East Anglian Witch hunter

Great Yarmouth was a wealthy, independent and well connected port town and was approaching the zenith of its power and prosperity in the seventeenth century. London's herrings were salted there while the trade passing up and down the North sea helped line its merchant's pockets. It was a major stop for those passing from England to the Netherlands, and from there on to the New World. The merchants who dominated the town jealously protected their rights and privileges within the town, granted through an oligarchic corporation. The town had long had a history of being highly reformed in its religion. Great Yarmouth was just one of many godly port towns dotted across the North sea coast of England, albeit particularly successful.

The town's politics from the 1630s onwards are remarkable because show a precocious political discourse. Through the latter part of Charles' personal rule saw the playing out of fierce factional conflict, played along both religious and interest lines. With the outbreak of armed conflict, the hopes for reconciliation were dashed and further ossification took root. The economic dislocation caused by the war undermined relations between the governed and the governors. The godly merchants hoping to unite the town, instead found themselves divided by the increasing influential Independent congregation. In 1645, at the height of the crisis of authority for the town's leadership, Great Yarmouth's assembly sent out an invitation to Matthew Hopkins. The political crisis and the witch hunt were connected, responses to the same ossification.

The connection between political crisis and witch hunting remains under exposed. Large scale surveys have noted the pattern of witch hunts, connecting them to political weakness in developing nation states. There has been considerably less attention paid to witch hunts as both a response to and a reflection of local political crisis. Larger surveys don't have time to delve into the conflicts in depth, while local political studies haven't used witch hunts as part of their exploration of transition. Annabel Gregory's study of Rye, looking at how a witchcraft accusation reflected the strain of political and religious transition within the town, might be the most powerful use of witchcraft as a means of studying a political crisis in an urban community.

Witch hunting needs to be considered as part of urban politics because it was a political decision. Unlike an accusation, witch hunting required the apparatus of the local state. A witch finder needed to be summoned, allowed to investigate and give evidence, and paid for his services and paid handsomely. This could not occur without the support of those with their hands on the levers of government within towns. The question is why it was supported by urban elites, why did they act to promote the hunting of witches?

This talk is a response to that gap, and an application of the political study of witchcraft to show how the 1645 political crisis is informed by and informs the witch hunt in Great Yarmouth. Firstly by examining the trials and the evidence in depth the paper will examine how closely the hunt was tied to local concerns over divisions within the body politic and how that informed godly governance. Secondly it will tie the witch hunt into larger political crisis within Great Yarmouth, giving it meaning as part of a much larger process of purgation and reconciliation. This will provide the context to see witch hunting back in its place as part of the political response to the 17th century crisis.

The witch hunt in Great Yarmouth is a useful tool for interrogating the political life of Great Yarmouth because of the strength of its bureaucratic and judicial records. These are corroborated by the narrative of a confession from Matthew Hale's Modern Relations. Hales account is important, not just for the detail it brings over and above the rather Spartan version from Hopkins and Stearne, but his source. He relied upon the son of Thomas Whitfield who was the town's junior minister at the time. That means the detail drawn upon from Hales account is from someone close to the ruling group in the town and part of their official investigation into the witch hunt.

Hale's version of events deals with the confession of one Elizabeth Bradwell and her bewitching of Henry Moulton's son. Bradwell was either a widow or a spinister, old enough that in court she was alternately referred to as both. She isn't even named in Hale's version. Instead she is an Old Woman, reliant on the charity of the local ministers twice a week. She was a woman without influence or family. Her victim's father, Henry Moulton, was a wealthy hosiery merchant, but also an important member of the Assembly of Great Yarmouth and well connected and well known puritan. The case already crosses the great divide of prosperity and power within Yarmouth's population.

The incident inciting Bradwell's demonic temptation resulted from a refusal from Henry Moulton's maid to give Bradwell part work or charity. The Devil came to her and offered her support and revenge after she signed his name in her book. Firstly she asked for revenge upon Henry Moulton and his maid, but the Devil claimed that they were too godly to be touched. The Devil offered instead to afflict Moulton's young son, but required Bradwell to use a wax poppet with a nail inside and bury it within the Town's churchyard. This was enough to cause Moulton's son to sicken for some 18 months. Bradwell was investigated by the town's ministers to whom she confessed all this. This confession and Moulton's accusation saw Bradwell hanged.

At first sight Bradwell's case seems a simple one of charity refused. Bradwell had been used to receiving work from Moulton or charity to supplement the limited charitable giving from the church, but the failure of provision and her own powerlessness offered demonic power as a means of revenge to someone cast at the very bottom of society. While that narrative has enough power to hold together Bradwell's confession, it also a framework, a shorthand. The detail of her case illuminates the conflicts within Yarmouth that lay behind the witch-hunt. The stress on the role of the ministers, the godliness and authority of Moulton, and the Devil mirroring the actions sectarian minister are all responses to Great Yarmouth's politics.

The crisis of authority among the Presbyterians provides the context for their fears over Bradwell's demonic pact. The devil provided an alternate source of authority, tempted those disposed against the godly governors. All he required to give Bradwell comfort and revenge was her name, in blood, written into his book. The devil resembles the a conformist minister, his pact resembling the signing of a church book. Great Yarmouth was already faced with two separatist churches, both an influential Independent congregation and a threatening Anabaptist sect. Bradwell's pact sounds like a conversion story of a heterodox convert, thus making the connection between sect's ossifying effects on the community of the parish with demonic infiltration.

The most notable thing from Hale's account is the lack of role of the witch finder Matthew Hopkins. His role is reduced to that of accuser, the magistrates sending the accused to the ministers to be examined. It was also the sermons of Whitfield and Brinsley that protect Moulton from the devil's influence. While the concentration on the role of the junior of the two ministers role reflects the origins of this account, it does allow an insight into the role of the ministers during this crisis. The ministers are a part of the town's inner circle, with Brinsley married to the daughter of Yarmouth's wealthiest citizen. They were expected then to be part of the judicial process of rooting out the witches within the community, by taking confessions. This cannot hide the palpable failure of the ministers to prevent the corruption of Bradwell. The tension that Hales fails to reconcile is between the way the constant coming to church to hear the ministers protects Moulton and his maid, but fails Elizabeth Bradwell. The divide between godly and retrograde remains stark and it is a decision made locally, not imposed by a witch finder externally.

The same tensions lie within Henry Moulton's role. As an Assembly member he was a part of Great Yarmouth's legal system, a godly magistrate. His inviolability to the devil's attacks is stressed as being due to being part of the Presbyterian community, listening to Brinsley and Whitfield's sermons as well as private piety. The communal element is given priority, with his constant appearance at the sermons being particularly praiseworthy. This attempt to stress his religiosity can't hide that it was Moulton's failure as a provider of charity that set Bradwell down her dark path. While this is distanced by rejection come from Moulton's man of business and maid, there remains the underlying tension between the expectation of godly charity and the economic strain of the war of the four kingdoms. The crisis for godly magistrates comes from the difficulty in reconciling the expectations of public godliness with his failure to provide the expected charity in a time of hardship.

The confession of Elizabeth Bradwell provides a vital insight into the divisions that lay behind the general crisis in Great Yarmouth and divided its leadership from the wider population. The threat of religious nonconformity threatened demonic influence over Great Yarmouth's citizenry, and while the piety of its ministers protected the godly it seemed to do little for the retrograde. Economic dislocation helped to further fray the ties that had bound together the godly governors with the rest of the population in the town. The witch hunt provided a symbolic outlet for these tensions and fears, reflecting a sense of crisis and instability filtered through the perceptions of godly governance.

However to understand and inform this moment and to understand why the witch hunt as seen as a necessary act of purgation in 1645 requires placing it in a context of existing pressures and strains. Admitting the need for a witch hunt implied a failure of godly governance, with a corruption within the population. The witch-hunt can only be understood as a response to a moment of supreme weakness where purgation was the preferable option.

The place of witch hunt as part of wider process of purgation has been neglected. It needs to be considered as part of a spectrum of responses to the encroaching division within 17th century society. It was part of the same reaction that inspired rioting, political purges and iconoclasm across East Anglia during the civil war. In the extreme moment of violence the existing pressures were exaggerated, making the witch hunt an excellent means of exploring the religious and political strains underpinning this unrest.

The nature of corporate governance stressed a consensual politics. The construction of the corporation as a legal person required a unified will to have the authority to act. The threat of internal dissension was not just to the good running of a town, but to its obedience, freedom and independence from central interference. It also required popular assent through the rituals of selection. When faced with the reality of an increasing ideological gulf, the strain of maintaining unity in the face of ossification became the motor of conflict.

The roots of the growing divide lay in the 1630s. The existing tensions within urban communities between those with court patronage and local support as well as between Laudian conformists and the hotter sort of protestant were exacerbated by the policies of the Carolinian government. By seeking conformity in politics and religion, the agents of the crown destroyed the ambiguity that made consensus possible. The relative extremity of the King's position helped Puritans form wider alliances of resistance. However it also helped to strengthen the divide between Puritans willing to wait out the Caroline regime in England, and those who sought to move to the continent or New World rather than be compromised

The outbreak of the civil war in England sped up this process. The formation of the local assemblies and the move to either side occurred due to a few partisans dragging the neuters into either side. This was followed by the purgation of their rivals, engraining the growing divisions. The threat of a reversal via uprising, invasion or coup meant that the small group of committed governors were under threat from perceived enemies both within and without. Unity seemed increasingly distant, while the increased demand upon local governors increased as the war became more brutal.

Heterodox religious sects further divided communities. For the godly communities of the East Coast where the Puritans were in control, the problem lay in the collapse of consensus. While all the hotter sorts of protestants agreed in the need for the removal of the Episcopal system, they could not agree on the settlement on should take. The contradictory desires for a purified and yet comprehensive settlement lead to a fracturing between Presbyterians seeking conformity and Independents seeking a purity of congregation. These congregations threatened the cohesion of the Puritan elite, offering those outside the charmed circles of patronage their own influence and power.

For Great Yarmouth the roots of division lay in the 1630s and the development of Puritan political power as a reaction to encroaching royal power. As Richard Cust has so richly described there was a precocious conflict for conformity in the town, waged between court backed candidates accusing the Puritans in the town of faction and the Puritans who rallied around John Brinsley as a popular minister to attempt to effect godly reform. With John Brinsley dismissal and installation at nearby Lound the town was divided between the godly gadding to gear him and the conformists supporting the Anglican Matthew Brookes.

The tension between these two visions for Yarmouth boiled over in 1637. There was an accusation from the town's Puritans that Matthew Brookes' man of business Mark Prynne was involved in witchcraft. The antagonism between Brookes and the Puritans heightened tension enough that he was being seen as a demonic. Popular rioting in 1636 at the arrival of the high church bishop of Norwich Matthew Wren show the willingness of the Puritan authorities to tolerate violent action to stymie the growing influence of Laudianism.

With the collapse of Charles' personal rule there seemed space for a reconciliation and a godly unified Great Yarmouth. Brinsley was reinstated and Brookes cast out. The previously influential 'court' supporters on the assembly stood down. This optimism is recorded in Brinsley's sermon Healing Israel's breaches which described the process of rebuilding the town as a godly citadel. Yet there was already a sense of this reformed world coming under threat. The sermon was given to Norfolk's trained bands, in readiness to defend the new settlement. However the bigger lay within the town, those seeking to pull down the freshly rebuilt walls. Brinsley paralleled them with wreckers in a siege. There was an understanding of urban politics as something fragile.

When the Civil War arrived it threatened the stability of Great Yarmouth's politics. Despite the distance between Great Yarmouth and the frontline the town faced severe economic strain. The continuing conflict require ever increasing funds to maintain an army in the field, and with Great Yarmouth unwilling to let its volunteers go they needed to provide the hard monies the parliamentarian army required. The town though still felt isolated, and engaged in large scale fortification, with embrasures, a moat and a large number of cannons brought in at great expense. They also hired a professional captain to train the militia along with purchasing and equipping a warship to defend the herring fleet. These were paid for in part by the MP and key Presbyterian Edward Owner with the promise of repayment later, leaving the cost remaining hanging over the town.

The strain of these additional costs was made more onerous by the wider conflict which limited trade to and from Yarmouth, hitting the merchant oligarchy hard. The result of this was that the increasing costs struggled to be met by taxation. The assembly began authorising the distress of goods in 1643. The duty of collection had become so onerous that Henry Moulton feigned ill health to get out of collection, while others complained about being out of great sums of money. The previously voluntary collections to support the town ministers had to be enforced, requiring further distress. This left the assembly in a perilous situation, struggling to get the funds needed to support the cause and defend themselves. With both their temporal and spiritual defenders in arrears it is no wonder the assembly were worried.

The shortfall and decline in trade wasn't just a severe strain on the resources of the merchants, but a disaster for the poor of Great Yarmouth. Where previously they had been able to find work and charity from their betters, they were turned away. The need for additional work was all the more pressing as from 1643 the herring fleet came under attack by a privateer in the North Sea leading to a halving of the total catch. In a town of fishermen this was ruinous for the ordinary families. This had a further knock on effect on the very poorest, since the half doles from the herring went toward the charitable works in the town. The town deployed their warship to defend the herring fleet in 1644 but the catch struggled to recover. 1644 also saw one of the coldest winters in living memory, putting yet further strain on dangerously thin resources. Resistance was expressed through small acts of defiance, such as fishing for herring on the Sabbath. In response the Assembly choose to lay the boom across the harbour to prevent further fishing on the Lord's day. The governors were no longer sure of the governed and their commitment to godly reformation and it cannot be a coincidence that the witch hunt came just after the period of greatest hardship.

More dangerous to the Assembly was the growing resistance to the Presbyterian oligarchy coming from within the merchant group. While the initial foot dragging over the rates was passive, there was increasingly vocal and active disobedience. From 1643 the well connected merchant Thomas Bendish sought to subvert the will of the assembly. He ignored the requirement to land goods at the harbour, choosing instead to use the salt pans across the river to avoid paying customs, requiring the Assembly to dig up the landing. He also attempted to confiscate the Earl of Manchester's ship and its cargo when it was blown into Great Yarmouth. Despite censure and a fine of 40 shillings he remained defiant, using his status as man of business for one of the town's MPs to avoid further punishment. The failure to control Bendish, despite repeated offences showed the limits of the Assembly's authority.

The Independence of the Assembly was further threaten in November 1643 when notice was receive that the supreme commander in East Anglia intended to a place a military governor in the town over the heads of the Assembly, in response to a request from citizens living there. The Assembly found it necessary to send back a response to counter aspersions to their loyalty to the parliamentarian cause. When the governor, Colonel Fleetwood, arrived he agreed to swear an oath testifying the falseness of these aspersions into the town's hutch book. This was a threat to the very independence of the town and its customs, by those who would have preferred military to civilian rule. The Assembly, while able to water down the governorship could no longer represent themselves as the united voice for the body politic and faced schism without knowing who sought to undermine them.

The most vivid ossification developed from early 1644. The puritans had been able to agree on what they wanted to remove, but identifying a new settlement remained difficult. The Presbyterian Ministers Brinsley and Whitfield had been willing to share the pulpit with the preacher William Bridge and his protégé John Oxenbridge , granting them the Wednesday exercises. His role in the assembly of divines had brought prestige to the town and a relatively blind eye had been turned to his community of followers who had arrived with him from his exile in the Netherlands. They had been part of a shared godly ministry. However after Bridge's signing of the Apologeticall Narration as part of the so called 'Independent preachers', the difference between his position and that of Great Yarmouth's ministers became stark. His desire for separate godly communities was at odds with Brinsley's repeated call for an inclusive community. He referred to the Separation as pulling down a newly restored temple and breaking down defensive city walls.

To try and control the situation Bridge was banned from the pulpit and separate churches were spoken out against by Brinsley's sermons. The Independents remained defiant, their continued survival and increasing conversions a challenge to the notion of a unified community at prayer. The Independents were also willing to argue their case, including a petition promulgated in the town asking for toleration for the Independent congregation in 1644. This was followed by increasingly influential Great Yarmouth converts to the congregation. This included a number of wives of common councillors on the assembly. These were from the lower rungs of the assembly, often new families to the assembly, excluded from the inner circle of the Aldermancy. This spiritual perversion was added to by a political one as the Independent congregation accepted the troublesome Thomas Bendish into their midst, making it a second, increasingly powerful faction. Their conversions began to take on a demonic character to the Presbyterians, with Brinsley's sermon 'A looking Glass for good women' compared Independency with Eve's rebellion against God.

Finally in January 1645 the Independents managed a psychological breakthrough with three members of the assembly openly joining the congregation. This was a collapse of the unity of the godly governors, a crisis in their perception of the assembly as a united godly body, caused by those they presumed to be among the saints. With the infiltration and turning by and of men reckoned amongst the elect, and which began with their wives, it is not surprising minds should have turned to witchcraft.

The Presbyterians brought to bear their full power and authority to attempt to end the influence of the Independent Congregation. In February of 1645 their leading citizen Edward Owner and the minister John Whitfield went to see Bridge, seeking to show their displeasure at the separate church within their community. After talks the Congregationalists agreed to forebear increasing their membership for the foreseeable future. This cauterised the wound, preventing further growth. In April the Presbyterians went further, calling a special meeting of the assembly to discuss a new settlement for the town. While the Independents had enough influence to trigger a debate within the Assembly and call for a separate place of worship and further ministers in the town, the end result was a simple official Presbyterian policy for Great Yarmouth. Public preaching was only to occur at the parish church and the only the two Presbyterian ministers were allowed to preach as they had before. There were to be no more ministers in Great Yarmouth. This was hailed as a great victory, a return to peace and uniformity by cleansing the town of these enemies within. No longer would the Independents pull down a church half repaired.

The connection between the witch hunt and the dispute with the Independent church is notable. The debates that saw the call for Independent forbearance were followed by the assembly sending a letter of invitation to Matthew Hopkins. The question remains if the witch hunt was an act of purifying that mirrored the attempted purgation of the Independent church or an attempt of healing by offering a mutual threat.

The witch-hunt that occurred in 1645 comes then as a result of a godly governance under immense pressure. It was failing to provide governance that the parliamentarian authorities felt they could trust, considering the imposition of a military government. They struggled to raise the monies needed to defend the town and the parliamentary cause, turning very quickly from a voluntary collection to the use of force to be sure of collection which still lagged behind demand. They struggled to provide charity to the poorer folk, both as an assembly and individuals, causing further tension on top of war related hardship. They had to enforce godliness, no longer sure of the piety of the wider population. The assembly faced dissolution and division from those who mistrusted their vision for Yarmouth. These tensions would have challenged any early modern government, leading the assembly to seek the corruption that threatened to divide their urban commonwealth.

The Independent congregation and the witches mirrored each other as spiritual threats to the community. The charismatic leadership of Bridge was mirrored by the Devil in the witch narratives. The threat of the enemy within, of citizens corrupted and attempting to undermine the Presbyterian authorities was the same. The crisis of Godly Governance represented by the Independent church provided the same existential threat of an enemy within corrupting the citizenry. It is that struggle, that need to purge and purify, that places witch-hunting as part of Godly governance and a response to a wider crisis.

The 1640s was a period of immense transition, with the very nature of urban politics in flux. The shift from a consensual politics that excluded the citizenry before the civil wars to the development of a competitive electoral politics determined by election after the restoration was one of the largest changes in political life in British history. It was mirrored by a similar collapse in religious unity and the tacit acceptance of divided religious communities. The witch hunt taps into the luminal tipping point between these two models of community, where unity was sought but division grew increasingly engrained. The methods of restoring a consensus became more extreme and purgative rather than restorative. It is in that spirit we need to consider the witch hunt as a part of a Puritan reaction to impurity that reflected deep weakness that purgation rather than healing and reconciliation were seen as the answer. Looking forward it was a failed coup and purge of Independents in 1649 that saw Great Yarmouth able to reconcile the duelling impulses for unity and purity in peace

East Anglian Witch hunter

Thursday 31 March 2016

Peter Elmer's Appendix to the East Anglian Witch hunt

Thursday 10 March 2016

A few of my favourite Sermon titles by John Brinsley, Minister of Gospel in Great Yarmouth

Wednesday 17 February 2016

A talk given 8th February at Norwich's Old meeting house

Tuesday 16 February 2016

The Crisis of Urban Government during the English Civil War: Great Yarmouth's 1645 witch-hunt

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