Hopkins was a lawyer and the son of James Hopkins, a Puritan clergyman. According to his book The Discovery of Witchcraft (not to be confused with Reginald Scot[?]'s book of the same title) he began his career as a witch-finder when he allegedly overheard various women discussing their meetings with the Devil in March of 1644, in 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 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, looking for the Devil's mark that was supposed to be dead to all feeling and would not bleed.
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:
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. Unfortunately, the parish records of Manningtree[?] in Essex record his burial in August of 1647.
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