Catherine Murphy, coiner, was the last case, in 1789. She was strangled first and Mary Lackland may have been as well.
Mary Lackland, or Lakeland, was burned on the Cornhill on 9th September 1645 but why? The heresy laws had been repealed in 1558/9 although they were invoked later, up to 1612/3.
This execution took place at the peak of the Matthew Hopkins witch mania but those convicted of witchcraft under English law, unlike Scotland and the continent, were routinely hanged – which was not just far more comfortable for the convict but makes life easier for scientists and historians today who can analyse bones.
About twelve years ago, I attended a talk at the University of Essex by that institution’s Professor Alison Rowlands, in which she spoke about evidence towards the identification of the St. Osyth witches, before Hopkins’ time. Hopkins himself, son of a vicar of Framlingham and Great Wenham, only lived from c.1620 to 1647 but, coinciding with the legal vacuum of the Civil War, procured the hanging…
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