The Yorkshire Witch Read online

  John Bateman, nevertheless, must have had serious reservations about leaving his wife to her own devices for any length of time, as in an encore to the house-clearance she had previously performed during John’s mercy dash to his ‘dying’ father’s side, when he was next absent visiting friends, Mary took the opportunity to sell all of her husband’s clothes, as well as many other of his belongings, along with some items she had stolen from a neighbouring tailor’s shop.

  We cannot know what exactly made Mary tick. Did she steal for the vicarious excitement? The risk of getting caught? Or was she merely a plain opportunist stealing purely for profit or greed? The issues of compulsive criminal behaviours have only relatively recently been identified and classified as mental health conditions. This aspect of Mary’s life is examined more closely in the last chapter. That Mary felt no compunction regarding her actions however is obvious, and her next fraudulent endeavour was indeed shameless.

  On 13 February 1796, a serious fire broke out in the Marshall & Benyon flax mill in Water Lane, in the industrial district of Holbeck on the western outskirts of Leeds. During the eighteenth century, fires were commonplace in mills, with the processing of flax creating a highly combustible dust, and the risk exacerbated by hot machine bearings lubricated with linseed oil, as well as the additional risk posed by workers using candles. Needless to say, the catastrophe was compounded by the inadequacies of fire-fighting capabilities at this time – hand drawn manual pumps with a short range were the only equipment available. For most of the eighteenth century, individual insurance companies maintained their own fire brigades, extinguishing fires only in those buildings insured by the company providing fire cover. It was not until the mid-1850s that the first reliable steam powered appliances were adopted by brigades.

  This particular mill fire not only resulted in crushing financial costs amounting to £10,000 – in the region of 6 million pounds by today’s reckoning – only half of which was met by the insurance, but also tragically brought a cost in lives as ten people were known to have died in the blaze when one of the walls collapsed.

  With sympathies amongst the townsfolk running high for the injured and bereaved, Mary saw an opportunity to make good on the tragedy. Without a shred of genuine contrition, she set about ‘relief ’ work in collecting sheets from charitable souls for the purposes of laying out the dead whose relations were too poor to meet the cost themselves, initially playing on the goodwill of a Miss Maude, a lady known for her ‘humane disposition’. She had been charitably moved to supply Mary with sheets to wrap the body of a child who had fallen victim in the mill fire, and whose mother was too impoverished to provide the necessary linen herself. However, the sheets acquired by Mary, along with linen begged from three other good hearted benefactors, ended up pledged in the pawnbrokers. Pawn shops, their three-ball signs a reminder of an illiterate age, sprang up wherever the working class congregated. It was possible to ‘pledge’ an item in exchange for instant cash, said item to be redeemed when financial times were easier. Pawnbrokers were often ‘fences’ of stolen goods and few of them asked searching questions.

  Yet the mileage Mary exacted from this calamity didn’t end here, as she further had the audacity to pose as a nurse from the Leeds General Infirmary, and in this guise was successful in collecting even more linen on the pretext that it was needed to dress the wounds of those lying injured in the infirmary. Before Florence Nightingale made nursing a respectable, middle-class vocation in the 1850s, ‘nurses’ were often prostitutes who provided comforts to male patients that would never be available on today’s NHS! Hospitals themselves were unhygienic in Mary’s day, spreading the very diseases they were supposed to be dealing with. Leeds General was built in 1771 where today’s Yorkshire Bank stands off City Square. Its founding doctors were all graduates of the University of Edinburgh Medical School. Of course, the reality was that Mary pawned this linen too.

  Whether or not John Bateman had been turning a blind eye to his wife’s deceits, the time came when he could no longer live in a state of denial, and in order to escape the inevitable derision and possible legal ramifications of Mary’s frauds, he decided to join the supplementary militia to get out of Leeds, away from the disgrace caused by his wife’s conduct, and the stigma that must now have been attached to the name of Bateman in many quarters.

  The militia were a vital part of homeland defences in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, aimed at creating a professional national military reserve, and embodied at various times during the French and Napoleonic Wars (1792–1815). They served at several strategic locations, particularly stationed on the South Coast and in Ireland. Both these areas were highly vulnerable. In the 1790s and again in 1804, the French had active plans in place to invade the coast of Sussex and Kent. Ireland had for centuries been a hotbed of anti-English violence, culminating in an attempt by the revolutionary Wolfe Tone and his United Irishmen to encourage a French invasion of England. This was famously dispersed by a handful of Welsh fishwives at Fishguard, Pembrokeshire, in 1798. Men were selected by ballot to serve for longer periods, but volunteers also came forward to fill the militia quotas, as was the case with John Bateman. This civilian force, whose officers consisted of local gentlemen, drew their ranks from the poor and semi-literate, and the wives of those men already married were allowed to live within the walls of the garrison and follow their husbands wherever they might be stationed. Whether willingly or not, John took Mary with him, and in doing so exposed his wife to a whole new sphere of opportunity in which to expand her nefarious activities.

  While on the march, encamped, in barracks or billeted in towns, naturally the militia were closely engaged with the civilian population, and needless to say, trading relationships offering the opportunity for black market transactions in regimental clothing and equipment were many. Mary would soon have had her fingers firmly stuck into one of the many illegal ‘pies’ afforded her. Of course, her new situation would also have considerably widened Mary’s scope for the performance of her established arts of fortune telling and divination, capitalising on the gullible and unsuspecting within the ranks, as well as the people of the districts wherever the regiment ended up. Married quarters for Other Ranks offered little privacy. Beds were arranged in dormitories, the family ‘home’ being a bed on the other side of a horse blanket slung over a rope across the room.

  No specific details of Mary’s exploits during her husband’s service have come down to us, but it is safe to assume that she got up to her old tricks and maybe even acquired some new ones. Eventually, and perhaps again of necessity, after three years, John quitted the service and in 1799 the couple returned to Leeds, perhaps feeling that enough time had passed for the outrage and memory of Mary’s prior misdemeanours and blackened reputation in that town to have sufficiently faded.

  Taking up residence in Marsh Lane, near Timble Bridge, and a good half mile from their previous home in Wells’ Yard, Mary set up selling trinkets and love charms and offering her healing services and predictions of the future to unsuspecting customers taken in by her guile. Regardless of Mary’s proficiency, whether her clients were satisfied by a coincidental happy chance outcome, or conversely were too ashamed to admit they’d resorted to Mary’s ministrations if the matter did not turn out well for them, at this time Mary began to specialise as a professional agent for a ‘screwer-down’, an art which requires some explanation.

  Persuasive in convincing her victims that someone or other intended them harm, Mary nevertheless assured them that the potential evildoer could be prevented from acting if they were ‘screwed down’. While Mary did not profess to be able to perform this service herself, she would defer in such matters to a certain ‘Mrs Moore’, a respectable name for Mary’s entirely fictitious colleague who possessed supernatural skills as the seventh child of a seventh child. The number seven had ancient magical properties or so the superstitious believed. The seventh child of a seventh child was particularly blessed with second s
ight. Intriguingly, some believed that such an offspring was the agent of the Devil. Mary would seek Mrs Moore’s counsel for those knottier problems she felt herself unable to resolve; Mrs Moore was apparently proficient as a screwer-down of husbands with wandering affections and equally adept and much employed as a screwer-down of creditors pursuing unpaid debts, with Mary acting as her agent, and of course taking payment on the lady’s behalf. It was while acting as Mrs Moore’s representative that Mary also started a business as a part-time abortionist.

  While procuring or performing abortion was against the law – prior to 1803, abortion or the offence of ‘attempting to induce a miscarriage’ was punishable by a fine or short term of imprisonment – as the population of Leeds continued to swell, so too did the birth rate. In such a climate of poverty and overcrowding, and in the absence of any effective methods of birth control, Mary’s services must have been in demand. For those in desperate and dire straits, the alternative was infanticide, a crime for which a woman could be found guilty, under a statute passed in 1624, even if she simply tried to hide her pregnancy and later miscarried, or if the infant was stillborn. Understandably, countless women sought to remedy their condition, especially amongst the ranks of domestic servants who often stood to lose their position if they were discovered to be with child. Single teenage girls, recent migrants to the city in fruitless search of work as domestic servants accounted for about a third of those who turned to working the streets of Leeds as prostitutes, and there were many like Mary herself on hand to offer their services, for monetary gain of course. Her knowledge of folk remedies, of harvesting and administering the centuries old concoctions of Pennyroyal and Tansy, and the most effective combinations of these herbal abortifacients had most probably been garnered from the Topley Fair gypsies with whom Mary had so freely mingled in her childhood. Pennyroyal (mentha pulegium) also called puddling grass smells of spearmint and is highly toxic. In small doses it was used in cooking and the making of herbal tea. Tansy (tanacetum vulgare) also called bitter buttons, was used to aid conception as well as induce abortions.

  Nevertheless, there was a high risk of endangering the life of the mother, as attested to by the many murder cases in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that were a consequence of poisonous draughts administered in an attempt to induce an abortion. We do not know how many of the women that Mary ‘helped out’ suffered fatal consequences, but Mary certainly supplied something stronger than a ‘herbal remedy’ to at least one young woman as detailed later in this chapter.

  With regard to the mysterious Mrs Moore, a lady called Mrs Greenwood was the first recorded victim of Mary’s dupe, though many had probably preceded her. Mary had obviously identified Mrs Greenwood as susceptible, and manipulated the poor woman into believing that she had foreseen a terrible future for her. Mrs Greenwood, she predicted, was in danger of attempting suicide in view of the desperate domestic misfortunes about to befall her, namely that her husband, who was away from home at the time, had been locked up in jail and that only Mrs Moore could secure his release. According to Mary, four guards had been set to watch over Mr Greenwood in his imprisonment, and the necessary course of action would be to screw down the guards to facilitate his escape. As there were four of them, in order for Mrs Moore to get Greenwood out, Mrs Greenwood would need to provide four pieces of leather, four pieces of blotting paper, four brass screws and, tellingly, four pieces of gold to make an effective charm. The window of opportunity was narrow however, and if these items were not placed in Mary’s hands by nightfall, by the following morning Mrs Greenwood would be a widow. While Mrs Greenwood may well have been able to get the first three items on the list, she certainly didn’t have four pieces of gold, yet Mary had a ready suggestion to overcome the obstacle; Mrs Greenwood could either borrow or steal the necessary coin. Fortunately for Mrs Greenwood, this last suggestion set alarm bells ringing, and the mention of theft brought her to her senses. Realising she had very nearly been taken in by Mary, she disassociated herself from the whole sorry affair, and was certainly the richer and hopefully the wiser for it. Sadly, in a testament to Mary’s skill as a fraudster, many others were completely taken in.

  Indeed, the next victims exposed to the Mrs Moore scenario proved more pliant, and in the Stead family Mary found ripe pickings in both husband and wife. Barzillai Stead, as a failed businessman, was easily persuaded that his creditors were fast closing in. With Mary succeeding in working his paranoia into panic, rather than face the inevitability of the bailiffs at his door, he decided to join the army, even handing over his enlistment fee to Mary. Recruits at the time received the ‘king’s shilling’, the daily pay of an infantryman, but this was merely a token of signing on in an illiterate age. The ‘bringer’ or recruiting sergeant, as well as telling tall tales of regimental glory, would give the recruit a ‘bounty’ (additional expenses) which could add up to £9, more money than many men had seen before in their lives. This was removed from them for ‘incidentals’ when they reached the barracks and was probably the fee that Stead gave to Mary.

  Simultaneously Mary worked on his wife, telling her that her husband was keeping a mistress, and that he was on the point of eloping with her when he left to join his regiment. The mistress, Mary said, lived in Vicar Lane, about half a mile further into the heart of Leeds and at the time an area crowded with slums and slaughterhouses. To add more fuel to the lie, the woman was also pregnant by Stead. The remedy for the situation would be for Mrs Moore to screw down the love rival, but in order to do so payment of three crowns was necessary – over a week’s wages for a skilled craftsman – and Mrs Moore’s screws would never drive without money. In addition to the cash fee, bizarrely, two pieces of coal were also required. Of course the money went straight into Mary’s pocket, but the coal was to be placed on the mistress’s doorstep, the idea being that upon discovery the pieces of coal would be thrown onto her fire, the smoke from which, after putting the love rival into a deep sleep would then taint all of her clothes freshly laundered in anticipation of the elopement. Mary reasoned that the mistress would be prevented from leaving with the errant husband as she would have no clean clothes to take with her. To all intents and purposes, from Mrs Stead’s point of view, the charm worked; her husband left the next morning to join his regiment, without the mistress, who of course had never existed, and conveniently, his departure left his grateful and impressionable wife to the mercies of Mary, who proceeded to fleece her to the extent that she was forced to pawn virtually every article in the marital home. Eventually reduced to complete penury, she attempted suicide by drowning herself in the river Calder but was luckily saved. Mary’s actions were rendered even more wicked in light of the fact that Mrs Stead was expecting a child.

  At some point, the Leeds Benevolent Society intervened. This charity was also known as the Stranger’s Friend Society, founded in 1789 by a group associated with the Wesleyan Methodist church. It investigated all applications for relief, gave food and money, found others work and provided children with a suitable education. Mrs Stead clearly qualified for assistance, and to ease the expectant mother’s destitute situation, a guinea was offered in poor relief, paid in three separate payments of seven shillings. Mary, however, managed to extort eighteen shillings of the relief payment, to be used to screw down the Benevolent Society into granting further monies on the wretched woman’s behalf. In her desperate and highly susceptible state, Mary also convinced Mrs Stead that it was the intention of her father-in-law to murder her. Naturally it was only Mrs Moore who possessed the power to avert the crime, though a further guinea would be required in payment. Pawning what few possessions she had left to raise the sum, Mrs Stead was nevertheless safe in the knowledge that Mrs Moore’s ministrations had paid off – after all, her father-in-law had made no attempt on her life.

  Even though Mrs Stead had virtually nothing left, Mary continued to put pressure on the poor woman. She told her that the Steads’ daughter, eight at the time, would becom
e pregnant at fourteen and would either ‘murder herself ’ or be murdered by her seducer. The solution was for the child to wear a silver charm bracelet. That would keep her safe but would cost seventeen shillings, to be paid to Mrs Moore. Needless to say, Mary switched the silver, and the charm was later discovered to be made of pewter. This falsehood, along with the many others perpetrated by Mary were finally exposed when one of Mrs Stead’s neighbours managed to convince the distraught woman that she had been utterly taken in. By this time, the few tools left behind by her husband before he joined the army, and the only items now left in the house, were pawned in payment for screwing down all the officers in his regiment with a view to securing his discharge. It was possible to buy one’s way out of the army, but the cost was huge. Oddly enough, in this instance Mrs Moore’s ministrations failed, perhaps as there was now nothing left to extort.

  Having wrung this victim dry, Mary turned her attention to a young relative of the Steads who had come to Leeds when she’d found herself pregnant and deserted by the father. Mary assured the young woman that the purchase of a series of charms, priced at one guinea each, would bring the baby’s errant father to her side. When the magic failed, Mary then promised to ensnare the eligible son of a reasonably affluent family for whom the girl had worked in service. With no proposal forthcoming, Mary recommended a stronger charm, at additional cost of course. When this also failed, she offered, and presumably at additional cost again, to provide medicines that would induce an abortion.