Witchfinder General (novel)  

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"Vicious, tireless, Matthew Hopkins the Witchfinder General, scourge of the ungodly, flayer of the demented, burst into 1645 like a black-winged merciless Attila, leaving behind him a trail of gibbet-hung corpses and vermin-infested gaols filled with beaten, terrified women – like bloody footprints across the length of Suffolk."--Witchfinder General (1966) by Ronald Bassett, page 139

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Witchfinder General is a 1966 novel written by Ronald Bassett. It tells the heavily fictionalized story of Matthew Hopkins, a notorious 17th-century witch-hunter.

According to historian Malcolm Gaskill, in Bassett’s novel Hopkins is a 50-ish Ipswich lawyer “who becomes a pikeman in a parliamentarian regiment to escape his creditors, and from there reinvents himself as ‘a black-winged Attila, leaving behind him a trail of gibbet-hung corpses’.” Promoted as a horror novel, the back cover blurb of the book warned that the contents were “Not for those with delicate stomachs.” The book served as the basis for Michael Reeves’s violent and controversial 1968 film of the same name, also known as The Conqueror Worm.





Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Witchfinder General (novel)" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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