The Discovery of Witches
A Study of Master Matthew Hopkins
Sir Jeffery. Is there a Justice in Lancashire has so much skill in Witches as I have? Nay, I’le speak a proud word, you shall turn me loose against any Witch-finder in Europe; I’d make an Ass of Hopkins if he were alive. Shadwell, The Lancashire Witches, I. (1681; 4to, 1682).
In the earliest English codes of law, such as the statutes of Withraed, King of Kent, of Edward and Gunthrun, as well as those of Aethelstan and King Edgar, of Ethelred and Cnut; in the most ancient Penitentials, as for example the famous collection of S. Theodore, seventh Archbishop of Canterbury, and the Confessional of Ecgberht, Archbishop of York, who received the pallium from Pope Gregory III in 735; in ecclesiastical canons and the decrees of secular witenagemot alike, there are laws, prohibitive and minatory, against sorcery and the practices of witchcraft, which were ever recognized as a very real and terrible evil. When S. Augustine, in the spring of 596, landed with his holy monks on the Isle of Thanet, he realized from the first
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