ever sentenced to death, save by the judges of assize.

To put it in a nutshell, England was in a state of judicial
anarchy.[107] Local authorities were in control. But local authorities
had too often been against witches. The coming of Hopkins and Stearne
gave them their chance, and there was no one to say stop.

This explanation fits in well with the fact, to which we shall advert in
another chapter, that no small proportion of English witch trials took
place in towns possessing separate rights of jurisdiction. This was
especially true in the seventeenth century. The cases in Yarmouth,
King's Lynn, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Berwick, and Canterbury, are all
instances in point. Indeed, the solitary prosecution in Hopkins's own
time in which he had no hand was in one of those towns, Faversham in
Kent. There the mayor and "local jurators" sent not less than three to
the gallows.[108]

One other aspect of the Hopkins crusade deserves further attention. It
has been shown in the course of the chapter that the practice of torture
was in evidence again and again during this period. The methods were
peculiarly harrowing. At the same time they were methods which the
rationale of the witch belief justified. The theory need hardly be
repeated. It was believed that the witches, bound by a pact with the
Devil, made use of spirits that took animal forms. These imps, as they
were called, were accustomed to visit their mistress once in twenty-four
hours. If the witch, said her persecutors, could be put naked upon a
chair in the middle of the room and kept awake, the imps could not
approach her. Herein lay the supposed reasonableness of the methods in
vogue. And the authorities who were offering this excuse for their use
of torture were not loth to go further. It was, they said, necessary to
walk the creatures in order to keep them awake. It was soon discovered
that the enforced sleeplessness and the walking would after two or three
days and nights produce confessions. Stearne himself describes the
matter graphically: "For the watching," he writes, "it is not to use
violence or extremity to force them to confesse, but onely the keeping
is, first, to see whether any of their spirits or familiars come to or
neere them; for I have found that if the time be come, the spirit or
Impe so called should come, it will be either visible or invisible, if
visible, then it may be discerned by those in the Roome, if invisible,
then by the party. Secondl