Folklore of Yorkshire Read Online Free Page B
Author: Kai Roberts
scrying vessel and told him to wait alone at Arncliffe Bridge at midnight. The man followed her instructions and at the foretold hour heard a low moan and saw a great disturbance in the waters below. As he returned home, he encountered a great black dog which vanished as mysteriously as it had appeared. The following day this man returned to the Wise Woman to ask the meaning of these things. She told him that the dog he’d seen was a barguest and despite his scepticism, the man knew such an encounter portended death. Later in the day, he was told that the friend whose image he’d seen in the scrying glass had committed suicide from Arncliffe Bridge that very morning.
If the famed Mother Shipton of Knaresborough was a historical figure, it is likely that her reputation during her lifetime was as a cunning-woman with powers of precognition. Her alleged prophecies were almost certainly fabricated by later writers in order to feed the seventeenth-century appetite for such material, but it is possible that they were inspired by an older oral tradition. In 1684, Richard Head recorded biographical details, claiming that she was born Ursula Southiel around 1488 in a cave on the banks of the River Nidd and adopted the name Mother Shipton following her marriage to Toby Shipton in 1521. However, as she is supposed to have died in 1561 and documentary record of her name does not appear until the first publication of her supposed prophecies in 1642, the evidence for her historical existence is thin.
Nonetheless, between the seventeenth and nineteenth century, her reputation as a soothsayer was unassailable across the whole of England. Following the publication of Two Strange Prophecies in 1642, interest burgeoned so rapidly that the pamphlet had expanded to Fourteen Strange Prophecies by 1649. The celebrated diarist, Samuel Pepys even records that during the Great Fire of London in 1666, the king’s cousin, Prince Rupert, was heard to remark, ‘Now Shipton’s prophecy is out.’ This was in reference to a notorious couplet which ran, ‘Triumphant Death rides London through / And men on tops of houses go’. Typically, however, like most prophecies, Mother Shipton’s alleged divinations are couched in ambiguous, symbolic language and for any event, there are lines which can be imagined to fit.
With the success of the prophecies, a rich body of legend grew up around Mother Shipton’s birth and supposed childhood in Knaresborough. It was said that she was born from her mother’s union with the Devil and that fearsome sounds accompanied her entry into the world. Even as an infant, Ursula was reported to be fearsomely ugly, with a crooked body, hooked nose and goggling eyes. Her powers manifested from an early age and she would make the furniture in her nurse’s house dance up and down the stairs. On one occasion, the child went missing and when her nurse returned with a search party, they were all magically compelled to take the four ends of a cross and dance until they dropped, whilst a simian imp goaded them with pins. A priest was eventually summoned and he found Ursula in her cradle, floating three full yards above the ground.
Mother Shipton’s fame endures today, as the cave in which she was purportedly born has been turned into one of North Yorkshire’s principle tourist attractions – although arguably its appeal rests on the neighbouring petrifying well rather than the cave itself. Nonetheless, the sibyl has become something of a county icon, which may be some small vindication for all those who were persecuted for their uncanny reputation in Yorkshire’s history. Her birthplace is certainly a more edifying spectacle than the skeleton of Mary Bateman, which following the donation of her corpse to an anatomy school after her execution now hangs forlorn in the Thackerary Medical Museum – a stark reminder of the havoc superstition could wreak in centuries gone by.
TWO
C HARMS AND T ALISMANS
B efore the advance of
If the famed Mother Shipton of Knaresborough was a historical figure, it is likely that her reputation during her lifetime was as a cunning-woman with powers of precognition. Her alleged prophecies were almost certainly fabricated by later writers in order to feed the seventeenth-century appetite for such material, but it is possible that they were inspired by an older oral tradition. In 1684, Richard Head recorded biographical details, claiming that she was born Ursula Southiel around 1488 in a cave on the banks of the River Nidd and adopted the name Mother Shipton following her marriage to Toby Shipton in 1521. However, as she is supposed to have died in 1561 and documentary record of her name does not appear until the first publication of her supposed prophecies in 1642, the evidence for her historical existence is thin.
Nonetheless, between the seventeenth and nineteenth century, her reputation as a soothsayer was unassailable across the whole of England. Following the publication of Two Strange Prophecies in 1642, interest burgeoned so rapidly that the pamphlet had expanded to Fourteen Strange Prophecies by 1649. The celebrated diarist, Samuel Pepys even records that during the Great Fire of London in 1666, the king’s cousin, Prince Rupert, was heard to remark, ‘Now Shipton’s prophecy is out.’ This was in reference to a notorious couplet which ran, ‘Triumphant Death rides London through / And men on tops of houses go’. Typically, however, like most prophecies, Mother Shipton’s alleged divinations are couched in ambiguous, symbolic language and for any event, there are lines which can be imagined to fit.
With the success of the prophecies, a rich body of legend grew up around Mother Shipton’s birth and supposed childhood in Knaresborough. It was said that she was born from her mother’s union with the Devil and that fearsome sounds accompanied her entry into the world. Even as an infant, Ursula was reported to be fearsomely ugly, with a crooked body, hooked nose and goggling eyes. Her powers manifested from an early age and she would make the furniture in her nurse’s house dance up and down the stairs. On one occasion, the child went missing and when her nurse returned with a search party, they were all magically compelled to take the four ends of a cross and dance until they dropped, whilst a simian imp goaded them with pins. A priest was eventually summoned and he found Ursula in her cradle, floating three full yards above the ground.
Mother Shipton’s fame endures today, as the cave in which she was purportedly born has been turned into one of North Yorkshire’s principle tourist attractions – although arguably its appeal rests on the neighbouring petrifying well rather than the cave itself. Nonetheless, the sibyl has become something of a county icon, which may be some small vindication for all those who were persecuted for their uncanny reputation in Yorkshire’s history. Her birthplace is certainly a more edifying spectacle than the skeleton of Mary Bateman, which following the donation of her corpse to an anatomy school after her execution now hangs forlorn in the Thackerary Medical Museum – a stark reminder of the havoc superstition could wreak in centuries gone by.
TWO
C HARMS AND T ALISMANS
B efore the advance of
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