The Yorkshire Witch

by Strevens, Summer;

  Mary’s reputation as something of a ‘witch’ was not new, however. Another ‘sorceress’ hailing from Yorkshire, the 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 nevertheless bought her remedies and potions made from local flowers and herbs. Her prophecies began with seemingly insignificant premonitions, but as she practiced, her confidence grew and she became known as ‘Knaresborough’s Prophetess’. Earning her living by foretelling what the future held, when she spoke people believed her and passed her words on, and her power to see into the future made her well known not only in her hometown but throughout the country as a whole.

  Mother Shipton lived in Tudor England but she predicted the fates of several monarchs in the future, not to mention the Great Fire of London in 1666, the building of the Crystal Palace in 1851 and the outbreak of the Crimean War in 1854.

  While the infamous witch hunts that had reached their peak in Britain in the seventeenth 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, the result of the Church’s condemnation of witches as devil-worshipping heretics, did not necessarily mean a decline in the long held belief in witches, and unfounded fears and irrationality still abounded, even in the Age of Reason which saw the arrival of the steam engine and a certain intellectual opposition to superstition. Among the poor there was still the dread of the unknown. Trust in magic or chance was commonplace and Mary Bateman was well placed to exploit this fear in the susceptible souls amongst the poor and dispossessed now inhabiting the rapidly growing town of Leeds.

  For these people, living conditions were grim. Wages were very low; men rarely earned more than twelve shillings a week, women only two or three shillings. Children got half of that again but in many cases their addition to the family income was vital. From these meagre earnings, as well as food, there were basics like candles, salt, fuel, clothes and linen that had to be paid for, and then there was the rent. Families were crammed into the first developments of ‘blind back’ houses, the precursors of back-to-back housing, built around yards and courts behind the main streets of the town. As their fronts faced each other across a small courtyard and adjacent properties were similarly developed, the blind back houses became back-to-backs. 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 dysentery outbreaks were frequent. Mary played on the superstition of this first and second generation of mill workers. She used the old wives’ tales that it was risking lifelong spinsterhood to sit on a table; that to rock an empty cradle would encourage the birth of another child. And she almost certainly began to add abortion to her repertoire.

  Two other ‘witches’ were operating in Yorkshire at the time. One was ‘Old Nan’, the locally renowned ‘cunning woman’ who lived beneath the overhang of Kilnsey Crag in Wharfedale in the late 1700s. Old Nan, or Nancy Winter to give her real name, was famous throughout the Craven district for telling people’s fortunes, and even had a witchcraft ‘shop’ in Bag’s Alley in Skipton. How effective her predictions were remains questionable in view of the fact that ‘her stock of spells was not very large’. Old Nan relied on her pet guinea pig and half a pack of dirty playing cards in divining futures. The other was Hannah Green, or the ‘Ling Bob Witch’ as she was commonly known. A renowned fortune teller who lived on the outskirts of Bradford in the latter half of the 18th century, she must have been very successful as by the time she died in 1810 she had saved more than £1,000, a fortune at the time. Her chosen method of divination was the reading of tea leaves, a popular method of fortune telling which began to increase in popularity during the seventeenth century when tea was introduced into Europe from China, although she could occasionally be induced to make more general prophecies. The services of the Ling Bob Witch came to be held in such high esteem that the rich and aristocratic would travel considerable distances for a consultation, their carriages with teams of horses and attendant grooms not an uncommon sight, often seen lined up outside her home. This was a cottage on the edge of the moor on the left of the old road from Otley to Bradford, between Carlton and Yeadon, the tall chimney stack painted white so her gentrified clients would know where to find her. Clearly Old Nan and the Ling Bob Witch, whose career spanned forty years, were rather more benign practitioners than Mary Bateman. No whiff of any criminal association ever attached itself to either of them. It was said that, after nightfall, Hannah Green could transform herself into any form, but both she and Nancy Winter were free of the accusations of frauds, petty thefts, poisonings and murder that were to cling to Mary.

  Interestingly, the village of Mary’s birth also spawned another who ‘was looked upon by some as a witch’, a woman called Peggy Lumley who lived in Asenby in the mid-1800s. A description of Peggy was given by T Carter Mitchell in the Thirsk Falcon (1887–1891), a magazine written for the Masonic Lodge of the same name, though Carter Mitchell himself was a noted local personality, known for donning his frock coat and top hat on the first evening of the Topley Fair and making his way down the hill and over the bridge to the gypsy encampment where he visited each caravan and welcomed the occupants. His portrayal of Peggy Lumley ran thus:

  ‘A great reader, especially of quaint old books which taught of necromancy and magic art. A clever, strong-minded woman, she mingled her conversations with dark sayings too deep for the comprehension of her associates … Her appearance too was striking. A tall commanding figure she reminded one of the enchantress Medea but for a fearsome squint in her eyes which, although it detracted from her comeliness, became well a votary of the “black art’’. There were even stories circulating ‘of persons who, having unwittingly angered Peggy, received from her a look which made them return home with foreboding to find some of their stock stone-dead.’

  Clearly, Peggy Lumley was a force to be reckoned with and she should certainly not be crossed. Perhaps it was something in Asenby’s water!

  In late 1792, Mary was still working in the shop of the mantuamaker. The soothsaying side-line had expanded, and as many folk believed her to possess supernatural powers of divination and fortunetelling, the smooth-tongued deceiver gained something of a reputation amongst the superstitious of Leeds. In addition to telling fortunes, she specialised in the ‘removal of evil wishes’, but unlike the Ling Bob Witch’s affluent customer base, drew her clientele largely from the ranks of servant girls who occasionally introduced their mistresses to Mary’s services.

  At the age of twenty-four, Mary seems also to have cast another kind of spell with a view to her longer term prospects – bewitching a potential source of livelihood and security in the shape of one John Bateman. Bateman was a wheelwright, the son of another John Bateman who was the Town Crier of Thirsk. Astonishingly, after a whirlwind courtship of only three weeks, the couple were married by licence at St Peter’s Church, Leeds, on 26 February 1793.

  But marriage did nothing to change Mary Harker’s old ways. Within two months of the newly-weds moving into furnished lodgings in High Court Lane, close to the river wharves and just west of the parish church where they had married, Mary had already stolen from another lodger on the premises. Breaking open the man’s box of belongings, she stole his watch, some silver spoons and two guineas.

  In this instance, Mary escaped prosecution and the full weight of the law by returning the stolen goods and cash; ‘there can be little doubt,’ The Extraordinary Life acerbically recorded, ‘that the young
man who she robbed made her infamy the price of his clemency’. Returning the stolen goods was a tactic that Mary would later repeatedly employ to escape prosecution. When the Batemans later took in lodgers of their own, a Mr Dixon found that he frequently missed small sums of money kept in his room. In total, two guineas was found to have disappeared. The finger of suspicion firmly pointed to Mary, and despite her protestations of innocence, Mr Dixon’s threats of prosecution induced Mary to ‘hush up the disgraceful business by returning his money’. This was a clever move on Mary’s part as at the time the statute books legislated that the theft of more than forty shillings from a dwelling place – twenty-one shillings making up a guinea – was a capital offence. Incidentally, pickpocketing more than a shilling on the street and the theft of five shillings from a shop also carried the same penalty. This heavy-handed overuse of punishment did not end until the reform of the penal code by Robert Peel, Home Secretary in the 1820s.

  Though Mary managed to escape the implications of her discovered thefts, it seems she turned to the less direct method of ‘appropriation in fraudulently obtaining retail goods’, which could then presumably be sold on. In the eighteenth century, it was common for shopkeepers to allow customers to buy items on credit, or ‘on account’ with no money exchanged up-front. Posing as a buyer for a ‘Miss Stephenson’ Mary went shopping. Calling at a linen draper’s shop in Leeds, she asked for fabrics to make up into three silk petticoats, in the fictitious customer’s name, to be sent for Miss Stephenson’s inspection. Upon Miss Stephenson’s selection, two of the petticoats would be returned to the shop and the third kept and paid for. Indeed, two articles were returned. But Mary kept the third, directing that it should be charged to Miss Stephenson’s account. Of course it was never paid for, and the out of pocket draper was left with egg on his face. Mary was further successful in getting her hands on ‘a gown-piece and two webs of cloth’ as well as some flannel fabric, but this time using the name ‘Mrs Smith’ to dupe another unsuspecting shopkeeper. It is a testament to Mary’s skill as an actress that in spite of the several charges of swindling that were levelled against her, the shopkeepers involved were persuaded into a mistaken clemency and forgave her. In hindsight, had they not been so kind, the lives of many unfortunate people might have escaped ruin.

  Obviously, Mary’s darkening reputation meant that a frequent change of address was a shrewd and necessary move. A little over a year after their marriage, the Batemans moved from High Court Lane and took a house in the yard of a Mr Wells, a spirit merchant who lived on Briggate, then as now at the heart of Leeds shopping centre and about a third of a mile from where the Batemans had previously lived, a safe enough remove from their previous lodgings. While the accommodation in High Court Lane had been furnished, the couple apparently furnished their new abode in Well’s Yard themselves in ‘a tolerable comfortable manner’, possibly financed by Mary’s various thefts and scams, many of which must have gone unnoticed and unrecorded. In these first years of industrialisation, the flotsam of mill workers drifted constantly. No one of Mary’s class could afford their own homes, so they rented, often from unscrupulous landlords out to rook them. Unable to afford the rent, tenants sublet and the subtenants did likewise, so that tenements filled up with anonymous people who came and went on a regular basis.

  Whether John Bateman was either unaware or unwilling to acknowledge the truth, he cannot have failed to notice the pattern of accusations of theft that appeared to dog his wife. But what Mary did next must surely have sharpened any suspicions John Bateman harboured about the audacity and wickedness of the character of the woman that he had married.

  Chapter 2

  Mrs Moore’s Screws

  While Mary was busy with her various dupes, thefts and scams, her husband John was earning his rather more honest living as a wheelwright. He was employed in the business of the aptly named Mr Wright whose workshop, as listed in the Leeds Trade Directory covering the period 1790–1799, was located opposite the now demolished St James’s Church in New York Street near Kirkgate Market. In fact, it was Wright who would later testify at Mary’s trial as a crucial witness of the authentication of her handwriting, but here we are jumping ahead of her story.

  John Bateman would have had a five minute walk to work from their lodgings in Wells’ Yard, though it may sometimes have taken longer as the streets would have been busier on Tuesdays and Saturdays, the days of the twice weekly cloth market. This business had formerly been conducted on the Leeds Bridge, but the increase in manufacturers soon made the market too big to be confined to the bridge, so trading moved to the high street – Briggate – the wide road from the river crossing originally called Bridge Gate. The cloth market, which would eventually move to the Kirkgate site in 1822, began from the bridge, running along Briggate, at this time still lined with the old timber framed houses and the numerous shops and workshops which occupied the yards beyond, one of which of course belonged to the Bateman’s landlord. It then followed the course of the street northward, almost to the Moot Hall at the Kirkgate junction with Commercial Street. Once adorned with a statue of Queen Anne, the Hall was the meeting place for the justices of the town and was also used to administer relief to the poor and determine the paternity of illegitimate children. It was where vagabonds were flogged; outside the front of the building were the pillory and stocks, and in 1664 the heads of three of the Farnley Wood plotters, anti-monarchists who planned to overthrow the recently restored Charles II – Robert Atkins, John Errington and Henry Wilson – were stuck on poles there, where they remained for thirteen years before being dislodged in a storm.

  The area around the Moot Hall had long been subject to serious congestion; part of a block of buildings known as Middle Row. The ground floor below the courthouse was occupied by butcher’s shops, and with a roadway on each side so narrow that it was dangerous for two carriages to pass one another. Although the original seventeenth century building was replaced in 1710, it was still considered a hindrance to traffic. Briggate was the general market place for the town, with cattle, fish and fruit for sale, with as much as five hundred loads of apples being sold in one day. John Bateman would have been part of the daily ebb and flow of the tide of pedestrian and wheeled traffic, though Mary herself would one morning contribute to the throng when, astutely timed after the arrival of the first post, she hurried to her husband’s workplace, overwrought with feigned sorrow carrying a forged letter with the news that John’s father, the resident Town Cryer of Thirsk, was near death.

  Mary needn’t have waited long to start out on her deceitful journey; the Post Office in nearby Boar Lane opened at eight o’clock in the morning in the winter months and seven in summer for the delivery of letters, ‘and the letter carrier begins to deliver the letters in the town about the same time’. Of course, this was immaterial to Mary, as the forged letter she was delivering had never seen the inside of a post satchel. Arriving at Wright’s workshop clutching the forgery detailing John Bateman Senior’s imminent death, she entreated her husband that if he wanted to see his father before it was too late, he should immediately get to Thirsk to be by his father’s side. Understandably distraught, John downed tools, and, borrowing a small amount of money from his understanding employer to cover travelling expenses, he started out on the near forty-mile journey to Thirsk. Whether John hired a hack and rode there or caught one of the many mail coaches which left Leeds daily or whether he begged rides along the way we do not know. Delivery waggons are mentioned in the Leeds Directory (R Sweeting’s waggons setting off from the Call Lane warehouse ran a route to Stockton via Thirsk) so this would be a possibility. When John arrived in the town he must have been astonished and relieved, to see his father alive and well and ringing his bell, crying the news in Thirsk town square. ‘I am glad’ said the bewildered son to his father ‘to see you so much better.’ ‘Better?’ said his perplexed father, ‘nothing has ailed me.’ It now became clear that the dire contents of the letter which Mary had so hurriedly b
orne to her husband was a wicked lie on his wife’s part, and when the furious husband returned to Leeds, her motive became all too apparent. During John’s engineered absence, Mary had sold every belonging and stick of furniture from their rented house and used the monies presumably to pay off the victim, or victims, of another of her thefts.

  We must assume that in spite of his wife’s outrageous behaviour, forgiveness was in John Bateman’s nature, and that the couple were reconciled after this incident, at least periodically, as their marriage produced three children – possibly as many as five. The article appearing in the Leeds Mercury detailing Mary’s arrest in October 1808 noted that she was the mother of ‘several children’. The paper was a prominent local weekly with a readership of 3,000. It cost 6d because of the increased stamp duty and its editor was Edward Baines. We know that the Batemans had a son called Jack as mention was made of him at Mary’s trial, and presumably this child was the same John Bateman (Jack being a traditional diminutive for John), who was baptised on 21 February 1796 in St Peter’s Parish Church, where his parents had been married, the paternal relationship noted in the baptismal register as ‘Father: John Bateman’. The church is Leeds Minster today. The vicar who baptised John was Peter Haddon. The same records yield the earlier baptism of a Mary Bateman, noted as daughter of John Bateman, on 16 February 1794, a little less than a year after Mary and John’s marriage, and possibly the daughter that Mary referred to in a letter written to her husband from the condemned cell at York Castle Gaol, requesting that her wedding ring be bequeathed to the child, a traditional bequest as the girl, named for her mother, was the eldest. Records of Mary’s last days also indicate that she was allowed to have her youngest child, although the sex wasn’t stipulated, with her in the condemned cell until her execution – this may have been James Bateman, again recorded as the son of John Bateman, who was baptised at St Peter’s on 19 July 1807. The register of St Peter’s also show records for the baptisms of a Maria Bateman on 6 December 1801 and George Bateman baptised on 20 May 1804, and as both births fall neatly into the obstetric gap between the births of the eldest child Mary, and James born in the summer of 1807, Maria and George may well have been the elder siblings of James who is the most likely candidate for the child sharing Mary’s imprisonment. The child would still have been classed as care-dependant of a nursing mother – young children cared for by their mothers in prison being a distressing yet common practice.