Witch Hunts: Where “Fake News” Began

- They make it up.

It is so dishonest, it is so fake.

And, you know, I have come up with some pretty good names for people.

I think one of the best names is, you know, I've really started this whole fake news thing.

- Really?

Try turning back the clock by 500 years.

(clock ticking) Fake news is nothing new.

The Reformation began with Martin Luther criticizing the Roman Catholic Church for selling indulgences so that people's souls would spend less time in purgatory.

Yet Luther wrote in his Commentary on Galatians, 'When I was a child, there were many witches 'and they bewitched both cattle and men, 'especially children.'

Later, Luther also wrote, 'For where God builds a church, 'there the devil would also build a chapel.'

(uneasy music) Such falsehoods can have fatal consequences once they go viral via social networks.

Promoted by the printed word, witch-hunting spread virally through Europe during the Counter-Reformation, as competing Catholics and Protestants sought to attract new followers by demonstrating their prowess at exposing witches.

In England, the witch craze reached its horrifying climax between 1645 and 1647, here, in the Puritan heartland of Cambridgeshire.

Matthew Hopkins, known as the Witchfinder General, claimed the lives of 200 men and women here.

Clearly, Hopkins believed in his God-given mission.

But he was also on a bonus plan.

The more witches he found, the more he'd be paid.

He even wrote a book about it, a sort of beginner's guide, which included a number of surefire ways of identifying witches, like spotting a devil's mark, a mole or birthmark.

In 1647, Hopkins plied his trade on a gruesome journey from Cambridge to Ely.

He picked off witches along the way.

In May, Hopkins reached the small village of Stretham.

Here, Margaret Moore was arrested after three farmers blamed her for misfortunes they'd suffered.

She confessed to being a witch, quite probably after being tortured.

(faint crowd jeering) Accused of having surrendered her soul to the devil, she was tried and convicted.

Margaret Moore was hanged here on the green in front of Ely Cathedral.

With books like Hopkins's spreading stories of witchcraft, over the course of a century-and-a-half, some 40,000 people, mostly women, were put to death on bogus charges.

(pensive music)