The Yorkshire Witch

by Strevens, Summer;

  Returning to the engraving, Mary was described as having ‘nothing ingenuous in her countenance, it had an air of placidity and composure’. Perhaps if the artist were Samuel Topham, and he had not actually laid eyes on his subject in life, then he was borrowing from this description. Mary was also described as ‘neat in her person and dress’; certainly this is how she is presented in the illustration. Her clothes are befitting of a housewife of her time and station in life: the de rigueur neckerchief and mob cap, along with the clean white apron worn over the high-waisted ‘Empire line’ gown representative of the most popular and fashionable style of dress in the early nineteenth century. It is likely that Mary would actually have worn a dress made from a harder wearing material such as a light wool of brushed cotton as opposed to the more expensive and less functional muslin and silks worn by her social superiors.

  Visual images, or lack of them, aside we are reliant for details of Mary’s life on the heavily moralising The Extraordinary Life, which must be considered as something of a sensationalised and indeed unsubstantiated account, whoever wrote it. From a near contemporary point of view, other than the chapter given over to Mary in the second volume of The Criminal recorder: or, Biographical sketches of Notorious Public Characters, written in 1815, itself borrowing heavily from The Extraordinary Life, and the colourful though brief account of her life and crimes as reported by The Newgate Calendar, there is little else to draw on. The Calendar was a hugely popular monthly bulletin, yet a supposedly moralising publication that gave vivid accounts of notorious criminals in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It was remarked that if an individual owned two books, one was the Bible and the other the Newgate Calendar, which did not disappoint in the report of Mary’s case, opening with the line:

  ‘The insidious arts practised by this woman rendered her a pest to the neighbourhood in which she resided, and she richly deserved that fate which eventually befell her.’

  Though numerous brief accounts of Mary Bateman proliferate, they were written to warn against and perpetuate the stereotype of the ‘dangerous’ woman, to be heeded by other potential malefactors. Exhuming the real woman from the lurid accounts of her life is difficult to say the least, and that is why this book does not pretend to be a ‘biography’ in any conventional sense. Of necessity the preceding chapters rely to a certain extent on conjecture, yet in the instances where ‘hard’ evidence is lacking, there is too much ‘soft’ evidence to be brushed aside entirely.

  Whereas today the high profile of the exploits of any insidious criminal is aired in any number of media formats, giving a clear image and insight into that person’s life and motivation, the principal conundrum for the modern historian is sifting the historical record of the often biased past presented in line with history’s censoring hand. Though Mary Bateman was and still is regarded as possessing a perfidious personality, resorting to psychoanalysis and intuition to fill in the blanks of her life and character, in the absence her own words, and any concrete and less biased biographical detail, is risky. Aside from the affecting letter she wrote to her husband from the condemned cell the night before her execution, the only other correspondence recorded are those conning letters written in the alleged hand of Miss Blythe. Even so, it is the duty of the historian to offer as full an explanation as possible for the events of the past and we have to try with Mary.

  She began her career with thefts and frauds. Were these acts the results of feelings of anger, loss, disempowerment or social inadequacy rather than sheer economic need or greed as is so often the case with many compelled to steal? The factors supposedly influencing those who are today ‘addicted’ to shoplifting, include increasing stress, materialism, emptiness, and addiction in our society and world as a whole. Were such factors operating in Mary’s day? The stress of survival in the harsh materialism of the new industrial cities must have been immense. She tended to defraud those of her own class, which meant that they trusted her. Colloquially known as a ‘long game’, a confidence trickster attempts to defraud a person or group after first gaining their confidence in exploiting characteristics of the human psyche. In Mary’s case she played on her victims’ inherent fears. Yet in view of the extremity of her later misdeeds, consideration must be given as to whether Mary Bateman was suffering from a psychological disorder, and should be branded either a psychopath or a sociopath, the professional terms for what psychiatry calls an antisocial personality disorder.

  Broadly speaking, with regards to such complex psychological conditions, both types of personality disorder could have been applicable to Mary. Both have a pervasive pattern of disregard for the safety and rights of others, with deceit and manipulation central features to either type of personality. Contrary to popular belief, a psychopath or sociopath is not necessarily violent, as was the case with Mary Bateman, who relied on her own cunning to achieve her ends. The shared common features of diagnosed psychopaths and sociopaths include regularly flouting or breaking the law and perhaps most markedly feeling no remorse in their actions. In examining the traits of both of these complex, multifaceted conditions, the question of nature versus nurture is brought to the fore. While the clues to psychopathy and sociopathy are usually available in childhood, where a pattern of behaviour indicative of the violation of the basic rights or safety of others, and breaking rules and societal norms manifest at a young age, researchers generally believe that at variance to sociopaths, psychopaths tends to be born, and not ‘made’ and that they are subject to a genetic predisposition. Mary was, after an incidence of petty theft, marked out as being of a ‘knavish and vicious disposition’ from the age of five. Possibly related to physiological brain differences, research has further shown that confirmed psychopaths have underdeveloped components of the brain commonly thought to be responsible for emotion regulation and impulse control. Difficulty in forming real emotional attachments with others consequently results in artificial, shallow relationships designed to be manipulated in a way that most benefits the psychopath, who rarely feels guilt regarding any of their behaviours, no matter how detrimental they might be to others. Yet psychopaths are often viewed as being charming and trustworthy, holding down a steady, normal day-to-day life, even having families and seemingly-loving relationships with a partner. The Extraordinary Life described Mary Bateman as possessing:

  ‘an air of placidity and composure, not ill adapted to make a favourable impression on those who visited her. Her manner of address was soft and insinuating, with the affectation of sanctity. In her domestic arrangements she was regular, and was mistress of such qualifications in housewifery as, with an honest heart, would have enabled her to fill her station with respectability and usefulness.’

  As a rule, when a psychopath engages in criminal behaviour, they tend to do so in a way that minimizes risk to themselves, having carefully planned their criminal activity to ensure they evade detection, with contingency plans in place for every possibility. Until the unravelling of the Perigo ‘sting’, this fits Mary Bateman like a glove. One also has to wonder, did Mary keep a mental note of the tally of those she had murdered? Perhaps, when in her last letter to her husband written from the condemned cell she maintained her innocence in respect of the murder of Rebecca Perigo (though she did acknowledge culpability to serial frauds) she was in denial, or simply merely detached from her feelings as a consequence of her psychological condition? It is highly likely that the Kitchin sisters and their mother were also Mary’s victims, which accounts for her place in criminal history as what the Victorians called a ‘multiple murderer’.

  In turn, unlike their psychopathic counterparts, sociopaths are believed to be the product of ‘nurture’ (the result of environmental factors), a consequence of childhood trauma, physical or emotional abuse, the negative aspects of their upbringing. We have no means of establishing whether Mary’s household was a loving one, though doubtless she would have been physically chastised for the theft of the Morocco shoes that marked out as being ‘knavish’ and �
��vicious’ at such a tender age, since corporal punishment was then the accepted norm. The early exposure in her formative years to the supposed detrimental influences of the unfavourably viewed gypsy population descending annually on her home town would doubtless have been viewed by her contemporaries as a contributory factor in her development of a psychological defect, had the science of psychology of course been in existence at the time. However, in general, sociopaths tend to be more impulsive and erratic in their behaviour, they may become agitated and angered easily and, in the eyes of others, sociopaths will appear to be very disturbed. Any crimes committed by a sociopath, including murder, will tend to be haphazard, disorganized and spontaneous rather than planned, and with little regard for the risks or consequences of their actions; the chances of being apprehended are increased, which tends to rule out this particular personality disorder being applicable to Mary. Her crimes were highly organized and co-ordinated.

  While considering the possibility of an antisocial personality disorder being the driving force behind Mary’s crimes, we should examine her methods. To use poison as a murder weapon takes planning and some degree of skill; a poisoner could never claim that the crime was committed in the ‘heat of the moment’ and this somehow makes the act seem controlled, premeditated and all the more sinister. Poison was popularly seen as a method of murder frequently employed by females; requiring no physical exertion, a crime committed by stealth and in private. The Extraordinary Life noted, and this was certainly pertinent to the murder of Rebecca Perigo, that ‘death by poison may be as surely accomplished at a distance as on the spot’, and in this respect perpetrators were also less likely to be found guilty if they were indeed caught. Since antiquity, women were the guardians of the domestic realm, and the keepers of the keys to the kitchen cabinets. The lady of the house was ideally placed to conveniently administer a poison as she was predominantly involved with the preparation of food and the management of and access to household remedies and ‘medicines’. Though their pharmacological skills could be directed to the good – as Alfred Swaine Taylor, the eminent nineteenth century toxicologist is quoted as saying ‘A poison in a small dose is a medicine, a medicine in a large dose is a poison’ – knowledge of the poisons needed to induce abortions and eliminate inconvenient rivals nevertheless has done nothing to diminish the stereotype of the poisoning woman, a stock character throughout history.

  Such a woman was epitomised from the earliest times by Cleopatra, who in the Roman imagination was a ‘fatale monstrum’ using poison not only to effect her own suicide but also on prisoners of war. She in turn influenced later portraits of femmes fatales like Lucrezia Borgia, (who, historians now believe, never killed anybody). The notion is bolstered by the fact that in Medieval times poison had become a popular method of despatch as the increase in the establishment of apothecary shops in many towns and cities offered the sale of substances for medicinal use that could also be employed for a more malign purposes. While by the time of Mary’s conviction the development of analytical chemistry, albeit rudimentary, had already dawned, increasing the risk that a poisoner would be caught, poison was still seen as a popular method of murder. Indeed, in spite of the earliest convictions secured as a result of the presentation of forensic evidence in a court of law, that of Mary Blandy in 1752 as a consequence of Dr Addington’s efforts, and the later indisputable test for the presence of arsenic developed by chemist James Marsh in 1836, it was still possible for the guilty to walk free because juries were loath to convict on forensic evidence alone. An artful defence lawyer could play on a jury’s lack of scientific knowledge regarding chemical analysis, the confusion leading them to disregard it and return a verdict of not guilty

  Murders and attempted murders aside, the year 1806 was probably more memorable for events of a greater national significance, such as Lord Nelson’s state funeral, the death of Prime Minister William Pitt and Charles James Fox, then British foreign minister, introducing a bill to ban British ships from transporting slaves to foreign countries. This was also the year of Mary’s most notable fraud, in view of the sheer number of people she duped – the ‘miracle egg’ episode. Not only injurious to the egos of those taken in (and of course the poor chicken she employed as the vehicle for her hoax) the consequences of her fraudulent and blatant profiteering were certainly detrimental to the reputation of Joanna Southcott.

  Another aspect of Mary’s case piquing the curiosity of her contemporaries, as well as those who have become acquainted with her story in the two hundred years and more since her execution, stems from the incredulity at her ability to systematically steal and defraud people when she was already well known to be a thief and a trickster. Why wasn’t she informed on by the people of Leeds? The probable explanation is that they were more afraid of her supposed abilities as a witch than the consequences of her predations. It would be easy to brand William Perigo, amongst others, as entirely naive for allowing himself to be so completely taken in by Mary, but no doubt, as the medical profession could offer no orthodox treatment to remedy his wife’s condition, he sought assistance elsewhere. It was his and his wife’s misfortune that they happened to enlist the services of one of the most pernicious women of her age.

  Certainly the allusion to witchcraft darkly tinged Mary’s name. As evidenced by those amongst the crowd gathered to witness her execution, believing to the very end that ‘The Yorkshire Witch’ would save herself from death at the last moment by employing her supernatural powers to vanish into thin air as the noose tightened, her supposed craft was very real to her contemporaries; especially to Winifred Bond. Sometimes employed by Mary to run various errands for her, when Winifred’s testimony at Mary’s trial was questioned by Judge Le Blanc, she affirmed that she was ‘obliged’ to leave Leeds at Mary Bateman’s insistence as ‘she was afraid’, fearing the supernatural powers which she supposed Mary to possess. It was after all Rebecca Perigo’s belief in the supernatural causes of her ailment, particularly the allusion to the ‘black dog’, an age old phenomenon believed to be an omen of death, which opened the Perigos’ door to Mary’s malign ministrations in the first place.

  Although the last witch to be executed in England, Alice Molland, went to the gallows in Exeter in 1684, it was not until 1727 that the last witch in Scotland was burned at the stake. A Witchcraft Act was passed in 1735 which made it a crime for anyone to claim that a person had magical powers. Even so, witchcraft remained as a felony on the statute book until 1951. At Mary Bateman’s trial, many who genuinely feared her alleged powers gathered outside the courtroom, giving all the more credence to those who had fallen victim to her reputation. It is easy to feel distanced today from the accounts of Mary’s supposed witchcraft; people believed in things that we would no longer consider threatening, and indeed they acted in ways we might consider barbaric. We have become less credulous of ‘magic’ and more rigorous in our demand for empirical evidence, and in our modern technological age we pride ourselves on our rationality and scientific understanding of the world. Yet the vestiges and the power of the belief in evil remain. Believe it or not, the Church of England continues to perform exorcisms, though church representatives assert that most cases have conventional explanations, and actual exorcisms are quite rare. Nonetheless the ‘Deliverance ministry’ set up in 1974 makes provision for every diocese in the country to be equipped with a team trained in exorcism. Many still consider the ‘evil’ inherent in the actions of child killers, drug dealers, paedophiles, those responsible for genocide, ethnic purges, humanitarian atrocities and terrorists to be examples of the work of the devil. Now as in the past we are afraid, and at times of crisis fear still leads and fuels our beliefs and actions. In the current climate post 9/11 and the ‘War on Terror’ it could be said that we can still build policy on paranoia, to react, some would even say over-react, to certain situations in the name of security and feel threatened by an unseen enemy, finding ourselves behaving in ways frighteningly similar to those with an unshakeable convic
tion in the supposed powers exercised by Mary Bateman in the late 18th century, and certainly uppermost in the minds of those populating the public galley, and those who thronged outside the courtroom when her case came to trial.

  In 2001, Daru Rooke, social historian and the curator of Cliffe Castle in Keighley, made a series for BBC2 entitled ‘People Detectives’ in which he took ‘ordinary’ people and led them stage by stage through the process of discovering their extraordinary ancestors. The first episode of the series, where Mary Bateman’s five-times great granddaughter was introduced to the partial remains of her infamous forebear – at the time housed in a custom made box in the Thackray Medical Museum’s archives – was needless to say of particular interest. The focus of the programme was heavily directed toward Mary being popularly regarded as a witch. In the opening minutes, Rooke’s own superstitious proclivities were made apparent, with his particular reliance on a ‘witch ball’, a hollow sphere of reflective coloured glass suspended from his study ceiling intended to ward off evil spirits. He described Mary as a ‘rum lot’, highlighting the advantage she took of the literal belief in witchcraft prevalent at the time, though in his commentary, he was careful to note that Mary was in fact never tried as a witch. In addition to the ‘bizarre family reunion’ orchestrated in the Thackray’s archives, the relatively new, at the time, resource of 3D modelling was applied to Mary Bateman’s skull at University College London. The resultant lack of familial likeness to Mary’s descendant was less than surprising however, considering that only 1.5 per cent of Mary’s DNA would have been passed down to her present day descendants. Interestingly enough, Mr Rooke estimated the size of the crowd at Mary’s execution to be 20,000. Other sources stipulate the more conservative figure in the region of 5,000, though Knipe’s Criminal Chronology, ‘carefully compiled’ in 1867 ‘from prison documents, ancient papers, and other authentic sources’, made note that for Mary’s execution, ‘The number of persons assembled was much greater than usual on such occasions’.