This pamphlet is unusual and uncomfortable, because it is the accuser speaking in his own voice and expecting to be believed. Matthew Hopkins had spent roughly three years working through Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk and neighbouring counties with his associate John Stearne, at a moment when the ordinary machinery of assize justice in England had been disrupted by civil war. By 1647 there were objections, and the pamphlet is his answer, arranged as replies to queries put to him.
He defends the search of the body for the witch's mark, a place said to be insensible to pain where a familiar had fed. He defends watching, that is, keeping a suspect awake and seated for long periods while observers wait for a familiar to appear, and denies that this constitutes torture. He addresses the swimming test, in which a bound suspect was put into water on the theory that water would reject a witch, and is careful about it. He denies taking excessive money. He denies that he obtained anything by force.
Read it for what it is: not a report on witches but a self-defence by a man whose methods worked exactly as designed. Sleep deprivation over days produces hallucination and compliance. Searching a frightened elderly body for an insensitive mark will find a mole. Nothing in either technique can come back negative if the searcher is confident.