Mother Shipton Superstition

Mary’s exploitation of her reputation as something of a ‘witch’ was no fresh concept however. Another sorceress hailing from Yorkshire, Knaresborough based Ursula Southill, better known as Mother Shipton, had been famed for prophesying the future some three centuries previously. She exhibited prophetic and psychic abilities from an early age and, with her large crooked nose, bent back and twisted legs, to the superstitious her appearance was that of the archetypal ‘witch’. Though she was taunted by the local populace, they were nevertheless accepting of the remedies and potions that Ursula made from local flowers and herbs. But as well as her skill in making traditional remedies, Mother Shipton had another gift – she could predict the future.

While the infamous Witch Hunts that had reached their peak in the UK in the 17th century had long since abated (the last ‘witch’ to be executed in England was Alice Molland, who was sent to the gallows in Exeter in 1684) the decline in trials and hunts, which had been precipitated by the Church’s condemnation of witches as devil-worshipping heretics, did not necessarily presage a corresponding decline in the long held belief in witches, and unfounded fears and irrationality still abounded. At a time when dread of the unknown, or trust in magic or chance was commonplace, Mary Bateman was well placed to exploit this flourishing market amongst those susceptible souls amongst the poor and disenfranchised now inhabiting the rapidly growing town of

From these meagre earnings, as well as food, basics like candles, salt, fuel, clothes and linen had to be paid for, and then there was the rent. With families crammed into the first developments of ‘blind back’ houses, the precursors of back-to-back housing, built around the edges of yards and courts behind the main streets of the town, their fronts facing each other across a small courtyard, as the adjacent properties were similarly developed, the blind back houses became back-to-backs, the living conditions and legacy of which is discussed in Chapter 4. Scantily furnished with few possessions, except for some basic furniture and cooking utensils, the space would have been inevitably cramped in the face of economic necessity and the absence of any effective birth control; many were close to destitution in a climate of overcrowding and deprivation, living in filthy conditions where cholera outbreaks were frequent (and indeed a convenient circumstance employed by Mary Bateman to cover one of her later poisonings). Playing on such notions that it was bad luck for an unmarried girl to sit on the surface of a table, because it was believed that she would never be married, to the rocking of an empty cradle inviting the birth of another child (which may or may not have been a blessing,