THE ESSEX SOCIETY FOR ARCHAEOLOGY & HISTORY
204
12
Doe, ‘Churchmanship’, p. 28.
13
Ibid., pp. 29–42. The evidence for this part of Plume’s
life comes from two further notebooks, Plume MS. 7
(1651–56)
and Plume MS. 25 (1657 onwards), both held
in the Plume Library, Maldon; and an account of the life
and death of Hacket which Plume wrote as the preface
for a collection of Hacket’s sermons, see Thomas Plume,
A Century of Sermons Upon Several Remarkable
Subjects: Preached by the Right Reverend Father in
God John Hacket, Late Lord Bishop of Lichfield and
Coventry
, (1675),
pp. i-liv. This eulogy to Hacket was the
only text that Plume ever published. Doe has been able
to identify twenty of the individuals discussed by Plume
in MS. 7, all but three of whom were royalists, Arminians
or defenders of episcopacy, see Doe, ‘Churchmanship’, pp.
33–9,
and Appendix 1. All pre-1800 works were published
in London unless otherwise stated.
14
For a discussion of Plume’s career in Kent, see Doe,
‘
Churchmanship’, pp. 43–58.
15
Ibid., p. 58. Apart from the four notebooks he kept and
the text he published about Hacket, Plume has left us
only some almost entirely illegible manuscript notes from
sermons he gave at Greenwich, see Plume Papers A1-50,
B1-50, C1-50, and D1-42 (held in the Plume Library,
Maldon).
16
Doe, ‘Churchmanship’, pp 54–5.
17
See endnotes 1 and 2.
18
Doe, ‘Churchmanship’, pp. 65–6.
19
J. S. Cockburn, ed.,
Calendar of assize records. Essex
indictments
.
Elizabeth I
(
London, 1978), p. 117,
indictment 669 (Chaundeler); p. 183, indictment 1044
(
Smythe).
20
Reproduced in Marion Gibson, ed.,
Early modern witches.
Witchcraft cases in contemporary writing
(
London and
New York, 2000), pp. 41–9. The Plume Library does not
contain a copy of this or any of the other sixteenth-century
pamphlets dealing with Essex witch-trials.
21
Alan Macfarlane, ‘A Tudor anthropologist: George Gifford’s
Discourse
and
Dialogue
’,
in Sydney Anglo, ed.,
The
damned art. Essays in the literature of witchcraft
(
London, 1977), pp. 140–155.
22
The last Maldon individual to be formally charged with
witchcraft was Margaret Wiseman in 1592, see Alan
Macfarlane,
Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England.
A regional and comparative study
(1970;
second edn
London, 1999), pp. 284, 297. In addition to Wiseman,
Chaundeler and Smythe, the other inhabitants of Maldon
who were formally charged with witchcraft and related
activities in the early modern period were the wife of
Nethersall in 1566 (ibid., p. 279); Humfrey Poles in 1580
(
ibid., p. 303); and Edmund Hunt in 1591 (ibid., pp.
296–7).
23
See the indictments of women tried at the Chelmsford
Assizes in 1638, 1641 and 1642, listed in C. L’Estrange Ewen,
ed.,
Witch hunting and witch trials. The indictments for
witchcraft from the records of 1373 assizes held for
the Home Circuit A.D. 1559–1736
(
London, 1929), pp.
218–21.
24
Ibid., pp. 221–31. For the best scholarly account of the East
Anglian Witch Hunts, see Malcolm Gaskill,
Witchfinders.
A seventeenth-century English tragedy
(
London, 2005).
Gaskill deals with the Essex phase of the hunts on pp. 1–9,
33–77.
25
Gaskill,
Witchfinders
,
pp. 119–31.
26
Doe suggests that Plume would have been a boarder at
the school in Chelmsford, possibly with the headmaster
Daniell Peake, and that he would have spent most of the
school year in Chelmsford, as school holidays amounted to
only five to eight weeks a year, see Doe, ‘Churchmanship’,
pp. 10–11. For Plume’s admission to Cambridge, see
endnote 8.
27
Gaskill,
Witchfinders
,
pp. 129–30. The other four
condemned women were executed in Manningtree on 1
August 1645. This mass hanging of witches in Chelmsford
was surpassed only by the execution of eighteen convicted
witches at Bury St Edmunds on 27 August 1645, see ibid.,
pp. 158–61.
28
The Cambridge phase of the East Anglian witch-hunts is
discussed in detail in Gaskill,
Witchfinders
,
pp. 190–8.
29
The only Plume Library text that makes any reference to
an event from the East Anglian witch trials is Henry More’s
Antidote Against Atheisme
,
see endnote 93.
30
MS. 30 (held in the Plume Library, Maldon), p. 17. MS.
30
was originally unpaginated; page numbers have been
pencilled in at some stage post-Plume.
31
Ibid., p. 12.
32
See S. G. Deed, ed., with the assistance of Jane Francis,
Catalogue of the Plume Library at Maldon, Essex
(
Maldon, 1959). In establishing the absence of these
texts from the books originally collected by Plume and
bequeathed to the Plume Library I have also consulted
the manuscript
List of items missing from the original
collection
(
held in the Plume Library, Maldon). An online
catalogue of the Plume Library is now also available, see
http://library.thomasplumeslibrary.co.uk/HeritageScripts/
Hapi.dll/search1. The justificatory texts written by the
witch-finders were Matthew Hopkins,
The Discovery of
Witches
(1647)
and John Stearne,
A Confirmation and
Discovery of Witchcraft
(1648).
33
See Deed,
Catalogue
,
p. 72.
34
See ibid., p. 73 (Geree); p. 74 (Gillespie); p. 80 (Hall).
35
See ibid., p. 73.
36
See endnote 21. The Plume Library does have a copy of
the 1931 facsimile edition of Gifford’s 1593
Dialogue
,
but
this is a post-Plume acquisition and was not purchased
to replace a Plume text that had gone missing from the
original collection.
37
Petchey,
Intentions
,
p. 5.
38
Ibid., pp. 4–5.
39
Hilda Grieve,
The sleepers and the shadows. Chelmsford:
a town, its people and its past. Vol. 2. From market
town to chartered borough 1608–1888
(
Chelmsford,
1994),
p. 56.
40
Ibid., p. 59.
41
Ibid., p. 60.
42
Doe, ‘Churchmanship’, pp. 14–15.
43
Both Hopkins and Stearne claimed that their expertise came
from experience, which is of course a circular argument,
see Hopkins,
Discovery
and Stearne,
Confirmation
.
44
These procedures are helpfully described by Hopkins
himself, in his attempt to defend himself against criticism,
see Hopkins,
Discovery
.