John Stearne's Confirmation and Discovery of Witchcraft

Text, Context and Afterlife

Scott Eaton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000079432
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

Between 1645-7, John Stearne led the most significant outbreak of witch-hunting in England. As accusations of witchcraft spread across East Anglia, Stearne and Matthew Hopkins were enlisted by villagers to identify and eradicate witches. After the trials finally subsided in 1648, Stearne wrote his only publication, A confirmation and discovery of witchcraft, but it had a limited readership. Consequently, Stearne and his work fell into obscurity until the 1800s, and were greatly overshadowed by Hopkins and his text.

This book is the first study which analyses Stearne's publication and contextualises his ideas within early modern intellectual cultures of religion, demonology, gender, science, and print in order to better understand the witch-finder's beliefs and motives. The book argues that Stearne was a key player in the trials, that he was not a mainstream 'puritan', and that his witch-finding availed from contemporary science. It traces A confirmation 's reception history from 1648 to modern day and argues that the lack of research focusing on Stearne has resulted in misrepresentations of the witch-finder in the historiography of witchcraft. This book redresses the imbalance and seeks to provide an alternative reading of the East Anglian witch-hunt and of England's premier witch-hunter, John Stearne.

1 The Background of the East Anglian Witch-Hunt

The Economy, Courts, Religion, and the Beginnings of the Trials

By the time Stearne composed A confirmation in late 1647, the population of England had experienced the First Civil War. Its debilitating effects continued to be felt well beyond 1648, when A confirmation was published. Within Stearne’s text he does not make explicit references to the Civil War, except on one occasion when commenting on a witch he discovered, ‘not long before the Assizes, the first since these warres’. His comment was probably a reference to the end of the First Civil War in 1646, when the suspected witch he was discussing was arraigned.¹ However, it would be difficult to believe that such a momentous event did not impact upon Stearne or influence his thinking to some degree. This chapter will therefore explore the environment that facilitated the witch-hunt and in which Stearne wrote his pamphlet. It will foreground Stearne’s theories with a thick description of other contemporary systems of beliefs and intellectual frameworks present in East Anglia, in order to enhance our understanding of the author, the text and the witchcraft trials in which he was so heavily involved. This chapter will include a discussion on the themes of the economy, the courts, religion, local political figures, and their links to Stearne and Hopkins. East Anglia was situated on the periphery of the war but it was affected indirectly. Local government continued to function during the Civil War and godly men in positions of power found their offices strengthened. Many of these men gave their assent to Stearne’s witch-hunting agenda in 1645 in an attempt to cleanse their communities of sinners.² Because not much is known about Stearne’s background prior to the witch-hunt, it is essential to reconstruct parts of the culture from which he came to further contextualise A confirmation.

The Economy of Essex and Suffolk

During the First English Civil War, East Anglia remained a stronghold for Parliament.³ This area was not a frontier and so it was not directly affected by warfare. Stearne’s home county of Suffolk experienced little fighting but was used as a recruiting ground for the Parliamentarian army. So many soldiers were enlisted from Suffolk, and were consequently killed during the conflict, that the county was said to have had a dearth of men.⁴ Likewise, the neighbouring county of Essex, in which Stearne held land, remained largely unscathed by war, except for the Siege of Colchester in 1648.⁵ Essex villagers also enlisted in large numbers, and by July 1645, 500 men were recorded as being ‘away’, ‘dead’ or ‘in the service of Parliament’.⁶ East Anglian communities could not, however, escape the war’s effects on society or the effects of nature – both of which negatively influenced the economy. Unfortunately, Stearne provides little information on this situation. For another account of these events, though, we can turn to the diary of Ralph Josselin, minister in the village of Earls Colne, who recorded that from the early 1640s poor weather was destroying the harvest through flooding and heavy frost. In February 1645 he remarked that the grounds were ‘so hard they could scarce be ploughed. No old man could ever remember the like’.⁷ Josselin noted in August 1644 and 1646 that plague was spreading in London and Colchester, and that price of bread and meat was rapidly growing.⁸ According to scholars J. A. Goldstone and W. G. Hoskin, Josselin was correct: food doubled in price, and as the price went up, living wages fell.⁹ Michael Chrisholm further explained that poor weather and harvests affected the inland river trade as it forced retail prices to fluctuate considerably. Besides the corn trade, the Civil War made coal prices rise exponentially – up to 87% in some places. Newcastle was the main source of coal for London and the entire eastern coast of England. Coal was transported through waterways, stopping at various ports, eventually arriving at the capital. However, during the Civil War this did not always run smoothly, and by May 1643 London was quickly running out.¹⁰ The King controlled the coalfields of Newcastle and was willing to supply London to generate an income that would help fund his forces – for Londoners, this was an unacceptable trade-off who, instead, ‘shivered self-sacrificingly’.¹¹

To add to the economic difficulties of the 1640s, money was being levied by Parliamentarian forces in East Anglia, which was providing a yearly total of perhaps £330,000 by 1645. The citizens of Colchester contributed £30,000 to the Parliamentary cause in 1644, and within a single month £90,000 was collected in Suffolk.¹² Other financial strains came from the army’s troops, who were becoming burdensome due to their free quarter (arrears for this were growing). Yet taxes and free quarter were not completely separate: if payment of taxes was refused, the allocation of a house or parish to soldiers for free quarter was used as a threat, since hungry soldiers were prone to pillaging. Many villagers attempted to petition their superiors to relieve the amount of taxation on their parishes. In general, as John Morrill commented, ‘taxation was at a terrifying level’, especially with excises imposed on basic commodities such as beer and bread.¹³ The war clearly impacted all levels of society through the economy, and negatively affected Stearne’s finances: he claimed that many villages had failed to pay him for his witch-finding services during the Civil War and he was facing financial difficulties shortly after the witch-hunt, in 1651.¹⁴

The witchcraft confessions recorded by Stearne in A confirmation can be informative as they mirror concerns over income. Witches like Alice Wright and Joan Ruce confessed to making pacts with the Devil for monetary gain, whereas accusers blamed witches for damaging livestock.¹⁵ In this sense, witchcraft accusations can be seen as a reflection of contemporary economic concerns. For some people in East Anglia, their incomes were already being strained, so that any further damages to their livelihoods could be disastrous. Livestock and milk produce had to be protected, but dairy could be unexplainably spoiled and its loss attributed to magic. The alleged bewitching of cattle, butter, and milk was common in early modern English witchcraft accusations, primarily because society was largely based on agrarian farming.¹⁶ While most communities survived off farming, we do not know if Stearne was a farmer producing goods for market in the land he held near Little Clacton, Essex. Stearne’s vocation in the 1640s is uncertain, but based on extant records it appears that he supplemented his income by renting out a house to tenants in Manningtree, Essex. Between 1645 and 1648, this income was enhanced by fees from witch-hunting, and it has been suggested by Gaskill and Elmer that money might have been Stearne’s motive for writing his retrospective pamphlet.¹⁷ Stearne was classed as a minor gentleman, but he was not a man on secure financial standing. As noted above, in 1648 he was still awaiting payment from villages for identifying witches, was under threat of being sued by two anonymous men in Colchester, Essex, and by 1654 was facing financial difficulties which forced him to be demoted to the status of a yeoman.¹⁸ Financial uncertainty would have been widespread in East Anglia since locals relied on agriculture to provide income for their families. Any disruption to the crop yield therefore had the potential to be catastrophic. Events such as the Siege of Colchester in 1648, plague outbreaks in 1655–56, poor weather, new crops, and a slight downturn in agricultural work by the end of the century all impacted farmers’ produce in the 1600s. But the effect of food shortages went beyond nucleated families living just above the subsistence level and could have disrupted the supply of food to London – much like the coal trade. In the seventeenth century, East Anglian farmers were exporting much of their produce to the London markets to sell, or to export even further afield to the Netherlands.¹⁹ Trading with foreign markets was relatively minor whereas trading with London was crucial, so much so that clothiers in Essex and Suffolk described Londoners as those ‘in whom the breath of our Trade and livelyhood consisteth’.²⁰

Essex and Suffolk specialised in manufacturing high-demand products, such as saffron (which was used for medical purposes) and flax (which was destined for the cloth trade).²¹ Commercially, small ports like Manningtree, where Matthew Hopkins was employed, were important.²² Manningtree was a small parish of twenty-two acres, situated on the River Stour and surrounded by marshlands. Due to the area’s topography, the agrarian farming which was practiced in the north-west of Essex was not as prevalent in Manningtree. However, the village did have easy access to inland rivers and the ocean through the River Stour. This gave locals the ability to create and sustain a fishing industry that enabled them to export its goods to London. Since the fourteenth century the locals had capitalised on their environment by establishing an economy that revolved around brewing, malting, selling corn and, most importantly, shipping. This included shipbuilding and the transportation of goods to the capital and the Netherlands, especially oysters – Manningtree’s most valued product. The southern end of neighbouring Suffolk also had access to waterways but they were used to augment its distribution of dairy produce, which the central and northern parts of Suffolk were renowned for. These areas produced large quantities of butter and cheese that were much sought after by London cheesemakers. And, like other parts of East Anglia, it also had strengths in cloth-making, although sma...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The Background of the East Anglian Witch-Hunt: The Economy, Courts, Religion, and the Beginnings of the Trials
• 2 Puritanism: A Comparison of Stearne’s Religious Beliefs to the Orthodoxy of the Westminster Assembly’s Confession of faith
• 3 Print Culture: The Literature of the Supernatural and the Reception of A confirmation
• 4 Familiar Spirits: The Origins of Stearne’s Concept of Familiars and Its Symbolisms
• 5 Witchcraft, Sex, and Gender: Witchcraft Confessions in A confirmation as a Reflection of Seventeenth-Century Gender Roles
• 6 Science and the Decline of Witchcraft Beliefs: Evidence for the Scientific Basis of Stearne’s Witch-Finding
• 7 The Afterlife of A confirmation: The Circulation and Rediscovery of Stearne’s Text in the Nineteenth Century
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index