What did Thomas Plume think about witchcraft?
197
because he adopted a deliberately non-zealous stance towards
the disciplining of non-conformism and immorality amongst
his parishioners and by means of the archdeacon’s court. Doe
concludes that, ‘unlikely as it seems in his controversial age,
Plume was able to pursue a non-controversial course through
many years of preaching and administration’.
15
Plume seems
to have believed that people were best persuaded of the error
of their ways by means of Christian education. He joined
the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge and
bequeathed the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in
Foreign Parts £100 in his will.
16
In addition to the Cambridge
Professorship and the Library he established in Maldon,
17
educational benefactions figured significantly in his will, with
Christ’s College, Chelmsford School, Maldon School, the Gray
Coate School at East Greenwich and children on the Isle of
Grain near Rochester all benefiting from such bequests.
18
What might Plume have known about witch-trials as a
youngster? We can never know for sure, but some speculative
suggestions are possible. His home-town of Maldon had
experienced relatively significant levels of interest in and
anxiety about witchcraft in the late-sixteenth century. Two
Maldon inhabitants, Alice Chaundeler and her daughter Ellen
Smythe, were executed for witchcraft in Chelmsford in 1574 and
1579
respectively;
19
Smythe also attained the dubious honour
of appearing in the 1579 witchcraft pamphlet,
A Detection of
damnable driftes
.
20
Late-sixteenth-century Maldon was also
noteworthy in the history of English witchcraft for the presence
from 1582 of Puritan lecturer George Gifford, who published
two works (
A Discourse of the Subtill Practises of Devilles
by Witches and Sorcerers
and
A Dialogue Concerning
Witches and Witchcraftes
)
on the subject, in 1587 and 1593
respectively.
21
No more Maldon inhabitants were formally
accused of witchcraft after 1592,
22
but memories of Gifford and
the late-sixteenth-century witch-trials doubtless survived in
the town and the young Plume may also have heard about the
women from other parts of Essex who appeared periodically on
witchcraft charges at the Assizes in Chelmsford after he started
school there in 1638 or 1639.
23
This trickle of witchcraft cases became a flood in the
summer of 1645 as a result of the witch-finding activity begun
in March in Manningtree by self-styled Puritan witch-finders
Matthew Hopkins and John Stearne, with the support of the
local JPs, Sir Harbottle Grimston and Sir Thomas Bowes.
24
Hopkins and Stearne would go on to spread these hunts
throughout the Tendring Hundred and then into Suffolk,
Norfolk, Huntingdonshire, Cambridgeshire, the Isle of Ely
and Northamptonshire: at least 100 people were executed
before the trials ended in September 1647. In the initial Essex
phase of the process twenty-nine women from the Tendring
Hundred were tried before the Chelmsford Assizes presided over
Plate 1: Interior of Thomas Plume’s Library, Maldon.
Reproduced by kind permission of the Trustees of Thomas Plume’s Library.