Season of the Witchfinder
QUESTION The 1968 film Witchfinder General is based on 17th-century witch hunter Matthew Hopkins. How accurately does it portray him? WITCHFINDER General was a low-budget horror film directed by Michael Reeves and starring Vincent Price.
In graphic detail it tells the story of Matthew Hopkins, a lawyer from Suffolk, England, who set himself up as a freelance interrogator of witches.
With his partner John Stearne (played by Robert Russell), between 1645 and 1647, he secured the conviction and execution of 230 people for witchcraft.
The film is based on an historical novel by Ronald Bassett, which is a mixture of fact and fiction. It takes the trial and execution of a real priest, John Lowes (Rupert Davies), as its starting point, adding a fictional love story between Lowes’s ward Sara (Hilary Dwyer) and a Roundhead soldier, Richard Marshall (Ian Ogilvy).
Hopkins’s reign of terror began in March 1645 in the village of Manningtree, Essex, where he was living. His investigation resulted in the execution of 19 local women in July. There are documents showing Hopkins and Stearne tried more than 250 people for witchcraft between July and December 1645. Despite this, little is known of Hopkins other than that he was the son of a Suffolk clergyman, trained as a lawyer and died of consumption in 1647.
Technically, torture was illegal in England by 1645. The film accurately portrays how Hopkins subverted this by putting suspected witches through sleep deprivation to extract confessions. Another of his methods was the swimming test, based on the idea that as witches had renounced their baptism, water would reject them.
The suspects, who were mainly women, were tied to a chair and thrown into the water. All those who ‘swam’ – that is floated – were considered to be witches.
The film shows his attempts to find and pierce the ‘devil’s mark’ – the teat witches used to suckle their imps, usually concealed as a mole or wart. It was said it would not hurt or bleed if pricked.
In the film, Stearne is seen piercing these with a dagger. Hopkins’s real method was more insidious: he used a retractable pin, so it would appear that he was piercing the mole or wart. This method ensured a high conviction rate.
The film has inaccuracies. Hopkins was probably in his 20s, not middle-aged like Price; it does not show any of the trials; and Hopkins was never legally sanctioned, as the film implies.
However, James Sharpe, writing in Instruments Of Darkness: Witchcraft In Early Modern England, commends the film for coming close to historical accuracy.
Michael Fulton, Southampton. QUESTION Cricket was always popular in pockets of north Co. Dublin. Were there other pockets of Ireland where it was traditionally popular? IN the early days of cricket in Ireland, the game was also popular in Dublin city, as well as in counties Carlow, Galway, Kilkenny and Wicklow.
Games of cricket were played in Ireland during the later 18th century, but none was recorded. The first comprehensive report of a cricket match came in 1792, when an all-Ireland side took on a garrison side at the Fifteen Acres in the Phoenix Park.
In the 1820s, Trinity College Dublin was a hotbed of cricket, although the Dublin University Cricket Club didn’t begin until 1835. Eventually, matches at Trinity became so popular that spectator numbers were often over the 5,000 mark. In 1830, the first proper cricket club in Ireland was set up, the Phoenix Club. For the first five years of its existence, it played in the Phoenix Park, before moving to Dublin’s southside.
The Phoenix Club is one of the oldest cricket clubs in the world. In the year it started, 1830, cricket was also being played on the lawns in front of Kilkenny Castle, and by the end of that decade, Kilkenny had its own cricket pitch. From Kilkenny, cricket spread to Carlow in 1831. The 1830s also saw a cricket club established at Avondale, Co. Wicklow, by John Parnell, father of Charles Stewart Parnell.
Cricket also took off in Ballinasloe, Co. Galway, where a club was established in 1830. A local landowner, Lord Dunlo, who later became the Earl of Cloncarty, was a strong supporter of cricket in the area and before long, other local clubs were set up.
Cricket developed so strongly in Co. Galway that in its golden era, between 1870 and the start of the First World War, the county produced 12 international players.
Back in Dublin, the Leinster cricket club was founded in Rathgar in 1852. It later found a permanent home at the end of Observatory Lane in Rathmines.
During the 1850s and 1860s, teams of touring professionals from England visited Ireland to play matches. In 1855, the first Irish national team played against the Gentlemen of England, in Dublin. The Trinity College club played against top teams from England practically every year between 1870 and 1914.
In Cork city, however, cricket was slower to get off the ground. The game was being played on the Mardyke in Cork city in 1850, but the County Cork Cricket Club wasn’t set up until 1874. Between 1830 and 1870, cricket improved its fortunes so dramatically that what had begun as a minority sport now had mass appeal.
Andrew Higgins, Kilkenny. QUESTION When a rocket is launched for a Moon mission, does it fly straight? FURTHER to the earlier answer, which explained the difficulties of hitting the Moon – which is in orbit around the Earth at a distance of 385,000km and travelling at 3,200kph – the film Apollo 13 illustrated this well, showing an engineer using a slide rule to calculate a course correction for the spacecraft.
This was 1970, so it was before the era of fast computers and even the widespread use of pocket calculators. A slide rule consists of two pieces of wood or plastic that slide together and make use of the logarithmic scale to make complex mathematical calculations.
A logarithm compresses scale – the most widely used example is the indication of the severity of an earthquake, where magnitude seven would shake ten times more than magnitude six.
To make the course correction for a Moon mission, the engineer would need to do the calculation in three dimensions, adding spacetime before deciding for how long to burn the single engine.
A mistake would have resulted in the capsule burning up in the Earth’s atmosphere or spinning into space without any chance of recovery.
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