Death was now the penalty, even for a "good" witch. As a result, famous soothsayers and "cunning folk" were prosecuted by an increasingly suspicious and vengeful population. Matthew Hopkins, the notorious and self-styled "Witch-Finder Generall" behind the deaths of at least three hundred women, cited James’ Daemonologie as a primary influence on his own work. Arguably, a bad storm off the coast of Scotland was responsible for inspiring the deaths of hundreds of people and an entire paradigm shift in the perception of British "cunning folk". An exact number of witches killed during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is hard to arrive at, but, according to court records, there were about three thousand executions in Britain, most of them in Scotland. Across the whole of Europe the figure is likely to be in the tens of thousands and includes men as well as women. Although this number is shocking enough, the attempts by some neopagans to characterise the period as "The Burning Times" — a holocaust of several million women — appear to be a well-meaning but misguided exaggeration.