The Strange and wonderful history of Mother Shipton

I am afraid I have been very unwell and ended up in hospital this week, so the post on flying witches hasn’t been finished. So in the interest of getting a post up on time (while also getting my prescribed rest) I am instead posting a small piece of analysis which was originally part of my doctoral thesis. Although interesting in and of itself, it did not in the end drive home my thesis’ main argument, and was therefore taken out of my thesis earlier this year. But I hope you may find this short exploration of The Strange and wonderful history of Mother Shipton, by Richard Head, moderately interesting. Apologies for the change of plans, but the flying witches will be here next year,  in February. 

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I have argued throughout this thesis that there is an interaction between elite debates and popular representations of witchcraft. Though the details of the Restoration debates on witchcraft are beyond the scope of this thesis, the sense of their scope and some of their key ideas can be found in popular texts and trials. One of the most frequently re-published was The Strange and wonderful history of Mother Shipton, by Richard Head, which was first published in 1677 – the same year as John Webster’s assault[1] on Glanvill’s defence of witchcraft beliefs and trials.[2]

Head’s narrative centres on a young Mother Shipton who had ‘made a Hellish Contract’ with the Devil.[3] The ‘Strange and wonderful history’ Head relates has many features which accord with the ‘unusual’ demonology of the East Anglia trials, and also illustrates the confusion and contention over what witches and the Devil could and could not do.

Head’s The Life and death of Mother Shipton claims that Mother Shipton’s ‘hellish contract’ was a form of marriage, and that following her agreement theirs was a wedding ceremony between the witch and the Devil. This work recalled Henry More’s Antidote against Atheism and its rationalisation of the Devil’s cold body.[4] This 1653 commentary on the feeling of the Devil when he physically interacted with witches was also discussed in Head’s The life and deth of Mother Shipton, where Shipton reports to her midwife that the Devil was ‘cold as ice’.[5]

Head’s account of Mother Shipton continues on from their wedding night to discuss how Shipton’s liaison with the Devil was uncovered when she became pregnant to him. She was ‘discovered by the great swelling of her Belly, to be with Child’.[6] Head reports that ‘The people could not tell what to think, or who should be the Father, concluding that none would be so vile and wicked, as to have Copulation with a Devil incarnate; neither could they believe a Spirit had either desire or power, to generate with any humane Creature’.[7]

Although Shipton, in the narrative, admits her child was begotten ‘by no mortal Wight’, she is not believed. As she cannot provide bail two ‘Gentlemen as they appeared by their habits’ arrive to free her, but as soon as their bail is accepted and Mother Shipton is set free, they vanish.[8]

It is easy to see in this narrative a reflection of the demonological debates of the era, especially in terms of the questions people had about whether the Devil did or did not have copulation with witches, and his ability to take physical form. Head’s discussion of the contestation of witch beliefs therefore reflected the debate playing out in demonological and theological works in the late seventeenth-century.[9]

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[1] John Webster, The displaying of supposed witchcraft wherein is affirmed that there are many sorts of deceivers and impostors and divers persons under a passive delusion of melancholy and fancy, but that there is a corporeal league made betwixt the Devil and the witch ... is utterly denied and disproved, (1677).

[2] See Joseph Glanvill, A philosophical endeavour towards the defence of the being of vvitches and apparitions. In a letter to the much honoured, Robert Hunt, esq; by a member of the Royal Society, (1666) [later re-pblished in several editions, including as Saducismus triumphatus, or, Full and plain evidence concerning witches and apparitions in two parts: the first treating of their possibility, the second of their real existence (1681)].

[3] Note, Mother Shipton was widely discussed in this period. Not only were there several publications on her during the Civil War, but she was also a matter of discussion, according to the diary of Samue Pepys, in the Royal Family and was of particular import during and after the Great Fire of London. See Samuel Pepys, Samuel Pepys Diary “Entry for Saturday 20 October 1666”. See also ‘Mother Shipton’ [Anon], A true coppy of Mother Shiptons last prophesies as they were taken from one Joane Waller in the year of our Lord 1625 who died in March last, 1641 being ninety foure yeares of age of whom Mother Shipton had prophesided that she should live to heare of wars within this kingdome but not to see them, also predicting other wonderfull events that should befall in the clymate in these times, with two other strange prophesies threunto annexed, all which were never published before, (1642); [Anon], Fourteene strange prophesies: besides Mother Shiptons, and Mr. Salmarsh, predicting wonderfull events to betide these yeares of calamity, in this climate, whereof divers are already come to passe, worthy of observation, (1648); Head, The life and death of Mother Shipton.

[4] M2639 Henry More, An antidote against atheisme, or, An appeal to the natural faculties of the minde of man, whether there be not a God, (London: Prnted by Roger Daniel, 1653): p.138

[5] Head, The Life and death of Mother Shipton,  p. 3.

[6] Head, The Life and death of Mother Shipton,  p. 9.

[7] Head, The Life and death of Mother Shipton,  p. 9.

[8] Head, The Life and death of Mother Shipton,  p. 9.

[9] See Jonathan Barry, Witchcraft and Demonology in South-West England, 1640-1789 (2011); and  Ian Bostridge, Witchcraft and Its Transformations, c.1650-1750, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).

Distance and Sabbats in early modern English ‘witch plays’

This week’s post will be short and sweet, and be my first return to the early modern period in four weeks.

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In her book Witchcraft and Society in England and America, 1550-1750, Marion Gibson pointed out that Thomas Middleton distanced the sabbat led by Hecate in his play The Witch, by placing the narrative in a foreign, Catholic location.[1] Geographic displacement is a trait shared by two other plays from the seventeenth-century which featured a witches’ meeting or ‘sabbat’. A multitude of authors on witchcraft in early modern England, from the very first writers like C. L’Estrange Ewen, Wallace Notestein, and G.L. Kitteridge, to more recent works by James Sharpe have argued that the sabbat as it was conceptualised on the continent (as a black mass, a diabolic inversion of Roman Catholic ceremony) never truly made it into popular beliefs in England.

More recently James Sharpe has argued that meetings did develop in a small number of isolated cases in the seventeenth century and cited some of the more extraordinary cases. The earliest recorded gatherings in witch trials of large groups of witches, or of suspected associations of witches occurred in the 1570s and 1580s. Witches’ sabbats also appeared both in print and on stage.  

What is interesting about the majority of sabbats in print on stage and in print is that they were, as Gibson pointed out in relation to Middleton’s The Witch, were geographically distant. In plays they are in places that are distant from London, in Scotland, Italy and Lancashire. Not all witch plays were distanced, some were far closer geographically, but those didn’t 

I have written here before about Macbeth, a play which opens with three women who may be fairies, goddesses, fates, or witches. In 1618 several more direct witchcraft references in Macbeth were added from Middleton’s The Witch, suggesting that contemporaries therefore chose the last option and interpreted the weird sisters as witches.

I would suggest that the same distancing takes place at the beginning of The Late Lancashire Witches in 1634:

Corrantoes failing, and no foot post

Possessing us with Newe; of forraine State,

No accidents abroad worthy Relation

Arriving here, we are forc'd from our owne Nation

To ground the Scene that's now in agitation.

The Project unto many here well knowne;

Those Witches the fat Iaylor brought to Towne,

An Argument so thin, persons so low

Can neither yeeld much matter, nor great show.

Expect no more than can from such be rais'd,

So may the Scene passe pardon’d, though not prais'd.

This distancing suggests that these incidences of witchcraft are alien to the audience watching the play, and that Lancashire is as much a strange and foreign place as Italy or Scotland. Since no news has come from a foreign state which is strange enough to entertain.

These three places are interesting sites to place a sabbat. In Italy witches sabbats had long been described in trials; Scotland likewise had a longer history of large trials featuring groups of witches who met together to plan acts of maleficium. Lancashire, with its population of recusants, and distance from the London audience, must have seemed (and sometimes still does, depending on who you are talking to) a strange and foreign land, almost as alien as medieval Scotland or Roman Catholic Italy.

Richard Wilson has suggested that the representation of a satanic conspiracy would have been both frighteningly alien and strangely familiar to Shakespeare’s London audience in 1604. [2] A year later the Gunpowder Plot would have made it even more disturbingly familiar.

Wilson goes on to argue that the appearance of witches meeting late at night in strange and distant lands would influence not only a whole generation of ‘witch plays’ (including The Witch  and The Late Lancashire Witches).[3]

Witches who meet on stage or in real life in England have too often been dismissed as foreign aberrations, and the distancing of locales in witches might meet on stage seems to mirror that.  Yet sabbats were often depicted in the same manner across Europe. Yet some people Matthew Hopkins, believed he lived next to the site of a witches’ meeting:

he had some seven or eight of that horrible sect of Witches living in the Towne where he lived, a Towne in Essex called Maningtree, with divers other adjacent Witches of other towns, who every six weeks in the night (being alwayes on the Friday night) had their meeting close by his house, and had their severall solemne sacrifices there offered to the Devill, one of which this discoverer heard speaking to her Imps one night[.]

So to return to my three examples: the courtly intrigues presented in both Macbeth and The Witch needed to be distanced from the English courts where in Macbeth’s case, the new Scottish King ruled (and had a sideline as the only ruler to both take a personal hand in discovering witches, and writing his own guide to finding witches); and in The Late Lancashire Witches, the distance is emphasised as not actually a foreign place, but the strangest and most exotic story the playwrights could come up with, given the lack of exciting news from foreign lands.

Witches meetings have been on my mind this week as I edit the chapters of my thesis that deal with them. The problem of distance is tied up in the consensus that they are an English idea at all, and were imported from the continent. I suppose in the end i am agreeing that there reasons for distance in all three cases. But there is also something in the hypothesis that full fledged black masses were very unusual (if not downright alien) to English witch beliefs.
In these theatrical examples there are certainly ideas which can be seen as continental intruders, and next week I intend to continue with this exploration of distance, foreign ideas and plays, by examining flying witches in England. From Macbeth to a Civil War battleground, witches who flew were even rarer than their compatriots who met at distant locales to feast, exchange familiars, and worship the Devil.

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[1] Gibson, Witchcraft and Society in England and America, 1550-1750, pp. 97-98.

[2]  Richard Wilson, “The. pilot's. thumb: Macbeth and. the. Jesuits”, in The Lancashire Witches: Histories and Stories, p. 127.

[3]  Wilson, “The pilot’s thumb”, p. 127.

Crayfish and Monkeys and Dogs! Oh My!

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L.P. Hartley wasn’t wrong when he said ‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there’; he was just woefully understating the case. When you first encounter many aspects of early modern culture and belief systems it can sometimes be as disorienting and disturbing as passing through the looking glass, going down the rabbit hole, or being carried off by a tornado. Like Alice and her adventures in Wonderland, the unwary traveller through a topic like witchcraft and diabolism in early modern England can encounter strange new ideas and images that don’t quite make sense at first – and sometimes never do.

Coming to grips with witchcraft and demonology is one thing, understanding the double entendres, in-jokes, and colloquialisms found in my source material is quite another. It leads to a multitude of baffling questions, some of which are simply unanswerable. For example, why would Prince Rupert potentially be mortally offended by a the title of a pamphlet called An exact description of Prince Ruperts malignant she-monkey (1643)? And while we are on Prince Rupert, what, if any, is the connection between kissing and dog-training methods? Why would referencing a crayfish possibly be a crude joke? Is there something in the frequent references to lavish food in the major Lancashire witch trials of the early seventeenth century?

Of course, often we don’t even know there is a question to be asked, unless a reference to a colloquialism – or crudity – is so out-of-place as to cause your curiosity to be piqued. Or if we have already familiarised ourselves with the detail of early modern colloquialisms, ballads, plays, letters and assorted other cultural reference points – a task which could occupy a lifetime 

But some of these questions can be answered. In the case of Prince Rupert and his ‘she-monkey’ the hard work was done by others. In my paper at the Monsters and the Monstrous conference in 2014, I described this aspect of Prince Rupert’s ‘montrousness’ thus:

An exact description of Prince Ruperts malignant she-monkey describes how the she-monkey ‘Clap[s] her hand on her buttock and scratch it as if it were troubled with the lustfull itch’^[i] and her name is ‘Sunt with a C’.^[ii] John Taylor, the apparent author of this ribald discussion, drives home his double entendre on the monkey and the meaning of its name with ‘sunt written in that manner being often called a Monkey […] thus you sée what prince Ruperts Monkey doth nominally and figuratiuely signifye, she being in all her postures the picture of a loose wanton, who is often figuratively called a Monkey’.^[iii] The suggestion, as Mark Stoyle pointed out, is that Rupert is himself figuratively a woman, and was in possession of a ‘Sunt with a C’.^[iv]  

And Mark Stoyle’s work on the use of the term ‘monkey’ as slang in early modern England thankfully answered a question I hadn’t even asked yet (and put to an end my wondering if Rupert had had some sort of strange menagerie that he was carting around with him…)

And that isn’t even the end of the strange animal-related adventures the Prince Rupert pamphlets have lead me down. In 2012, when I had just begun my thesis and was still bright eyed and bushy-tailed without caffeine, I went to a conference at the University of Southern Queensland on the ‘British World’, where I discussed the massacre of women at Farndon field. In relation to this massacre I mentioned how a woman who became known as the Witch of Newbury had followed the example of Prince Rupert’s dogs when she

caught the bullets in her hands and chew’d them.

I also pointed out that Prince Rupert’s dog was also accused of being:

[…] loose and Strumpet-like. For hee salues and kisses the Prince, as close as any Christian woman would[...]^[v]

Which led Associate Professor Laurie Johnson to ask if the Prince was kissing his dog as part of inducing loyalty during puppy training? … Of course that question led to several entertaining days lost in the realm of book chapters on spit, saliva, and bodily fluid in early modern England – diverting, sure, necessary to my thesis?[vi] Sadly, probably not.

Although that question didn’t really go anywhere for my research, other encounters with slang have caused even greater amusement and consternations. For example, in chapter three of my thesis, I originally included an extensive footnote discussing whether a crabfish is a lobster or a crayfish? And what this might mean for any potential sexual connotations, since a doctor in the 1620s, John Cotta, wrote in his tract that the teats left by the familiar’s suckling: ‘are most commonly found in the priuie parts’.^[vii]  Which raises questions when Elizabeth Southerne confesses that:

her mother Priscilla Collit had sent the Devil to her in the shape of a crabfish which came into the bed to her and nipt her & fetcht blod &c., and afterwards spake to her & demanded of [her] to seale a covenant’.^[viii]

In the final version I decided to cut it down to the brief:

This may mean a lobster or a crayfish, it is unclear. A popular seventeenth-century song related a ‘crabfish’ biting a woman in the private parts after her husband secretly places the ‘crabfish’ in their Chamber pot. See ‘The Crabfish Song’, Thomas Percy, Frederick James Furnivall, John Wesley Hales, Bishop Percy's Folio Manuscript: Loose and Humorous Songs 99-100.

But I still wonder about whether or not there were connotations of drunkenness or black humour in the idea of the crabfish ‘nipping’ Elizabeth Southerne in her bed.

I hope this post has suggested just a little of the humorous, unusual, and sometimes pointless research avenues one goes up in the course of writing a doctoral thesis on witchcraft in early modern England.

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^[i] John Taylor, An Exact description of Prince Ruperts malignant she-monkey, p. 5.

^[ii] John Taylor, An Exact description of Prince Ruperts malignant she-monkey, p. 5.

^[iii] John Taylor, An Exact description of Prince Ruperts malignant she-monkey, p. 5.

^[iv] John Taylor, An Exact description of Prince Ruperts malignant she-monkey, p. 5; Mark Stoyle, The Black Legend of Prince Rupert’s Dog: 99.

^[v]  ‘T.B.’ [Anon], Observations, p. 5.

[vi] See for example Brett D. Hirsch “The Taming of the Jew: Spit and the Civilising Process in The Merchant of Venice”, in Rory Loughane and Edel Semple (eds), Staged Transgression in Shakespeare's England: pp. 136-52.

^[vii] John Cotta. The triall of vvitch-craft she  the true and right methode of the discouery: with a confutation of erroneous wayes. (London,1616): p.84.

^[viii] British Library, Add MS 27402, fs. 111.