We’ve seen this woodcut illustration before. It’s the frontispiece to the Witchfinder General, Matthew Hopkins’s pamphlet in defence of his methods, The Discovery of Witches, published in 1647. This time, I’m focussing on the unfortunate women her persecuted, and Hopkins’s allegations, which I delve into in The Brampton Witch Murders. (Out now, incidentally – grab you copy using the link in my bio.)

On the right there is Elizabeth Clarke, an 80-year-old woman accused of witchcraft in Essex by a local tailor named John Rivet. Hopkins took on the case and basically tortured Clarke until she confessed, and implicated other innocent women.

Clarke here is seen naming her devilish familiars, or imps, among them Nemauzar, Pyewackett, Peck-in-the-Crown, Griezell Greedigutt and Vinegar Tom (forefront) – I’ll quote now directly from Hopkins – “who was like a long-legg’d Greyhound, with an head like an Oxe, with a long taile and broad eyes, who when this discoverer spoke to, and bade him goe to the place provided for him and his Angels, immediately transformed himselfe into the shape of a child of foure yeeres old without a head, and gave halfe a dozen turnes about the house, and vanished at the doore.”

So that’s a greyhound-type beast who transformed into a headless four-year-old, ran six times around the room then out of the door.

Elizabeth Clarke – and the women she named as associates – all hanged.