Born the son of a minister in Suffolk, England around 1620, Matthew Hopkins was a lawyer by trade, though an unsuccessful one. Unable to make a living in the city center, he moved to the small village of Manningtree and soon found a new line of work: witch hunting.

In March 1644, he announced publicly that there were witches practicing black magic in the forest near his home and that he had seen them with his own eyes. After naming an elderly, one-legged woman by the name of Elizabeth Clark as his first suspect, she arrested and strip searched, whereupon the discovery of a third nipple was deemed to be a devil’s mark – scarified evidence of copulation with Satan himself.

Hopkins obtained a confession from Clarke in short order, then went about rousting out and arresting thirty-two more women from in and around Manningtree. Though four died during their internment, the remaining twenty-eight were put on trial before a specially convened tribunal in the neighboring hamlet of Chelmsford. Of those tried, fourteen were hanged and eight remained in jail and officially under investigation. Though Hopkins himself was the chief witness at the trials, he often did not wait to hear the verdicts—word of his skill at locating witches had spread and put his services at great demand throughout England.

Over the next year, Hopkins, now calling himself by the unofficial title of Witch-Finder General, and his four assistants traveled to towns such as Essex, Aldeburgh and Stowmarket — sometimes at the behest of the village elders and sometimes just to see what would turn up. In but one year, Hopkins’s investigations would lead several hundred men and women to the gallows on charges of death by enchantment and collusion with evil spirits. And Hopkins was paid for each and every one of them: in 1645 alone, he is said have earned the then-extravagant sum of £1000 for his work.

His fortunes changed in April of 1646, however, when a clergyman named John Gaule circulated a widely read pamphlet, Select Cases of Conscience, that denounced Hopkins’s methods as torture. Though the physical torment of witches was explicitly banned under English law, Hopkins routinely employed methods such as sleep deprivation and “swimming” – the notorious practice of casting suspected witches into water, the logic goes, where only the guilty float and the innocent sink – in his interrogations.

After two years of notoriety, Hopkins found himself the subject of a public backlash. One apocryphal account even tells an armed mob subjecting him to the “swimming” test, as if to prove a point. Nonetheless, Hopkins withdrew from witch hunting and retired to Manningtree, where he died of tuberculosis the following the summer.

The Reverend Montague Summers, re-examining Hopkins’s legacy centuries later, wrote that the self-proclaimed Witch-Finder General’s insincerity “made his name stink in men’s nostrils…as the foulest of foul parasites, an obscene bird of prey of the tribe of Judas and Cain.”

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