e. Hopkins charged 40 shillings for each investigation that he was asked to undertake and 9 pence for each witch he found. When the proceeding from a single town was over, the bill was usually between 15 and 23.In the space of little more than a year Hopkins brought over a hundred women, typically old, poor and unattractive, to the gallows in Essex alone. He extracted his confessions by various means such as `pricking', `swimming', and `watching and waking'. Since tortures were not allowed in England unlike the conventional manners of the continent, Hopkins had to employ tortures that shed little or no blood.`Pricking' was the job of his assistants so that no blood was ever on his hands. The "Devil's Mark" that was associated with witches supposedly when pricked would feel no pain. To insure that such a spot was found the pricking often went on for hours, especially if the victim was a good-looking young female, sometimes pricking to the bone. Hopkins however often employed a spring-loaded retractable blade on the bodkins his assistants used.Another popular test was `swimming' where the accused hands where tied to the opposite foot and then thrown into a local pond. James Is theory was that a witch who had renounced the sacred water of Baptism would never be received by the water into which they were thrown. James I so feared witches that he had his translators change to words of Exodus 22:18 from "Thou must not suffer a poisoner to live" to "a witch to live." Even though English law forbade witchfinders from using torture, local justices often turned a blind eye to the swimming of witches even condoning the practice as a useful first step to prosecution. Hopkins was notorious in the use of this ordeal excluding no one on the grounds of age or health, mental or physical.Hopkins final torture, watching and waking, was used to induce a delirium caused by sleep deprivation and starvation. In this delirium the victim would often...
