ON THE PROWL
In 1645, John Lowes, the roughly 80-year-old vicar of Brandeston in Suffolk, admitted to causing a shipwreck off the coast of Harwich in Essex. The confession was not gleefully given, but drawn from Lowes by keeping him awake for several days and nights, running him up and down a room for hours, and tying his thumbs to his toes and tossing him into a moat. It was only after such treatment that the clergyman ‘admitted’ that, with the help of six imps, he had committed “most heinous, wicked and accursed acts”.
Lowes was one of 18 people convicted of witchcraft (16 of whom were women) hanged in Bury St Edmunds in a single
