Who (1620-1647) claimed to have been given the title Witch Finder General?
"Witchfinder General (film) Witchfinder General is a 1968 British-American horror film directed by Michael Reeves and starring Vincent Price, Ian Ogilvy and Hilary Dwyer. The screenplay was by Reeves and Tom Baker based on Ronald Bassett's novel of the same name. Made on a low budget of under £100,000, the movie was co-produced by Tigon British Film Productions and American International Pictures. The story details the heavily fictionalised murderous witch-hunting exploits of Matthew Hopkins, a 17th-century English lawyer who claimed to have been appointed as a """" by Parliament during the English Civil War to root out sorcery and witchcraft."
"believed in witchcraft and possession. In the 16th and 17th centuries, thousands of people throughout Europe were accused of being witches and executed. In England and America, Puritans engaged in witch hunts as well. In the 1640s, Matthew Hopkins, the self-proclaimed ""Witchfinder General"", was responsible for accusing over two hundred people of witchcraft, mainly in East Anglia. In New England, few people were accused and convicted of witchcraft before 1692; there were at most sixteen convictions. The Salem witch trials of 1692 had a lasting impact on the historical reputation of New England Puritans. Though this witch hunt occurred after"
"Witchfinder General (novel) Witchfinder General is a 1966 novel written by Ronald Bassett. It tells the heavily fictionalized story of Matthew Hopkins, a notorious 17th-century witch-hunter. According to historian Malcolm Gaskill, in Bassett's novel Hopkins is a 50-ish Ipswich lawyer ""who becomes a pikeman in a parliamentarian regiment to escape his creditors, and from there reinvents himself as 'a black-winged Attila, leaving behind him a trail of gibbet-hung corpses'."" Promoted as a horror novel, the back cover blurb of the book warned that the contents were ""Not for those with delicate stomachs."" The book served as the basis for Michael"
"Reeves's violent and controversial 1968 film of the same name, also known as ""The Conqueror Worm"". Witchfinder General (novel) Witchfinder General is a 1966 novel written by Ronald Bassett. It tells the heavily fictionalized story of Matthew Hopkins, a notorious 17th-century witch-hunter. According to historian Malcolm Gaskill, in Bassett's novel Hopkins is a 50-ish Ipswich lawyer ""who becomes a pikeman in a parliamentarian regiment to escape his creditors, and from there reinvents himself as 'a black-winged Attila, leaving behind him a trail of gibbet-hung corpses'."" Promoted as a horror novel, the back cover blurb of the book warned that the"
"they were prosecuted as 'scandalous ministers' and their ritualistic behaviour was noted and used as evidence against them. The Rev. John Lowes was found guilty of witchcraft by Matthew Hopkins, the self-styled Witchfinder General and as result in the autumn of 1645 he was hanged at Bury St Edmunds, along with 39 innocent men, women and children. These events are recounted in the 1968 film Witchfinder General, starring Vincent Price. Church of All Saints, Brandeston The Church of All Saints is a Church of England parish church in Brandeston, Suffolk, England. The church dates from the Middle Age and is"
"1649, when the local magistrates found their own wives accused of witchcraft. There is evidence of judicial doubts about the validity of the legal process. In April 1650 as the hunt began to subside, the Chancellor, John Campbell, 1st Earl of Loudoun, writing to local commissioners about to try three Berwickshire witches, advised that they did not rely on any first confession before an ecclesiastical judge, but that they obtain a new confession before proceeding, suggesting that he thought previous prosecutions may not have been legally rigorous. In the later stages of the hunt the Parliament and its representative body"
"19, 1692. In mid-July, the constable in Andover invited the afflicted girls from Salem Village to visit with his wife to try to determine who was causing her afflictions. Ann Foster, her daughter Mary Lacey Sr., and granddaughter Mary Lacey Jr. all confessed to being witches. Anthony Checkley was appointed by Governor Phips to replace Thomas Newton as the Crown's Attorney when Newton took an appointment in New Hampshire. In August, grand juries indicted George Burroughs, Mary Eastey, Martha Corey and George Jacobs, Sr.. Trial juries convicted Martha Carrier, George Jacobs, Sr., George Burroughs, John Willard, Elizabeth Proctor, and John"
"Florence Newton Florence Newton (fl. 1661) was an alleged Irish witch, known as the ""Witch of Youghal"". The case against Newton is described as one of the most important examples of Irish witch trials, similar to witch trials in England, and the ""most known of 17th-century witch trials in Ireland"". Florence Newton was arrested and imprisoned 24 March 1661. She was put on trial 11 September 1661 at the Assizes held at Cork where she was accused of having ""enchanted"" Mary Longdon and employing sorcery to cause the death of David Jones. According to accounts of her trial, in Christmas"
"title was ""An Act against Conjuration, Witchcraft and dealing with evil and wicked spirits"", (1 Ja. I c. 12). It was this statute that was enforced by Matthew Hopkins, the self-styled Witch-Finder General. Supporters of the Act included the Earl of Northumberland, the Bishop of Lincoln, the Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas, the Attorney General for England and Wales, the Lord Chief Baron of the Exchequer, and the Chief Justice of the King's Bench. The Acts of Elizabeth and James changed the law of witchcraft by making it a felony, thus removing the accused from the jurisdiction"
"were sceptical of these, especially when Darrell claimed that he knew of thirteen witches in the town. Because of the intense public interest and the fierce arguments in Nottingham, John Whitgift, Archbishop of Canterbury, ordered an investigation. As a result, Darrell was accused of fraudulent exorcism. The prosecutor was Samuel Harsnett, who was to end his career as Archbishop of York. Harsnett's views about Darrell were published in ""A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures"" in 1603. Shakespeare read it, and King Lear contains the names of devils, like Flibbertigibbet and Smulkin, from the book. Darrell always maintained that there was"
"1647, followed by the conviction of Margaret Jones. As described in the journal of Governor John Winthrop, the evidence assembled against Margaret Jones was gathered by the use of Hopkins' techniques of ""searching"" and ""watching"". Jones' execution was the first in a witch-hunt that lasted in New England from 1648 until 1663. About eighty people throughout New England were accused of practising witchcraft during that period, of whom fifteen women and two men were executed. Some of Hopkins' methods were once again employed during the Salem Witch Trials, which occurred primarily in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692–93. These trials resulted in"
"John Stearne (witch-hunter) John Stearne (c. 1610–1670) was an associate of self-styled ""Witchfinder General"" Matthew Hopkins, a witch-hunter active during the English Civil War. Stearne was known at various times as the witch-hunter, and ""witch pricker"". Raised in Long Melford, Suffolk, Stearne later became a land owner at Lawshall near Bury St Edmunds. He met Hopkins, who was 10 years' his junior, in Manningtree and appointed him as his assistant. As a result of Stearne's accusations, a trial was held in Chelmsford in July 1645 for 29 people accused of witchcraft and sorcery. Of these four had died in prison"
"In 1619 he was made Lensmann (Governor) of the province of Finnmark in the far north, a post he retained until his death in 1651. There, he presided over 52 witch trials, nine of which afflicted the Sami population, but there may have been even more because of a lack of records for the 1640s; one of these trials was the great witch trial of 1621 in Vardø. John Cunningham (explorer) John Cunningham (c. 1575-1651), known in Danish as Hans Køning, was a Scottish explorer who became a captain in the Danish navy in 1603. In 1605, he was captain"
"outbreak of witchcraft scares in the 17th century, but there is little evidence that Plymouth was engulfed in anything similar. Witchcraft was listed as a capital crime in the 1636 codification of the laws by the Plymouth General Court, but there were no actual convictions of witches in Plymouth Colony. The court records only show two formal accusations of witchcraft. The first, of Goodwife Holmes in 1661, never went to trial. The second, of Mary Ingram in 1677, resulted in trial and acquittal. Edward Winslow and Susanna White both lost their spouses during the harsh winter of 1620–1621, and the"
"General Assembly co-ordinated presbyteries in their pursuit of ""fugitive witches"", reminding them of the importance of hunting witches and encouraged them when obtaining commissions of justiciary to recommend the names of commissioners. By May 1650 Parliament had a committee in place to deal with depositions and other legal papers connected to accusations and commissions. Individual members of parliament and other leading Covenanters took a proactive role in witch hunts. In July 1650 Cromwell led an army of 16,000 over the border at Berwick and moved towards Edinburgh, taking control of the Lowlands and eventually winning the decisive victory at Dunbar"
"New World by the 1690s. The pact was allegedly signed between Urbain Grandier and the Devil, stolen from the Devil's cabinet of pacts by the demon Asmodeus. This page shows the signatures of all demons in possession of the Ursuline nuns at Loudun and the note added ""Dictionnaire infernal"" by Collin de Plancy (1826) Urbain Grandier was appointed parish priest of St-Pierre-du-Marché in Loudun, a town in Poitou, France, in 1617. Grandier was considered to be a very good-looking man, and was both wealthy and well-educated. The combination made the priest a target for the attention of girls in Loudun,"
"Margaret Bane Margaret Bane also called ""Clerk"" (1542 – 25 March 1597), was a Scottish midwife and alleged witch, one of the prominent victims of The Great Scottish Witch Hunt of 1597. Margaret Bane was a midwife and cunning woman who was reportedly widely famed with a clientele with connections from the peasantry to members of the nobility. She was accused of witchcraft in 1567, but managed to avoid a trial. She was accused a second time in 1596, but was acquitted. During the Great Scottish Witch Hunt of 1597 she was pointed out by eight women accused of sorcery"
"to be able to separate the guilty from the innocent"". Therefore, no one was sentenced harsher than to a whipping. In February 1670, the governor complained that there was suddenly talk of witches everywhere, and that this hysteria was spreading as fire in dry grass. Vicars were constantly writing to him asking for more witch trials, but he refused and advised them to preach to the suspected witches instead. The government gave the order that a special prayer, the witch prayer, was to be held in the churches of the kingdom: that prayer was said from 1670 to 1677. The"
"the main characters in his 2017 novel The Fatal Tree. There are a few treatments of Wild that attempt to dramatise his life, but there remains only one full length non-fiction biography on Wild: Other 20th century sources 18th century sources Jonathan Wild Jonathan Wild, also spelled Wilde (1682 or 1683 – 24 May 1725), was a London underworld figure notable for operating on both sides of the law, posing as a public-spirited crimefighter entitled the """"Thief-Taker General"""". Wild was exploiting a strong public demand for action during a major London crime wave in the absence of any effective police"
"related ever took place, allowing the two accused witches to go free, and condemning Panzona to a three-year prison sentence for heresy. In 1621, a wealthy man named Alessandro Marchetto of Udine submitted a memorandum to the Holy Office accusing both a fourteen-year-old boy and a local shepherd named Giovanni of being a ""benandanti"", each of whom he had previously tried to employ to cure his own cousin, whom it was believed had been bewitched by sorcery. Ginzburg suggests that by the 1620s, the ""benandanti"" were becoming bolder in their public accusations against alleged witches. In February 1622 the inquisitor"
"Jonathan Wild Jonathan Wild, also spelled Wilde (1682 or 1683 – 24 May 1725), was a London underworld figure notable for operating on both sides of the law, posing as a public-spirited crimefighter entitled the """"Thief-Taker General"""". Wild was exploiting a strong public demand for action during a major London crime wave in the absence of any effective police force. As a powerful gang-leader himself, he became a master manipulator of legal systems, collecting the rewards offered for valuables which he had stolen himself, bribing prison-guards to release his colleagues, and blackmailing any who crossed him. He was responsible for"
"on the Jesuits. The great controversy on the Chinese Rites (1645) continued. Owing to his great age, Father Nickel obtained from the 11th General Congregation the election of Gian Paolo Oliva as vicar-general with right of succession (on 7 June 1661). This was approved by Alexander VII. The German novelist Thomas Mann mentions Nickel in his famous book ""The Magic Mountain"", bringing up a relatively forgotten quote by the Superior-General about love for one's fatherland, which Nickel called ""a plague with the most certain death of Christian love"". This notion of Nickel's has already been touched on in the Finnish"
"Margareta i Kumla Margareta i Kumla ('Margareta of Kumla') also known as the ""Sibylla of Kumla"" ('Prophetess of Kumla'), or ""Kumlapigan"" ('Maid of Kumla'), (died after 1628), was a Swedish visionary, who claimed to be possessed. She became the target for pilgrimages when claiming to be the channel of the words of the angels. Margareta was born to Johannes Laurentii, the Vicar of Kumla since 1619. In 1626, Margareta, by then in her teens, claimed to have a vision of a white bird and a black man. The black man tried to convince her to abandon her beliefs. At the"
"of that total. According to John Stearn(e) known at various times as the witch–hunter, and ""witch pricker"", associate to Matthew Hopkins, in his book ""A Confirmation and Discovery of Witchcraft"" there were one hundred and twenty others in gaol awaiting trial, of these 17 were men, Thomas Ady in 1656 writes of ""about a hundred"", though others record ""almost 200"". Following a three-week adjournment made necessary by the advancing King's Army, the second sitting of the court resulted in 68 other ""condemnations""; though reports say – ""mass executions of sixty or seventy witches"". Both Hopkins and Stearne treated the search"
"Pyewacket (familiar spirit) Pyewacket was one of the familiar spirits of a witch detected by the witchfinder general Matthew Hopkins in March 1644 in the town of Manningtree, Essex, England. Hopkins claimed he spied on the witches as they held their meeting close by his house, and heard them mention the name of a local woman. She was arrested and deprived of sleep for four nights, at the end of which she confessed and called out the names of her familiars, describing the forms in which they should appear. They were: Hopkins claims he and nine other witnesses saw the"
"John Griffith (Baptist minister) John Griffith (1622?–1700) was an English General Baptist minister. Griffiths appears to have joined the Baptists about 1640, and founded about 1646 a London congregation in Dunning's Alley, Bishopsgate Street Without. It is probable that he practised medicine, as he was known as Dr. Griffith. After the Restoration of 1660, Griffith frequently got into trouble as a conventicle preacher; and persistently declined the oath of allegiance. His difficulty was that the terms of the oath bound him to obey laws not then in being, and future sovereigns who might be Roman Catholic. His first imprisonment was"
"bereft of her naturall wit"". Divination was also a common accusation, often with lesser penalties, like the case of Marjorie Plumber, who was debarred from the sacrament by the presbytery of Cullen in Banffshire in 1649 for trying to determine if her ailing child would live by laying it between two holes, a ""living grave"" and a ""dead grave"", and seeing which way it turned. However, there were total of 69 confessions of demonic pacts in the court records and the Devil was an important figure in the Inverkeithing hunt, where several women confessed to associations with the Devil, renouncing"
"The book was used in the American colonies as early as May 1647, when Margaret Jones was executed for witchcraft in Massachusetts, the first of 17 people executed for witchcraft in the Colonies from 1647 to 1663. Witch-hunts in North America began about the time of Hopkins. In 1645, forty-six years before the notorious Salem witch trials, Springfield, Massachusetts experienced America's first accusations of witchcraft when husband and wife Hugh and Mary Parsons accused each other of witchcraft. In America's first witch trial, Hugh was found innocent, while Mary was acquitted of witchcraft but she was still sentenced to be"
"believed that the accused in the Logroño trials had made false statements under torture or threats. This conviction was shared by local priests, Jesuit preachers and even the Bishop of Pamplona, Venegas de Figueroa, who informed the Inquisitor General that the witch craze consisted of rumours spread by children and simple folk who had heard about the witches in France. Faced with so many new unsubstantiated accusations and confessions, Salazar refused to support the other inquisitors, and a divided vote was forwarded to the Supreme Council. In March 1611, the Inquisitor General instructed Salazar to make a new visitation, this"
"in ""Witches: A Century of Murder. Season 1: Episode 2 ""Part 2"" (2015)."" Elizabeth Clarke Elizabeth Clarke (c. 1565–1645) was the first woman persecuted by the Witchfinder General, Matthew Hopkins in 1645 in Essex, England. She was accused of witchcraft by local tailor John Rivet. Local magistrates appointed John Stearne and Hopkins to investigate. This led to further accusations and the deaths of up to two hundred people. She was a woman over eighty with only one leg, who confessed after being deprived of sleep for many nights. Matthew Hopkins also claimed he saw her 'evil helpers', one of which"
"prior to the trial and 15 or 16 were subsequently hanged. Nine who had been convicted of conjuring spirits were reprieved. Within a year of the death of Matthew Hopkins, John Stearne retired to his farm and wrote ""A Confirmation and Discovery of Witchcraft"". Notes Bibliography John Stearne (witch-hunter) John Stearne (c. 1610–1670) was an associate of self-styled ""Witchfinder General"" Matthew Hopkins, a witch-hunter active during the English Civil War. Stearne was known at various times as the witch-hunter, and ""witch pricker"". Raised in Long Melford, Suffolk, Stearne later became a land owner at Lawshall near Bury St Edmunds. He"
"Loudun possessions The Loudun possessions was a notorious witchcraft trial in Loudun, France in 1634. A convent of Ursuline nuns said they had been visited and possessed by demons. Following an investigation by the Catholic Church, a local priest named Father Urbain Grandier was accused of summoning the evil spirits. He was eventually convicted of the crimes of sorcery and burned at the stake. The case contains similar themes to other witchcraft trials that occurred throughout western Europe in the 17th century, such as the Aix-en-Provence possessions (France) in 1611 or the Pendle witches (England) in 1612 before reaching the"
"the chapel and used his pension towards the cost. Notes Bibliography James Wood (minister) James Wood (1672–1759) was a Presbyterian minister of the first Atherton and Chowbent Chapels in Atherton, Greater Manchester, England. During the Jacobite rising, he was given the title ""the General"" for leading a force of men that routed the Highlanders. James Wood was born in Atherton, the son of James Wood (1639–1694) the nonconformist minister of Atherton Chapel and his wife Anne Townley. His father was imprisoned in 1670 for defying the law and preaching in the homes of sympathisers after Atherton Chapel had been closed"