The Witchfinder General (1968) is a classic of low-budget horror, but it's also a pretty accurate historical film of the English Civil War (1642-51). It's also arguably Vincent Price's best role. He, naturally, plays the Witchfinder General, a real-life figure named Matthew Hopkins as a vicious bully who knows how to needle with words and insinuations as well as with pins.
As you can see from the above description, The Witchfinder General (also known as "Edgar Allen Poe's Conqueror Worm") is not, strictly speaking, medieval. The witchcrazes were largely a Reformation phenomenon that didn't begin until the very late Middle Ages, though it had roots in ancient times (this week's book review. But the film does show why that was the case, giving a frightening and gruesome portrait of a society that has lost its original moral compass (the medieval western branch of the Church) and hasn't yet found a new one (the Enlightenment).
The film follows the three-year career (1644-7) of Hopkins as he cuts a bloody swathe of impromptu trials and lingering suspicions through the English countryside, charging hefty sums for his services all along the way. He would go to a town, fire up the townspeople's fear of witches with claims of a local infestation, then offer himself as the cure.
Hopkins operated in the power vacuum of the period as the King's and Cromwell's forces struggled for control. This explains why Hopkins was able to coopt an authority that in medieval times was supposed to belong strictly to the Church and those secular authorities working with the Church. Those who had pursued heretics and other out-groups too zealously and independently in the past (as the Flagellants did during the Black Death) could find themselves condemned for heresy and breaking the public peace. The latter was a serious offense in communal medieval society. Hopkins established his own authority by claiming to have obtained the office of "Witchfinder General" from the Puritan Parliament and by writing a book called "The Discovery of Witches", which helped to establish him as an expert of sorts on the subject.
Hopkins also employed torture in his questioning-something kept under strict restrictions during the medieval period. He used sleep deprivation (as in the Templar Trial) and "pricking" of the skin (because witches were reputed to be insensitive to pain where the Devil had marked them), as well as the "swimming" test (allegedly, witches floated while normal people did not). This type of evidence, like "spectral" visitations, was considered too subjective to hold up in medieval law. Like modern law, medieval legal codes required corroboration of evidence.
Hopkins died in 1647, probably of an illness. Legend claims that he was hung as a witch himself. In the film, he is murdered by his victims with his own torture implements. Either way, his legacy of twisting the law in witchhunts lived on after his death. Fifty years later, Puritans in the New World used similarly dodgy evidence at Salem to convict and hang witches.
