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Witches disclose their familiar spirits to Matthew Hopkins.

Matthew Hopkins, d. 1647, was an English witchhunter whose career flourished in the time of the English Civil War. He held, or claimed to hold, the office of "Witch-finder General" as bestowed by the Puritan Parliament, and practised his witch-finding in the counties of Suffolk and Essex, in East Anglia.

Hopkins was a lawyer and the son of Matthew Hopkins; a Puritan clergyman. According to his book The Discovery of Witches (not to be confused with Reginald Scot's book The Discovery of Witchcraft) he began his career as a witch-finder when he overheard various women discussing their meetings with the Devil in March of 1644, in Coggeshall, a village near Colchester. As a result of Hopkins's accusations, nineteen alleged witches were hanged and four more died in prison.

Hopkins was soon travelling over eastern England, claiming truthfully or not to be an official specially commissioned by Parliament to uncover and prosecute witches. His witch-finding career spanned from 1644 to 1646. While torture was technically unlawful in England, he used various methods of browbeating to extract confessions from some of his victims. He used sleep deprivation as a sort of bloodless torture. He also used a "swimming" test to see if the accused would float or sink in water, the theory being that witches had renounced their baptism, so that all water would supernaturally reject them. He also employed "witch prickers" who pricked the accused with knives and special needles, looking for the Devil's mark that was supposed to be dead to all feeling and would not bleed. It was believed that the witch's familiar would drink their blood from the mark as milk from a teat.

The most gruesome trial was when Hopkins found a 'witch' called Jack Walsh. Male witches were less common and this was Hopkin's first male trial. First he was tried with the pin test (The desired witch was stripped naked in front of an audience and pricked with a pin on the leg. If they bled, the were innocent. If they didn't or not very much, they were a witch. the trick was to make the 'witch' blush and the blood from their legs will rush to the head leaving only a little blood flowing in the leg) and was found innocent. Then he was tried with the water test three times. The first two he was found as a witch and the third time he was tied with weights until he drowned. Then, he brought up the lifeless form of Walsh's body and hung him on a tree to prove to other people that witches were not only female.

On the strength of his commission, Hopkins then demanded that the communities he visited pay him for his work. He also sold fetishes he called "witch boxes" that were supposed to protect the households of their owners from sorcery.

Samuel Butler's satire Hudibras commented on Hopkins's activity, saying:

Has not this present Parliament

A Lieger to the Devil sent,

Fully impowr'd to treat about

Finding revolted witches out

And has not he, within a year,

Hang'd threescore of 'em in one shire?

Some only for not being drown'd,

And some for sitting above ground,

Whole days and nights, upon their breeches,

And feeling pain, were hang'd for witches.

And some for putting knavish tricks

Upon green geese and turky-chicks?

And pigs, that suddenly deceast

Of griefs unnat'ral, as he guest;

Who after prov'd himself a witch

And made a rod for his own breech.

The last line refers to a tradition that disgruntled villagers caught Hopkins and subjected him to his own "swimming" test: he floated, and therefore was hanged for witchcraft himself. However, it is believed by most historians that Hopkins actually died of illness (possibly tuberculosis) in his home. The parish records of Manningtree in Essex record his burial in August of 1647.

• A british heavy-metal band is called Witchfinder General, after the (self proclaimed) title and nickname of Matthew Hopkins.
• British heavy-metal band Cathedral named both an EP and a song on it "Hopkins (The Witchfinder General)". The songs lyrics tell about witches and their supposed cursed deeds. One verse is written in the first person, where Hopkins tells about his gruesome actions.

• Works by Matthew Hopkins at Project Gutenberg
  • The Discovery of Witches, available at Project Gutenberg.
• Fortean Times article on the creation of Hopkin's folk-devil myth
• Animated/Audio Story of Hopkins and his demise
• History of the Essex Witch Trials