THE ESSEX SOCIETY FOR ARCHAEOLOGY & HISTORY
198
by the Parliamentarian Lord Lieutenant of Essex, the Earl of
Warwick, on 17 July 1645.
25
Plume went up to Cambridge in
early 1646, so was probably still living in Chelmsford (or just
down the road from Chelmsford in Maldon) when these trials,
at which both Matthew Hopkins and John Stearne testified,
took place.
26
Nineteeen of the women were found guilty and
condemned to death: fifteen of them were hanged in what
was until this point the largest ever mass execution of witches
in England and at which Plume might even have been a
spectator in Chelmsford on 18 July 1645.
27
There was also witch-hunting activity in Cambridge
in 1646, which Plume would probably have known about
after entering Christ’s College in February of that year. Two
women accused of witchcraft (one called Goodwife Kendall)
were held in Cambridge Castle where they were visited and
questioned by two Cambridge Fellows, Henry More and Ralph
Cudworth, probably in the spring of 1646; Goodwife Kendall
was publicly executed later that year in Cambridge. Witch-
hunts also took place in the Cambridge parish of Great St
Mary’s in 1646, although the scale of the episode is unclear.
The role of Hopkins and Stearne in Cambridge is also
unclear. Stearne was aware of Goodwife Kendall’s execution,
and the Great St Mary’s hunts bore the hallmarks of the
witch-finders’ coercive investigative methods, such as the
employment of groups of women to search suspects’ bodies
for the unnatural teats from which their familiars supposedly
suckled. The witch-finders surfaced in the villages of Over
and Fen Drayton on the Cambridgeshire/Huntingdonshire
border in 1646, so it is likely that they influenced events in
Cambridge to some extent, either personally or indirectly.
Even if he did not see Hopkins and Stearne while he was at
Christ’s, Plume would have had direct contact with Henry
More (1614–87), a Fellow of Christ’s from 1639, who had
questioned Goodwife Kendall about her supposed witchcraft
in the spring of 1646.
28
Thomas Plume grew up in Maldon, with its history of
involvement in witch-trials and witchcraft debates in the late-
sixteenth century, and lived through and perhaps even had
eye-witness experience of the largest ever English witch-hunt
in its Essex and Cambridge phases. And yet the East Anglian
witch-trials are conspicuous by their absence from the
notebook Plume kept between 1646 and 1650 (MS. 30) and
from the Plume Library: it is as if Plume has air-brushed the
event out of history, with a completeness that may have been
deliberate.
29
There are a few anecdotes about witchcraft and
magic in MS. 30, but none deal with the events of 1645–7 or
the people involved in them. The legal prosecution of people
for witchcraft is clearly referred to only once in the following
short anecdote: ‘An old witch going to be burned, called to hur
son for a little wate[r] O mother (saies he) ye drier you are,
ye better you will burn’.
30
This almost certainly refers to an
execution in Scotland, where witches were burned rather than
hanged. There is one reference in MS. 30 to the Chelmsford
Assizes, but it relates to an amusing misunderstanding that
arose at the Lent Assizes in 1648, when a man was presented
for selling beer by the pound; it transpired that his house
stood by a ‘pound side’.
31
One could, of course, argue that a
book of anecdotes, which were collected primarily because
Plume deemed them entertaining, was unlikely to contain
references to witch-finders, witch-hunts, or mass hangings, as
these were deadly serious subjects. However, the East Anglian
Witch Hunt is also conspicuous by its almost complete textual
absence from the Plume Library. The Library contains none
of the pamphlets that were produced recording the trials in
Essex and Suffolk in 1645 or Huntingdon in 1646, nor does
it give shelf-room to the tracts published by Hopkins and
Stearne in justification of their actions in 1647 and 1648
respectively.
32
The most noteworthy omission from Plume’s
collection is
Select Cases of Conscience Touching Witches
and Witchcrafts
,
by John Gaule, Vicar of Great Staughton in
Huntingdonshire, published in 1646. This was a trenchant
criticism of the witch-finders for their lack of education and
authority, and of the lower orders for listening to the witch-
finders rather than their ministers, opinions with which
Plume would probably have sympathized. Moreover, the
Library contains three other texts published by Gaule in 1629,
1630
and 1649 respectively,
33
and several other casuistical
texts from around the same period, such as John Geree,
A
case of conscience resolved
(1646),
George Gillespie,
An
usefull case of conscience, discussed
(1649),
and Joseph
Hall,
Cases of Conscience
(1654).
34
The Library also contains
two of the sermon collections published by the Maldon
Puritan George Gifford
35
but neither of his two late-sixteenth-
century publications on the subject of witchcraft –
36
perhaps
another indication that Plume was deliberately playing down
the importance of the subject, even when it had a Maldon
connection. I thus disagree with those Plume scholars who
warn against the assumption that the contents of the Plume
Library provide any clear indication of its founder’s thoughts
and opinions. Bill Petchey, for example, argued that ‘the
Plate 2: Frontispiece of
The Discovery of Witches
,
by
Matthew Hopkins (1647). Plume almost certainly abhorred
the persecutory zeal and self-aggrandisement of Hopkins.