Witchfinder General

1645. Cromwell's Roundheads are at war with the King's forces and the rule of law has collapsed across the English countryside. Matthew Hopkins, a soft-voiced lawyer turned self-styled 'Witchfinder General', rides Suffolk and Norfolk with his brutish assistant John Stearne, charging each village a fee to extract confessions of witchcraft and execute the accused. Their methods are torture, the pricking of moles for the devil's mark, and drowning. Their victims are mostly women.

They are summoned to the village of Brandeston, where the Catholic priest John Lowes has been denounced. Lowes's niece Sara, engaged to a young Roundhead cavalryman named Richard Marshall, tries to save her uncle by offering herself to Hopkins. Hopkins accepts. While he is away on other business, Stearne brutally rapes Sara himself. When Hopkins discovers what has happened he loses interest in her and resumes work on Lowes, who is 'swum' in the moat and then hanged.

Marshall, returning briefly from his Roundhead unit, finds Brandeston broken — Sara violated, her uncle dead. He marries her before God in the empty parish church and swears to track Hopkins and Stearne down wherever they ride. He returns to his unit, then deserts when his commanding officer privately permits him to chase his quarry.

Marshall pursues the witchfinders across the countryside as they continue their executions village to village. There is a horse chase, a near-miss; at one point Marshall is captured and Hopkins, recognising him, has him strung up and accused of witchcraft himself. He escapes.

Marshall tracks Hopkins and Stearne to a castle dungeon at Orford, where they are mid-torture of two more accused villagers. Sara is among the prisoners — taken as bait to draw him in. A vicious dungeon brawl erupts. Marshall shoots Stearne dead with a pistol. He turns on Hopkins and hacks at him over and over with an axe while Sara screams. A fellow Roundhead bursts in, sees the maimed Hopkins, and shoots him dead to spare him. Marshall, half-mad with grief, screams 'you took him from me' at his rescuer as Sara wails on. The film ends on this scream of ruin, the witchfinder dead, the soldier and his bride destroyed.