Folklore of Yorkshire E-Book

Kai Roberts

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Folklore
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 352

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

The beautiful county of Yorkshire is the largest in England, and yet still possesses a strong and cohesive regional identity. Built on centuries of shared tradition, a characteristic body of folklore has thrived and endured well into the present day. Folklore of Yorkshire chronicles such beliefs throughout the whole county, identifying distinctive common themes, placing them in their historical context and considering their social and psychological function. You'll discover Yorkshire's holy wells and buried treasure, its boggarts, Black Dogs and fairies, and the legends behind the county's stunning landscape. This fully illustrated book shows how the customs of the past have influenced the ways of today, whilst also revealing something about the nature of folklore itself, both for the tradition-bearers and those who collect it.

Leseprobe

For Miss Kathryn Adelaide Wilson (of the Moors).

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks to John Billingsley, Dr David Clarke, Jonathan Dow, Anna O’Loughlin, Tania Poole, Matilda Richards, Andy Roberts, Helen Roberts, Phil Roper and John Warren.

CONTENTS

Title

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Introduction

one

Witches and Cunning Folk

two

Charms and Talismans

three

Dragons and Serpents

four

Giants

five

Fairy Lore

six

The Devil

seven

Phantom Hounds

eight

Tutelary Spirits

nine

Ghosts

ten

Water Lore

eleven

Secret Tunnels and Buried Treasure

twelve

Robin Hood

thirteen

Calendar Customs and the Ritual Year

Bibliography

Copyright

INTRODUCTION

In the present day, two questions may naturally arise when a book such as this is encountered: what is ‘folklore’, and what value does it have? When the word was first coined by W.J. Thoms in 1846, the answers were relatively easy. Folklore was an attempt to record, systematise and preserve what had previously been referred to as ‘popular antiquities’ – the beliefs and practices of the ‘folk’; a poorly educated and primarily rural class whose indigenous, insular culture was perceived as threatened by the rapid advance of industrialisation and urbanisation. Such people were typically regarded as quite separate from the refined, scholarly collectors, and, as the historian E.P. Thompson so scathingly put it, ‘Folklore in England is largely a literary record of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century survivals, recorded by parsons and by genteel antiquarians regarding them across a gulf of class condescension.’

Today, with the advent of universal education, global communications, mass media and a mobile population, it is impossible to regard the ‘folk’ in such a detached, homogenous manner – if it was ever truly possible in the first place. We are all immersed in popular culture and we are all members of many social groups over the course of our lives; whether those groups be determined by generation, geography, ethnicity, occupation, religion, hobby or economic status. The boundaries are permeable, flexible and almost impossible to identify. As a result, the term ‘folklore’ increasingly looks anachronistic and yet somehow it survives; for no matter how nebulous the concept might be, it still identifies an area of knowledge worthy of study in its own right and too often overlooked by its close cousins, social history and ethnography.

The best definition of folklore we can find today comes from Jacqueline Simpson and Steve Roud: ‘It includes whatever is voluntarily and informally communicated, created or done jointly by members of a group (of any size, age, or social and educational level) … The essential criterion is the presence of a group whose joint sense of what is right and appropriate shapes the story, performance or custom – not the rules and teachings of any official body.’ The value of studying such material lies not just in preserving it but in learning to recognise what counts as folklore, because often it provides a rare insight into the hidden assumptions and unrecognised priorities of the culture that spawned it; whilst historically, it offers a valuable alternative narrative to the ‘authorised’ or ‘official’ accounts supplied by the hegemonic interests in that society.

Of course, this book does not have quite such high ambitions. In the history of folklore studies, the county folklore collection has been something of an institution. In the early days of the discipline, they provided a great deal of the material with which folklorists subsequently worked and whilst they have slowly calcified into a product primarily marketed to tourists, they remain one of the primary sources of folkloric material available to a general readership. This work undoubtedly falls into the latter category, but whilst it does not aim for originality or innovation, it will hopefully do more than merely repeat material which has been printed in such collections a hundred times before without context or analysis. Folklore is something that once possessed meaning for those who lived with it and it should not be reduced to mere whimsy or entertainment.

An entrenched problem with county folklore collections, dating back to the very first examples, has been their failure to properly consider the environment in which it was typically transmitted and the significance it was afforded by those who communicated it. Either the original collector imposed his own beliefs on the material or failed to regard it as anything more than a novelty. As Gillian Bennett complains, ‘For the most part, no great care was taken to make any sort of sense of these stories. They were simply “stories” and not expected to make sense: they were curiosities rather than realities. There was no attempt to put them in context either: we do not know when or why or how or to whom the legends were told … Such accounts do not tell us what … traditions meant to the informant: they only tell us what they meant to the collectors – which was precisely nothing.’

A common difficulty with such collections is that they were often rooted in the folkloric theory of the nineteenth century. Influenced by the reductive academic climate of the day, early folklorists took inspiration from the emerging theory of evolution and attempted to apply it their own material. The result was the hypothesis of ‘survivals’, which claimed that whilst human history and culture was often a progressive, dynamic process, some features remained relatively static: these remnants gradually lost their original function and significance to become ‘folklore’, preserved in debased form by the collective memory of a conservative rural working class. The early folklorists believed that by studying these relics, it was possible to reconstruct the religious belief of pre-Christian societies.

As a result of this assumption, English folklore studies developed an obsession with continuity. For something to be regarded as ‘folklore’, it was thought to have remained unchanged for countless centuries and be ‘fixed’ so that no further collection was necessary. The same old stories were reprinted again and again in folklore anthologies, under the mistaken impression that folklore never moved on; whilst commentaries on this material never considered the unique circumstances which might have produced an individual legend or custom, nor the needs they might have fulfilled. It is an error which has been repeated by county folklore collections down the ages, and although academic folklore studies have advanced considerably in the last fifty years, new ways of thinking about the subject have rarely filtered through to popular books on the subject.

The truth is, however, that even the most insular, rural populations were rarely as conservative as the early folklorists believed. New traditions often developed in response to changing populations and circumstances, and even the oldest surviving customs underwent constant revision over the centuries. Some continuity does exist, but it was a dynamic rather than a static process, and the emphasis needs to be placed on how and why such development occurs. Similarly, the turnover of some traditions is very rapid indeed and a great deal of what is popularly thought of as ‘folklore’ is merely the folklore of the nineteenth century, preserved by uncritical repetition in printed texts over the last 150 years. Much of this material has not been relevant since it was first collected and bears scant resemblance to the ‘folklore’ that circulates in modern society. Yet we are so immersed in the folklore of our own age, that often we do not even recognise it.

A truly twenty-first century ‘Folklore of Yorkshire’ would include such topics as ufology, conspiracy theories, urban legends, aliens, big cats, email rumours and more, but this is not that book. Such a project would probably take a lifetime of collection to compile and owing to the dynamic nature of the phenomena it dealt with, would be obsolete long before it was finished. This work can only ever be A Folklore of Yorkshire – no definitive article – and one that will primarily deal with historical material at that. But whilst it will repeat some familiar legends and hopefully bring one or two gleaned from obscure sources to a larger audience, its purpose is not just to repeat stories without any reference to their wider meaning. Instead, the material will be treated as the vehicle by which centuries of Yorkshire folk expressed their hopes, fears and beliefs in response to ever-changing and diverse circumstances – a dynamic, creative process which continues today.

Kai Roberts, 2013

ONE

WITCHESAND CUNNINGFOLK

It is an incongruity often observed that the most acute phase of witch hysteria in England occurred not in the Middle Ages – commonly decried as the zenith of scientific ignorance and superstition – but in the first half of the seventeenth century, even as the first seeds of the Enlightenment were being sown. There is ample evidence to suggest that Yorkshire was as much embroiled in the witch craze as any other region, but whilst there were undoubtedly a number of associated executions in the county, there were no episodes as egregious as the Pendle Witch Trials which gripped neighbouring Lancashire in 1612, or ‘Witchfinder General’, Matthew Hopkins’ reign of terror in East Anglia from 1644 to 1646.

Yorkshire’s most famous witch-hunt occurred around Washburndale in 1621 and was amply documented by its instigator in the pamphlet ‘A Discourse on Witchcraft as it was acted in the family of Mr. Edward Fairfax of Fewston in the County of York in the year 1621 AD’. Fairfax was an accomplished writer whose work was praised by future Poet Laureate John Dryden, but it seems that he possessed a misanthropic disposition which often brought him into conflict with his less educated neighbours after he inherited Newhall at Fewston (now submerged beneath Swinsty Reservoir) from his father in 1600. His contempt for them is clear throughout his work: ‘Such a wild place,’ he writes, ‘Such rude people upon whose ignorance God have mercy!’

Doubtless the locals regarded Fairfax with similar disdain, and, by 1621, tensions erupted in accusations of witchcraft. Fairfax charged eight Fewston women with working enchantments on his three daughters, Ellen, Elizabeth and Ann: he claimed they had caused the girls to suffer from fits, trances, ‘irrational behaviour’ and, on one occasion, temporary blindness. Meanwhile, every minor misfortune the family suffered, Fairfax did not hesitate to attribute to witchcraft. For instance, when Elizabeth fell from an insecure haymow and injured herself, he perceived it to be the work of Bess Fletcher, who was watching the child at the time. His suspicions were only confirmed when Ann died of natural causes during infancy.

Fairfax also claimed to have evidence of the alleged witches’ malefic intent. Supposedly an old widow named Margaret Thorpe had been seen casting images of his daughters into a stream; lamenting if they floated, but cheering if they sank. Perhaps most fancifully, he accused the women of abducting his daughters and forcing them to attend a Midsummer’s Eve bonfire on the surrounding moors – a superstitious and possibly pagan survival which to Fairfax’s Puritanical mind was identical with diabolism. However, to the credit of the local authorities – including Fewston’s vicar, Henry Greaves – all such ‘evidence’ was dismissed as circumstantial or hearsay and Fairfax twice failed to have the women convicted at York Assizes. Following their release, the women held a great celebration in Timble Gill, over which Fairfax insisted the Devil himself had presided.

Contrary to popular belief, this is how most witch trials concluded. Although accusations of witchcraft were rife in the seventeenth century, only 30 per cent of those indicted were actually convicted. The spate of such allegations around that time was largely due to familiar social tensions heightened by the febrile religious atmosphere that followed the Reformation. As social historian Keith Thomas notes, whilst the Reformation had aimed to purge Christianity of superstitious practices, it actually heightened superstitious dread amongst the majority of the population. Protestantism emphasised the power of the Devil, yet by prohibiting the characteristically Catholic rite of exorcism, simultaneously removed the ordinary person’s best defence against his work. As such, paranoia increased but it could only now be defused through the secular courts rather than harmless religious ritual.

The Reformation also brought about a change in attitude towards the poor. Whilst Catholicism had stressed the religious importance of almsgiving through the Middle Ages, Protestantism was much more individualistic and exalted the idea of self-reliance. This exacerbated social conflict, increasing ill-feeling on both sides of the divide: the poor resented the new mercantile class for their reluctance to give alms, whilst the merchants resented the poor for begging for them. The potential consequence of this dynamic can be seen in the Heptonstall witch trial of 1646. In the week before Michaelmas, Elizabeth Crossley had been refused alms at the house of Henry Cockroft and left muttering imprecations. Thus, when Cockroft’s infant son began to suffer fits two nights later, from which he eventually died, the finger of blame was pointed straight at Crossley.

But whilst Elizabeth Crossley was probably just an innocent beggar with a temper, the issue was compounded by the fact that some outsiders who were otherwise ostracised by the community exploited their reputation for witchcraft in order to gain some modicum of deference from their neighbours. Their perceived power was the art of ‘maleficium’ – causing harm to people or property through the use of sorcery. It was essentially ‘black magic’, as opposed to the ‘white magic’ practiced by ‘wise’ men and women, whose skills were primarily directed towards healing, finding lost items and defence against maleficium. Yet when the charms of such people failed – for instance, if a potion they had administered to cure an illness was coincidentally followed by the death of the patient – it was easy for such people to be accused of maleficium themselves.

Gatherley Moor Witch Tables.

Furthermore, there is evidence to suggest that rare individuals may have offered malefic services. In the nineteenth century, two lead tablets dated to 1575 were found buried in a tumulus on Gatherley Moor. They were described as ‘quadrangular with several planetary marks, rude scratches and an inscription on one side; and on the other are figures set in arithmetical proportion from 1 to 81 and so disposed in parallel and equal ranks, that the sum of each row, as well diagonally and horizontally as perpendicularly is equal to 369.’ The inscription states that these ‘witch tables’ were spells to cause the Philips family to flee Richmondshire or forever fail to prosper there and as they were signed by John Philips, this unambiguous act of maleficium must have arisen from a family dispute, possibly over the terms of a will.

By the end of the seventeenth century, belief in witchcraft was dying out amongst the educated classes. The last executions for the ‘crime’ occurred in Exeter in 1682 and its definition was revised by the 1735 Witchcraft Act, so that the offence became one of fraud rather than harmful intent. In Yorkshire, the trend was no different: even evangelically religious sources were growing sceptical about such accusations and in May 1683, the radical nonconformist preacher, Reverend Oliver Heywood, scathingly dismissed the concerns of a member of his Calderdale congregation who feared her twelve-year-old son had been bewitched. Yet despite the increasingly enlightened attitudes of learned authorities, amongst the general population fear of witchcraft persisted well into the nineteenth century and Victorian folklorists recorded countless such narratives in their county collections.

North Yorkshire was blessed with two prodigious collectors of witch lore during this period: Reverend J.C. Atkinson of Danby and Richard Blakeborough of Ripon, whose books provide a relatively reliable and comprehensive survey of witch belief in rural North Yorkshire at the time. Fear of maleficium causing injury to individuals does not seem to have been as rife as it was during the seventeenth century, doubtless helped by improved understanding of the causes of illness. Nonetheless, witches were still widely credited with the ability to adversely affect somebody’s fortune and their livelihood. Equally, they were still identified with outsiders in the community, especially the friendless or destitute, who have always acted as scapegoats for any misfortune and were perceived to leech on the prosperity of the more industrious.

It is, therefore, not surprising that one of the principle crimes witches were imagined to commit was milk-stealing. In rural communities, dairy-farming was one of the cornerstones of the private economy and the subsistence of a household greatly depended upon its herd, so when the cows produced less than their expected yield for natural reasons such as infertility or mastitis, a scapegoat was required. Moreover, as J.C. Atkinson observes, prior to the passing of the Enclosure Acts between 1750 and 1860, livestock was grazed on common pasture and milk-stealing was a genuine problem which resulted in numerous court actions. Doubtless if a culprit could not be identified, then blame would be projected onto a witch.

Witches were ascribed the power of shape-shifting and supposed to go about their milk-stealing business in a variety of animal guises. Nancy Newgill of Broughton, for instance, not only changed into the form of a hedgehog and sucked the milk from cows’ udders overnight; she also had power over other hedgehogs in the district to encourage them to do the same. Meanwhile, shortly after the herd belonging to a farmer at Alcomden above Calderdale ran dry, he woke in the night to find a strange black cat watching him for the end of his bed. He threw a knife at the intruder and struck its foreleg, which caused it to scamper away. The following day a neighbour remarked that he had seen old Sally Walton of Clough Foot near Widdop with her arm in a sling, and the farmer understood who had been bewitching his cattle in the night.

However, the milk-stealing, shape-shifting witch was most commonly associated with the hare. Like hedgehogs, hares are solitary, nocturnal feeding animals which might often have been seen in pastures after dark; unlike hedgehogs, they have a connection with magic extending into the pre-Christian past and an uncanny countenance that can disarm many. When a farmer in Commondale near Guisborough feared that a witch named ‘Au’d Molly’ was milking his cattle dry, he received advice to watch overnight in the field and carry a shotgun loaded with silver bullets, for nothing else could disable such a supernatural creature. But upon its arrival in the field, the witch-hare stalked up to the farmer and gave him such a stare with its piercing eyes that he turned heel and fled!

Sometimes the hare is not the witch herself but her familiar, albeit one with which the sorcerer is so intimately connected that injury to it has a corresponding effect on its mistress. This was the case at Eskdale where a drove of hares were causing great mischief by feeding on the saplings in a new plantation. The steward managed to cull them all except for one, which continued to evade both hound and bullet; he was subsequently advised to use silver slugs in his gun and with this contingency he finally succeeded in putting an end to the beast. At that moment, some distance away, an old woman with an evil reputation flung up her hands as she was carding wool and cried, ‘They have shot my familiar spirit!’ whereupon she fell to the floor dead.

The witch does not seem to have taken the form of a hare only to steal milk; in many tales, she seems to adopt such a guise for the sheer pleasure of it. In an archetypal narrative from Westerdale on the North York Moors, a party of hare-coursers encounter a witch simply known as ‘Nanny’. She asks them how their sport is going and when the men reply that they haven’t seen a single hare all day, she tells them of a field in which they might find just such an animal, one bound to give them a fine chase. They must only promise that they will not hunt it with a black dog. All members of the party agree to this stipulation and Nanny proceeds to tell them where this superior specimen of a leporid can be found.

Sure enough, the party find the hare in the place Nanny described, and they pursue it the length and breadth of the dale, never gaining upon it. But just as they are once more drawing near to the point where they started, a stray black dog joins the chase. It proves fleeter than any of their hounds and so little by little, it closes in on the hare until they reach the vicinity of Nanny’s cottage. The hare makes straight for a cavity in the cottage walls but squeezes through it just a little too late, as the black dog manages to bite a chunk out of the hare’s flank before it can get fully into the hole. The party of coursers is mortified: they know and fear Nanny’s reputation, and are concerned about how she will react if she finds out that her injunction was broken, so they enter her cottage to explain. Within, they find Nanny lying on her bed, bleeding profusely from a wound on her haunch.

The tale is told of many witches in several different localities, such as Peg Humphreys of Bilsdale or Peggy Flaunders of Marske-by-the-Sea. Indeed, it is a classic example of a migratory legend known throughout the British Isles and much of northern Europe, the motif now categorised by folklorists as ‘The Witch Who Was Hurt’. In Yorkshire, there are some minor local variations worth mentioning. For instance, the witch Abigail Craister, who dwelled in a cave on Black Hambleton, is said to have evaded pursuit by leaping from Whitestone Cliff into the waters of Gormire Lake below and re-emerged from a sinkhole some nine miles away. Her ghost is thought to haunt the vicinity of the lake still and can be seen riding over Kilburn on her broomstick.

Gormire Lake, haunted by the ghost of the witch Abigail Craister. (Kai Roberts)

However, the most developed and instructive version of the legend is told about Lady Sybil of Bearnshaw Tower in Cliviger, West Yorkshire. As a wealthy heiress, Lady Sybil was widely courted by suitors keen to lay their hands on her estates but unfortunately for them, Sybil was fond of her own company and her position was secure enough to rebut them all. Despite her repeated rejections, one suitor was more persistent than the rest: William Towneley was his name and he hailed from Hapton, near Burnley in Lancashire. Seeking to improve his chances, he sought advice from Mother Helston, a local wise-woman who intimated that she and Lady Sybil had much in common and rather than provide William with a simple love charm, directed him to go hunting around Thieveley Pike on All Hallows’ Eve.

William followed Mother Helston’s advice and sure enough he encountered a white doe of rare pedigree, which proceeded to run his hounds ragged across the moor. Eventually, they cornered the beast at a precipitous projection of rock known locally as Eagle Crag and William was able to slip a silk leash around its neck, as specified by the wise-woman. He led the doe back to the stables of his family seat at Hapton and the following morning was amazed to discover Lady Sybil sat where he had left it, with the silk leash still tied around her neck. With her secret discovered and prejudice against witchcraft being what it was, Lady Sybil was left with no option but to assent to William’s proposal of marriage, lest he reveal her true nature.

Although Sybil initially agreed to renounce her sorcerous ways for the sake of the marriage, she soon grew restless and yearned to run wild over the lonely hills around her old home once more. Increasingly, William found her missing from their bed during the night as she roamed the Cliviger district in the guise of a white cat. This particular feline, however, was not much liked in the neighbourhood as it riled up the other mousers and was often caught stealing milk from the dairy. One evening, a local miller decided to put an end to its visits and told his son to lay in wait for the animal overnight. When the cat finally arrived, the boy pounced; but whilst he managed to cut off one of its paws in the struggle, it escaped before he had the chance to kill it, leaving its severed paw behind.

Eagle Crag above Cliviger, burial place of Lady Sybil. (Kai Roberts)

The following morning, William Towneley found his wife confined to her bed-chamber with a terrible fever and blood-soaked sheets. Only when a mystified miller arrived from Cliviger, bearing a severed female hand with a distinctive ring on one of its fingers, did he understand what had occurred. Fortunately, although she was weak from loss of blood, Lady Sybil was able to use her magical art to reattach the appendage. Nonetheless, she bore an ugly red circle around her wrist thereafter and never again went roving the moors. She died barely a year after the event and as her witchery was now widely known, she was refused burial in consecrated ground. Instead, she was interred at the foot of Eagle Crag and it is said that on Halloween, a spectral doe pursued by phantom hounds can be seen bounding across the moors thereabouts.

It seems especially clear from the Cliviger version of ‘The Witch Who Was Hurt’ legend that the motif was an expression of the gender politics of its age. In narratives where the witch adopts an animal guise simply for the joy of it, her crime is not maleficium but daring to exhibit independence. Such tales symbolise the forcible ‘taming’ of headstrong, autonomous women by patriarchal forces, threatening the unfortunate consequences which may befall such individuals if they fail to adhere to gender norms and submit to male authority, whether it be social opprobrium or physical injury. Although it is simplistic to say that all fear of witchcraft arose from historical misogynistic attitudes, ‘The Witch Who Was Hurt’ undoubtedly displays profound hostility towards the possibility of liberated women.

There is no evidence for the existence of any Lady Sybil at Bearnshaw Tower, but often such migratory legends were attached to historical individuals for whom this must have represented a considerable danger. Nan Hardwick was a Danby woman with a reputation for witchcraft and it was her habit to spend evenings sat amongst the gorse on a bank about a mile from her cottage. No reason is given for her behaviour but it was regarded as ‘aberrant’ by the local community and as such, young men used to play a game they called ‘Hunt Auld Nan Hardwick’. It is said that on an evening in Danby her clogged feet were often heard rattling along the causey from the gorse bank to her home, with a pack of baying hounds and jeering youths in hot pursuit.

Nor were the acts attributed to such women always so benign as shape-shifting, and many were accused of maleficium in local legend. Peggy Flaunders of Marske-by-the-Sea, who died in 1835 aged eighty-five, was believed to hold a grudge against a local farmer named Tom Pearson and when all his cattle died, she was blamed for bewitching them. Pearson was ruined and forced to sell his land to a cousin who had always been civil to Peggy. It is said that on the morning he took possession of the farm, she walked past and wished him well, before performing a curious ritual: she turned around three times, threw her cloak on the ground and leapt over it whilst muttering some incantation. The farm proceeded to prosper under its new owner.

A more sinister story is told of Auld Nanny of Ayrton, who according to Richard Blakeborough lived around the district sometime between 1750 and 1780. Mary Longstaffe of Stokesley was in Kildale to nurse her unwell cousin, Martha Sokeld and one day noticed the ill-favoured old woman hobbling towards her. To avoid conversation, Mary feigned picking some flowers from the verge but unfortunately for both Mary and her cousin, Nanny noticed this snub and took offence. The alleged witch said she would not forget the insult, banged the ground thrice with her stick and disappeared. As Mary was wearing a sprig of rowan at the time, which provided protection from witch-work, she thought little of the encounter and a few days later when her cousin had regained her health, she returned to her home in Stokesley.

Several nights later, Mary was surprised when Martha turned up at her home. She claimed to have taken a turn for the worse and would not live much longer, so she was travelling to Northallerton to bid farewell to her sister. She asked Martha if she could stay with her in Stokesley for the night before journeying on the following day. Mary agreed, and Martha sent her out for some items she wanted whilst she napped. Martha seemed so eager to be rid of her that Mary grew uneasy and returned before her time to spy through the window. To her horror, she saw her kinswoman dropping powders into a pan over the fire whilst muttering some incantation, at which point Mary realised that it was not Martha but Nanny in her cousin’s guise. She rushed and struck Nanny with a Bible, causing the witch to throw over the pan and flee. The next day, news came from Kildale that Martha Sokeld’s body had been found on the moors, three days dead.

Whilst Mary Longstaffe was fortunate enough to have interrupted the spell-casting before it could take effect, others were not so lucky and many stories suggest that it required considerable effort to ward off the effects of maleficium once it had been directed at them. Typically the blood of the witch was needed to neutralise the spell, which was not an easy thing to procure: often it had to be taken whilst the witch was in animal guise and even then certain procedures had to be followed before the creature could be caught. In some cases, these measures were familiar. For example, when the squire of Goathland called on Nanny Pearson to bewitch his daughter to prevent her eloping with a suitor of whom he disapproved, a wise-man advised the young lover to track the witch as a hare and shoot it with silver bullets to obtain the essential ingredient for a counter-spell.

In other instances, the instructions were more opaque. The folklorist William Henderson records that a Halifax man charged with obtaining blood from a local witch named Auld Betty was told to bake a cake before the fire of the household she was enchanting. This he did, and at length he noticed a black cat sitting by the fire, although he did not see or hear it enter. He was surprised to hear a voice from the cat purr ‘Cake burns’ to which he replied, ‘Turn it then.’ After a little while, the cat made the same complaint and the witch-catcher gave the same answer. This exchanged went on again and again, until the man grew so frustrated that he forgot that he had been warned against uttering any holy names in the witch’s presence and he responded with an oath. At the sound of this, the cat mewled and sprang up the chimney with the witch-catcher in hot pursuit. He emerged badly mauled but managed to wound the animal with a table fork and the bewitchment was undone.

A belief in the efficacy of the witch’s blood in counter-spells was evidently deeply ingrained in the Calderdale region. As late as 1904, a local antiquary noted that people believed that victims of witchcraft only needed to scratch their tormentor’s back with a pin to break her hold over them. Two and a half centuries earlier, the Heptonstall witch trial intimated similar superstitions were held. It records that the minister of Cross Stones Chapel told Daniel Briggs of Wadsworth that if he wished to break the suspected bewitchment of a neighbour’s child, if anybody crossed his path on his way home, he should ‘maul them in the head’. Briggs did in fact meet Elizabeth Crossley on his return journey, who suspiciously inquired after the health of the infant; but whilst Briggs was too afraid to act himself, the following day his maid attacked Crossley with a candlestick.

In many cases, it was the local wise-man or wise-woman who provided counsel when it came to combating maleficium. These individuals were sometimes referred to as ‘cunning folk’, derived from the Old English ‘cunna’ meaning ‘to know’ and indeed, knowledge was their most successful commodity. Such people were often literate in a widely uneducated society and tended to be well versed in arts such as astrology and herbalism. Yet cunning folk possessed an ambivalent reputation. Whilst their learned advice was often widely sought after, they were still regarded as being only a step away from witches themselves and should relations with a client turn sour, their position was tenuous. Equally, many stories circulated to suggest that they should not be trifled with – possibly propagated by the cunning folk themselves.

In some respects, people were right to fear cunning folk as the awe in which they were held provided the perfect cloak for nefarious deeds and whilst they may not have practiced maleficium through sorcery, they undoubtedly practiced it through more orthodox means. The infamous example here is Mary Bateman of Leeds, who used her reputation as a wise-woman to poison at least three clients and obtain their property. She was finally caught when the coroner investigating the death of her third victim found evidence of arsenic in the deceased’s stomach and with the help of the woman’s husband entrapped Bateman, who was passing off arsenic-laced concoctions as healing potions. Bateman was executed on 20 March 1809 and such was her reputation as a witch, her skin was tanned and her tongue pickled to be sold to those who wished to exploit their supposed supernatural power.

On the other hand, some cunning folk were certainly held in great esteem and John Wrightson, known as the Wise Man of Stokesley, was one such example. Wrightson died in 1840, but remembrances collected later by J.C. Atkinson and Richard Blakeborough suggest he was favourably regarded by all who’d had dealings with him. His methods seem to have been a potent mix of showmanship, charlatanry, herbalism and canny insight into human nature – he maintained a network of informants to keep him apprised of local gossip and like many modern fortune-tellers, he was probably adept at cold-reading. Wrightson also undoubtedly cultivated his image, claiming to be the seventh son of a seventh son and receiving clients in a room full of esoteric paraphernalia whilst wearing a long gown and strange headgear.

Numerous stories about Wrightson’s powers have been recorded. Some are perfectly explicable – such as his successful diagnosis of tumour in a cow – whilst others have probably been exaggerated to enhance his reputation, especially those which emphasise his powers of precognition and mesmerism. One tale relates that as two young men were passing close to his house, they thought to have a little fun with Wrightson and so called to see him. He received them warmly enough, told them to take seats by the fire and proceeded to engage them in conversation about all manner of topics, during which time he placed log after log on the hearth. After a while, the two men grew uncomfortably hot, but when they tried to move away from the fire, they found themselves paralysed in their seats. They endured this ordeal for some time before Wrightson decided they had learnt their lesson and sent the pair away with a reprimand for their impudence in thinking they could toy with him.

Another credited with second sight was the Wise Woman of Littondale, who lived in a rundown cottage near Arncliffe filled with black cats and pictures of Merlin, Michael Scott and Nostradamus. When a sceptic visited her to seek proof of her power, she is said to have shown him a vision of one of his friends in her scrying vessel and told him to wait alone at Arncliffe Bridge at midnight. The man followed her instructions and at the foretold hour heard a low moan and saw a great disturbance in the waters below. As he returned home, he encountered a great black dog which vanished as mysteriously as it had appeared. The following day this man returned to the Wise Woman to ask the meaning of these things. She told him that the dog he’d seen was a barguest and despite his scepticism, the man knew such an encounter portended death. Later in the day, he was told that the friend whose image he’d seen in the scrying glass had committed suicide from Arncliffe Bridge that very morning.

If the famed Mother Shipton of Knaresborough was a historical figure, it is likely that her reputation during her lifetime was as a cunning-woman with powers of precognition. Her alleged prophecies were almost certainly fabricated by later writers in order to feed the seventeenth-century appetite for such material, but it is possible that they were inspired by an older oral tradition. In 1684, Richard Head recorded biographical details, claiming that she was born Ursula Southiel around 1488 in a cave on the banks of the River Nidd and adopted the name Mother Shipton following her marriage to Toby Shipton in 1521. However, as she is supposed to have died in 1561 and documentary record of her name does not appear until the first publication of her supposed prophecies in 1642, the evidence for her historical existence is thin.

Nonetheless, between the seventeenth and nineteenth century, her reputation as a soothsayer was unassailable across the whole of England. Following the publication of Two Strange Prophecies in 1642, interest burgeoned so rapidly that the pamphlet had expanded to Fourteen Strange Prophecies by 1649. The celebrated diarist, Samuel Pepys even records that during the Great Fire of London in 1666, the king’s cousin, Prince Rupert, was heard to remark, ‘Now Shipton’s prophecy is out.’ This was in reference to a notorious couplet which ran, ‘Triumphant Death rides London through / And men on tops of houses go’. Typically, however, like most prophecies, Mother Shipton’s alleged divinations are couched in ambiguous, symbolic language and for any event, there are lines which can be imagined to fit.

With the success of the prophecies, a rich body of legend grew up around Mother Shipton’s birth and supposed childhood in Knaresborough. It was said that she was born from her mother’s union with the Devil and that fearsome sounds accompanied her entry into the world. Even as an infant, Ursula was reported to be fearsomely ugly, with a crooked body, hooked nose and goggling eyes. Her powers manifested from an early age and she would make the furniture in her nurse’s house dance up and down the stairs. On one occasion, the child went missing and when her nurse returned with a search party, they were all magically compelled to take the four ends of a cross and dance until they dropped, whilst a simian imp goaded them with pins. A priest was eventually summoned and he found Ursula in her cradle, floating three full yards above the ground.

Mother Shipton’s fame endures today, as the cave in which she was purportedly born has been turned into one of North Yorkshire’s principle tourist attractions – although arguably its appeal rests on the neighbouring petrifying well rather than the cave itself. Nonetheless, the sibyl has become something of a county icon, which may be some small vindication for all those who were persecuted for their uncanny reputation in Yorkshire’s history. Her birthplace is certainly a more edifying spectacle than the skeleton of Mary Bateman, which following the donation of her corpse to an anatomy school after her execution now hangs forlorn in the Thackerary Medical Museum – a stark reminder of the havoc superstition could wreak in centuries gone by.

TWO

CHARMSAND TALISMANS

Before the advance of modern science, when livelihoods could be destroyed by a simple crop blight and lives suddenly snatched away by some unknown sickness, so many individuals must have felt cast adrift in a hostile environment, powerless against forces beyond their understanding or control. With the human tendency to anthropomorphise and seek causal agency, the world could not help but be transformed into a demon-haunted place, apparently overrun by baleful supernatural forces bent on doing harm to persons and property. It is scarcely surprising that these beleaguered folk attempted to assert control by any means necessary, and a rich legacy of protective charms and talismans survives as testament to their endeavour. Whilst such contingencies may seem absurd today, they once represented the only hope in the face of an unforgiving universe.

Should a house find itself tormented by a restless spirit, there were few expedients available following the Reformation, as the rite of exorcism was forbidden to Protestant clergy and often householders were forced to resort to a local cunning-person to help ‘lay’ the ghost. Such individuals might perform a corrupted remembrance of the old Catholic ritual or provide a charm to ward off the spirit, which had to be kept in the house indefinitely. For instance, in 1905, the occupier of High Fernley Hall at Wyke in West Yorkshire discovered seven pieces of parchment concealed in the rafters of the building, apparently deliberately fixed into place for posterity. These parchments were inscribed in the legal hand of the latter half of the eighteenth century, each with a series of largely nonsensical words doubtless meant as magical formulae.