e time about the beginning of June he must have gone to
Norfolk. Before the twenty-sixth of July twenty witches had been
executed in that county.[46] None of the details of these trials have
been left us. From the rapidity with which they were carried to
completion we may feel fairly certain that the justices of the peace,
seeing no probability of assize sessions in the near future, went ahead
to try cases on their own initiative.[47] On the fifteenth of August the
corporation of Great Yarmouth, at the southern extremity of the Norfolk
coast line, voted to send for Mr. Hopkins, and that he should have his
fee and allowance for his pains,[48] "as he hath in other places." He
came at two different times, once in September and once in December.
Probably the burden of the work was turned over to the four female
assistants, who were granted a shilling a day apiece.[49] Six women were
condemned, one of whom was respited.[50] Later three other women and one
man were indicted, but by this time the furor against them seems to
have abated, and they probably went free.[51]

Hopkins's further course can be traced with some degree of certainty.
From Yarmouth he probably went to Ipswich, where Mother Lakeland was
burned on September 9 at the instance of the justices of the peace.[52]
Mother Lakeland's death by burning is the second instance we have,
during the Hopkins panic,[53] of this form of sentence. It is explained
by the fact that it was the law in England to burn women who murdered
their husbands. The chief charge against Mother Lakeland, who, by the
way, was a woman quite above the class from which witches were
ordinarily recruited,[54] was that she had bewitched her husband to
death.[55] The crime was "petty treason."

It is not a wild guess that Hopkins paused long enough in his active
career to write an account of the affair, so well were his principles of
detection presented in a pamphlet soon issued from a London press.[56]
But, at any rate, before Mother Lakeland had been burned he was on his
way to Aldeburgh, where he was already at work on the eighth of
September collecting evidence.[57] Here also he had an assistant, Goody
Phillips, who no doubt continued the work after he left. He was back
again in Aldeburgh on the twentieth of December and the seventh of
January, and the grand result of his work was summarized in the brief
account: "Paid ... eleven shillings for hanging seven witches."[58]

From Aldeburgh, Hopkin