Inquisition_4of4_The Witch Hunts
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00:00The Inquisition swept like a plague across medieval Europe.
00:05It was without question one of the darkest and bloodiest episodes in human history.
00:10A time when thousands of people accused of heresy by the Catholic Church
00:14were arrested, tried and put to death.
00:18It was ethnic cleansing on a huge scale.
00:22It was one faith trying to exterminate another.
00:27There were Inquisition tribunals going on all over the country.
00:32It really was a people living in fear.
00:35This religious fanaticism spread to Tudor England
00:38where Catholics and Protestants did their best to wipe each other out.
00:42The persecution continued in the 18th century
00:45when countless ordinary women were drowned or burned at the stake
00:49after they were accused of being witches.
00:52The entire population was accused of heresy and witchcraft by the other two-thirds.
00:58The Christians were actually aiming to stamp out something
01:01that had been in place for thousands of years before them.
01:05This was a war of magic and witchcraft
01:08but what it really was was a war of people that couldn't fight back.
01:13The world lived in the shadow of Inquisition and persecution
01:19for over 500 years.
01:22You would think we would have learned our lesson.
01:26Thousands of heretics in this country died under the knife,
01:32the axe or in the flames.
01:36The witch hunts that terrorised parts of the 16th and 17th century England
01:41took place in an atmosphere of near hysteria.
01:44We look at the campaigns against Satan
01:47in this episode of Inquisition.
01:52Thousands upon thousands of women were executed in this country
01:58for their beliefs purely and simply because they were on the wrong side
02:03of the accepted religion of this country at the time.
02:06For me, it was one of the darkest periods of England's history.
02:18INQUISITION
02:37In the year 1484, Pope Innocent VIII issued a decree
02:41authorising the correcting, imprisoning, punishing and chastising
02:45of women who were devil worshippers.
02:49He did so largely at the urging of two German inquisitors,
02:53Onrich Kramer and Jacob Springer.
02:57Having attacked the Cathars, the Templars, the Jews and the Muslims,
03:02the Holy Inquisition now found itself a new target, witches.
03:10Witches were believed to have made a covenant with the devil,
03:14a crime considered so foul that it fell outside all normal legal procedures.
03:22In 1487, Kramer and Springer published their notorious
03:26Malleus Maleficarum, the Hammer of the Witches,
03:30which was nothing less than a do-it-yourself guide
03:33to finding, torturing and executing witches.
03:38The Malleus was the first DIY manual for witchcraft.
03:43It really provided three things.
03:45The first was evidence that witchcraft existed.
03:49Second, insight into how to identify a witch.
03:53And thirdly, how do I prosecute one?
03:58The witch-hunting craze started really in the early 13th century.
04:06Again, trying to stamp out paganism.
04:08And Dominican priests, again, were appointed as witch-finders, witch-hunters.
04:14Two particularly nasty ones in Germany, Kramer and Springer,
04:18who wrote a book, The Hammer of the Witches, Malleus Maleficarum.
04:23And that was the Bible, if you like, for witch-hunting.
04:26And of course, in Europe, the witches were tormented terribly,
04:30tortured very badly and burnt at the stake.
04:34But over in this country, we weren't so bad.
04:37We were more lenient with them.
04:39And then it became a capital offence under Queen Elizabeth.
04:43And that became a hanging offence.
04:45So we actually stopped burning witches over here.
04:48They were no longer considered heretics,
04:50but it was a capital offence and so they were hanged.
04:54CHANTING
05:07Although the Inquisition had tried witches across Europe
05:10during the 14th and 15th centuries,
05:13the mania for hunting them down didn't really gather pace until the 1600s.
05:19To modern eyes, it was an extraordinary business
05:22that had very little to do with justice or legality.
05:29The whole witch-finding era was nonsensical.
05:33It was crazy.
05:35All it was was, you know, you wanted the cottage
05:38that the old lady still lived in.
05:40You owed the baker some money.
05:43You didn't like the old lady.
05:47You didn't like the old woman that lived down the road.
05:51You wanted to get rid of your wife.
05:53You wanted to get rid of your girlfriend.
05:55You wanted to get rid of your husband.
05:57And so you would make up some nonsensical stories
05:59that they would creep out in the middle of the night
06:02and down at the bottom of the garden would be a hare
06:05that suddenly turned into a demonical figure
06:08and had sex with them at the bottom of the garden.
06:11All manner of absolute nonsense that went on in those days,
06:16but went on for the best part of...
06:19Well, the last witch was hanged in this country
06:23in the early 1700s.
06:28These women you see here before you
06:30have been accused and found guilty of murder.
06:35All those that parlour to no more protect us
06:38shall be taken from this earth and dispatched by way of hanging.
06:50Dr Alison Rowlands of Essex University
06:53is an expert on witchcraft during this period
06:56and she thinks that the very real belief in magic and sorcery
07:00at the time helped to create an atmosphere of fear.
07:05At this time, in the 16th and 17th centuries,
07:08most people believed in magic.
07:11It was just part of everyday life.
07:13People believed in the supernatural, in God,
07:15but also in the possibility of magical intervention in everyday life.
07:19And in that context, it made a lot of sense
07:22to think that some people could use magic for harmful purposes.
07:25So it's not really hysterical or unreasonable
07:28if you live in that world and have those beliefs.
07:32So I think what's different about the 16th and 17th century
07:36is you get the men in power,
07:39the kings, the lawmakers, the church,
07:43they begin to get very concerned about witchcraft
07:46as a new form of heresy, as a new form of sin against God,
07:50with this belief that witches were actually in league with the devil.
07:53So I think part of what drives the witch hunts
07:56of the 16th and 17th centuries
07:58is a kind of a top-down concern on the part of the authorities
08:01that the witch is something more terrifying than before.
08:06The witch hunts get going in the 1560s
08:09because that's when the law against witches is brought in.
08:12The idea you must hunt witches
08:14arrives from the continent of Europe big time.
08:17And what you do then is you arrest about one person a year,
08:20occasionally a bunch of them and try them,
08:23and 80% of them are acquitted.
08:25So you need to be senile or mad
08:28or have an incredible number of influential local enemies
08:31to get executed.
08:33But then comes the English Civil War in the 1640s
08:37and the whole traditional system of law courts collapses.
08:41And into the vacuum steps a young man suffering from TB
08:46called Matthew Hopkins, who claims to know how to detect witches.
08:50And he and a scratch squad of witch hunters
08:53go through East Anglia like hot knives through butter,
08:56inviting the communities to bring out their suspects.
08:59He then tortures them into confession.
09:01And so probably over a quarter of the total number of people
09:06executed for witchcraft in England
09:08die in one summer thanks to Matthew Hopkins' witch hunt.
09:12So it depends where you look.
09:14Most of the time the English are pretty restrained
09:16about putting people to death for witchcraft.
09:18But once the usual checks are gone,
09:21they're as mad about killing witches as anybody else.
09:33I suppose the biggest irony, as new kids on the block,
09:36the Christians were actually aiming to stamp out something
09:40that had been in place for thousands of years before them
09:43and that had been a completely natural way of life.
09:46You know, these people were pagan.
09:48They celebrated nature, the harvest, their children, death, rebirth,
09:54all aspects that were important to them in life.
09:57And then they were being asked to just believe in this person
10:01they'd never seen, they just had to go on somebody's word.
10:05And in order to do that,
10:07they terrorised an entire nation to achieve that.
10:11Step back, lad!
10:13You're coming!
10:15You're done!
10:18Get out of here, then!
10:24Matthew Hopkins operated mainly in Essex, Norfolk and Suffolk
10:28in the early part of the 17th century.
10:31Such was his success at finding and punishing witches,
10:35he was given the title of Witchfinder General.
10:40It's believed that Hopkins was responsible for the execution
10:43of more than 300 women.
10:47Train her.
10:50Down! Down!
10:54Hopkins is a fanatic. He's not in it for the money.
10:58He's a young, minor gentleman with some training in law
11:03who's raised his consciousness and got born again.
11:06He really does believe that Satan is out to get the English
11:09and he, Matthew, has been told by God, stop him.
11:12So he asks people, who are your local witches?
11:15They're arrested and handed over to him.
11:17He then deprives them of sleep for nights on end.
11:20He ties them in ways that makes their muscles scream
11:23and these two things together break them.
11:25They then confess, as he wants,
11:27and he hands them over to the local vigilantes,
11:30who put them to death.
11:41No blood. No blood, master. She's a witch.
11:44Don't hurt me. Get him!
11:46Matthew Hopkins made loads of money
11:49identifying witches and making sure they were persecuted.
11:53The number of witches that were identified
11:55during his three- or four-year period of witch-finding
12:00absolutely dwarfed all the other witch persecutions
12:04that had taken place for hundreds of years previously.
12:07He was a one-man witch extermination crew.
12:15Let it go!
12:17Bring them all to the river.
12:20Some people think witch-finders were only motivated
12:23by a desire for profit.
12:25I actually think that's doing them a slight injustice.
12:29I wouldn't want to defend what they did,
12:31but I think they were genuinely committed to the persecution
12:35of what they saw as the devil's creatures.
12:38At some level, they actually thought that they were doing
12:41a public and godly service to the communities of Essex and East Anglia
12:45by helping to haunt witches.
12:47Come on, get him!
12:53Women who were accused of being witches were often rounded up en masse
12:57before being interrogated and tried.
13:02One of Matthew Hopkins' last surviving witches' prisons
13:05is today part of a 17th-century house
13:08in the small village of St Osif in Essex.
13:13Its current owner is convinced that the witches who were imprisoned there
13:17still haunt the house today.
13:23Through here is the prison room,
13:26which was called The Cage.
13:29This is a room where many prisoners would have been chained up
13:33and chained to these walls.
13:36There was up to probably 13, 14 prisoners in this small room
13:43that had been chained to the walls, men, women and children,
13:47and obviously most famous for Ursula Kemp
13:50and the famous witch trials of St Osif.
13:52The witches would have been kept in here
13:54before they were taken off for trial
13:56and eventually, in some cases, execution.
14:00Now, here is the downstairs toilet.
14:04One evening, my partner, Ross, had been actually drilling underneath this
14:10because we understood there was a cellar.
14:12We found out there's space underneath this hall,
14:15so we got a long drill bit and actually drilled underneath.
14:18We discovered it was empty space.
14:22So a bit later, I was sitting on the toilet
14:25So a bit later, I was sitting on the toilet
14:28and I heard the most deep, loud scratch
14:33and it felt like fingers and it came from somewhere within this cupboard space.
14:38And I sat there and I thought, oh, my God.
14:40Obviously, first instinct is to run out, but I couldn't.
14:44Then, after 30 seconds, it happened again louder and it was real deep.
14:49It didn't sound like a scratch on a tile or anything like that.
14:52It was definitely coming from that cupboard
14:54and it felt like it was coming from underneath.
14:56And obviously, it was terrifying. It was a really scary experience.
14:59I actually left the house and refused to come back in.
15:10The St Osith witch trials of 1582 caused a sensation at the time.
15:15Over a period of several days,
15:17groups of local women accused of practising witchcraft
15:20were brought before the rural court.
15:23One of the local women who was arrested and kept in the witch cage
15:27was Ursula Kemp, a local healer and herbalist,
15:30who was accused by the village of placing curses upon her enemies.
15:36As was usual, she was accused mostly on the basis of hearsay and malicious gossip.
15:41But nonetheless, Kemp was interrogated by Hopkins,
15:45put on trial, found guilty and sent to the gallows.
15:49Vanessa believes that Ursula's ghost still haunts the house today.
15:54I definitely feel that there is women entities of those days.
16:00I couldn't tell you if her name's Ursula or the ladies,
16:04but I've seen one particular lady when she walked through and she had...
16:08She was carrying a bowl with some type of...
16:12..leaves or... Something similar to potpourri.
16:16She looked like the witches, or the women, would have looked like in those days.
16:22There's definitely 100%, there's entities here from those days,
16:26without a doubt, I truly believe that.
16:28Whether it's her or not, I don't know.
16:30But there's definitely women here from those days.
16:34You have been accused of consorting with spirits at midnight.
16:38Guys, they're all mine!
16:41The cage at St Oseth wouldn't just have had accused witches in it,
16:45it was a small local lock-up for anybody accused of misdemeanours in the community.
16:51It was a way of keeping them safe to be questioned by the authorities
16:55before they were taken into formal custody in cultures to castles.
16:59So most reasonably-sized towns would have had some place like that
17:03or some designated space where people could have been kept under lock and key.
17:07But it wouldn't have just been witches, it would have been other criminals as well.
17:16In common with the Inquisition in France and Spain,
17:20local people soon came to realise that accusing somebody of witchcraft
17:24was a rather neat way of dealing with people that you didn't like.
17:28An inconvenient mistress or a troublesome neighbour
17:31suddenly became much less of a problem if she had to deny she was a witch.
17:38If you were a woman, it was almost impossible not to be accused of being a witch.
17:43I mean, if you spoke out of line to your husband,
17:46if you looked inappropriately unofficial,
17:48if you were just too intelligent for your own good,
17:51the conclusion? You're a witch.
17:57The classic suspected witch is somebody who is antisocial.
18:01They have a vicious tongue, they curse people anyway, they make people feel uneasy.
18:08It's entirely possible that some of the people who are accused of witchcraft
18:12actually did believe they had the power to make people suffer by cursing them.
18:16It's not a reason for putting them to death in modern terms,
18:19but it would close the cycle of suspicion pretty well completely.
18:24Going up to the woods and collecting ingredients.
18:26Merely herbs. Herbs for dinner.
18:30I think thousands of women were probably totally innocent of the crimes against them, really.
18:34Women were persecuted, there's no two ways about it.
18:37And in some cases, whether you were innocent or guilty,
18:41you'd still lose your life in the form of ducking stools in cold water, etc, etc.
18:45It's absolutely amazing to think that we had to wait into the early part of the last century
18:49for women to actually get the right to vote.
18:54I think the period of the witch hunts probably does make life more difficult for women.
18:59Even women who never get accused, there's always that risk of accusation.
19:03So I think if you're particularly abrasive, particularly independent,
19:07particularly feisty, particularly successful as well, people can get quite jealous of that.
19:14And so I think if you stand out from the crowd, then you could be at risk of accusation.
19:18So I think women probably did actually have to change their behaviour.
19:23I think as a woman at that time, just being completely mediocre
19:26and keeping your head down was probably the best option.
19:30It was not me! I didn't do it!
19:33Witchcraft is still practised in England today,
19:36with more than 2,000 women up and down the country still claiming to be witches.
19:41Diane Narroway is one of these, and she's in no doubt that thousands of innocent women
19:46were wrongly put to death during the 17th century.
19:50The sort of women they accused were generally healers, herbalists,
19:56old ladies that had nobody else to support them.
20:00Often beggars, and of course, you know, husbands and wives or friends
20:05would point the finger at, you know, their neighbour or their partner
20:09in order to, like, gain their land and estate.
20:12You know, it was absolutely brutal.
20:14Nobody was actually, like, kind of safe, because this was a war on magic and witchcraft,
20:21but what it really was was a war on people that couldn't fight back.
20:27Diane runs a pagan group called the Dolmen Grove,
20:31which is based in Portland, in Dorset.
20:34Its members are made up of men, women and children from all walks of life,
20:38including council workers, police officers and chefs.
20:42And they meet regularly at a stone circle on the cliffs high above the sea.
20:47There, they celebrate the ancient pagan festival of Dorset,
20:51and use drums, chants and rituals to invoke spirits which they say
20:55connect them to the energy of nature's forces.
21:07The majority of circles in paganism these days
21:11focus around the idea of creation and death and resurrection.
21:16Out here, we've had midsummer circles,
21:20which focus on, like, you know, the new life,
21:27the summer months, the goddess reigning over them.
21:32Also, we've had hand fastings out here, where people have got married.
21:36This is the central altar.
21:38And this is where couples will stand for hand fastings,
21:42or people will bring their children for naming ceremonies.
21:46If it isn't a normal sort of Wheel of the Year ritual,
21:50then the people that are leading the ceremony,
21:54um, will be the ones who are holding the ceremony,
21:57and the people who are holding the ceremony,
22:00will be the ones who are holding the ceremony.
22:02The people that are leading the ceremony,
22:05um, which would normally, in this case, be myself and Taluk.
22:09We'd have a brazier on here to burn incense.
22:13Um, and then it moves out to the inner circle.
22:18If there's only a few people here, then we'll only use the inner circle.
22:23But for larger gatherings, then we can, like, pull it out to the outer circle.
22:29And when we have hand fastings, the couple come down to the outer circle,
22:35they are greeted, then they move closer to the inner circle,
22:39and then they move eventually into here.
22:45For Diane, to be a witch today is to be part of an ancient spiritual tradition,
22:50with roots that can be traced back thousands of years
22:53before the arrival of Christianity.
22:58A natural spiritual way of life that focuses on the elements
23:04and their surroundings has existed since the beginning of mankind,
23:09thousands, millions of years before the Catholic Church
23:12ever thought about setting foot on British soil.
23:16And for all its attempts in the Middle Ages,
23:20there are still witches and still pagans here now, practicing today.
23:25And there will still be witches and pagans practicing here
23:28long after the Catholic Church is gone,
23:31and long after organised religion has collapsed.
23:44In Stuart, England, witches were believed to be possessed by the devil,
23:48and as the devil himself was unlikely to confess,
23:50it was the witch who had to do it.
23:52You are accused of practicing witchcraft.
23:55You will be lowered into the river.
23:57If the river rejects you, then you are indeed a witch.
24:00However, if the river consumes you, you may be innocent.
24:05Do you have any last words?
24:09Although torture was technically unlawful in England,
24:12witchfinder Matthew Hopkins often used techniques such as sleep deprivation
24:17to extract confessions from his victims.
24:19This was only one of a number of tried and tested methods
24:22employed by Hopkins to spot a witch.
24:26Another was to cut the arm of the accused.
24:28If no blood was drawn, it was, according to Hopkins,
24:32a sure sign of a witch.
24:34So he used a blunt knife.
24:36Lower her in.
24:42Historian Richard Felix has made a study
24:45of some of the torture techniques used by Hopkins.
24:50If you were accused of being a witch, probably a woman,
24:53remember this would probably be your 80-year-old grandmother.
24:57She'd be brought to a place like this, a pond in the village,
25:02for swimming.
25:04This is reputedly the remains of a pond that was used for witches.
25:10They were filled in, because, remember,
25:12these places were considered to be cursed.
25:15I don't want to go too far in, just in case there's still some water in it.
25:18What then happened was, of course, the whole village would be here.
25:21The accusers would be here.
25:23Matthew Hopkins would probably be here.
25:25Your right thumb would be tied to your left toe.
25:29Your left thumb tied to your right toe,
25:32and you'd then be hunched up,
25:34and they would literally throw you into the middle of the pond.
25:38SCREAMING
25:48There'd be a gasp from everybody as the old girl sank into the water,
25:54and then everyone would be waiting to see what happened.
25:57If you sank, you were innocent,
26:00because you'd accepted baptism of water.
26:04But, of course, if you rose from the water,
26:06you were a witch, and you were obviously opposed against baptism.
26:12Once you'd risen, you were definitely a witch.
26:15There'd probably be a loud cheer from the crowd,
26:18and I should think probably a loud cheer from Matthew Hopkins,
26:21who'd get more money for this, of course.
26:23You would then be taken out, and, of course, they'd hang you.
26:28SCREAMING
26:31So, just imagine the scene.
26:33We've got 17th- and 18th-century England.
26:36We've got bands of marauding witch-finders around the country,
26:41people accusing each other of witchcraft,
26:43people being swum in ponds like this one, some of them drowning,
26:47some of them being taken out and hanged.
26:50People absolutely terrified in the village
26:53that someone was going to accuse them,
26:55because England was gripped in this dreadful witch-finding craze.
27:04There are various illegal ways of detecting witches.
27:08One is that you search them for the devil's mark on their bodies.
27:12And this does happen sometimes,
27:14where the professional judges aren't out and aren't keeping an eye on things.
27:19And there's one which never gets into the law courts,
27:22and that's the idea that you test a would-be witch or a suspected witch
27:26by throwing her, sometimes him, into water.
27:30And if they sink, the water receives them.
27:33Then they're innocent.
27:35And if the water rejects them, then they're guilty.
27:38They've got ropes on them, so if they sink, they are hauled out alive.
27:41They don't drown.
27:42No sane person regards this as a good test.
27:46It's never made legal, but mobs do do it.
27:49It was an incredibly brutal thing to do, incredibly horrible.
27:53I mean, the amount of water they take into their lungs,
27:56quite a few of them just died anyway in the process.
28:03It got absolutely crazy with the accusations.
28:06Everybody was being accused of a witch.
28:08If you had a feud with another family in town, guess what?
28:12They're going to accuse you of being a witch.
28:14Anybody who had any sort of grudge, the witchfinders sought them out.
28:19This is how they got their list.
28:21This is how they got their commission.
28:23If it wasn't so tragic, it would be comical.
28:36Matthew Hopkins and his witchfinding assistants
28:39continue to scour the country looking for suspected witches.
28:44And devising some ingenious ways to spot them.
28:47One telltale sign was something known as the devil's mark.
28:52This was a skin defect, supposedly common to all witches,
28:56that was said to be dead to feeling and which wouldn't bleed.
29:00Although in reality it was usually a simple mole,
29:03a birthmark or a skin blemish.
29:07Torture was illegal in 17th-century England,
29:11but Matthew Hopkins devised his own forms of torturous methods
29:15to find out if you're a witch, other than the water torture.
29:19And that was called pricking.
29:21They believed in those days that the witch bore the devil's mark,
29:25which was either an extra teat or a mole.
29:29And they believed that that mark would not bleed if pricked or cut.
29:34And Hopkins created a knife with a retractable blade,
29:38that when he stuck it into the devil's mark, of course, no blood came out.
29:43And she was a witch.
29:45And was condemned to death.
29:48We didn't burn witches in 17th-century England.
29:52We hanged them.
29:56The rope was either thrown over the bow of a tree...
29:59This is rough justice in the village.
30:02Or, of course, it would be the county gallows in the town at the top of a hill.
30:07We're not talking of a broken neck and a trapdoor.
30:13We're talking of slow strangulation.
30:16She was either stood on a stool
30:18or there was a ladder going up to the bow of the tree.
30:20She climbed up there, the rope was put around her neck and tightened,
30:24and then the executioner would turn the ladder
30:27or kick the stool away.
30:29Her hands were tied in front of her, not at the back,
30:32and her legs were free.
30:34And it would take her anything up to a quarter of an hour
30:37to die of slow strangulation.
30:39Kicking, writhing, choking, vomiting.
30:43Unless she had a kindly executioner.
30:46And then he would grab hold of her legs and pull down,
30:49which, of course, tightened the rope around the neck
30:52and strangled her quicker.
30:58Records show that Hopkins and his retinue were well paid for their work.
31:03He charged on average some 20 shillings per town,
31:07although Stowe Market in Suffolk paid him 47 pounds,
31:11nearly 7,000 pounds in today's money.
31:14Ipswich was even more generous.
31:16It paid him 50 pounds for his services, more than 10,000 pounds today.
31:22Haunting witches was clearly very good business.
31:26MUSIC
31:30Matthew Hopkins became a famous, notorious witch-finder,
31:35and towns and even sometimes villages paid Matthew Hopkins
31:40to travel to their part of the country as a witch-finder,
31:45and they paid him handsomely to find as many witches as he could.
31:49So, of course, he fared well.
31:52He found as many witches as he could.
31:54So, of course, he found as many witches as he could,
31:58and they were hanged, and he was paid.
32:03Matthew Hopkins' motivation was clearly money.
32:05He was highly commissioned.
32:07He and his associate, John Stern,
32:09and the women who did the ducking and the pricking,
32:12they were all paid handsomely.
32:14So, needless to say, when they came into a town,
32:17they found what they were looking for because they were paid on commission.
32:21There's one classic example, when he goes into Ipswich,
32:24he finds so many witches that the town has to levy a new tax
32:28just to pay his commission.
32:34Matthew Hopkins had failed as a lawyer,
32:37but had kind of discovered that he could actually set himself up
32:40as a witch-finder general
32:42and could charge exorbitant amounts of money
32:45to the townspeople to rid them of witches.
32:48And purely it was a way of lining his pockets.
32:50He took women with him that performed pricking
32:54and, you know, obviously were real quite clever about it,
32:57and they had to earn their cut,
32:59and John Stern, who was with him, earned his cut.
33:01And I think between, they made a fortune.
33:03They absolutely kind of, like, made loads on the back
33:06of, like, the potential witches in the parishes of, like, Britain.
33:11But at the end of the day, you know,
33:14he was responsible for the majority of trials and deaths
33:20around that time in this country, you know.
33:23He tried something ridiculous.
33:25I think he was responsible for 300 of 500 deaths or something,
33:29with a lot more trials.
33:32You have been found guilty and condemned as witch.
33:35Lowestoft in Suffolk was the scene of another set
33:38of infamous witch trials in the mid-17th century.
33:42Here, a group of local girls were accused of cursing townsfolk.
33:46Bad enough.
33:48But even worse, when several of those who had been cursed
33:51suddenly died.
33:57Local historian and author Ivan Bunn takes up the story.
34:03Yeah, I have a book here, which is, in actual fact,
34:07the second edition of the account of the trial
34:11of the Lowestoft witches.
34:13And it's from this we were able to get all the information,
34:17which are the boons, if you like, of the trial.
34:21From that, we were able to pull out all the local history details
34:25and flesh out these boons and bring these people back to life.
34:34Of course, the big question is, were they guilty or not?
34:38And that depends on where you're coming from.
34:41The laws were there, in place,
34:44which meant, technically, they were guilty of the crimes
34:48that they were being accused of by society.
34:51In the eyes of the law, they were guilty.
34:53But obviously, unless you actually believe in the existence
34:56of witches and witchcraft, we know that they couldn't possibly
34:59have done the things that they were accused of.
35:02So, was it a miscarriage of justice?
35:05Certainly, by today's standards, it was,
35:07but certainly by the standards of that day,
35:10it probably wasn't considered to be a miscarriage of justice,
35:13and society would have seen the full penalty of the law
35:18kicking in and bringing these two wanton women to their just ends.
35:24Cursed a child, and he died.
35:27There's been too many deaths in the village.
35:30Somewhere in here, I've actually got
35:33the original indictments of the trial.
35:37These are the Latin indictments, all 14 of them,
35:41which were produced at the trial,
35:45and they are interesting for two reasons.
35:49First of all, they're actually all in Latin,
35:52and along the top of each of the indictments,
35:55the clerk of the court is recorded in shorthand Latin
36:00exactly what's happening.
36:02So he tells us that they pleaded not guilty,
36:05he's telling us they're guilty now,
36:08and at the end, he's written suspende per column,
36:12which means hanged by the neck.
36:14So this actually effectively records the end of a human life.
36:21SHOUTING
36:24This was a brutal punishment, and quite often, the people never...
36:29Their necks weren't broken at all, but there is records of them
36:34actually choking to death, hanging at the end of a rope,
36:38urinating and defecating, and in some cases, in public hangings,
36:42a member of the family, if the person was suffering,
36:45would run out of the crowd and swing on the feet
36:48of the person being hanged to hasten the end.
36:50It was brutal.
36:55Naturally, the witchfinder General Matthew Hopkins
36:58also cut a swathe through Suffolk,
37:01charging each town and village handsomely as he went.
37:04Ivan has studied the local records
37:07and discovered the true extent of Hopkins' ill-gotten gains.
37:12Matthew Hopkins published a small booklet
37:16justifying what he was doing.
37:18He says in his booklet that he never charged more than one pound
37:23no matter where he went,
37:25no matter how many witches he found or didn't find,
37:28and out of that, he had to pay for his horses and his accommodation.
37:32We know, for instance, from the records of King's Lynn in Norfolk,
37:36where he visited, his first visit, he was paid 15 pounds
37:40because it shows up in the town accounts.
37:43The same in Stowmarket.
37:46It cost the town over 47 pounds
37:50to employ him, board and lodgings, his charges.
37:54The same thing happened to Albury in Suffolk.
37:57Again, he says he only charged a pound.
38:00We know for a fact that he was paid over four pounds
38:04and also a lot more money was expended on his board and lodgings.
38:09I could go on. Great Yarmouth there is another example.
38:12He might be a Christian, he might be a non-conformist,
38:15but when you read his book and hear what he says about what he was paid,
38:20then you see from the actual accounts of what he was paid, he was a liar.
38:30For me, there are no such things as witches.
38:33They were nothing more than the wise one of the village, the healer.
38:37Thousands upon thousands of women were executed in this country
38:43for their beliefs, purely and simply because they were on the wrong side
38:48of the accepted religion of this country at the time.
38:52For me, it was one of the darkest periods of England's history.
38:59Bring them to the river.
39:01The witch hunts of the Middle Ages
39:04remain a dark stain on British history.
39:07And as much as, at the time, they actually caused such fear in people,
39:14can you imagine, like, you know, you never knew
39:17if somebody was going to knock on your door,
39:20accuse you of being a witch, take you off, stick pins in you,
39:23duck you, torture you.
39:25I mean, they sat them on burning stools, a variety of horrific things.
39:30And all of that just to gain, you know,
39:33that people were subservient to that one religion.
39:36They refused, they walked away from their old ways.
39:40And that stain still stands.
39:42As I said, like, in other countries, the burning times aren't over.
39:47As the years passed, the witch-hunt madness in England slowly abated,
39:52until it was eventually outlawed by the Witchcraft Act of 1735.
39:59The Holy Inquisition in Europe would formally be abolished
40:02in the early 1800s,
40:04after the Emperor Napoleon invaded Spain with his armies.
40:08So, after 600 years of trials, torture and executions,
40:12Europe moved into the new century
40:14free from the threat of religious persecution.
40:20Well, almost.
40:22In 1900, the Vatican tried to distance itself a little from its brutal enemies.
40:28It was the first time in its history that the Vatican
40:31had ever been a part of a religious movement.
40:34In 1900, the Vatican tried to distance itself a little from its brutal past.
40:40It changed the name of the Inquisition to the Holy Office,
40:43and later to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
40:48This was put under the control of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger,
40:52who was later to become Pope Benedict XVI.
40:59The Inquisition has never really gone away, let's be honest.
41:02It's just rebranded itself.
41:04Clearly, they're up to their old tricks.
41:06While they're not slaughtering towns in France,
41:09they are going after the Da Vinci Code, they're going after Harry Potter.
41:13The prejudice is still alive and well in Rome.
41:20The Inquisition no longer exists, it was abolished,
41:23and the local Inquisitions in most European states no longer exist,
41:27but the original one at Rome certainly does exist.
41:30It's there to identify wrong belief.
41:33It has taken on Harry Potter, unbelievably.
41:37It's condemned the Da Vinci Code a lot more understandably.
41:41And it's lost its power to kill people,
41:44it's lost its power to arrest people who don't buy into its basic premises,
41:49but it is there as a force to help define right beliefs for Roman Catholics.
41:54And in that more or less harmless form,
41:57I suppose in a world of free speech, it has the rights that everybody else has.
42:04About ten years ago, the Vatican opened up its archives
42:07in an attempt to prove that the Inquisition was nowhere near as bad,
42:12nowhere near as brutal as history tells us it actually was.
42:15It's really a pathetic attempt at retroactively doing damage control.
42:20I mean, try telling the people of Béziers and Madrid
42:24that the Inquisition wasn't as bad as you think it was.
42:28They should be ashamed of themselves.
42:35The Inquisitions that began in the 13th century
42:38and that engulfed most of Europe
42:40have cast a dark shadow over half a millennia of human history.
42:44It's estimated that during that time,
42:47more than one million people became the victims of the bloody campaigns
42:51of persecution, treason and witchcraft.
42:54But it's a sad postscript to the story
42:57that religious and ethnic persecution still carries on to this day.
43:04The world lived in the shadow of Inquisition and persecution
43:09for over 500 years.
43:12You would think we would have learned our lesson.
43:16But look at Bosnia.
43:18Look at Iraq.
43:20Look at Syria.
43:22The persecution.
43:24The ethnic cleansing.
43:26The death.
43:28It continues.