Mistley Walls

Stretching from Manningtree to Mistley Towers, Mistley walls is common land looked after by Mistley Parish Council. The saltings and mud flats are a vital wildlife habitat. Spring and autumn see over a thousand black-tailed godwits gathering here.

Matthew Hopkins

The activities of the Essex Witchfinders took place between 1645 and 1647. Nationally in this period, 112 people were hanged for witchcraft - 82 coming from Essex. It is likely that Matthew Hopkins and his colleague John Stearne were responsible for most of these.

In 1620, Matthew Hopkins, the son of a local minister, was born in Great Wenham, Suffolk. This was the time of the Puritans and Hopkins was brought up in a household ruled by strict obedience to God's Law and a life-long devotion to Christ.

After a period as a shipping and lawyer's clerk, Hopkins used an inheritance to buy the Thorn Inn at Mistley in 1642. This was at the time of the start of the Civil War when a lack of order in the land meant that the 'godley" felt that their orderly world was being turned upside down. There was much folklore and storytelling about evil witches that were causing catastrophe and death. Local gossip would be directed against those who were a bit "odd" or were suspected of having "cunning powers".

Matthew Hopkins met up with another staunch puritan, John Stearne, who, in March 1645 was commissioned by the local magistrates to "question" a suspected witch, Elizabeth Clarke.

Questioning was carried out with the assistance of female searchers. The task of these women was to physically examine the suspect for signs - the devil's marks. These could be warts, moles or bits of extra skin that were declared to be "teats" to give suckle to imps and familiars. These searchers would sometimes prick the marks to see if the witch felt pain. The "witch" would be interrogated for three days and nights, going without sleep, food or water.

Elizabeth Clarke broke down and named several other women including - Anne Leech, Helen Clarke, Anne West and her daughter Rebecca. The women were detained and taken to the cells in Colchester Castle for questioning. The young girl, Rebecca West, confessed and implicated her mother and others, thus saving herself from hanging.

Hopkins and Stearne continued their work and after a while 33 women were locked in the cells at Colchester Castle. There was some disquiet locally, not only about the cost to the town, but also about the awful conditions in which the accused were being held.

In July 1645, the women from the Colchester cells (four of whom had already died) were tried at the County Assizes in Chelmsford under the jurisdiction of Robert Rich, the 2nd Earl of Warwick and Lord Lieutenant of Essex. With no legal representation and among scenes of of chaos, all but one of the women were found guilty. Elizabeth Clarke and 14 of the others were hanged in Chelmsford but four were taken back to Manningtree and hanged on the village green. Nine were later reprieved.

At Bradfield I made a navigation error which cost me a kilometer! I was using the Essex County Council guide, and the junction at Bradfield fell exactly on the middle of the two pages, and had been cropped out during photo copying! Hence it looked to me as though the road went straight on until a sharp right hand bend, when it went over fields down to the railway line and the River Stour. Also, although I looked long and hard, I could not find markers at this critical junction.