Witchfinder General
England is in the grip of bloody civil war… The structure of law and order has collapsed. Local magistrates indulge their individual whims; justice and injustice are dispensed in more or less equal quantities and without opposition, an atmosphere in which the unscrupulous rebel and the likes of Matthew Hopkins take full advantage of the situation. In a time where the superstitions of country folk are still a powerful factor, Hopkins preys upon them, torturing and killing in a supposed drive to eliminate witchcraft from the country, and doing so with the full blessing of what law there is…
The voiceover near the opening of Witchfinder General powerfully sets out the film’s context; and it’s an exaggerated picture (entirely consistent with the action in the film), with at least a grain of truth. The British Civil Wars, as such events tend to do, did indeed severely disrupt the structures of law and order, if not to anything like the extent the voiceover suggests; and it’s no coincidence, I think, that England’s only sustained, mass witch-hunts took place at this time. It’s also the case that without the beliefs of ordinary people and the support (however short-lived) of the representatives of the law, Hopkins (played by Vincent Price in, for him, an understated performance) could not have operated. But the film never explores these issues in any more detail: the ‘country folk’ are indeed a powerful factor, but, basically, it is the power of a mob; the director is certainly not interested in their ’superstitions’. Hopkins, meanwhile, appears to be motivated primarily by money (which is certainly not historically correct) and Sterne is simply a pathological sadist.
In this film, another one based on a novel, history is appropriated, exaggerated, sensationalised, to convey a message; it’s done with conviction in a brutally shocking style, and I think it has something important to say about the effects of war and violence (its own context being the late sixties and the height of the Vietnam War) and even about the events of the 1640s in particular. But it never lets the ‘real’ history get in the way of what it wants to say.
Reading
Much has now been written on this topic: the two texts listed below have been chosen simply as examples, respectively, of an early ground-breaking study and a recent discussion and synthesis.
Alan Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England: a regional and comparative study (London, 1970)
James Sharpe, Instruments of darkness: witchcraft in England, 1550-1750
Online Resources
East Anglian Witchcraft
Scotland and East Anglia: a Comparative Study (Stephanie du Barry)
List of English Witch Trials (Mark Carlson)
England & Scotland Time-line ()
The Film
Short review (Richard Schreib)
Essay by Quentin Turnour; a stimulating analysis of the film in its contemporary (and genre) context
Review by Malcolm Gaskill, useful on the historical inaccuracies
