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00:00Four hundred years ago, one man launched a crusade against the forces of darkness.
00:07To people who believe literally in magic, these are murder weapons.
00:11And they're terrifyingly effective.
00:14That man was King James, the first ruler of both Scotland and England.
00:19He believed that Satan and a conspiracy of witches were trying to kill him.
00:24I do not know Satan, sir.
00:26What powers did Satan offer you?
00:29What diabolical promises did he make to you?
00:34He even wrote a manual on the dangers of witchcraft.
00:38This is the story of how one man's paranoia sparked persecution across the British Isles.
00:44The witch hunts have to be one of the greatest injustices ever seen in British history.
00:49It involved hundreds if not thousands of women being put to death for crimes they could never have committed.
00:55But we'll also reveal extraordinary archaeological discoveries, which show that in the king's war on witches, it was the witches
01:04who eventually won.
01:05They knew that it was dangerous, but if you believe something deeply enough, then the fact that your life is
01:12in danger for doing it is not going to stop you.
01:31In 1590, the British Isles were ruled by two monarchs, the English Queen Elizabeth I and King James VI of
01:40Scotland.
01:42In May of that year, James was returning home from Denmark with his new wife, Anne.
01:48But this honeymoon voyage turned into a nightmare.
01:55As the flotilla crossed the North Sea, an enormous storm blew up.
02:01According to a sensational account of the incident, the king's ship in particular was buffeted by extreme winds and huge
02:09waves.
02:13It said that the ship behaved differently from all the other ships in the flotilla that was coming across with
02:18the royal ship itself, that the winds affected it differently, that it couldn't be controlled by the sailors in a
02:24natural way.
02:25And therefore it was thought that the storm must have been caused unnaturally, that James and Anne must be its
02:32target.
02:34The idea that the storm had been generated specifically to kill the royal couple seeded a terrible fear in James's
02:42mind.
02:45The young king was already nervous, with good reason.
02:49He had powerful enemies, and he had been abandoned as a baby when his mother, Mary Queen of Scots, was
02:57forced to flee the country.
03:00James grew up in a pretty terrible context for a young monarch.
03:06He succeeded a mother who gets her head hacked off an English jail.
03:10His dad's already dead, strangled off in an attempt to blow him up.
03:14There are four guys in charge of Scotland while James is growing up.
03:17And all of them are either murdered or executed or driven into exile.
03:22And when James becomes a man, before he leaves Scotland, there are apparently two attempts to kidnap or assassinate him.
03:28One of which is foiled only by him pinning the assassin's head under an arm and screaming for help.
03:33No wonder he's edgy.
03:35As James brooded on the storm that had almost killed him, he became convinced that this was another assassination attempt.
03:43But this time, it had been orchestrated by sorcerers and witches.
03:49His fear of the threat posed by witchcraft had grown during his stay in the Danish royal court.
03:56Denmark is one of the intellectual centres of witch hunting in the age.
04:01So it's probable that he's been discussing witches and demons with some of the most interesting minds in Europe.
04:07And has come back to Scotland interested in putting this into practice.
04:12There's no doubt that he's simply reflecting a Europe-wide trend.
04:16This is the very period in which witch trials are starting to boom all over the continent.
04:23Witches were believed to be allies of Satan and his demons.
04:30In the late 16th century, fear of Satan's power was at its height because of hatred between rival factions in
04:39the church.
04:39And altogether, in Europe, the period of most witch trials is that in which Protestant and Catholic are most at
04:46each other's throats.
04:48Where the traditional Western Christian church is being torn in half between warring creeds who truly believe that the others
04:55are inspired by the devil.
04:58The urge to eradicate evil lit fires of hatred throughout Western Europe.
05:04In France and Germany, tens of thousands were sentenced to a terrible death.
05:11There's one description that talks about a forest of stakes where basically people are just being burned in vast numbers.
05:18And there's a sense that the whole thing has got out of control.
05:24A real panic sweeps certain parts of Europe.
05:28If you want a quintessence of horror, go to a small north German town called Kedlinburg in 1589,
05:34where 133 women were burned alive in one day.
05:40It's a horrifyingly painful way to die.
05:42You're lucky if it's quick.
05:46You only need to burn about 20 or 30 people at a time, an average-sized North European town of
05:52the age,
05:53to create the impression of a forest of flaming stakes,
05:56and to ensure that if there's the slightest breeze blowing,
05:58the houses on the leeward side of the square, opposite the wind,
06:02are going to be coated from the cobblestones, the pavements, the roofs, and the human fat.
06:10In 1590, the full horrors of mass witch purges had not reached the British Isles.
06:18But King James was about to change that.
06:21The storm that had almost sunk his ship convinced James that Satan was trying to destroy him.
06:29The king now unleashed a war on Satanic terror that would bring persecution and death to hundreds of his subjects.
06:46In 1590, King James became convinced he was the target of a Satanic conspiracy,
06:53which was using black magic to try and kill him.
06:57His fear extended to the widespread popular belief in magic.
07:03This now became a thought crime punishable by death.
07:11In the 16th century, every village had folk magicians who used herbs and spells to cure illnesses,
07:19solve people's problems, or even influence the weather.
07:22These men and women were called wise or cunning folk.
07:31In the Museum of Witchcraft in Boscastle, Cornwall,
07:35there is remarkable evidence of the importance of magic in daily life.
07:41This is a handwritten book of magic dating from the late 16th century.
07:46And it's the personal notebook of a wise woman or cunning man.
07:51And it is fascinating evidence of the role that magic played in people's everyday lives.
07:56It's a real mixture of herbal remedies, love charms, how to obtain magical objects.
08:04So this is a spell for obtaining magical stones out of a swallow.
08:10Take him out of the nest and cut him in the middle, and you shall find within the belly of
08:15it three stones of diverse colours.
08:18The virtue of the first is,
08:20If thou wilt give it to any woman that travaileth with child, she shall be speedily delivered.
08:29Healing magic was particularly important because doctors were very expensive.
08:35These traditional healers were really very central people in their communities, right at the heart of people's lives.
08:44And magic actually liberated and empowered ordinary people and helped them to cope with the challenges that they faced.
08:52One of these healers was Agnes Sampson, who practiced in Keith in Scotland during the 1580s.
09:00Her clients included wealthy gentry as well as the very poorest.
09:05She had won wide respect for her work as a healer and a midwife.
09:11But she would soon become ensnared in one of the biggest witch trials in Scottish history.
09:20Healing magic could shield people from illness and misfortune, but it could also have darker purposes.
09:28It was believed to have the power to injure as well as cure.
09:33This is a very striking spell because it shows how protection magic could blur into cursing.
09:41People did use curses, but generally in retaliation when someone had done them some wrong.
09:48And this is a spell to make a thief confess.
09:52You make a picture of an eye and then you drive a nail into the eye.
09:58The thief will then suffer pain in his eye until he comes and confesses to the theft.
10:05Most of the objects here are for destructive magic.
10:09They are the classic image of a victim into which the person making the image inserts pins or daggers or
10:18other means of destroying their lives.
10:22The church made no distinction between the good and the evil forms of magic.
10:28To people who believe literally in magic, these are murder weapons and they are terrifyingly effective.
10:36Orthodox, elite Christian belief can't really believe that magic can come from anywhere but the devil.
10:42The old practical folk distinction between good and bad magic, with magic being a neutral force rather like any technology,
10:51is completely transformed in established Christian belief into a part of the all-out war between good and evil.
11:00In 1590, James VI became a crusader in that war on evil.
11:06He presided over the arrests of dozens of people who he suspected had raised the storm that had almost drowned
11:13him.
11:20One of the women caught in this trawl for suspects was Agnes Sampson, the respected healer from Keith in North
11:27East Scotland.
11:29James' obsession with rooting out evil drove him to interrogate her himself.
11:37When did Satan first come to you?
11:39I do not know Satan, sir.
11:42What diabolical promises did he make to you?
11:46What form did his imps take?
11:49One of the extraordinary things about what happens in Scotland in the 1590s is that James, the king, gets personally
11:56involved in the interrogation of the suspected witches.
12:00And actually, himself, conducts the questioning of Agnes Sampson.
12:04This is a very strange thing for a monarch to be doing at this time, but it's a reflection of
12:10how deeply involved James is with the subject of demonology.
12:14And not just with the abstract intellectual idea of demonology, but the practical application of witchcraft in his own kingdom.
12:24He's an academic scholar conducting research, and wants to do it firsthand, and also he found it fascinating.
12:33And where, on your body, did you suckle these imps?
12:38I know no imps, sir.
12:40What powers did Satan offer you?
12:43And did you believe his lies?
12:46No, sir.
12:48To start with, Agnes says that she's a healer.
12:50She says that she's not a witch.
12:52She doesn't do any of that kind of thing.
12:53But then she's taken away and tortured.
12:58Agnes was subjected to excruciating pain.
13:03She tried to explain to her torturers the techniques that she had used to treat the sick.
13:13She even recited a healing prayer.
13:17All kinds of ills that ever may be, in Christ's name I conjure thee.
13:23Both of the flesh and of the bone, and in the earth and in the stone, I conjure thee in
13:34God's name.
13:35It combines magic with Christianity, which was a very important part of folk magic.
13:40Most people who practiced magic regarded themselves as devout Christians,
13:46and that the magic that they were using was a gift from God, part of the way that God's power
13:53manifested itself in the natural world.
13:57For witch hunters, this mixture of religion and magic suggested that Christianity had become corrupted by demonic forces.
14:07With the king's permission, Agnes Sampson's torturers inflicted pain and sleep deprivation to extract a confession.
14:16Under this pressure, she accepted that she had made a pact with the devil.
14:23She was brought back for further interrogation.
14:26Her bizarre confessions were used as evidence against her.
14:32So, you took this black toad and hung it by its heels for three days, and collected the venom as
14:41it fell into an oyster shell?
14:45Yes, sir.
14:47And if you had obtained a piece of linen cloth that I had worn, you would have bewitched me to
14:54death?
14:56Yes, sir.
14:58But Agnes's confessions of spells and devilry were so extraordinary that James struggled to believe them.
15:06Well, this is so miraculous and strange that I can only believe that you are an extreme liar.
15:21Come closer, sir.
15:22Then Agnes shared a secret that convinced James she was indeed guilty of witchcraft.
15:32She whispered details of James' intimate conversation with Anne on his wedding night in Denmark.
15:39But at the time, Agnes had been hundreds of miles away in Scotland.
15:44This revelation seems to have persuaded James that she must have supernatural powers.
15:51I think that moment is really significant for James.
15:54It's a moment of his being convinced that what is going on is witchcraft and that he's the target of
16:00it.
16:01James seems to have ignored the most obvious explanation for Agnes's knowledge about his pillow talk with Anne.
16:08One of the things I think to remember about early modern marriages is they were not as private as modern
16:13ones are, especially if you were a king and a queen.
16:15So it's quite likely that perhaps a servant would have overheard something that was said.
16:20There may have been gossip about what was said.
16:22She might have picked it up that way, but I don't think she got it from magic.
16:26According to a detailed account of the trial, in a sensational pamphlet called News from Scotland, Agnes Sampson also confessed
16:36that she was part of a demonic conspiracy of 200 witches summoned by Satan to worship him in a church.
16:44Witchers would meet the devil, renounce their Christianity and pay homage to him, often in the most gross form involving
16:52kissing the devil's backside.
16:55The devil had even offered this unholy assembly, an image of the king, to try to destroy him.
17:02James was convinced that Satan was leading the witches in an assassination plot against him.
17:11Agnes Sampson and several others were burned to the stake.
17:18Her death marked the beginning of a series of witch panics.
17:23Scotland executed a higher proportion of its population than almost every other European country.
17:30It's estimated that two and a half thousand women and men were hanged or burnt at the stake.
17:38The witch hunts came in waves as suspects, under torture, incriminated dozens of others.
17:48But in 1597, Scotland's witch hunting crusade was thrown into chaos.
17:56It began when Margaret Aitken, a suspect herself, turned informer.
18:01She claimed to be able to identify witches by a secret mark in their eyes.
18:08But then Aitken destroyed her own credibility.
18:13She was taken around officially for three or four months and asked to do this, so she incriminates quite a
18:18lot of people.
18:20The problem is that on one occasion she starts to identify somebody as a witch and somebody says to her,
18:25but you've identified this person as not being a witch before, they've just got different clothes on.
18:30And at that point the whole thing collapses, of course, and there is a worry that all of the witches
18:35have not been witches,
18:37all of the trials have been mistrials.
18:41It was a pivotal moment.
18:43The exposure of Margaret Aitken as an unreliable witness threatened to discredit the witch trials.
18:51James leapt to defend his belief in the satanic threat.
18:54He published an extraordinary call to arms against witchcraft.
18:58He called his book, Demonology.
19:04The fearful abounding at this time in this country of these detestable slaves of the devil...
19:14James's book is incredibly short and incredibly lucid and incredibly well-structured.
19:21It's a good piece of literature.
19:24But only to dispel the doubting hearts of many,
19:29both that such assaults of Satan are most readily practised.
19:34James's book, Demonology, really becomes a handbook for the hunting and the persecution of witches.
19:41It's enormously influential and remains so for the next 50 to 60 years at least.
19:46And there are a number of very high-profile trials that draw directly on the influence of James's book.
19:54Demonology's influence might have remained in Scotland, but in 1603 Queen Elizabeth I died,
20:02and James VI of Scotland inherited her throne as James I of England.
20:09He brought his terrifying book with him.
20:13Demonology puts the king himself in the forefront of witch-hunting.
20:17As a result, it makes witch-hunting an official part of the new British state.
20:23There is now a line to be followed.
20:26It provides a brief, simple text, which all sorts of further ideas and publications can spring.
20:36James inherited a kingdom crackling with religious tensions.
20:39In 1605, Catholic conspirators, including Guy Fawkes, almost succeeded in assassinating the king in the gunpowder plot.
20:51To a devout Protestant like James, Catholic images and rituals could easily become equated with magic and even witchcraft.
21:03Catholicism was still widely practiced in areas like Pendle in Lancashire.
21:09This created a perfect breeding ground for demonology's deadly ideas.
21:14This is a county where there is a lot of political and religious deviance.
21:22And so this is really, this is the kind of powder keg really.
21:26And what you really need on top of this is an incident that touches the whole thing off.
21:31And you also need, crucially, you need a magistrate, in this case a man called Roger Nowell,
21:35who is very keen to persecute those who are associated with Catholicism.
21:41And this is a situation, a very feverish and fraught situation,
21:45where Catholics and witches can be associated with one another.
21:52In this climate of intolerance and suspicion, it took just one incident to trigger a witch hunt.
22:01Alison Devis, a girl from a poor family in Pendle, would be at the centre of the nightmare to come.
22:08Alison is the granddaughter of somebody called Elizabeth Demdike,
22:12who is thought to be a witch or a cunning person.
22:15And her mother also is thought to be a witch as well.
22:17So she has this background where she's part of a family who are cunning people,
22:21who are magicians of one kind or another, and who are also very poor,
22:25so that they often come into conflict with their local community.
22:29Alison met a peddler called John Law, who was travelling to a nearby town.
22:34She asked him for some pins, which had uses both in white and black magic.
22:42But John Law refused Alison's request.
22:45As he left her, he was stricken by paralysis on one side of his body.
22:51He later complained that he had been bewitched.
22:57Alison was brought before the Pendle magistrate, Roger Nowell.
23:02When Alison Devis is interrogated, she confesses that she did it.
23:07She may be shocked that her magic can have such power.
23:10She may even feel guilty.
23:13But confess she does.
23:14And this mixture of the misfortune, the accusation of witchcraft and the confession,
23:19and also the magistrate who's prepared to take it seriously,
23:22is a very kind of toxic mix, which starts this whole witch hunt going.
23:29Alison's entire family was questioned in the search for more evidence of witchcraft,
23:35including her younger sister, Janet Devis.
23:39But Janet was just nine years old,
23:42and under English law, child testimony was inadmissible in a normal trial.
23:49James notoriously says that special kinds of evidence are permissible in witch trials,
23:55because proof is so hard to find, including, for example, the evidence of children.
24:00And the evidence of a child is absolutely central to the Pendle trials.
24:04King James's own book, Demonology, had fed the fear that would consume the Pendle witches.
24:12When you look at the record of the Pendle witch trials,
24:15point by point, it's virtually a checklist of James's main arguments about witchcraft.
24:22If James is the theory, then Pendle is the practice.
24:28Janet Devis gave evidence against her mother and brother.
24:32They were hanged with her sister, Alison,
24:36next to seven others ensnared in the witch hunt.
24:40King James's disturbing ideas about witchcraft still had terrifying power.
24:46They would now lead to extraordinary accusations about child murder
24:51in one of the noblest families in England.
25:05In 1611, King James published a magnificent new translation of the Bible
25:11that reflected his obsessive fears about witchcraft.
25:16A Hebrew verse that was believed by some to condemn poisoners
25:21was here translated as a warning against witchcraft.
25:25Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.
25:29But despite James's efforts to stamp out witchcraft,
25:33it still seemed to have the power to strike close to the king.
25:39In 1618, Francis Manners, the sixth Earl of Rutland, one of the king's privy council,
25:46accused witches of murdering his young son, Henry.
25:51Manners was Lord Lieutenant of Lincolnshire
25:53and frequently entertained King James in Beaver Castle.
26:02Historian Tracy Borman is investigating the bizarre tragedy that struck the Earl's family.
26:10Francis Manners had travelled in Europe at the height of the witch hunts
26:14when witchcraft was seen as the terrorism of its day,
26:17striking innocents with deadly force.
26:20One of the most remarkable elements of this is that here on this tomb,
26:25in black and white, is a statement by the Earl himself
26:28saying that my two sons were done to death by wicked practice and sorcery.
26:34It was incredibly rare to find on any tomb such an accusation,
26:38let alone on one of the most noble families in the country.
26:46But behind the sad tale of loss recorded on the tomb,
26:49lies a disturbing mystery.
26:52The Earl blamed witchcraft for the death of both of his young sons,
26:56and he found suspects close at hand.
26:59A single mother, Joan Flower, and her two daughters,
27:03had all been employed as lowly servants at Beaver Castle.
27:09Margaret, the eldest daughter, was found guilty of stealing provisions from the castle,
27:14and they were all dismissed.
27:16And it was that that supposedly prompted the mother
27:19to set out on a path of revenge and destruction
27:23against the family at Beaver Castle.
27:26The women were arrested in 1618
27:29and charged with killing young Henry Manners by witchcraft.
27:34The sensational pamphlet reporting the case
27:38recorded that while Margaret and Philippa were working in the castle,
27:42they had stolen the boy's glove.
27:45They had given it to their mother,
27:47who treated the glove as if it represented the boy himself.
27:51She repeatedly stabbed it, and then she burnt it.
27:58But the boy had died five years before these charges were brought.
28:04So why had the Earl waited so long to accuse the women of witchcraft?
28:10One clue lies in Manners' close relationship with the king.
28:15James' book, Demonology, had recently been republished.
28:19It does seem that it was a bit of a set-up,
28:22and probably, I think, it was the Earl of Rutland
28:25who was doing his king, James, a favour
28:28by bringing James' work, Demonology, back into the public eye.
28:32Because the pamphlet that describes the case
28:35actually refers to demonology up front in the preface.
28:38It reminds people of this king's great work
28:42on the history of witchcraft
28:43and exactly how witches ought to be dealt with.
28:47The pamphlet claimed that the women had taken wool
28:50from a mattress at Beaver Castle.
28:53Joan Flower then allegedly mixed the wool with blood and water
28:57and boiled it to curse the Earl and his wife with infertility.
29:10The Flower family were taken to Lincoln Castle for trial.
29:16The prison where they were held
29:18is as forbidding today as it was 400 years ago.
29:24Coming down into this dungeon, the atmosphere immediately changes.
29:29It's very cold.
29:31There's a real sense still, hundreds of years later,
29:34of desolation, of the desperation that the prisoners must have felt down here.
29:39And still we see where the chains would have been bolted back to the walls
29:44and the prisoners tethered there.
29:46It really is quite a miserable, wretched place.
29:50The judge who tried Margaret and Philippa Flower and several others caught up in the Beaver case
29:55may have been the same man who had sent the Pendle witches to the gallows six years earlier.
30:02Even the evidence laid before him closely matched the claims made in the Pendle trial.
30:08You can see very similar evidence brought forward.
30:12It was very formulaic.
30:14There was all the sort of classic elements of the witchcraft case,
30:18the familiars, the pact with the devil,
30:21the curses that were uttered by the accused.
30:24They all come out in this case as they did in several others at around this time.
30:31The chief witness for the prosecution was King James' close friend and ally, the Earl of Rutland.
30:37There would have been one witness in the case of the Beaver witches
30:41and that was the Earl himself, Francis Manners, who was the first up on the witness stand.
30:47And of course you can imagine how his evidence was heard by the, you know, the hush in the courtroom.
30:53There could be only one outcome with such a high profile witness as the Earl.
30:59Margaret and Philippa Flower were executed.
31:02Their mother died in custody.
31:05The Pendle and Beaver trials demonstrate how demonology had become a handbook for witch hunting.
31:13But by the end of his reign, James himself was beginning to question
31:17some of the bizarre evidence and confessions used to convict witches.
31:23The growing interest in science in the early 17th century made it harder to believe in such fantastical tales.
31:30By the time James died in 1625, witch hunts in England seemed to be dying out.
31:39The king had done his best to root out witchcraft.
31:45But amazing new evidence from an excavation in Cornwall suggests that his campaign failed.
31:52Archaeologist Jackie Wood has uncovered a series of pits, which appear to contain disturbing ritual offerings.
31:59The earliest date from the 1640s, long after James had died.
32:04These three pits are actually grouped together and we've actually got a radiocarbon date for this one.
32:10And what's really amazing about this one, it's one of the only round pits we've got, as most of them
32:15are rectangular.
32:17They've skinned a swan, put the swan pelt, lined the pit with the swan pelt, and you can actually see
32:22the swan pelt still in here.
32:24They've put two magpie birds either side, and then between it, 55 eggs.
32:29Seven with baby chicks ready to hatch inside, from bantam to duck egg size.
32:34And that's a lot of commitment.
32:37This was at the time when people were hunting witches and anybody doing anything pagan.
32:41It was a really dangerous thing to be doing.
32:46Jackie has found further evidence of magical practices at the same site.
32:52She has discovered a specially dug pool, filled with strange offerings.
32:58These are the contents of a votive pool.
33:01We've got an incredible selection of textiles.
33:04Heather branches, cherry stones, human fingernail pairings.
33:09Usually when they throw pins into votive pools, they bend them and then make a wish.
33:15This seems to be a traditional thing.
33:16But all our pins are straight.
33:18So we think that possibly the pins would be actually used as a pin by pinning things like the human
33:25fingernail pairings and the human hair to the textile and throwing it in.
33:29Therefore, throwing a part of themselves into this pool.
33:34This wishing well seems to have been destroyed in the 1640s, probably as part of a crackdown on magic and
33:42witchcraft.
33:45The pit was dug from the medieval period and the thing is, it was capped, it was purposely filled in.
33:55The evidence suggests that it was filled in during the English Civil War.
33:59This exploded in 1642, when Parliament took up arms against King James' son, Charles.
34:08There was a parliamentarian called Major Seeley, based in St Ives, during the Civil War.
34:13And he employed local men to fill in all these ritual pools, these pagan pools.
34:19And we think this was actually filled in then, because we've got ceramics from the top, dating from that period.
34:26In the chaos caused by the war, witch hunts burst out again in England and Scotland, claiming hundreds more lives.
34:41The Civil War in the 1640s caused a breakdown of law and order across the British Isles.
34:48Experienced judges, who might have dismissed witchcraft cases, could no longer tour the country on circuit.
34:57Into this vacuum in East Anglia steps a nobody, a minor gentleman, who isn't a judge, isn't even a professional
35:05lawyer, called Matthew Hopkins,
35:08who's dying of tuberculosis, probably, he's certainly dying.
35:12He's raised his consciousness by reading continental stuff on witchcraft,
35:16and he is determined, before he dies, to purge his region of evil.
35:21Hopkins lived in Manningtree in Essex.
35:24In 1645, one of the most murderous witch hunts in British history began here,
35:30when he teamed up with another Puritan gentleman called John Stern.
35:36There's something incredibly evocative about this foreshore in Manningtree.
35:42As you can see, this was kind of once a port, you can see there's still boats here today.
35:46But it was once an incredibly thriving place, where there was trade being brought in from the North Sea and
35:51the continent,
35:52but also ideas too, radical ideas, political ideas, religious ideas,
35:57which partly explains why this in the Stour Valley was a hotbed of Puritanism in the first half of the
36:0317th century,
36:04and exactly the sort of place where witch finders like Hopkins and Stern could have played out some of their
36:11demonic fantasies.
36:13Matthew Hopkins even claimed that he had heard witches gathering in Manningtree.
36:20Some seven or eight of that horrible sect of witches had their meeting close by his house,
36:26and had several solemn sacrifices there offered to the devil.
36:33He left a record of his actions, starting with a chilling verse that James I had included in his translation
36:40of the Bible.
36:41Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.
36:46Hopkins and Stern harnessed existing grievances and fears of witchcraft between neighbors.
36:52The witch hunters brought these disputes before Essex magistrates as full-blown criminal charges.
37:00One of the most shocking occurred in the nearby parish of Lawford.
37:06One Sunday morning in the spring of 1645, Prudence Hart, a pregnant woman of the parish,
37:12was worshipping here in the church behind us and experienced severe abdominal pain.
37:17She staggered from the church in agony and collapsed somewhere out in the lane over there,
37:23immediately went into labour and gave birth to a stillborn child.
37:27Now, this was incredibly powerful evidence that the Harts had been bewitched.
37:34A local widow, Anne West, and her daughter, Rebecca, were blamed for causing the miscarriage.
37:40They were arrested and charged with witchcraft.
37:46Hopkins and Stern now toured other towns in the east of England, looking for more suspects.
37:52Their accusations became wilder as they were bewitched by their own fears.
37:59Their modus operandi would be to get the suspect isolated, to keep them awake for as long as three days,
38:08three nights,
38:09to march them up and down, to use a form of brutal leading questioning,
38:14which didn't leave much room for denials and for protestations of innocence.
38:22Matthew Hopkins recorded some of these interrogations in an account he wrote soon afterwards.
38:28In it, he claims to have witnessed the monstrous creatures summoned by the suspected witches.
38:34Elizabeth Clarke, this old woman, disabled woman, is interrogated personally by Hopkins.
38:41And after the period of three days, she cracks and she says,
38:44I'm ready for my imps to come.
38:46And she gives them names. They're called things like sack and sugar and grizzle greedy gut and pie-whacket.
38:53The accounts basically say that this parade of animals comes into the room,
38:59but they are obviously not natural animals, which seems to confirm that finally this old woman is a witch
39:06and that these are the creatures through which she commits her crimes.
39:11Hopkins' pamphlet shows how victim and accuser could share the delusion that their hallucinations were demonically real.
39:20There are these watchers who are watching day and night, possibly by candlelight,
39:25who are expecting that something is going to happen.
39:31They are actually very afraid.
39:34Maybe then when a mouse walks into the room or a dog or a cat, their minds play tricks with
39:40them.
39:41And I think that there are reasons for thinking that the descriptions of these weird creatures are honest and sincere,
39:48even if it was nothing other than a cat casting a long shadow or something.
39:56The self-styled witch finder general arrested and tortured as many as 300 women across eastern England.
40:04About 100 were executed.
40:07But in the late 17th century, the witch panics fueled by demonology began to burn out.
40:13The last execution for witchcraft in England was in 1682, almost a century after James' book was published.
40:24But the remarkable finds in Savioc Cornwall show that the king's fanatical crusade failed.
40:32The site proves that magical beliefs lived on for centuries afterwards.
40:38I believe that this is a really unique site.
40:41And from the archaeology, there doesn't seem to be any more pits found like this in Britain or in Europe,
40:46as far as we know.
40:47But they give us a brief insight, a special insight into somebody's belief system that's been very private and very
40:55sort of secret until now.
40:58Over the last 12 years, Jackie has discovered more than 40 pits lined with the skins of different birds and
41:05animals.
41:06They are all within yards of the one containing swan feathers that dates from 1640.
41:14And this is 100 years later than that one. It's dated to 1740s.
41:19And it's lined with fur, not feathers.
41:21And when we actually analysed it, it's lined with cat fur.
41:27So they've skinned a cat, lined the pit with this black cat fur, put a piece of quartz two-thirds
41:34of the way up, and extraordinarily, above the quartz was 22 eggs.
41:39And every single egg had a baby chick in it, ready to hatch.
41:42I do believe that it is some kind of witchcraft.
41:47These bizarre ritual burials appear to span 350 years, from the 17th century right up until remarkably recent times.
41:57This is the latest one we had, and this is really exciting, because this one is actually lined with different
42:03coloured brown and black fur all the way around the outside of it.
42:07And then it's got the legs of a goat put around the inside of the base of it.
42:12And then at the head of the goat, with its teeth, and around its head, under its head was a
42:18piece of plastic and a piece of orange baletwine.
42:22Now, the thing is, baletwine was invented in the 60s, and basically it didn't come to Cornwall until the 1970s.
42:28So we've got a 1970s pit.
42:29So we're dating from the Civil War, 1640, to 1970, of people putting these pits in this valley.
42:38The animals and birds, buried in the Saviok pits, seem to be part of a lost tradition of belief.
42:47But none of the finds on the site show any association with satanic rituals.
42:53They were a terrible myth that cost thousands of lives.
42:58There is no evidence whatsoever that anybody who was tried for witchcraft in early modern England actually worshipped the devil.
43:05There's a fair amount of evidence that some of the people who were put on trial did practice magic in
43:11a folky kind of way.
43:12Some of them almost certainly did curse their neighbours in fits of ill temper and for purposes of revenge.
43:18But the satanic conspiracy, the anti-religion, imagined by witch hunters, was purely a fantasy.
43:26The horror of what was done to women like Agnes Sampson has given us the term witch hunt as a
43:34shockingly vivid description of the worst kind of injustice.
43:38This really was such an unjustified persecution of these poor women who really had done no wrong other than being
43:44slightly different to their neighbours.
43:47They may be older, they were often poorer, or single, unmarried women.
43:52And they were seen as a threat therefore because they didn't quite conform to the usual pattern of society.
44:01King James's book Demonology provoked an ideological war that swept up thousands of innocents.
44:10King James's book Demonology provoked an
44:12It's a warning from history that we dare not ignore.
44:22She left the African Queen in ship-shape condition, but have the owners kept her on an even keel?
44:28Alex Polizzi returns to this floating establishment on the Thames as the new hotel inspector continues, next on Channel 5.
44:49.
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