Dairy reveals the horrors of the Witchfinder General trials

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TUESDAY, MARCH 22, 2011

Dairy reveals the horrors of the Witchfinder General trials

350-year-old notebook which describes the execution of innocent women for consorting with the Devil, has been published online by The University of Manchester’s John Rylands Library. Puritan writer Nehemiah Wallington wrote passages on his attitudes to life, religion, the civil war as well as the witchcraft trials of the period.

Wallington’s Diary

By 1654 Wallington catalogued 50 notebooks, of which only seven are known to survive.

Each is unique, and the Tatton copy documents battles and skirmishes of the English Civil War period and the disturbing violence of the 1640s in which dozens of East Anglian women were killed.

Matthew Hopkins, the Witchfinder General, contemporary woodcut
There are four further copies in the British Library, one in the Guildhall Library, one in the Folger Library, Washington DC, and one at Tatton Park in Cheshire, England.

Last year, a team of experts from the John Rylands’ Centre for Heritage Imaging and Collection Care (CHICC), spent a week at Tatton Park, to capture the diary as a digital document.

Wallington tells how a supposed coven of witches was found in the Suffolk village of Manningtree, which was the home village of Witchfinder General Matthew Hopkins, notorious for his brutality against women.

Matthew Hopkins and his colleague John Stearne even had a staff of women “prickers” whose job was to jab and probe those suspected of witchcraft and to shave their bodies in search of hidden marks.

Hopkin’s reign of terror

During two years, Hopkins and Stearne were directly responsible for the hanging of 112 people for practising witchcraft; more than were killed in the entire 16th century, and around 40% of the total number of witches killed during all persecutions in Britain between the early 15th and late 18th centuries. After their strenuous efforts, both Hopkins and Stearne retired in 1647 and wrote how-to books on finding witches and beating the Devil (for a modest fee, of course).

Hopkins’ The Discovery of Witches was highly influential in the New England colonies of America, which was to have its own devastating witch trials.

In 1645 Hopkins had been appointed to examine villager Elizabeth Clarke for ‘devil’s marks’ like warts or moles and under torture, she named other women, including her own daughter Rebecca. When Rebecca was herself tortured, she implicated her own mother as a witch.

A total of 19 women were eventually hanged, though Rebecca was saved due to her confession.

It is at this Chelmsford trial in July 1645 that Wallington wrote about Rebecca.

First page of Wallingtons' diary entry on the Chelmsford trial:

On the ‘many witches in Essex, Suffolk and Nortfolk’, he said: “July the XX111 there were at Least XXXV111 witches imprisoned in the Town of Ipswich…divers of them voluntarily and without any forcing or compulsion freely declare that they have made a covenant with the Devill, to forsake God and Christ ant to take him to be their Master and Like wise do acknowledge that divers Cattell; and som Christians have been killed by their meanes …By this wee may see the grand delusions and impostures of Satan by which we works upon men & women in these Latter times of the world What sins so hanious what crimes so grevious will not they run in to from whom God is gone’

Recording the past

James Robinson, senior photographer at the John Rylands Library, said: “Our work at Tatton Park involved careful documentation of each and every page of this fragile and important notebook.”

Tatton Park mansion and collections Manager Caroline Schofield said: “Nehemiah Wallington, a turner by trade and a Christian by religion, was an intelligent working man battling with the adversities of life in the seventeenth century.”

“At times he doubted his salvation to the degree that he suffered a mental breakdown and tried to take his own life. He began to keep his diaries in an effort to record his own sins and God’s mercies.”

Although much of what he writes about fill us with horror today, the Wallington manuscripts are hugely important primary sources for scholars of the period that encompasses this turbulent but influential period.

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-Jeff

Was intrigued by the dairy idea yet reassured that it was actually diary.....and then feeling unity with murdered "witches"..........