The Yorkshire Witch

by Strevens, Summer;

  Chapter 4

  ‘Crist is coming’

  The extent of John Bateman’s awareness of, or complicity in his wife’s criminality at this point can only be guessed at. They removed as a couple to new lodgings in Black Dog Yard; another shrewd and necessary relocation in view of Mary’s increasing notoriety. Black Dog Yard was within an area of Leeds known as ‘Bank’, the Black Dog Inn close to the junction with East Street and Cross Green Lane. Bank was the focus for those property developers, mentioned in the first chapter, who capitalised on the cheap land upon which to build the haphazard development of back-to-back housing, which they rented out to the poor workers, invariably employed in the numerous mills proliferating in Leeds at the time. While some of the terraces were never finished, the building of others was begun in open fields. As the tenements of slum dwellings grew, access was gained by a narrow tunnel reaching the back halves of the houses off narrow unmetalled roads, thus saving ground so that even more houses could be crammed onto a site; after all, access roads and pavements were wasted space which brought in no rent to the landlord.

  Inside, the houses were cramped, with two rooms, one up, one down, about fourteen feet square, often with a cellar, presenting an additional rental income when let out as a one-room dwelling. The precise conditions in these hovels were not officially catalogued until the 1830s, when the Whig government of that decade appointed Edwin Chadwick to carry out his investigation into the working classes. So, although the details that follow postdate the Batemans’ period, they nevertheless reflect conditions in the opening years of the century.

  One seventeen-year-old flax mill worker named Eliza Marshall told a government inspector in 1832, ‘I live in a cellar. I pay 1s a week for it. I have no mother. I live with my little sisters.’ Eliza had worked in the factories from the age of nine, and by the time she was eleven she was starting to go lame due to the long hours and harsh conditions. By the age of seventeen, she was too ill to work. As there was no piped water supply or proper sewerage system, the ‘necessary’ (lavatory) was often a wooden screen round a hole dug in the ground. Sometimes there weren’t even any ‘out offices,’ or outside toilets, so people used a bucket which would be emptied onto a common midden heap. In 1832, during the first and one of the worst cholera epidemics to hit Leeds, seventy-five cartloads of soil were removed from just one of the privies in Boot & Shoe Yard in Kirkgate. Over a decade later things had not improved, as a report on the Sanitary Conditions in Leeds published in 1845 stated that:

  ‘By far the most unhealthy localities of Leeds are close squares of houses, or yards, as they are called, which have been erected for the accommodation of working people. Some of these, though situated in comparatively high ground, are airless from the enclosed structure, and being wholly unprovided with any form of under-drainage or convenience, or arrangements for cleansing, are one mass of damp and filth … The ashes, garbage and filth of all kinds are thrown from the doors and windows of the houses upon the surface of the streets and courts … The privies are few in proportion to the inhabitants. They are open to view both in front and rear, are invariably in a filthy condition, and often remain without removal of the filth for six months.’ However insalubrious the Batemans’ new surrounding were (the conditions of ‘filth’ alluded to above were yet to reach their zenith) the fact remained that they were a safe mile or so from Marsh Lane. They were also a decent remove from the Anchor Inn in Kirkgate where the proprietor, a Mr Crookes, had recently outwitted Mary’s attempted theft of a watch. She had had more success, however, in stealing some linen laid out to dry on a hedge. Hedges and bushes were often used to dry washing outdoors in the summertime, in the fresh air while the sun bleached it, especially where there were no open fields to use as tentergrounds for the same purpose. This bold theft was from under the nose of the lad who’d been set to watch over it; no doubt he received a serious scolding later for his inattentiveness.

  Doubtless Mary continued with her deceitful ways, keeping up her thefts and malign ministrations to the susceptible needy. However, it was while the Batemans were living in Black Dog Yard that Mary conceived of her most masterly and far reaching scam to date, with a cash incentive to exploit the variations to orthodox Christian beliefs which flourished toward the close of the eighteenth century. As religious tolerance gained in strength, the growing zeal arising from the beliefs in the ministries of the self-proclaimed prophetess Joanna Southcott increased in popularity. Her following flourished in the climate of expectant frenzy whipped up by her and the assertions of other visionaries that the return of Jesus Christ was imminent. Another zealot emerging in the arena of religious radicalism was Richard Brothers, who, in 1793, declared himself to be the apostle of a new religion, proclaiming himself to be Prince of the Hebrews, a literal descendant of the Biblical House of David, and the Nephew of the Almighty, who decreed he was to rule over Israel until the return of Jesus Christ.

  To put into context the implausibility of belief in the unbelievable exploit which Mary put into practice, both Southcott and Brothers, whose careers overlapped, had attracted quite a following, in spite of their apparently far-fetched assertions. Joanna’s devotees, referred to as ‘Southcottians’, were said to have numbered over 100,000. Around the year 1792, Southcott had become persuaded that she possessed supernatural gifts. She wrote and dictated prophecies in rhyme, and then identified herself as the woman spoken of in the Book of Revelation who would give birth to the new Messiah. Incredibly, at the age of sixty-four, the virgin Southcott announced that she was indeed pregnant and would in due course be delivered of the messianic ‘man child’, the Shiloh of Genesis. The date of 19 October 1814 was that fixed for the birth, but Shiloh failed to appear. It was given out that Southcott was in a trance. She died not long afterwards at the end of December, her followers refusing to release her body for some time as they believed she would rise from the dead. They agreed to her burial only after the corpse began to decay.

  Richard Brothers based his declarations on the premise that he had a special divine commission. Claiming to hear the voice of an attending angel, who proclaimed to him the fall of Babylon the Great, which, according to Brothers, was in fact London, his plea for mercy was apparently heard by God and London was spared. Brothers was also anticipating the arrival of a heavenly lady who, descending from the clouds, would shower him with money, love and happiness. In February 1792, declaring himself a healer with the ability to restore sight to the blind, he drew large crowds, not so much in demand for his alleged healing ability, as for the small gifts of money he paid out to those he prayed for. Ordained with the special role of gathering and returning the Jews to Palestine, in particular the ‘Jews’ who were hidden amongst the population of Britain, Brothers maintained he would achieve this by using a rod he had made from a wild rosebush, with which he would perform miracles, much as Moses had done with his staff, to produce water from a rock and to part the Red Sea. Later on, in consequence of his prophesying the death of King George III and an end to the monarchy of Great Britain, Brothers was arrested for treason in 1795, and imprisoned on the grounds of being criminally insane.

  From a private asylum in Islington, Brothers predicted that on 19 November 1795 he would be revealed as Prince of the Hebrews and Ruler of the world. However, when the date came and passed without any such manifestation, his disillusioned followers drifted away, many swelling the ranks of the Southcottians. Brothers spent the last 30 years of his life designing flags and uniforms and drew up plans for a palace in the New Jerusalem. His release from the asylum was finally secured in 1806, the same year in which Mary Bateman’s hen laid its first miraculous egg.

  Like many other housewives of her time, Mary kept several hens to keep her supplied with fresh eggs. As her reputation as a fortune teller had begun to suffer as a consequence of the increasing complaints inevitable from her deceived clientele, Mary changed tack, and jumping on the spiritual bandwagon, announced that she had been granted a vision in which she had b
een told that one of her hens would lay fourteen special eggs and that the last one would mark the beginning of the Apocalypse. By this time, thanks to the impact of Brothers and Southcott, the popularity of Millenarianism was assured and had gained a remarkable hold on the collective imagination. Right on cue then, one of Mary’s hens laid an egg with the inscription ‘Crist is coming’ written on the shell.

  Mary was astute enough to embellish the miracle, and shore-up her shaky reputation, by claiming that she herself was a devotee of Joanna Southcott, who in 1802 had begun ‘sealing’ her followers by giving them a special token to mark them out as being among the 144,000 to be ‘saved’ according to the Book of Revelation. These were the survivors of the Twelve Tribes of Israel, sealed as servants of God on their foreheads. Mary had somehow managed to secure one of these genuine tokens and, while one should not jump to conclusions, presumably by nefarious means. Her status as one of Southcott’s ‘sealed’ reinforced her announcement that not only did the eggs laid by her hen proclaim Christ’s second coming, but that they foretold it would happen very soon. Cashing in on the mounting hysteria caused by this pronouncement of the imminence of Doomsday, Mary put the prophetic hen on display, charging the faithful between a penny and a shilling a look. Mary also began selling to believers her own version of Southcott’s ‘proclamations of faith’, special ‘seals’ (a piece of paper bearing the initials ‘JC’) which she assured would guarantee the bearer admission into Heaven following the Apocalypse. Thousands of visitors came to be saved, and at the same time lined Mary’s pockets.

  In relatively recent memory, several ‘portents’ had occurred. In the autumn of 1799, the sky had been ablaze with strange electrical storms and lights. On 19 November, over Huncoates, in Lincolnshire, a ball of fire was seen to blaze across the heavens, leaving a trail of flashes behind it, while seven days prior to this celestial spectacle, in the skies above Hereford the moon was seen to shine with a fierce glow and a ‘large red pillar of fire’, preceded to the south by ‘flashes of extremely vivid electrical sort’. This display, accompanied by short dazzling flashes and pulses, coalescing together, then suddenly bursting apart, shooting trails of fire across the night sky was witnessed by many, the meteorological fireworks display taken by most, with typical end-ofthe-century-foreboding, as a clear apocalyptic omen.

  It is difficult to say how long Mary’s holy hoax would have continued, and how much more money she would have made, had not a sceptical doctor managed one morning to examine one of the ‘freshly laid’ miraculous eggs. He got up early, hid near her house and found that the inscription had been written in a corrosive concentrated vinegar, Mary re-applying the message until it was partially burned into the shell of the egg. The misspelling of ‘Crist’ was also a giveaway, although by contemporary standards Mary had what was then considered a reasonable education for the daughter of an agricultural labourer, possibly attained at Sunday School, where she had learned to read and write; accomplishments she was later to use remorselessly against her more gullible ‘clients’. When the authorities were made aware of the deception, Black Dog Yard was raided and Mary was actually caught in the cruel act of re-inserting an inscribed egg back into the chicken’s egg duct, ready to be ‘laid’ again later. The ruse exposed, the resulting scandal forced Joanna Southcott to stop ‘sealing’ her own followers because of the stigma of Mary’s fraud. As for the celebrated chicken, Mary profited a final few pennies from the bird by selling it to a still curious neighbour, who on finding that none of the subsequent eggs that it laid bore any mystic messages, wrung its neck and put it in the pot. The records are ominously silent on the ‘authorities’ who would eventually stop Mary in her tracks. There was no Yorkshire Constabulary in the modern sense of the term until the 1830s when boroughs were given the right to establish police forces along Metropolitan (London) lines in their own areas. The men who raided Black Dog Yard were almost certainly Constables of the Watch under the direction of a magistrate.

  Oddly enough, after toying with people’s religious devotions for the better part of a month, rather than for the monstrous hoax she’d played out, Mary was most resented for her cruelty to chickens. And it is the image of Mary holding up the ‘miracle egg’ which graced the frontispiece of the book detailing her exploits, trial and execution, which would run to a twelfth edition two years after its first publication in 1811, two years after she was hanged.

  This engraving of Mary was a somewhat emblematic representation of ‘The Yorkshire Witch’. Along with the infamous egg, on the writing desk at which Mary is sitting is another item with religious overtones – a bottle bearing on the label the words ‘M. Bateman’s Balm of Gilead’. Balm of Gilead is a high-quality ointment with healing properties extracted from resin taken from a flowering plant in the Middle East. The Bible uses the term ‘balm of Gilead’ metaphorically as an example of something with healing or soothing powers; clearly this is the illustrator’s jibe at the supposed curative preparations that were later to become Mary’s hallmark. The further poignant inclusion in the engraving is that of pens and ink on the desk, and a letter addressed to William Perigo, whose significance will become apparent in due course.

  Mary’s exploitation of the Southcott phenomenon was not however restricted to her prophetic chickens. Perhaps in a bid to avoid the local fallout from her apocalyptic predictions, and capitalising on the susceptible nature of unquestioning Southcottians, Mary contrived to combine a convenient removal from Leeds with another fraudulent undertaking and took a trip to York. Enough time had passed since her last hasty departure from that city, when she had fled to Leeds in 1788 after the thefts from her then mistress had come to light. On her arrival in the city, Mary astutely sought out and attended meetings of York’s Southcott followers. The License Register kept by the ecclesiastic authorities recording all Protestant dissenters’ meetings confirms a proliferation of such gatherings in the city, with licenses granted for worship in private houses before a national network of Southcottian chapels was established after 1811. Posing as a devoted follower of Southcott, we can imagine Mary, the consummate actress, joining in with the proceedings, which included the distribution of ‘wine and cakes’, hymn singing, the reading of Southcott’s prophecies and ‘the lifting up of hands for Christ’s Kingdom to come’. And from one of those York congregations Mary selected for herself a likely and receptive victim, settling on a poor widow living in alms housing who she identified as being ripe for exploitation.

  After following the widow home to find out where she lived, Mary knocked on her door, seemingly at random, and explained that she was a stranger who had come to York for a few days, and was seeking the company of fellow Southcottians. When the widow told her that there were many followers in the city, and indeed she herself was one, Mary congratulated herself on her good fortune in happening upon a fellow believer. She next enquired whether there were any Southcottians in the city who might be able to accommodate her during her stay as it was her ‘particular wish to be in kindred company’. When the widow could think of nobody in a position to offer her lodgings, on seeing Mary’s exaggerated and feigned disappointment, the widow had the charity to offer Mary to share her own bed – even though it would be an inconvenience; Mary did seem after all to be ‘a clean kind of woman’. In the eighteenth century it was not unusual for people, even relative strangers, of the same sex to share a bed – difficulties of transport often made overnight stays a necessity and the sharing of rooms and beds was tolerated, particularly in houses where space was restricted.

  Once through the door, next on Mary’s agenda was the reconnoitring of the widow’s dwelling, to mentally mark down whatever possessions might be worth stealing. To make a thorough survey however she would need the widow out of the way. Mary suggested with another lie, that as she was not at all acquainted with the streets of York herself, perhaps the widow would be kind enough to purchase on her behalf a little meat. However, the widow was wary at leaving a person of such recent acquaintance a
lone in her home so a girl was sent on the errand instead. On her return with some mutton, once boiled, Mary gobbled down the lot, offering only the broth to her hostess, whose refusal to partake of even a spoonful seemed to unduly enrage Mary. In spite of her insistent urgings, the broth was eventually thrown out, and as Mary herself had refused to touch the proffered dish, in all probability the widow had avoided being poisoned by her house guest, whose likely intention was to steal the old lady’s belongings unimpeded.

  Mary only stayed a couple of nights with the widow, but predictably after her departure it was discovered that she had made off with not only the few guineas in the widow’s possession, but also some items of clothing. Needless to say, the widow never laid eyes on Mary again.

  On her return to Leeds following her profitable stay in York, with the memory of the holy hen still fresh in people’s minds and having thoroughly worked the Bank quarter of the town, Mary and John again moved, this time to lodgings near the Old Assembly Rooms in Kirkgate. Switching her energies and focus back to medicinal remedies and her side-line as an abortionist, in spite of those clients whose health began to falter after seeking Mary’s assistance, her customer base nonetheless remained healthy, even if those who took her potions didn’t, and her services were again in high demand.