![]() He had 68 people put to death in Bury St. A man called Matthew Hopkins, an unsuccessful lawyer, came to help (!) He became known as the ‘Witchfinder General’. The people of these eastern counties were solidly Puritan and rabid anti-Catholics and easily swayed by bigoted preachers whose mission was to seek out the slightest whiff of heresy. Witch fever gripped East Anglia for 14 terrible months between 1645 – 1646. The ‘pilnie-winks’ (thumb screws) and iron ‘caspie-claws’ (a form of leg irons heated over a brazier) usually got a confession from the supposed witch. Many unfortunate women were condemned on this sort of evidence and hanged after undergoing appalling torture. ![]() Any who were unfortunate enough to be ‘crone-like’, snaggle-toothed, sunken cheeked and having a hairy lip were assumed to possess the ‘Evil Eye’ ! If they also had a cat this was taken a proof, as witches always had a ‘familiar’, the cat being the most common. Most supposed witches were usually old women, and invariably poor. ![]() From 1484 until around 1750 some 200,000 witches were tortured, burnt or hanged in Western Europe. Witchcraft was not made a capital offence in Britain until 1563 although it was deemed heresy and was denounced as such by Pope Innocent VIII in 1484.
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