The Yorkshire Witch Page 7
Her thieving and prophesying weren’t entirely side-lined however. Shortly after the miracle egg debacle, Mary, while benevolently nursing a neighbour, Rebecca Fisher, the expectant mother of seven children, took payment for her charity by stealing two of the children’s shirts and a loaf of bread from the household. She also managed to extort money, and wreck the livelihood of a neighbouring poor family whose only living was gained from a horse and cart. When the head of the household passed away, Mary persuaded his widow, left with four children, that the eldest son, aged fifteen, was set on selling what little property his father had left, with the intent of absconding with the proceeds. Mary advised that to avoid this, the widow should sell the horse and cart and what little furniture she had, and leave Leeds with the cash. The widow, who was in fact stepmother to the fatherless children, followed Mary’s instruction to the letter – and presumably paid a commensurate sum for it – and disappeared, leaving the children to go into the workhouse. Not to diminish their stepmother’s part, Mary must have been fully aware of the fate that would befall those four children as a consequence of her actions.
While all the town’s Charity Children in receipt of poor relief were taken into the workhouse, it was cold comfort for the young inmates; life in the workhouse was hard, especially for children. The first Leeds parish workhouse had opened in 1638 at the north-east corner of the junction of Lady Lane and Vicar Lane. Here, as in other workhouses, generations grew up in the shadow of an institution intended to be a form of social welfare for those with nothing. In practice, it was seen as a dark and terrible fate and a system which eroded all human dignity. The poor called the workhouses ‘Bastilles’ after the appalling prison in Paris destroyed during the Revolution of 1789. There was an enormous social stigma attached to ending up in the workhouse – a very public humiliation that everyone would have been aware of. Thousands of people lived in constant dread that some accident or illness would overtake them, leading to destitution and to that place where husbands were separated from their wives, and mothers from their children. Within these institutions, paupers were given profitless, pointless tasks such as breaking granite with a mallet or grinding animal bones by hand, while women scrubbed the floors, or sewed sails. Rules had to be obeyed to the letter on pain of harsh punishment, which included flogging and solitary confinement, and complaints about living conditions also invited punishment, as did lack of deference to the master. Dormitories regularly held up to seventy people, with beds of narrow bags of straw laid side by side and levels of cleanliness were low. It was noted in 1797 that the bedclothes in the Lady Lane Workhouse were ‘scoured’ once a year. Heating was minimal, even in the depths of winter, and paupers’ heads were often shaved to protect against lice. Meals, such as they were, were often eaten in silence. While the able-bodied faced the daily grind of menial labour, for the elderly, the prospect of dying in a workhouse held out the grim possibility of a pauper’s funeral in an unmarked grave or even worse, being despatched for anatomical dissection. Nobody went into the workhouse willingly.
While Mary was clearly responsible for some truly diabolical exploitation, she was still capable of incorporating petty thefts and frauds into her day, which ran to securing a free dinner. Finding herself one morning in The Shambles (the district of butchers shops which ran along Briggate from what would now be the junction with King Edward Street up to the entrance the County Arcade) on overhearing a man from Meadow Lane buying a leg of mutton with the instruction that it be delivered to his home, Mary decided she would intercept the purchase en route. She knew the direction the butcher’s boy would have to take and, stationing herself on the Leeds Bridge, on seeing the boy approach with the parcelled up meat in his arms, she proceeded to scold him for taking too long a time about his errand and, manhandling the purchase from him, she said she would take it home to her master’s kitchen herself, and gave the lad a thump on the back for good measure.
Needless to say, when the time came for the real cook in the Meadow Lane kitchen to prepare dinner, she was left wondering what had become of the delivery of meat. The butcher who had sold the mutton, after being berated by a decidedly less than satisfied customer, said that his delivery boy had been sent with it an hour since, but that the mutton had been taken off him by a woman purporting to be the customer’s cook. The gentleman remembered having seen such a woman hanging around the shop earlier. The Batemans weren’t destined to dine on stolen mutton that evening – the gentleman had recognised Mary and knew where she lived, and on being greeted by the cooking smells in the Bateman’s kitchen, Mary was forced to make good on the cost of the stolen meat. Though she was spared the necessity of concocting a lie as to why her husband would find no supper on the table when he came home that evening, in hindsight she was fortunate that the wronged party had taken no legal action. Her later victims were less fortunate; Mary was free to carry on her life of crime.
Chapter 5
A Long Distance Dupe
Mary continued to read fortunes, mainly for young serving girls, many of whom she terrified into parting with what little savings they had. She also continued to employ the insights of the fictitious Miss Blythe, whose direction and advice she passed on to her dupes, wringing even more pennies from them. While the psychic industry remains a woefully unregulated one, then, as now, vulnerable people formed a credulous prey, believing claims of foretellings and clinging to predictions of a better future, presented under the guise of one who claims to have their best interests at heart. Though many do experience a beneficial measure of comfort and solace from psychic readings, tarot cards, astrological and clairvoyant predictions, even spiritual lifestyle gurus, there are those desperate for guidance and reassurance who can be held in the tightest grip of psychic addiction, cravenly acting on less than benign life-changing ‘advice’, usually centring on some cash transaction, and even more so in Mary’s day.
The Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century, centring on Isaac Newton in England, ought to have swept away the superstition of earlier centuries, but it hadn’t. Few of the working class who were Mary’s clients had anything resembling an enlightened education and to them, the mood swings of the economy and the ever-climbing natural death rate, were just as bewildering and terrifying as it had been to their ancestors.
Often employing the ruse of removing ‘evil wishes’, whether placed by a specific antagonist or by forces unseen, Mary’s fraudulent and profitable exploitations now wholly centred on the instructions of Miss Blythe, who in spite of having ‘no existence but in the artful mind and lying mouth of Mrs Bateman’, nevertheless recommended a specific range of lucrative ‘charms’ that the desperately trusting fell for time and time again.
With regard to her own ministrations and those carried out on behalf of Miss Blythe, Mary could tentatively be placed into the category of folk healer, in England also known as ‘cunning folk’. Their spells and charms as part of their profession stemmed from the Medieval period or earlier and carried through to the early twentieth century. Like Mary they were regarded as witches. While large numbers of ordinary people used the services of these white witches in lieu of expensive – and equally unreliable – doctors, it was all too easy for white witchcraft to slip to grey and then to black, the evil arts associated with Satan. There had been widespread persecution of them across Europe from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, although the hysteria of Loudun in 1632 and Salem sixty years later, rarely showed itself in Britain. Most people, even magistrates, could tell a beneficent ‘cunning woman’ from a black witch and in any case, witchcraft in England was regarded as a felony, punished in extreme cases by hanging. It was not seen as devil-worship for which, in Europe and Scotland, the penalty was the stake.
Typically, the benefits that cunning folk offered their local community were facilitated by what they claimed to be their own magical powers, and operating in a competitive market where reputations and first impressions were very important. Perhaps Mary’s ruse of the alt
er ego of Miss Blythe in some measure protected her against any potential backlash should her clientele prove dissatisfied, as her services were apparently directed by the instruction of another, professed to be highly skilled in such matters. White witches used spells and charms in order to combat malevolent witchcraft, to locate criminals, missing persons or stolen property, to tell fortunes, to heal, to seek out hidden treasure and to influence matters of the heart. In one example, a cunning man from Newcastle, Peter Banks, was charged in 1673–74 for offering to draw up a magical contract which promised to secure a presumably errant husband’s fidelity for the term of one year. Cunning folk were often widely consulted with regard to health problems too, where both humans and their livestock were concerned. In the context of Mary’s work as an abortionist, two hundred years earlier, those who practiced the ‘dark arts’ ran a serious risk. According to the sixteenth century Examen of Witches:
‘Those midwives and wise women who are witches are in the habit of offering to Satan the little children which they deliver, and then of killing them … They do even worse; for they kill them while they are yet in their mothers’ wombs. This practice is common to all witches.’
There may have been an element of power-seeking in Mary’s control of her gullible clients, but her main motive was clearly greed. She used her literacy to write spells, usually symbols, grimoires or biblical quotations, giving the client hard ‘proof ’ that the remedies were real. They all came, of course, at a cost, payable either to Mary herself or to be passed on to the mysterious, all-knowing Miss Blythe.
These particular charms, consisting of varying sums of money, supplied of course by the client, were sewn into small bags, and, once secreted as directed were not to be opened for a specific length of time, lest the magic be rendered ineffective. Invariably, when the bags were opened, they were found to contain worthless items equal to the weight of coin supposedly contained. By the time these discoveries were made, Mary was long on her way. One unfortunate client of Mary’s, selected from the ranks of Leeds’ youthful girls in domestic service, was persuaded that an ‘evil wish’ had been placed on her by an old beggar woman to whom she’d refused to give alms. After the initial provision of a pocket handkerchief for Miss Blythe, she then gave up five guineas to be sewn into five bags as an effective charm, along with handing over clothing to a corresponding value. Of course, Mary gave assurances that the money and clothing would be restored to her upon the cessation of the curse, but a few days before the appointed date when the bags were to have been opened, an anonymous gift of a fruit pie was received by this young woman, allegedly an offering from her sweetheart. While in appearance the pie appeared ‘very nice’, on sampling a slice with a fellow servant, the taste was found to be ‘hot and offensive’ and, her suspicions aroused, the girl took the pie straight to Mary for inspection. At that point, the girl still regarded her as a wise-woman and a trusted confidante.
Mary maintained that she knew nothing of such things, but that if she wrote to Miss Blythe she would be able to help. And so it proved. She told Mary that it was indeed fortunate that the pie had not been eaten as it was ‘full of poison’. But then, Mary already knew that! Having failed to eliminate the gullible girl, when the appointed time came and the magic bags were finally opened it was discovered that the guineas had mysteriously changed to coppers and the clothing to rags. Needless to say, her dupe never saw Mary again.
Conveniently, Miss Blythe lived in Scarborough, a far enough distance from Leeds for Mary to maintain the pretence of her existence. It was also necessary for her to communicate by letter, giving Mary the opportunity of forging Miss Blythe’s supposed replies and charging her clients for the postage into the bargain. One such correspondence entered into with Miss Blythe concerned the predicament of a widowed washerwoman called Judith Cryer.
In April 1807, Mrs Cryer had come to Mary in some distress concerning the behaviour of her eleven-year-old grandson. Mary had been recommended to Mrs Cryer by a Winifred Bond, who later testified at Mary’s trial that she had been employed by Mary to run various errands for her, delivering letters and presumably acting as a recommending agent for Mary’s services. It would later become apparent at Mary’s trial that Winifred Bond was unable to read, a convenient deficiency from Mary’s point of view, yet Winifred still had a tongue in her head, and this was presumably why Mary had later coerced this potential witness into leaving Leeds. She obligingly relocated to the outskirts of Keighley as she was afraid of the supernatural powers she supposed Mary to possess.
Thus began a masterly play on Judith Cryer’s fears for her grandson’s wayward inclinations, especially when the response received from Miss Blythe included a drawing of a gallows and hangman’s noose, reinforcing the prediction that the grandson would be hanged before he reached the age of fourteen – unless, of course, Mrs Cryer stumped up four guineas in payment to Miss Blythe to avert the catastrophe. In view of Mrs Cryer’s situation, Mary’s exploitation of her was as shameless as any other she had undertaken. The occupation of washerwoman was largely the province of older women, often widows, trying to support themselves and their children. For those who could afford it washing was habitually ‘sent out’, especially in view of the time consuming and backbreaking aspects of laundry work before the advent of piped and heated water and domestic appliances; paying someone else to do the laundry was a top priority of many households when circumstances permitted. Though washing entailed a great deal of lifting and carrying, as well as the extraordinarily heavy job of wringing out sodden linen, in common with any other manual labour that was the province of the lower-classes, the wages were meagre. Somehow Mrs Cryer managed to scrape together what must have been an astronomical sum for a woman of her means, and at length an instruction arrived from Miss Blythe that three of the guineas were to be stitched into a leather bag – presumably the balance was pocketed by Mary as Miss Blythe’s fee – and the bag then sewn into Mrs Cryer’s bed, where it was to remain untouched until her grandson had attained the age of fourteen. Before the three-year interim was up however, Mary’s later arrest and exposure caused Mrs Cryer to extract the bag from her bed, and on opening it found it to be empty. The three guineas of course had never been placed in the bag in the first place, and had long since been spent by Mary, who’d even had the audacity to make Mrs Cryer do her laundry free of charge for three months in order to defray the postal charges incurred in communing with Miss Blythe on her part!
While Mary was clearly consummate at the art of deception, she didn’t always come out on top. A young man who had applied to her with the age old problem of having ‘made a young woman a mother without making her a wife’ was assured that a payment of 2 guineas would cover the cost of an effective charm that would remedy the situation. Perhaps if the expectant mother herself had applied to Mary the desired outcome would have been achieved, but the child duly arrived and the enraged father swore vengeance on Mary, forcing her to refund the monies he’d paid. But even here, Mary lied. Saying that she had no ready money in her possession, she claimed that she’d had the fortune to meet a mysterious ‘man in black’ on leaving her house one evening, and it was he who had given her the necessary coin to make good on her failed promise; a fortuitous and very usual occurrence on the streets of early nineteenth century Leeds!
Mary’s extortions were not limited to exploiting the susceptible subjects identified by herself or those supplied by Winnifred Bond however, as she even extended her deceptions to her own family. One of Mary’s brothers, having deserted from the Royal Navy, came with his wife to Leeds to lodge with the Batemans for a while to escape detection. If convicted, he would have faced the death penalty. The Navy was notorious for its harsh discipline; since a good many sailors in the seventeenth, eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were pressed into service unwillingly, a firm hand was often needed to keep the crews in line. While flogging was frequently administered for lesser offences, deserters were hanged. After the destruction of the Franco-Span
ish fleet at Trafalgar in 1805, the threat of invasion by France was seriously diminished. It could not be discounted entirely however, and the navy was still vital in maintaining trade, continuing its blockade of French ports and, after 1808, supplying Arthur Wellesley’s army in Spain. Not a single sailor could be spared.
Mary must have found that the couple cramped her style somewhat, and conceived a plan to be rid of them both as well as turning a healthy profit from the exploitation of her house guests. Firstly, echoing her contrivance of John Bateman’s unnecessary mercy dash to his healthy father’s ‘deathbed’, Mary presented her sister-in-law with a forged letter from Newcastle stating that her own father’s life was in the balance and that she should hurry to his side to receive his last blessing. Duped, as Bateman had been before her, Mary’s sister-in-law got to Newcastle only to find her father in perfect health. The port on the Tyne was famous for its glass production at the time and its Literary and Philosophical Society was the envy of the north.
During his wife’s absence, Mary put the time to good use, and began to work on her brother; she told him that not only had his wife been unfaithful to him but that she was busy running up extraordinary debts in his name. Furnishing him with the necessary ink and paper, Mary encouraged her brother to write to his wife telling her that the marriage was over and not to bother to return to Leeds. The lady was obviously made of sterner stuff as she did return, in spite of her husband’s letter, and not only convinced him of the truth and of her constancy, but also of his sister’s deceit, which became unquestionable when it was discovered that Mary had stolen all of their clothes from their travelling trunks and sold them for whatever money she could get. In the face of her brother’s warranted indignation, Mary engineered the couple’s hasty departure from Leeds by proceeding straight to the magistrate and informing on her brother as a deserter. Then she plumbed the depths even further when she wrote to her mother, telling her that her son had been apprehended as a deserter and that the sum of £10 was necessary to set him free. As any concerned mother would, Mrs Harker duly sent the money for her son’s release. As well as informing on her brother and almost wrecking his marriage and causing untold distress and financial hardship to their mother, Mary had managed to turn a healthy profit from the whole sorry episode.