Five women were accused in Bramford; Alice Marsh, Elizabeth Richmond, Payne (male), Alice Wright, Anne Cricke.

Stearne passed through Rattlesden, Wetherden and Bacton on his way north-east. In Rattlesden, he gathered evidence against a number of suspects. 

Bacton was a community gripped by social and spiritual unrest. A group of women were accused of trading their souls to upend the village’s power dynamics and tensions between rich and poor had been sharpened by the implementation of the Poor Law.

The main accusers included Henry Prettyman (Lord of the Manor), John Marleton (Puritan rector of St Mary’s), yeoman farmers Garnham and Lockwood, and Widow Hoggard, a cattle farmer.

Also implicated in Bacton was Elizabeth Watcham, a middle-aged woman.

On a Monday evening, all four women – Bennett, Bush, Watcham and Greenliefe – were arrested. The rector, John Marleton, heard the confessions of Bennett and Bush. Greenliefe also admitted to laming Goodman Garnham’s cow and sending a swarm of lice to Master Lockwood.

Records from Chelmsford Gaol list a Mary Greenliefe who dies of bubonic plague whilst awaiting trial. It is believed that Mary and Ellen were the same person.

Stowmarket, one of Suffolk’s largest towns and a model of the Reformation, saw several witchcraft accusations during the 1640s. John Stearne himself testified at the assizes against two men of the town accused of witchcraft, but the grand jury rejected the charges.

Combs was a parish with a tradition of puritan dissent. Its minister between 1615 and 1647 was the godly Thomas Sothebie, who married the daughter of Edmund Dandy, lord of the manor of Combs. This small village also supplied migrants to New England in 1630. In 1647, a returning émigré, Richard Jennings (1616-1709), became rector of the parish until his ejection in 1662, like his predecessor he married another daughter of the Lord of the Manor.

Only the name Mary Fuller remains from these trials.

In January 1646, the magistrates at Ipswich ordered the people of Athelington, Horham and Brandeston to appear before them to ‘hear and determine their differences as to payment of rates towards charges of Witches 78 accused by the town of Branston’. Constables or churchwardens who refused to set a rate, or parishioners who refused to pay, were to be bound over.

The names of the Horham victims are unknown

More than forty years before the Hopkins trials, Stradbroke had already experienced a witch hunt with strong Puritan influences. In 1599, a local woman was executed at Bury St Edmunds, and her case was later used by supporters of the Puritan exorcist John Darrell.

By the 1630s, Stradbroke was deeply divided by religious conflict.

In the years leading up to the witch hunts, Westhorpe was a deeply divided parish shaped by intense religious conflict. From 1630 to 1636 it was dominated by the strict Puritan minister Robert Stansby, whose refusal to follow Church of England practices led to his removal. His departure caused many committed Puritans to leave the village, including families who later emigrated to New England and became involved with radical religious movements there. Those who stayed behind remained sharply divided, and resentment continued under his replacement, Samuel Scrivener, who was later removed himself during the Civil War. This long period of mistrust, moral judgement and ideological conflict created an atmosphere in which accusations, suspicion and the policing of behaviour became normal – conditions that helped pave the way for the witch accusations that would soon follow in neighbouring communities.

Little is known about Wingfield’s religious life before the witch hunts, but in the years that followed it became a centre for radical religious ideas.