Elizabeth Clarke

It's really being done on the hoof in a very ad hoc way.

I first proceed against a woman called Elizabeth Clarke.

What happened?

The women involved in this sometimes thought to be very old, but Elizabeth Clarke is much more likely to have been a middle-aged woman, a disabled woman, a woman who had a child.

She is the first suspect who is interrogated because it is said that she cursed a local tailor during the winter of 1644 to 1645.

And that as so often happened when somebody believed that they had been or suspected that they had been bewitched, She went to a cunning woman who said whatever.

And so this is where Hopkins and Stern, first of all, make their investigations.

And that having been watched for a number of nights, Elizabeth Clark then does confess that she had given herself to the devil.

And him and John then go... on this mass accusation spree of accusing lots of people of witchcraft.

And the first person that they end up accusing is a lady called Elizabeth Clarke.

Elizabeth Clark

is this lady that lived next door to him that was part of this...

So I wanted to look at that stereotype in a bit more detail and see if I could find any disabled witches and look at their lives.

And so one person I was drawn to here was a woman named Elizabeth Clarke, who was the first person executed in the mass outbreak of witch hunting in eastern England in the mid-1640s.

initiated by the so-called witchfinder general Matthew Hopkins.

We have a number of pamphlets about Elizabeth Clarke.

None of them are written by her, but I think reading her testimony against the grain, we get a sense of what witchcraft might have meant to a disabled woman in this society.

She was someone who was socially marginalized, not just by disability, but also because she had an illegitimate child.

During one of their assemblies he overheard a witch bid her imps to go to another witch.

The other witch, whose name was thus revealed to him, Elizabeth Clarke, a poor one-legged creature, was promptly taken into custody on Hopkins' charge.

Other accusations poured in.

John Rivet had consulted a cunning woman about the illness of his wife and had learned that two neighbors were responsible.