confess to anything in the hopes that they would be allowed to sleep or eat. The formal procedure would be to make the victim sit cross-legged on a stool and kept there for 24 hours, tightly bound. "Do but imagine a poor old creature, under all the weakness and infirmities of old age, set like a fool in the middle of a room, with a rabble of ten towns round about her house; then her legs tied cross, that all the weight of her body might rest upon her seat. By that means, after some hours, that the circulation of the blood would be much stopped, her sitting would be as painful as the wooden horse. Then she must continue in her pain four and twenty hours, without either sleep or meat, and since this was their ungodly way of trials, what wonder was it, if when they were weary of their lives, they confessed any tales that would please them, and many times they knew not what." Hopkins involvement in the Bury St. Edmunds witch trials was particularly notorious. He accused nearly 200 individuals of which eighteen were hung including an eighty-year-old Royalist clergyman John Lowes, who made the mistake of irritating his parishioners in Suffolk. Lowes was hung on the gallows after being accused by Hopkins of sinking a ship by magic, even though motives for doing so were never found and no one ascertained that a ship had in fact been lost on the day concerned.Hopkins' motives remain obscure since he was not a government or church official, but one theory is that he was acting out of religious zeal. Although he may have been attracted by the prospect of becoming one of the most feared men in the country and also by the fortune waiting to be had out of such revelations. Whatever his motives it appears that he wholly believed in witches, going so far as to saying that a coven had released a bear with orders to kill him. Hopkins even had a "Devil's List," a document that supposedly contained every name of every witch in England.Fortunately...
