Matthew Hopkins (ca. 1620 – 1647) was an English witchhunter whose career flourished during the time of the English Civil War. He held, or claimed to hold, the office of Witch-Finder General, although this was not a title ever bestowed by Parliament, and conducted witch-hunts in the counties of Suffolk, Essex, Norfolk and other eastern counties of England. Matthew Hopkins, born in Grantham, Lincolnshire, was one of six children born to James Hopkins, a Puritan clergyman, vicar of Wenham, in Suffolk.[1] Because of the way he presented evidence in trials, Hopkins is commonly thought to have been trained as a lawyer but there is scant evidence to suggest this was the case. According to his book The Discovery of Witches, he began his career as a witch-finder when he claimed to have overheard various women discussing their meetings with the Devil in March 1644 in Manningtree, a town near Colchester, where he was living at the time. In fact the first accusations were made by John Stearne and Hopkins was appointed as his assistant. As a result of the accusations, nineteen convicted witches were hanged and four of the accused died in prison. Hopkins and Stearne, accompanied by the women who performed the pricking, were soon travelling over eastern England, claiming to be officially commissioned by Parliament to uncover and prosecute witches. Parliament was well aware of his and his team's activities, as shown by the concerned reports of the Bury St Edmunds witch trials of 1645. His witch-finding career spanned from 1645 to 1647. While torture was technically unlawful in England, he used various methods of browbeating to extract confessions from some of his victims. He used sleep deprivation as a sort of bloodless torture. Another one of his methods was to first search for the Devil's mark on a woman; this would be a boil. If she had a familiar (cat or dog) he would suspect that the familiar was sucking the woman's blood. This boil would be known as the third nipple. Then he would cut her arm with a blunt knife and if she did not bleed she was a witch. He also used a "swimming" test to see if the accused would float or sink in holy water, the theory being that witches had renounced their baptism, so that all holy water would reject them. He also employed "witch prickers" who pricked the accused with knives and special needles, looking for the Devil's mark (a mole or birthmark) that was supposed to be dead to all feeling and would not bleed. It was believed that the witch's familiar would drink their blood from the mark as milk from a teat. Hopkins and his colleague John Stearne, together with their female assistants, were well paid for their work. Samuel Butler's satire Hudibras commented on Hopkins's activity, The last line refers to a tradition that disgruntled villagers caught Hopkins and subjected him to his own "swimming" test: he floated, and it was therefore suspected that he was hanged for witchcraft himself but, no evidence of this ever happening exists. Most historians believe that Hopkins died of illness, possibly tuberculosis, in his home. The parish records of Manningtree in Essex record his burial on 12 August 1647.[1] Matthew Hopkins has been immortalized in song, literature and film for his role as the Witchfinder General. References include: