Denham was later hanged after being paraded through town in front of everyone who cared to see her.

Mary, though, was sentenced to death by fire, the only witch in Hopkins' entire campaign to be burned alive. On September 9, a crowd was gathered at the southeast corner of town to watch her execution. Now, when most people think of witch burnings, they think of someone being tied to a tall pole surrounded by a pile of kindling, which is partly true. Mary's burning, though, was slightly different. When she arrived, the executioner first placed her inside a barrel of hot pitch, coating her body in flammable black tar.

Then she was pulled out and chained to the post, where her body was surrounded by brush and wood planks. The fire burned hot and black, fueled by the thick tar, and Mary's own body. The following morning, the small pile of ash was carefully cleaned up, because even the smallest fragment of a witch could do irreparable harm. Which, of course, is nonsense, because witches aren't real, they're an excuse. A weapon swung around by angry, bigoted people who allow hate to override their common sense. Mary Lakeland was no witch, just an innocent woman caught at the intersection of superstition

and circumstance. Except, well, fate didn't help her reputation much after her death. You see, something happened the very same night her body burned in front of that angry crowd. Henry Reed, the sailor who had spurned her granddaughter, the man who lay at home in pain dying from the tumors that were eating him alive, suddenly took a turn for the better. His symptoms vanished, and he quickly returned to health. Mary's death, at least in the eyes of everyone in town, had somehow released the man from

her curse. No incidents, it seems, might just be the most powerful spell of all. Today we have the benefit of 350 years of distance between Matthew Hopkins and ourselves. We can look back and study it. We can roll it around in our fingers and feel the rough edges and flaws in a way that maybe his contemporaries were just a bit too personally invested to see. So it's easy for us to see everything that went on across southeastern England from 1645 to 1647 as pure madness.

This that acted like a wave, and Matthew Hopkins wrote it like a pro. His mission didn't stop an Ipswich either. After Mary Lakeland's execution, he stopped in Stomarket for more of the same. Then he headed to Cambridgeshire and Northamptonshire after that. As sad as it is, Hopkins got around. There were sane voices, though, standing firm against that wave of madness. One of them was a minister named John Gall from the village of Great Stoughton. He held the unpopular opinion that the people involved in these trials were just blaming

other people for their own misfortunes than using superstition as an excuse. He even published a pamphlet that politely trashed the young witchfinder general. When Hopkins read the paper, he sent a letter to Gall promising the minister that he'd be visiting him soon to hunt for witches there. I don't know about you, but I'd call that a threat. For over a year, Matthew Hopkins and John Stern visited dozens of villages and guided scores of innocent people to the gallows. By some estimates, more than 300 men and women were charged with the crime, and over one-third

of them were convicted and executed. Let's put that in perspective. In just over a year, Hopkins had more people executed for witchcraft than in the entire century before. Thankfully, he eventually retired. There's a lot that went into the reason why. Part of it has to do with the expense of it all. When Hopkins entered a town and set the wheels in motion for a trial and execution, those

things were expensive to the community, and they were already struggling under the tax burden required to pay for a war. Then in the summer of 1646, something else spread across the area, the plague. Hopkins was seen more than 200 new cases each week, and people were getting very worried. Maybe Hopkins found the villages to be a lot less receptive to his message, or maybe he just decided to stay home and not get sick. I wouldn't blame him if he did. A year later, he was dead.

And there's a lot of folklore surrounding that death, too. Some say he was subjected to his own infamous ducking test, where the accused were tied up and tossed in a lake or river. Because witches were said to literally repel Christian baptism, people believed that the guilty would float while the innocent would drown. Another legend says that after his death, someone found that mysterious scroll he carried around with him, the one with the names of all the witches in England. They say Hopkins' name was listed among the guilty.

But there's no evidence that Hopkins was ever tried and convicted as a witch. No evidence that a scroll ever existed. Like so much of his own mission and work, even the stories of his death are filled with lies and hearsay. The truth is a lot less supernatural and a lot more boring. Matthew Hopkins died in August of 1647 from tuberculosis. Look, I get it. It's easy to think that all of this was just primitive behavior and that we've gotten

better in the years since. We've had over three centuries after all. Surely, we've evolved. And yes, in some ways, we have. But don't miss the point here. When people are scared enough, when their worldview is threatened and everything they know and believe is put at risk, they lash out and hurt others. Given the chance, people will do anything to end the madness, even toss their own family

into the arms of a murderous zealot, and they'll justify it better than any criminal defense lawyer ever could. I wish we were better now. I really do. But sadly, very little has changed. Sure, most people no longer believe in witches, but for those who are easily swayed by hatred, there's a whole new list of others to focus their obsession on. The madness, it seems, is all too familiar to us.

It's always there, just on the other side of the door, tempting us to step on through. As in the end, as sad as it seems, there's always another witch to burn, isn't there? This episode of Lore was written and produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with research help from Marsette Crockett. Lore is much more than a podcast. There's a book series in bookstores around the country and online, and the second season of the Amazon Prime television show was recently released. Check them both out if you want more lore in your life.

I also make two other podcasts, Aaron Mankey's Cabinet of Curiosities, and Unobscured, and I think you'd enjoy both. Each one explores other areas of our dark history, ranging from bite-sized episodes to season-long dives into a single topic. You can learn about both of those shows and everything else going on all over in one central place, theworldoflore.com slash now. And you can also follow the show on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Just search for Lore podcast, all one word, and then click that follow button.

When you do, say hi. I like it when people say hi. And as always, thanks for listening. I'll see you in the next one.