The Essex witch panic of 1645–47 began, by Matthew Hopkins's own account, on his doorstep. In his 1647 pamphlet The Discovery of Witches, Hopkins describes overhearing a group of Manningtree women discussing their meetings with the Devil near his house in March 1644, which led to the arrest of Elizabeth Clarke, an elderly one-legged woman. Clarke was kept awake and watched for signs of a witch's familiar, a technique that avoided the letter of the law against torture while achieving much the same effect. Under this questioning she confessed and named others. By the time the Essex Assizes sat that summer, twenty-nine people from the area stood accused. At least four were hanged at Chelmsford, including Clarke.
What had started as a local prosecution became something else once Hopkins, styling himself "Witchfinder General" (a title with no legal standing), began touring East Anglia with an associate, John Stearne, and a fee structure charging each visited town for their services. Over the following three years their campaign reached into Suffolk, Norfolk, Cambridgeshire, Northamptonshire and Huntingdonshire. It is estimated to have sent more people to the gallows for witchcraft than the previous hundred years of English prosecutions combined, a toll the historian Malcolm Gaskill puts at upward of a hundred deaths, though exact figures are disputed.
Hopkins retired to Manningtree and died there in 1647, reportedly of tuberculosis rather than, as a later legend insisted, by his own witch-test at the hands of an angry mob. He is thought to be buried at Mistley Heath, though no marked grave survives. His pamphlet was written to answer critics who had begun to question his methods even before his death. It remains the fullest surviving account of how the panic operated, and the clearest evidence, in Hopkins's own words, of just how thin the line was between examination and coercion.
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