My name might not mean much to you but i was always better known under my job title of The Witchfinder General.People had believed in witchcraft for centuries but King James had a strange fascination with all things associated with the occult and convinced Parliament to pass the Witchcraft Statute of 1604, which ruled witchcraft as a crime punishable by death.
As a struggling lawyer, i took up my Bible and crucifix and after being officially commissioned by Parliament to uncover and prosecute witches for a fee, i made it my mission to set about accusing as many innocent people of being witches as i could.
If anybody had an accident, a trip over a tree root for example, then they had obviously been cursed by a witch so we would go into a town, find some innocent woman, say she's a witch and have her burnt to death.
If your crops failed then it was almost certainly the fault of the strange old woman with warts who lived in the village but we always gave them a fair trial even if unfortunately proving their innocence also meant they died but if they never died then it proved that they were a witch and we would kill them anyway.
Our methods were simple, you either confessed to being a witch which resulted in burning or not
confessing to being in league with the devil which resulted in being tortured until you said you are
a witch, and then you were burnt.
Not all witches were burned though, we were not barbarians, some were starved while others were hung, beheaded, stoned to death or had their eyes gouged out and in two years i was responsible for the deaths of 300 witches, 18 in one glorious day in Bury St. Edmunds.
Things were going well until i drowned whilst demonstrating my own swimming trial but as i never floated i guess i passed, unfortunately.
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