Legend has indeed given Mother Damnable a notorious reputation. Her parents, it’s said, were hanged for causing a young girl’s death by witchcraft and her lovers either met gruesome ends or mysteriously vanished. Three were reputedly dispatched by her hand, with the charred body parts of one being discovered in her oven. She’s alleged to have given shelter to the infamous female bandit Moll Cutpurse. In her old age, when rumours of her dabbling in the black arts were at their most intense, Mother Damnable was blamed for any misfortune that befell the inhabitants of Camden Town. (Then little more than a hamlet and collection of alehouses scattered around a crossroads on a northerly route into London.) The villagers would apparently gather outside the witch’s cottage and berate her. Mother Damnable would respond by leaning from her window and flinging foul abuse. Usually, the appearance of her huge, vicious black cat  – widely thought to be a devilish familiar – sent the yokels scurrying.

But was Mother Damnable really a practitioner of black magic? Was she a murderer? Did she exist at all? Was she perhaps a composite of several infamous females? Why was she associated with a pub that remained notorious for centuries after her death? What was Mother Damnable’s connection with the renowned Yorkshire fortune teller Mother Shipton and what did Dracula author Bram Stoker have to say about her? And why might rumours of witchcraft have attached themselves to such a person in the first place? Read on for tales of gallows, hairless cats, bat-embroidered cloaks, spooky crossroads and weird potions.

Mother Damnable’s Notorious Parents and her Four Dead or ‘Disappeared’ Lovers

According to the legends, Mother Damnable’s real name was Jinney – or Jinny or Jenny – Bingham. Though records of her birth have either been lost or never existed, she seems to have been born around 1600. She was the only child of a brickmaker, Jacob Bingham, from Kentish Town, which was the nearest settlement of any size to Camden. Her mother was the daughter of a Scottish peddler, who Jacob met while serving in Scotland in the army. His military service over, Jacob returned to the Camden Town area with his Scots wife and resumed his brickmaking trade. The couple and their young daughter, however, would sometimes travel around the country to peddle Jacob’s wares.

At about 16 years of age, Jinney Bingham became pregnant by her boyfriend, a man known as ‘Gypsy’ George Coulter. Her father built the couple a cottage on a patch of waste land, commonly believed to be the spot now covered by Camden Town Tube Station. (Though some say the cottage stood on the site now occupied by the – perhaps appropriately named – World’s End pub just across the road.) George’s residency in the cottage would prove a short one. Accused of stealing sheep near Holloway, he was tried at the Old Bailey and hanged at Tyburn (A notorious place of execution close to Marble Arch). Jinney next took up with a man named Darby, a heavy drinker. Their relationship soon became full of furious arguments and violent confrontations. After one particularly brutal incident, Jinney is said to have sought her mother’s advice on how to deal with her drunken lover. Darby vanished shortly afterwards. No one knew what had befallen him and no investigation was conducted into his disappearance.

But Jinney was about to lose more people in her life. Her parents were ordered to appear in court, accused of killing a young girl by means of witchcraft. The two were found guilty and hanged. Jinney, perhaps to fill the emotional gap left by their execution, began cohabiting with a man named Pitcher. As with her liaison with Darby, their relationship soon degenerated into a series of arguments and fights. Pitcher, like his predecessor, wouldn’t be part of Jinney’s life for long. Unlike with Darby, however, it soon became clear what had happened to him. Pitcher’s body was discovered – charred and toasted – in Jinney’s oven.

As there was a body, there could be an investigation and Jinney Bingham was put on trial for Pitcher’s murder. Things were looking grim for her until an associate popped up in the witness box. This acquaintance said Pitcher had a habit of hiding in the oven to escape Jinney’s savage tongue. Perhaps, having done this, he’d fallen asleep and his roasting had merely been an accident. The court was convinced and Jinney was acquitted.

An image of ‘Mother Damnable of Kentish Town’, said to be from 1676

Despite her evasion of the noose, the trial ruined Jinney’s – already far from spotless – reputation in her neighbourhood. People avoided her and she became more reclusive. She’d normally wait until nightfall to leave her home, when fewer people were around. Nobody could say for certain how she supported herself, a fact which likely gave rise to more gossip. It was around this time she acquired certain nicknames – Mother Damnable, Mother Redcap and the Shrew of Kentish Town. (In that era, a ‘shrew’ was an ill-tempered, aggressive woman prone to nagging and scolding, as in Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew.)

In the 1640s, during the English Civil War, the reclusive Jinney Bingham was surprised by an urgent banging on the door of her cottage. She opened it to see a man who begged her for shelter, claiming he was being pursued. Jinney gave him lodgings and the man – who turned out to be wealthy – became her lover. Moll Cutpurse – a notorious thief who wore men’s clothing, smoked a pipe and pimped both male and female prostitutes – sometimes stayed with them during the Civil War and its aftermath. Jinney’s wealthy lover would, however, prove little better at getting on with her than her previous partners. Though their vitriolic relationship dragged on for many years, he eventually died. The villagers suspected Jinney had poisoned him. Their claims were investigated, but the inquest decided there was insufficient evidence to support this allegation. Around this time, rumours grew up that Mother Damnable – as her parents had – was meddling in the black arts. Such gossip would dominate the later years of Jinney Bingham’s life.

Mother Damnable’s Old Age, Reputation for Witchcraft and Devilish Death

As Mother Damnable aged, she became ever more reclusive. Usually, just her large, vicious black cat provided her with company. Villagers did, however, sometimes sneak in to see her thanks to her reputed skills as a teller of fortunes and – according to Samuel Palmer’s local history book St Pancras (1870) – ‘a healer of strange diseases’.  The same residents, however, scapegoated her for anything that went wrong – the death of a cow or child, perhaps, or the failure of a business or crops.

Palmer stated that ‘when any mishap occurred, then the old crone was set upon by the mob and hooted without mercy. The old, ill-favoured creature would at such times lean out of her hatch-door, with a grotesque red cap on her head.’ The cap was said to be worn to hide her baldness. Palmer goes on to describe Mother Damnable as having ‘a large broad nose, heavy shaggy eyebrows, sunken eyes and lank and leathern cheeks; her forehead wrinkled, her eyes wide and her looks sullen and unmoved. On her shoulders was thrown a dark grey striped frieze, with black patches, that looked from a distance like flying bats. Suddenly she would let her huge black cat jump upon the hatch by her side, when the mob instantly retreated from a superstitious dread of the double foe.’

Despite her age and isolation, Mother Damnable never seemed to want for anything. The house, having been built by her father, was hers and she presumably either made sufficient money from fortune-telling and herbalism or had enough left over from her rich boyfriend. She probably died around 1680 and, according to legend, the Devil was seen coming to collect her wicked soul and she was found with a concoction of herbs still bubbling over her fire.

Samuel Palmer quotes from the ‘old pamphlet’ describing the witch’s demise. According to this text, one of those who discovered Mother Damnable thought it would be a good idea to give some of her potion to the cat. The feline’s ‘hair fell off in two hours, and the cat soon died’. Mother Damnable, the pamphlet continues, ‘was stiff when found, and … the undertaker was obliged to break her limbs before he could place them in the coffin and … the justices have put men in possession of the house to examine its contents.’

Palmer concludes by asserting: ‘Such is the history of this strange being, whose name will ever be associated with Camden Town, and whose reminiscence will ever be revived by the old wayside house, which, built on the site of the old beldame’s cottage, wears her head as the sign of the tavern.’

The above account is the story of Mother Damnable as popularly understood in legend. But how true might such a tale be and – if it is more folklore than fact – what could have influenced the evolution of this weird myth? Let’s investigate in the next sections.

Camden Town Tube Station – built over the home of the notorious witch Mother Damnable? (Photo: Sunil060902)

Might Mother Damnable Have Been a Fearsome, Foul-Mouthed, She-Dragon of an … Innkeeper?

In this strange case, it might be wise to see to how much we can tease out the possible narratives of Mother Damnable, Mother Redcap, the Shrew of Kentish Town and Jinney Bingham, see how far they go back and question to what extent these different names might be referring to the same person.

A Mother Redcap is mentioned in a letter said to have been sent from Whitehall by one Henry Foxhall to Charles Firebrace in 1666, but perhaps the most interesting early sources depict a ‘Mother Damnable of Kentish Town’. These sources, consisting of pictures and a satirical rhyme, are dated 1676 and probably came from a broadside. (Broadsides were single sheets of paper hawked in the streets and printed with poems, news or ballads.) The earliest copies of the 1676 sources we have, however, are from 1793. They appear in James Caulfield’s Portraits, Memoirs, and Characters of remarkable Persons, from the Reign of Edward III to the Revolution; collected from the most authentic accounts, which seems to have been published in batches between 1790 and 1795.

The pictures show Mother Damnable as a witchy-looking old woman in patched threadbare clothes seated close to a fire, but the accompanying rhyme appears to depict her as a foul-mouthed, combative pub landlady rather than a worker of magic. We learn that Mother Damnable was prone to ‘cursing, fuming, flinging fire in the face of Madam, Lord, Knight, Gent, City Squire’. We also learn that whenever she was ‘ruffled into the least pet, will cellar-dore key into pocket get, then no more ale, And now the fray begins!’ During this ‘fray’, customers are warned to beware of ‘heads, wigs, hoods, scarfs, shoulders, sides and shins’. As the fracas unfolds, the ‘fierce she-dragon’ Mother Damnable ‘sends forth such dismal shrieks and uncouth noise, As fills the town with din, the street with boys.’

The satirical rhyme about ‘Mother Damnable of Kentish Town’. The spilt and broken tankards in the background might also indicate she was the landlady of a rowdy establishment.

So how might this ‘Mother Damnable of Kentish Town’, this terrifying landlady, connect with the witch of Camden Town, Jinney Bingham? Caulfield – who claimed to have acquired the pictures and rhyme from the collection of a ‘J. Bindley Esq’ – states that Mother Damnable’s real name was unknown. But beneath one of the pictures is written: ‘Mother Damnable, the remarkable shrew of Kentish Town, the person who gave rise to the sign of Mother Recap on the Hampstead Road, near London, an dom 1676.’

I suspect this caption was written by Caulfield or some other later writer rather than dating to the late 1600s. The language – though I wouldn’t claim to be an expert – doesn’t sound like 17th-century English and the tense would indicate it was written after Mother Damnable’s death. (The tenses used in the verse, on the other hand, make it sound like Mother Damnable is vigorously alive, as she might well have been in 1676.) What Caulfield, or whoever wrote the caption, is doing, however, is making an explicit connection with a pub that stood for a long time at the crossroads where Jinney Bingham’s cottage is once said to have been located. (Now either the site of Camden Town Tube Station or the World’s End.) This pub – also for a long time – seems to have been called The Mother Red Cap (or Old Mother Red Cap), which – as we’ve seen – was another of Jinney’s nicknames. The satirical rhyme links Mother Damnable to Kentish Town rather than Camden, but as Camden Town was so small in those days it was often lumped in with its more sizeable neighbour. So it’s possible the pub of the notorious alewife of the Mother Damnable rhyme might have been situated at Jinney’s crossroads – and the alewife herself might have been Jinney.

The first known reference to a pub in this location is from 1690. Though we can’t know what the pub was named in such times, the idea seems to have arisen that it was long called the Mother Redcap after a notorious ex-owner. A sketch reputedly from 1746 names the pub the Old Mother Redcap while a cartoon from 1820 includes a painting of the pub with that name (though minus the ‘Old’). In his Book for a Rainy Day or Recollections of the Events of the Years 1766-1833 (1905), J.T. Smith wrote that the Mother Red Cap had a terrifying reputation as ‘it has been stated that “Mother Red Cap” was “Mother Damnable” of Kentish Town in early days, and that it was at her house that the notorious “Moll Cut-purse”, the highwaywoman of Oliver Cromwell’s days, dismounted and frequently lodged.’ In Old and New London (1878), Edward Walford reports that ‘the old house was taken down, and another rebuilt on its site, with the former sign, about the year 1850. This again, in its turn, was removed; and a third house, in the modern style, and of still greater pretensions, was built on the same site a quarter of a century afterwards.’

The sign – which always seems to have been rescued from any demolition and displayed outside each version of the Mother Red Cap – according to Walford: ‘Exhibited that venerable lady – whether she was alewife or witch – with a tall, extinguisher-shaped hat, not unlike that ascribed to Mother Shipton.’

A bucolic sketch of the Mother Red Cap, said to be from 1746

So Jinney Bingham – if that was indeed her name – might have been an innkeeper rather than a witch. If Jinney was an innkeeper, one would suspect she’d have presided over a less than respectable hostelry, perhaps some sort of grog shop. (Maybe, due to the tavern’s prominent location, though, the madams, lords and gents of the rhyme occasionally wandered in – to be quickly repulsed by the landlady and clientele.) A character running a rough pub popular with travellers and criminals might well – like the Jinney of legend – have possessed a robust will, volatile temper, razor-edged tongue and propensity to undertake occasional violent acts. The supposed location of Jinney’s cottage – on the corner of a busy crossroads on a route into London – seems to me a more likely site for an alehouse than a ramshackle witch’s dwelling. It’s hard to imagine such a piece of prime real estate being a scrap of waste ground on which a poor workman might erect a humble house for his daughter. Jinney’s giving of lodgings to people – like Moll Cutpurse and the Civil War fugitive – might also suggest innkeeping was her occupation. In addition, ‘Mother Redcap’ was a common nickname bestowed on female innkeepers from the late 1500s onwards. The name is mentioned, for instance, in a 1595 jestbook, a 1597 play and a 1656 ballad. It seems that only in the 1800s did the name Mother Redcap cease to denote an innkeeper and start denoting a witch.

Cartoon of 1820 showing a picture of the Mother Red Cap in Camden Town

But might there not have been some indications of witchiness around this ferocious landlady? It’s been suggested that alewives were perceived by some to have a witchy aura. They owned cats to keep rodents away from the malt, wore tall black hats so they’d stand out in the marketplace, used broom-like braided twigs to remove yeast from fermented beer and displayed magical-looking stars as a sign of their ale’s purity. Furthermore, the 1676 rhyme compares Mother Damnable to other notorious females – Mother Shipton, Mother Louse and ‘Macbeth’s wayward women’. Mother Louse was another infamously ugly and sharp-tongued alewife, but Mother Shipton (of whom we’ll hear more later) and the women mentioned from Macbeth were seen as witches. It’s unlikely, however, that the author of the rhyme was seriously suggesting Mother Damnable was a witch. Though by 1676 the persecution of witches had lost some of its intensity, executions for witchcraft continued into the early 1700s and those suspected of this offence were despised social outcasts. No one would have wanted to drink in a bar run by a witch. What the broadside might have done, however – especially if it had sold well – was put the idea in some minds that there was some link between witches and Mother Damnable and – as we’ll see below – this association may have grown stronger over the centuries.

So How Did Mother Damnable Come to Be Seen as a Witch and What Did Mother Shipton Have to Do with It All?

The 1676 sources depicting ‘Mother Damnable of Kentish Town’ – assuming the materials James Caulfield acquired for his book were genuinely from around that date – would suggest there might have been a formidable landlady with that nickname and that she might have run a pub on Jinney’s crossroads. But, as we’ve seen, these sources describe her as alewife rather than witch. They also make no mention of her slaying her lovers, of her parents being hung for practising the black arts and of the Devil’s remarkable visit to her cottage on the day of her death.

Most of what we know today about the Jinney Bingham/Mother Damnable character comes from Samuel Palmer’s 1870 book, the full title of which is the snappy St Pancras, Being Antiquarian, Topographical, and Biographical Memoranda, Relating to the Extensive Metropolitan Parish of St Pancras, Middlesex, with Some Account of the Parish from Its Foundation (St Pancras was the large semi-urban parish that then included Camden Town). Palmer appears to have been the first to link the name Jinney Bingham with the Mother Damnable figure. The only reference to sources he makes, however, is his mention of the ‘old pamphlet’ describing Mother Damnable’s death. I haven’t been able to find any earlier references to this pamphlet. Some of the descriptions Palmer gives – the likening of the patches on the cloak to bats, for instance – smack more of Victorian Gothic Romanticism than how people would have perceived witches in the 1600s. (Palmer – a writer, painter and disciple of William Blake – was an important figure in the English Romantic movement.)

We might suspect, then, that the shrewish and combative aspects of Jinney Bingham/Mother Damnable stemmed from the attributes of a real person and only in the Victorian age became mingled with legends of witchcraft. This could have been thanks both to a misunderstanding of the term Mother Redcap, the meaning of which had changed over time, and the Romantic Victorian embellishments of writers like Samuel Palmer. (The letter from Henry Foxhall, though supposedly sent in 1666, actually first appears in a book published in 1843, perhaps suggesting some gothic Victorian enhancements may have taken place with that correspondence.) From Palmer’s descriptions of Mother Damnable, it would seem he was familiar with the pictures published by Caulfield. Could Palmer have observed Mother Damnable kneeling before the fire and allowed his gothic imagination to invent her teapot full of ‘drugs, herbs and liquid’? (Palmer and other later writers perhaps also converted Mother Damnable’s inclination for casual violence into a string of murders.)  

The English Romantic Samuel Palmer (1805-81) in a self-portrait of 1826. Palmer did much to popularise the tale of the Camden Town witch Mother Damnable.

It is possible, however, that Palmer drew at least some of his material from local oral traditions. The turning of Mother Damnable into a witch was probably not a completely Victorian innovation. To understand how this switch of identity may have come about, we’ll need to turn our attention again to Camden Town’s inns. One such tavern had a very similar name to the Mother Red Cap: the Mother Black Cap.

The Mother Black Cap seems to have been established by about 1750. It must have been in existence by 1830 at the latest, as a manuscript from around that date mentions both the Mother Black Cap and Mother Red Cap in a list of Camden Town’s pubs, along with eight other hostelries with names like the Laurel Tree, the Hope and Anchor, and the Elephant and Castle. The Mother Black Cap, according to Walford, stood ‘at the northern or upper end of the High Street’. Mother Blackcap was a common name for Mother Shipton, a semi-legendary witch and fortune teller with astounding prophetic powers said to have lived between 1488 and 1561 and to have been born near Knaresborough, Yorkshire. Walford comments, ‘It is not a little remarkable that two inns bearing the names of these semi-mythical ladies exist within half-a-mile of each other.’

The first records of Mother Shipton and her prophecies appeared in 1641, 80 years after her reported death. By this stage, accounts of the prophetess would have passed somewhat into the realms of the mythic. Though Mother Shipton was generally seen as a less malevolent character than Jinney Bingham/Mother Damnable, the legends of the two enchantresses have certain aspects in common. Mother Shipton was also said to be hideously ugly, she knew the medicinal properties of plants and herbs, and – like Jinney Bingham – she suffered ostracisation because of her ugliness and reputation as a witch. Her husband died young and – as with the Shrew of Kentish Town and her lovers – some suspected Mother Shipton of causing his death. The Devil was also rumoured to be involved in Mother Shipton’s story. Some said Mother Shipton sold him her soul in exchange for her weird powers; others that her mother Agatha had been seduced by the Devil or had summoned him herself, with their union resulting in the birth of the strange child that would grow up to be Mother Shipton. Like Mother Damnable, Mother Shipton foretold the future, though her prophecies tended to be grander than Mother Redcap’s predictions about her neighbours’ affairs. Mother Shipton predicted the first piped water system in York, Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the Monasteries and Break with Rome, and the spectacular growth of the capital: ‘Shall Highgate Hill stand in the midst of London’. Several accounts have her casually assigning a date for the Apocalypse. Despite her fame as a witch, Mother Shipton, like Mother Damnable, wasn’t put to death. She died peacefully in her bed at an old age.

The famous Yorkshire witch Mother Shipton – a model for Camden Town’s Mother Damnable?

We might wonder why a witch from the north would have a pub named after her in Camden Town. Mother Shipton did have a nationwide fame. D.C. Mackay, in his Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions (1841), wrote, ‘The prophecies of Mother Shipton are still believed in many of the rural districts of England. In cottages and servants’ halls, her reputation is still great; and she rules, the most popular of British prophets, among all the uneducated and half-educated portion of the community.’ Her popularity in the north, however, seems to have been especially strong.

In his 1910 book Famous Imposters, the author of Dracula Bram Stoker devoted a chapter to Mother Damnable’s legend. Stoker felt the Mother Black Cap pub was likely so-named because ‘Camden Town was a suburb through which the northern traffic passed on its way to and from London.’ It was, therefore, ‘wise to use for publicity and entertainment names that were familiar to north country ears. Before the railways were organised the great wheeled and horse traffic between London and the North – especially Yorkshire which was one of the first Counties to take up manufacturing and the wool trade – went through Camden Town. So it was wise forethought to take as an inn sign a Yorkshire name. The name of Mother Shipton had been in men’s mouths and ears for about two-hundred years, and as the times had so changed that the old stigma of witchcraft was not then understood, the association with Knaresborough alone remained.’ As for Mother Damnable’s reputed end, Stoker wryly comments, ‘What a pity it was that no veracious scribe or draughtsman was present in the crowd which had noticed the Devil’s entry into the house. In such a case we might have got a real likeness of His Satanic Majesty – a thing which has long been wanted – and the opportunities of obtaining which are few.’

So, in Camden Town, two public houses were named after notorious women of legend. One – the Mother Black Cap – was named after Mother Shipton, a well-known soothsayer and witch, whereas the other – the Mother Red Cap – may have been christened in honour of Jinney Bingham/Mother Damnable, a sharp-tongued shrew with a reputation for violence who, nonetheless, might not have originally had associations with magic. Despite this, there were similarities in the two women’s legends and both pubs’ landlords – according to Stoker, ‘open and avowed trade rivals’ – likely used those legends to promote their competing establishments. Over time, the two ladies with similar names – who also, excepting the colour of their headgear, probably looked similar on their pub signs – may have been confused by the residents of Camden Town and the travellers that stopped there. Bits of Mother Shipton’s myth could therefore have sneaked into the folklore surrounding Mother Redcap. (Perhaps building on the tenuous links already made as long ago as the 1676 broadside.) In this way, witchcraft might have been added to the list of fearsome attributes the sword-tongued shrew possessed. Victorian writers may have then applied a gothic gloss to the legend of Mother Damnable, giving it its current form.

The Black Cap pub in Camden Town, which closed in 2015, was a descendant of the Mother Black Cap. (Photo courtesy of Nylki)

Of course, the Mother Damnable character might over the years have accumulated aspects of several women. A number of scholars – including the folklorists Steve Roud and Jacqueline Simpson and the historian John Callow – do see Mother Damnable as a composite figure of two or more individuals. Mother Louse has already been mentioned and it’s also been suggested that one of the models for Mother Redcap was a follower of the Duke of Marlborough’s army during the Reign of Queen Anne (1702-14). In Holloway, not far from Camden Town, a coin or token is said to have been discovered dated 1667 and crudely stamped with the inscription ‘Mother Read Cap’s in Holloway.’ Another possible prototype for the Mother Redcap myth was an alewife named Eleanor Rumming of Leatherhead, Surrey, who lived in the reign of Henry VIII. The poet John Skelton (c.1463-1529) described Eleanor as being ‘ugly of cheer, her face all bowsy, wondrously wrinkled, her een bleared, and she grey-haired.’ It’s interesting, though, that none of these women seem to have been associated with witchcraft, a fact that would perhaps support the idea that the witchy aspects of Mother Damnable were imported into her myth thanks to Mother Shipton and a confusion – especially after a few ales – of pub signs. But is this necessarily the case or might parts of Mother Damnable’s legend really match up with deep folkloric notions of the magical and attitudes towards witches that were current in the 1600s? Let’s try to find out below.

Crossroads, Black Cats, Scapegoats and the Coming of Capitalism – How Might the Mother Damnable Legend Match up with the Folklore and History of Witchcraft?

Although the Jinney Bingham/Mother Damnable legend might have arisen in the Georgian and Victorian epochs from the fusing of various elements – and various semi-historical figures – certain things about her mythos do equate with folkloric notions of witches and the historical knowledge we have of those who tended to be accused of witchcraft.

Mother Damnable owned a black cat and such felines already had their reputation as sinister beings and witches’ familiars in the 1600s. It’s possible, however, that the cat was later added to her myth. It’s also interesting that her cottage was said to have stood at a crossroads. Crossroads, perhaps because they symbolise the intersection of different realities or realms, are in many parts of the world seen as magical sites. In England, they were reputed to be places where magical rituals occurred. They were also sites where suicides were buried and gallows and gibbets set up. This was partly due to the belief that the unquiet ghost of the suicide or executed convict would be confused by the choice of four ways and therefore wouldn’t wander off to haunt nearby settlements. There were indeed once plans to erect a gallows at Mother Damnable’s crossroads. In 1776, The Morning Post stated, ‘Orders have been given from the Secretary of State’s office that the criminals capitally convicted at the Old Bailey shall in the future be executed at the crossroads near the “Mother Red Cap” inn, the half-way house to Hampstead, and that no galleries, scaffolds or other temporary stages be built near the place.’

Ye Olde Mother Red Cap in 1930 opposite Camden Town Tube Station. Some, however, say the station itself was the site of the original tavern.

It seems these gallows were either never erected or never used. This may have been because of the popularity of the site with Londoners. In Old and New London Walford wrote, ‘At the beginning of the present (19th) century the “Mother Red Cap” was a constant resort for many a Londoner who desired to inhale the fresh air and enjoy the quiet of the country, for at that time the old tavern – which, by the way, was also known as the half-way house to Highgate and Hampstead – stood almost in open fields and was approached on different sides by green lanes and hedgerow roads. At that time too, the dairy over the way, at the corner of the Chalk Farm, or Hampstead, or the Kentish Town Roads, was not the fashionable establishment it afterwards became, but partook more the character of “milk fair” … for there were forms for the pedestrians to rest on, and the good folks served out milk fresh from the cow to all who came.’ This bucolic scene perhaps contrasts with some of the crossroads’ more sinister associations and Smith’s depictions of the Mother Red Cap as a terrifying inn.

A postcard showing the Ye Olde Mother Red Cap pub in Camden Town around 1925. The pub is listed under that name in directories from the 1930s and 1940s. In 1985, it was renamed The World’s End.

Returning to Mother Damnable, though, research by historians – such as Keith Thomas in his Religion and the Decline of Magic – indicates that in the Early Modern Period (1500-1700) certain types of people were more likely to be accused of witchcraft. Though individuals of any age, sex or social rank could have the charge of witchcraft levelled against them, older poor women were much more frequently accused. This was largely because the emergence of the capitalist system was leading to a more individualistic and money-orientated outlook on life. The old feudal bonds of community were weakening and people were less inclined to give charity to their poorer neighbours. And the poorest of all tended to be old, often widowed women, who had no one to support them and to whom the economic and social structures of the time gave little opportunity for employment. But the old ways of thinking hadn’t gone entirely so when such people turned up begging at their neighbours’ doors and were sent away, the neighbours were likely to feel guilt. As so often is the case, this guilt expressed itself as anger and blame towards the victims of the social system. When a mishap occurred – an animal dying, a failure of crops – and the householder remembered the old woman he’d turned away (and perhaps turned away with a good few curses and threats coming from the crone) he might assume she’d cast a spell on him.

It’s interesting that the rumours of Mother Damnable practising witchcraft became more intense towards the end of her life. It’s also intriguing that her neighbours were depicted as harassing her when any of them had suffered a misfortune. What doesn’t fit this narrative, however, is that Mother Damnable never seems to have wanted for anything and was never put on trail for witchcraft. This could indicate that – if one of the prototypes of the Mother Damnable figure was some sort of enchantress – she might have been a cunning woman. Cunning men and women were village folk magicians who used a combination of sympathetic magic, Christian prayers, amulets and talismans, and herbal remedies to help neighbours who came to them in trouble. They might, for instance, cure human and animal diseases, help find lost goods or identify thieves. Though being accused of witchcraft was an occupational hazard for a cunning woman or man, it was something that in fact happened infrequently, perhaps indicating the importance communities placed on such people. The Mother Damnable character’s brewing up of potions, her relative prosperity and the fact she wasn’t tried for witchcraft might suggest that one of the models for her was such a person.

Is Camden Town Tube Station still infused with the dark spirit of the witch Mother Damnable? (Photo: Rossographer)

All this is, of course, speculation and the scarcity of sources from the time she was said to have lived makes it difficult to do more than take educated guesses about Jinney Bingham/Mother Damnable’s identity. But an attempt to understand her strange narrative could run something like this. A female innkeeper in the 1600s – infamous for her sharp tongue, aggressive demeanour and violent tendencies – was so notorious that pubs built on the site of her tavern were thereafter named after her. Her legend thus established, it over the years merged with tales of similar redoubtable alewives and – possibly – with memories of old women accused of witchcraft and cunning folk. The setting up of a rival tavern nearby – called the Mother Black Cap, after Mother Shipton – either introduced magical elements into her myth or enhanced any such elements already there. This was largely due to the public confusing Mothers Blackcap and Redcap and merging their legends, legends which may have already boasted striking similarities. When excitable Victorian writers put a fashionably gothic overlay on it all, the terrifying tale of black magic and villainy was complete.

I think Camden Town Tube Station is still a strange spot. The atmosphere’s heavy, as if with centuries of foreboding, and the meeting of four roads throbbing with London traffic does give one a feel of a crackle in the air. On a London Underground network replete with tales of ghosts and hauntings, the origin myth of Camden Town Station stands out as especially eerie. Perhaps, also, the spirit of Mother Damnable lives on in the gothic culture the area’s now famous for, with its market stalls of black drapery and witchy trinkets. The psychogeography of Camden’s pubs also hints at an influence from the tutelary spirit of the once notorious innkeeper. There’s the doomily named World’s End; there was until some years ago a pub bearing the name the Halfway House (called now, I think, the Camden Eye, with a somewhat ominous-looking eye painted on its gable). There was also, until 2015, a pub called the Black Cap – a descendant, I believe, of the original Mother Black Cap. This pub was a haunt of the serial killers Dennis Nilsen and Anthony Hardy and Nilsen picked out some of his victims in there. On a less dark note, a pub called the Mother Black Cap appeared in the cult film Withnail and I (1987), set in Camden Town in 1969. The main characters, drink-soaked and drug-infused out-of-work actors, are threatened with violence in the establishment. Perhaps the spirit of Mother Damnable has truly settled on Camden and – despite ongoing attempts to corporatise, sanitise and gentrify the neighbourhood – isn’t going to leave any time soon.

The post Mother Damnable – the Wicked Witch of Camden Town Tube Station appeared first on David Castleton Blog - The Serpent's Pen.

Beckoned into a large room and given a seat near the fire, the man warmed his icy hands and his shivering subsided. Apologising that there were no spare rooms, the owners said the beggar could spend the night on the rug, where the embers of the blaze would at least warm him for a time. Profusely thanking the landlord and landlady, the man accepted their offer.

Everyone soon retired to bed, but the maidservant – having remembered one last chore – crept into the kitchen. She walked on tiptoes so as not to disturb the beggar, who she thought would be asleep in the large room, which the kitchen opened onto. But, glancing in there, she saw something that made her gasp – a gasp she only just managed to stifle.

The man had drawn himself up from the rug. Now standing straight, he was clearly neither weak nor old. The man confidently sat down at a table, reached into the pocket of his cloak and drew out a strange object – an object that resembled a withered, disembodied hand. He wedged the hand into a nearby candle holder and daubed some liquid on each finger and the thumb. Stepping over to the fire, the man lit each of these digits, digits that then burned like candles.

Trembling, her heart pounding, knowing the man must have some evil intent, the maid sneaked out of the kitchen and up the stairs to wake the household’s other members. Entering the room of her master and mistress, the maid shook them vigorously, but couldn’t rouse them. She’d never seen anyone sleep so profoundly – it was as if some spell had locked them in the world of dreams. Despairing of waking them, she scurried into the room of their oldest son, but he too was deep in the same enchanted slumber and no amount of shaking, slapping or even pinching could make him stir. It was the same with the other children and with all the servants so – heart bashing, mind whirling – the maid crept back downstairs.

Hiding again in the kitchen, she watched the beggar walk around the large room with an open sack. He picked objects up, examined them leisurely and dropped anything he seemed to think valuable into the bag. The hand stood on the table, its fingers blazing with an eerie light, but the maid noticed the thumb was lacking any flame. The man saw this too and tried to relight it, but the thumb wouldn’t ignite, making the man scowl and swear. (If any person remains awake in a household then one digit of the Hand of Glory – as the thief’s macabre implement was known – will stay unlit.)

Hastening a little now, the man picked up the burning hand and walked towards the door that led to the next room. The girl at least knew he wouldn’t get in there – that door was locked and the key well-hidden. But she was amazed to hear a click and see the man effortlessly push open the door. Placing the Hand of Glory back on the table, the man picked up his sack and entered the room he’d just unlocked, leaving the door ajar behind him.

Now certain the hand was some instrument of devilish magic, the maid sneaked from her hiding place and grasped the candlestick. She tried to blow the fingers out, but couldn’t extinguish them. Hurrying with the Hand of Glory into the kitchen, she poured beer over it, but this just made the fingers burn brighter. She seized a jug of water and tipped it over the talisman, but the flames barely faltered.

The maid was panicking now – the floor was creaking, the metal clinking in the man’s sack as he walked back towards the large room. She grabbed a jug of milk and – as a last resort – drenched the hand with it. With a fizzle, all four fingers went out. Dashing back into the big room, she snatched the key from its hiding place and locked the thief in the room he’d entered.

The hush that lay over the house shattered. The horrors the maid had witnessed broke from her throat in screams; the man was shouting, cursing, barging at the locked door, trying to knock it down. The landlord, his sons and servants came charging in from their bedrooms, the thief was apprehended and it wasn’t long until he was dangling on the gallows.

That’s the story, anyway, that was told to the folklorist Sabine Baring-Gould by a Yorkshire labouring man, probably in the late 1800s. The story seems, at that point, to have been old and widespread. Very similar accounts appear in William Henderson’s Notes on the Folklore of the Northern Counties of England and the Borders (1866) as well as in Disquisitiones Magicae (1593) by Martin Anthony Delrio.

But what exactly was the Hand of Glory? What uncanny powers did folklore ascribe to this grisly object and how might a thief or bandit with a side-interest in the occult go about acquiring or making one? If you suspected someone wanted to use a Hand of Glory against you, how could you defend yourself? As well as hands, could other bewitched body parts be of aid to the enterprising villain and how might the thoroughly weird beliefs around the Hand of Glory have grown up in the first place?

Let’s embark on a strange and gruesome journey past gibbets and gallows, pausing along the way to peruse popular books of magic, to examine the enchanted droppings of ravens, and to watch priests bless severed fingers. And I might just let slip where a person with a macabre curiosity and robust stomach could get a glimpse a genuine Hand of Glory today.

What Was the Hand of Glory?

A Hand of Glory was a severed, preserved hand of an executed criminal. The left hand (the word ‘left’ was once synonymous with ‘sinister’) was generally preferred. If the man, however, had been hung for murder, the hand that ‘had done the deed’ was usually chosen. The Hand of Glory gets a mention in the Petit Albert (Little Albert), an 18th-century French compendium of folk magic, alchemical lore and Kabbalistic enchantments, which was widely translated and distributed across Europe. According to the Little Albert, this is how you can create your very own Hand of Glory:

‘Take the right or left hand of a felon who is hanging from a gibbet beside a highway; wrap it in part of a funeral pall and so wrapped squeeze it well. Then put it in an earthenware vessel with zimat, nitre, salt and long peppers, the whole well powdered. Leave it in this vessel for a fortnight then take it out and expose it to full sunlight during the dog days (the hot, sultry days of July and early August) until it becomes quite dry. If the sun is not strong enough then put it in an oven with fern and vervain.

Next make a candle from the fat of a gibbeted felon, virgin wax, sesame and ponie, and use the Hand of Glory as a candlestick to hold this candle when lighted, and then those in every place into which you go with this baneful instrument shall remain motionless.’

A Hand of Glory in the popular grimoire – or book of magic – known as the Petit Albert (Little Albert)

Notwithstanding the Little Albert’s helpfulness, there was some debate about its instructions. Did ‘ponie’, for instance, refer to horse dung or was it a type of sesame? It’s disputed whether the original French was du siseme et de la Ponie (horseshit) or du siseme de Laponie (sesame of Lapland). Did zimat mean verdigris (a green pigment) or Arabian sulphate of iron? It’s easy to imagine an apprehended thief cursing their decision to substitute sesame seeds for horse manure or bitterly lamenting their choice of green pigment over iron sulphate when preparing their precious Hand of Glory.

Even more confusingly, the Little Albert wasn’t the only authority on how to manufacture this macabre tool and different sources gave differing advice. In Whitby Museum, North Yorkshire, a genuine Hand of Glory is on display. This hand – leathery and long-fingered, its digits leached (or burnt) white – was found hidden in a thatched cottage and is thought to have come from the appropriately named Gibbet Howe, near the Yorkshire village of Castleton. The hand is exhibited with a page from a book published in 1823, which obligingly offers directions on creating a Hand of Glory:

‘It must be cut from the body of a criminal on the gibbet, pickled in salt, and the urine of man, woman, dog, horse and mare; smoked with herbs and hay for a month; hung on an oak tree for three nights running, then laid at a crossroads, then hung on a church door for one night while the maker keeps watch in the porch – and if it be that no fear hath driven you from the porch … then the hand be true won and it be yours.’

A genuine Hand of Glory, in Whitby Museum, Yorkshire. (Photo: badobadop)

But from all the above sources, we get the general idea: a hand must be hacked from an executed convict, somehow preserved and made to produce light, either from its own fingers or by gripping a candle made from an executed felon’s fat. The Hand of Glory’s darkly miraculous powers range from throwing people into unwakeable sleeps to rendering people immobile to unlocking doors, all assets highly useful for those bent on burglary.

But what should you do if you suspect a criminal with a sideline in witchcraft is plotting to use a Hand of Glory? As we’ve seen in the story above, milk seems the only liquid capable of putting the dreadful candles out. If you’d, however, prefer not to get to the desperate stage in which the maid found herself, you can take preventative action. Once again, the Little Albert proves helpful:

‘The Hand of Glory would become ineffective, and thieves would not be able to utilise it, if you were to rub the threshold or other parts of the house by which they may enter with an unguent composed of the gall of a black cat, the fat of a white hen, and the blood of a screech owl; this substance must be compounded during the dog days.’

So now you know. If you have any thieves in your locality with a penchant for the occult then searching out black cats, white hens and screech owls may be more effective than investing in a burglar alarm.

The Strange and Macabre Folklore of the Hand of Glory

The folklore around the Hand of Glory seems to have been fairly similar in a number of parts of Europe. In his A Provincial Glossary, with a Collection of Local Proverbs, and Popular Superstitions (1787), Francis Grose stated that belief in the malevolent powers of the Hand of Glory was widespread across France, Germany and Spain. Grose mentions a foreign judge who told him he’d been present during the torture of criminals who’d admitted using the hand.

The criminals confessed to making the Hand of Glory in a similar way to that prescribed by the Little Albert. They said the hand should be ‘cut from a gibbeted person and wrapped in a piece of shroud or winding sheet’. The hand must be ‘well squeezed to get out any small quantity of blood that may have remained in it, then put in an earthenware vessel with zimat, saltpeter, salt and long pepper.’ The hand should be dried ‘in the noontide sun in the dog days’ and should be used to hold a candle ‘made with the fat of a hanged man, virgin wax and the siseme of Lapland.’ The malefactors also confirmed that an antidote to the ‘dreadful instrument’ could be made from ‘the gall of a black cat, the fat of a white hen and the blood of a screech owl’.

The cover of the Petit Albert (Little Albert), which promises an insight into the ‘marvellous secrets of natural and Kabbalistic magic’.

The folkloric tales concerning the Hand of Glory have many similarities too. One night in 1797, a hunched and feeble old woman appeared at the Inn of Spital on Stanmore, a high and lonely hostelry run by George Alderson and his wife and son, with the help of their maid Bella. When they heard the crone’s hopeful tapping, the Aldersons had already barred the inn’s sturdy door, and were seated around a crackling fire, discussing a substantial amount of money they’d recently made at a fair at Broughton Hill. Opening the door, they immediately took pity on the woman, especially as a freezing wind was moaning around the inn and whipping stinging rain about.

The woman, dressed in a long cloak and hood, tottered into the warm room as water dripped from her garments, leaving pools on the oaken floor. Though shivering violently, she refused to take off her cloak and have it dried and also declined all offers of food and drink. She said she merely wanted to sleep a little in a chair by the fire and that she’d let herself out and resume her journey as soon as daylight came.

The family went to bed and Bella was left with the old woman. The maid’s attempts at conversation met with little more than single words and grunts, but Bella did notice the woman had an unusually gruff voice. When the woman stretched her feet towards the fire, Bella saw she wore horseman’s gaiters under her long skirt. Deeply suspicious, Bella yawned and stretched, feigning exhaustion. She lay down on the sofa and pretended to fall asleep, but kept her eyes open a crack.

A few minutes into Bella’s mock slumber, the figure in the chair stood up. Frail and stooped no more, the person now seemed to Bella a powerfully built man. Delving into his cloak, the man tugged out what looked like a withered hand. Reaching into his cloak again, the man produced a candle, lit it on the fire and wedged it in the hand’s grip. The stranger stepped towards Bella and leant over her. Though she quickly scrunched her eyes shut, Bella soon had the impression the villain was waving the candle in front of her face. The man chanted an incantation:

‘Let those who rest more deeply sleep,

Let those awake their vigils keep.’

Creaks on the floor indicated the man had turned and stepped away from her so Bella opened her eyes a notch. She watched the man place his Hand of Glory on the table as he murmered the next part of his charm:

‘O Hand of Glory shed thy light;

Direct us to our spoil tonight.’

The man walked to the window, lifted the curtain and peered outside. Apparently satisfied with what he saw he went on:

‘Flash out thy blaze, O skeletal hand,

And guide the feet of our trusty band.’

The flame of the candle shot up and blazed brightly, producing an unworldly light which filled the whole room. The man walked to the door, unbarred it and took a few steps outside. He pulled a whistle from his cloak, which he then blew. Grasping this opportunity, Bella rushed to the door, slammed it shut and slid the bar in place, locking the man out. Running to the bedrooms, she tried to rouse the family, but they all seemed in the deepest slumber and didn’t respond at all no matter how much she shook them and yelled. There now came shouts from outside. Fists were bashing, and shoulders barging, the door; hands were shaking the sash windows. Guided by the glow of the gruesome candle, the rest of the criminal gang must have arrived.

Bella raced back into the main room. Seeing the Hand of Glory burning, she realised the weird implement was the cause of the family’s abnormal sleep. The bandits outside were screaming threats; the stout bar on the door was bending, splintering, as the men repeatedly threw themselves against it. Glancing around in panic, Bella spotted a jug of milk and poured it over the hand. The flames hissed out; seconds later George Alderson and his son hurtled into the room in their nightclothes, clutching firearms. Flinging open a window, the son fired into the darkness.

‘Give up the Hand of Glory and we will not harm you!’ a voice called out.

In answer, young Alderson fired again. There was a groan and the thieves fled. The next morning, the family noticed a trail of blood that ran for quite a distance. The Hand of Glory stayed in the Aldersons’ possession for the next 16 years.

This story appears in About Yorkshire (1883) by Thomas and Catherine Macquoid. The authors claimed that one of their informants, a Mr Atkinson, was told the tale by Bella herself when she was an old lady.

A Hand of Glory in the 1565 artwork ‘The Elder St Jacob Visiting the Magician Hermogenes’ by Pieter van der Heyden

Another story has two magicians cadging a night’s lodgings in a pub. Distrustful of the strangers, the maid spies on them through a keyhole and sees them producing a Hand of Glory from a sack. The magicians anoint the fingers with a mysterious potion and light them like candles. Only the thumb won’t burn because the maid is still awake. While the thieves are trying to break into her master’s strongbox, the girl grabs the hand and blows the candles out. The family – who’ve been trapped in a magical sleep – swiftly wake up.

In a story from Huy in the Netherlands, two miscreants beg a bed for the night before sparking up a Hand of Glory. The maid, however, stays awake, a fact indicated by a tell-tale finger that won’t light. She soon seizes the morbid candelabra and blows out its flames. Her master and the manservants come bounding from their beds and drive the villains off.

These accounts all have a similar pattern – thieves, sometimes in disguise, request a night’s shelter before trying to rob the family using the baleful hand. They’re foiled by the maid, who manages not to fall asleep and – often with the milk jug’s help – extinguishes the instrument of enchantment. The thieves are captured or chased away and never succeed in their attempts at burglary.

Though similar tales about the Hand of Glory were widespread across Europe, we might ask if it was only dead men’s hands that criminals used as supernatural aids. Other magical body parts were indeed sometimes employed by those seeking to rob, cheat and steal as the next section will show.

Ravenstones, Felons’ Feet and Fingers of Sin – Gruesome Alternatives to the Hand of Glory

Tales from Continental Europe suggest that other dubiously acquired body parts were seen as having similar properties to the Hand of Glory.

An account from the Netherlands has a thief being arrested near Bailleul. When searched, the thief was found to have been carrying the foot of a hanged man, which – like the Hand of Glory – had the power to put people to sleep.

Sometimes just a finger seems to have been enough. Also in the Netherlands, in a village called Alveringen, there once lived a sorceress who owned a thief’s finger. The sorceress had got the village priest to empower this dastardly digit by reading a total of nine masses over it. She’d wrapped the finger in cloth and persuaded the sacristan it was a holy relic, which the priest was then happy to bless. Though just a single finger, the dismal talisman seems to have had all the powers of a full Hand of Glory as the sorceress would use it to send people to sleep before pilfering their possessions. But, like all those who use such morbid relics, she was eventually found out and the stolen items were recovered from her home.

Another tale concerning a finger comes from Poland. In Pomerania, a tavern owner possessed a finger of sin – a preserved finger from an executed felon. The wily publican kept this finger in his casks of drink and – because of the detached digit’s baleful powers – his establishment was always thronged and he grew wealthy. One day his servant, when cleaning out a cask, was shocked to discover the bleached wrinkled relic. The servant reported his master to the authorities and the publican was given a long prison sentence. After getting out of jail, the man tried to re-establish his tavern, but – due to his reputation for dabbling in the occult – customers avoided his bar. The man went bankrupt and became a beggar.

In Germany, thieves made use of objects called ravenstones. Ravens were infamous for feasting on the corpses of gibbeted convicts. Ravenstones were the undigested remains of criminal’s eyes picked out of ravens’ droppings. Supposedly, ravenstones gave off a light only their owners could see.

Thieves’ Lights – An Even More Repulsive Practice

An especially horrifying variation on such customs was found in Germany – the practice of making so-called thieves’ lights. Thieves’ lights were candles formed from the body parts of unborn, unbaptised babies. The lights were especially effective if the mother had been an executed felon. The poet and historian Ernst Moritz Arndt (1769-1860) wrote in his Der Rabenstein:

‘It is gruesome to relate how thieves’ lights are obtained. They are the fingers of unborn, innocent little children. For these purposes, the fingers of already born and baptised children cannot be used …

When a female thief or murderer hangs or drowns herself, or is hanged or beheaded, and she is carrying a child inside her body, then you must go forth at midnight on the Devil’s roads, not on God’s roads, with incantations and magic, not with blessings and prayers, and you must take an axe or knife that has been used by an executioner, and with it you must open the poor sinner’s belly, take out the child, cut off its fingers and take them with you.

But this absolutely must all be done at midnight in the most perfect solitude and silence. Not even the softest sound, no “oh” and no sigh can escape the lips of the seeker.’

These gruesome lanterns would supposedly ignite whenever and wherever their owner wished, would burn for him and no one else, make him invisible and enable him to see even in the thickest darkness. The owner could also put them out with just one thought. No matter how many times it was used, the finger wouldn’t burn down but would stay the same length. Like the Hand of Glory, thieves’ lights put people into a deep sleep. According to Arndt, a bewitched individual wouldn’t wake even if you ‘set off ten thunderbolts over his head’.

Fingers weren’t the only parts of unborn children that could be used in this way. The German folklorist Jakob Grimm (1785-1863) wrote that a talisman known as a thief’s thumb – the thumb of an unbaptised child – was reputed to have similar effects to the Hand of Glory.

The toes of such infants could also be utilised for wicked purposes. A story from Germany has an old vagrant begging a night’s lodging from a widow. But, unlike in the stories above, this beggar proves to be a hero rather than a criminal. Hearing a noise, the beggar wakes to see three men – their faces painted black – moving through the house clutching strange candles. The beggar murmurs a spell, the men’s candles are extinguished and they find they can’t move. Their face-paint scrubbed off, the villains turn out to be in-laws of the widow. Their mysterious lanterns had been made from the toes of unborn children.

In Swiss folklore, the whole hand of an unbaptised child could be employed for villainy. Like with the Hand of Glory, one finger wouldn’t burn if anyone in the house was awake. Apparently, in Switzerland it was the practice to bury unbaptised babies at night in unmarked graves so no one would be tempted to put their remains to such unholy uses.

Indeed, some tales suggest criminals would go to incredible lengths to acquire these nefarious trophies. In Germany, it was alleged bandits would buy pregnant women for high prices so their babies’ fingers could be made into thieves’ lights. In one story, the serving girl of a miller is with child. Her fiancé, coming to visit one night, sees a covered cart outside the house and hears a groan from inside the wagon. The fiancé peers through the miller’s window and sees him counting a pile a coins in front of a group of suspicious-looking men. Climbing into the back of the wagon, the fiancé finds his intended gagged and bound. He carries her off and – from a hiding place – they watch the jubilant bandits drive away, convinced they’ll be enriched by their malignant talismans.

What Could Explain the Strange Customs and Beliefs around the Hand of Glory?

We might ask why criminals – and much of the general populace – believed the Hand of Glory could imprison people in sleep and make locks spring open. The strange notions around the hand – and similar gruesome artefacts – seem to have arisen from a weird mix of entrenched folklore, gallows superstitions and misunderstandings of ancient books. Keep reading for tales of gibbets, sun-bleached bones said to cure arthritis, midwives acting as undertakers, and dead convicts’ hands healing beautiful women.

Many Believed Relics from Executions Were Imbued with a Potent Magic

In many parts of the world and across different periods of history, there’s been a sense that objects linked to executions have magical or healing powers. Accounts of public executions in London speak of the crowd scrambling to hack pieces from the hangman’s rope or tear scraps from the dead felon’s clothing. Those fighting over these morbid souvenirs presumably either wanted them for their own superstitious purposes or were keen to sell them for a substantial sum.

Murderers were often gibbetted, meaning their rotting bodies were suspended – sometimes for years – in a cage or chains from a gallows-like structure as a warning to others. Gibbets could be a target for those seeking items of folk magic or medicine. The bones of one John Breads, whose body was hung up on Gibbets Marsh near Rye, Sussex, were stolen by old women who believed they could help their rheumatism. Wooden splinters from Winter’s Gibbet in Northumberland were famous for curing toothache.

The popular imagination seems to have, especially, imbued the hands of the executed with strong powers of enchantment or healing. An account by a Frenchman of a London execution tells of a sickly ‘young woman, with an appearance of beauty, all pale and trembling, in the arms of the executioner, who submitted to have her bosom uncovered in the presence of thousands of spectators and have the dead man’s hand placed upon it.’ In the mid-1600s, the severed hand of an executed criminal could fetch the price of ten guineas as ‘the possession of the hand was thought to be of still greater efficacy in the cure of diseases and the prevention of misfortune.’

It’s not surprising, then, that the Hand of Glory – cut from an executed, often gibbetted, criminal – was seen as a magical instrument. But what might explain the specific powers ascribed to the hand – its abilities to shed an eerie light, pick locks, make people immobile and cast them into the deepest sleep?

The Hand of Glory’s Weird Powers – Sympathetic Magic and the Ominous Mandrake Plant

There was probably some sympathetic magic going on with the notions around the Hand of Glory. The dead man’s hand made people temporarily ‘dead’ – by throwing them into a ‘deathlike’ sleep and rendering them as immobile as a corpse. There was also the fact that the hand had belonged to a criminal. Magically empowered by the execution its owner had gone through, the criminal’s hand – villains may have reasoned – would have been adept at criminal acts like picking locks. But the hand’s alleged ability to glow with a weird light is harder to explain.

The idea the Hand of Glory could shed light might have arisen from nothing more than a misunderstanding of an ancient book. A great deal of superstition surrounded the mandrake plant – whose roots resemble a human body – and mandrakes found growing under gallows were particularly prized. ‘Hand of Glory’ is probably a translation of the French Main de Glorie, which is believed to be a corruption of mandragore, meaning mandrake. According to the 4th-century author of an influential book of herbal medicine, Pseudo-Apuleius, the mandrake – among its other startling attributes – can ‘shineth by night altogether like a lamp’.

Pseudo-Apuleius’s Herbal was, until the 12th century, Europe’s most popular book on healing plants and copies of it were found across the continent well into modern times. The capacity for illumination the Herbal credits the mandrake with and its confusion with the term Main de Glorie could – at least in part – account for the legends of the Hand of Glory’s light-giving prowess.

The mandrake in Pseudo-Apuleius’s ‘Herbal’ – dogs were often used to uproot this magical plant.

The Lack of the Church’s Blessing and the Misuse of Holy ‘Magic’

Executed convicts were often denied a Christian burial and the lack of this sacrament may have given the Hand of Glory a devilish potency in the minds of the superstitious. Such notions can also be seen with the gruesome custom of making thieves’ lights from the bodies of unbaptised children.

These dismal objects were often imbued with the magic conferred by an execution – it was considered best if the infant’s toes or fingers came from the womb of an executed felon. But folklore also ascribed a strange power to the fact the children hadn’t undergone baptism. It may have been believed that – as the purifying holy water hadn’t been sprinkled upon them – the babies’ relics were empowered with a demonic force.

The idea unbaptised children were ‘unhallowed’ was once widespread, with the baptism ritual not only marking the baby’s entrance into the Church but also into the local Christian community. Stillborn or unbaptised children couldn’t be buried in consecrated ground. Instead, it was the duty of midwives to respectfully – but without ceremony – bury the bodies in some field or wood.

Medieval and early modern documents, however, feature complaints about midwives being less than conscientious about this responsibility. They sometimes carelessly left the tiny corpses where pigs or wild animals might find them or even abandoned them on dunghills. All this underlines how necessary people felt baptism was for a person to be considered fully human. The fact thieves’ lights came from bodies that had received neither baptism nor Christian burial likely boosted the faith of the credulous in their potency.

But, while the absence of the Church’s blessing seems to have aided the effectiveness of the Hand of Glory and thieves’ lights, the Church’s otherworldly powers – even if harnessed dishonestly – could, paradoxically, make such items more formidable. The Whitby Hand of Glory had to hang for a night in a church porch while the sorceress in the Netherlands made sure six masses were said over her gruesome finger.

Common Elements from Folk Magic and Folktales

In addition to the potent mixture of all the above, the traditions around the Hand of Glory seem to have combined the sort of practices – doing things at midnight, journeying to crossroads, utilising black cats – that are common in folk magic across the world.

As for the reputed adventures involving the Hand of Glory, these stories contain elements frequently found in folktales. It’s interesting that it’s usually a person of humble status who foils the thieves. Normally, it’s the maid, but in the German story above it’s a beggar and, in one account from England, a cook disables the Hand of Glory with a conveniently placed milk jug. In folktales, those of modest rank – children, servants, peasants, vagrants, even animals – can demonstrate a resourcefulness and cunning that eludes the better-educated, powerful and wealthy. The heroes and heroines of folktales are also – like the maids – often young.

The accounts of the Hand of Glory contain an element of rough justice, another common facet of folk stories. Those using ghastly body parts for criminal purposes are thwarted, arrested, wounded, impoverished, imprisoned or hung. Though Hands of Glory really existed, the narratives of encounters with them do appear to have borrowed from the usual range of folk archetypes and motifs.

But does the Hand of Glory belong in a more credulous, folkloric past or does the malignant light of its flaming fingers still cast its shadow over literary culture and the modern epoch? Let’s find out in the next section.

The Flickering Hand of Glory Casts Its Shadow over Literature, Culture and the Modern Age

The Hand of Glory inflamed the gothic creativity of some members of the Romantic movement. Robert Southey has the hand crop up in his Thalaba the Destroyer (1801):

‘A murderer on the stake had died;

I drove the vulture from his limbs, and lopt

The hand that did the murder, and drew up

The tendon strings to close its grasp;

And in the sun and wind,

Parch’d it, nine weeks exposed …

Look! It burns clear, but with the air around,

Its dead ingredients mingle deathliness.’

Writing under his pseudonym of Thomas Ingoldsby, Richard Barham included a Hand of Glory in The Ingoldsby Legends (1837):

‘Open, lock,

To the Dead Man’s knock!

Fly bolt, and bar, and band!

Nor move, nor swerve,

Joint, muscle or nerve

At the spell of the Dead Man’s hand!

Sleep all who sleep! – Wake all who wake!

But be as the dead for the Dead Man’s sake!’

Though few – as far as I know – would nowadays use the Hand of Glory as an aid to theft, its doleful light still, in a strange way, illumines modern culture. The Hand of Glory has made quite a few appearances in books, films, TV programmes and video games.

The Hand of Glory features in the novels Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (in which Draco Malfoy stumbles across a hand in a ‘dark arts shop’) and Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince. The hand also made it into the film version of Chamber of Secrets. All this has no doubt brought the Hand of Glory – through J.K. Rowling’s outpourings – to millions of page-flickers and cinemagoers.

A Hand of Glory appears in the dark Hollywood film Angel Heart (1987) as well as in the Amicus horror production – starring Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee – The Skull (1965). The hand has turned up in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and in Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, where a Hand of Glory is discovered in a floating market. Perhaps most famously, a Hand of Glory features in the classic 1973 folk-horror film The Wicker Man. Here a pagan landlord uses the hand to lull the Christian policeman Sergeant Howie to sleep, despite the landlord’s daughter fearing the hand’s potency could mean ‘he might sleep for days.’

The Hand of Glory makes an appearance in the 1973 folk-horror classic ‘The Wicker Man’.

Maybe we’ll never quite escape the grisly, bizarrely compelling legend of the Hand of Glory. The hand may well be shedding its sinister light upon us for some time to come.

(This article’s main image is an illustration from the Little Albert, showing the two variations of the Hand of Glory.)

The post The Hand of Glory – a Macabre & Magical Criminal Implement appeared first on David Castleton Blog - The Serpent's Pen.

There were six brooms, an old armchair and – most mysteriously – a one-and-a-half-metre-long piece of string with chicken feathers woven into it. The workmen who found these objects assumed the chair was for witches to rest in, the brooms for them to fly on and the string to act like a ladder to help them to get across roofs.

The house already had an ominous reputation among local people as a woman rumoured to be a witch had lived and died in the building. The workmen’s finds strengthened these fears and dark whispers circulated about the house and what might have gone on in there.

These feverish speculations – especially about the ‘witch’s ladder’, as the feather-entwined string came to be known – would stretch far beyond Somerset and would entangle some of the Victorian world’s most eccentric scholars, imaginative writers and erudite folklorists.

Perhaps as a reaction to the mechanisation and urbanisation of their age, the Victorians were obsessed with all things rural, folkloric, mythic and magical, and so the unearthing of this West Country artefact was bound to fascinate, entrance, even ‘bewitch’ those who researched such things.

Read on to learn about knots enchanted with curses; about how aches, pains and even deaths could be woven into the ladder’s cords; about haunted moorland pools; about how the witch’s ladder could steal cows’ milk and frighten deer; about the bizarre rituals necessary to escape the ladder’s hexes; and about the wild theories of oddball Victorian polymaths.

Victorian Folklorists Find out about the Witch’s Ladder – and Get Extremely Excited

Colles’s sketch of the witch’s ladder

Although the discovery of the witch’s ladder passed into local gossip, it didn’t receive wider attention until the folklorist Dr Abraham Colles visited the Wellington area nine years later.

Upon hearing about the witch’s ladder, Colles was intrigued. He sought out the workmen who’d discovered it and interviewed them. Though Colles wasn’t able to establish why the workmen had made their assumptions about the items they’d found, he was struck by the fact they’d immediately recognised them as magical paraphernalia and had ‘at first sight designated the rope and feathers “a witch’s ladder”.’

Eager to ascertain how this ‘witch’s ladder’ had been put to magical use, Colles made more enquiries among local people. He didn’t manage to unearth much though some old ladies made vague mentions of ‘a rope with feathers’ when he asked them about witches and spells.

In 1887, Colles wrote an article – probably edited by the influential anthropologist Sir Edward Burnett Tylor – for Folk-Lore, the journal of the Folk-Lore Society. This article – complete with a sketch of the witch’s ladder – described how the artefact had been discovered as well as the little Colles had found out about its possible purposes.

Colles and Tylor’s article ignited a blaze of interest in the Victorian folklore community and triggered some fascinating suggestions about the uses of the witch’s ladder.

Italian Witches, Death Charms and Cursed Cows – Dr Colles’s Fellow Folklorists Chip in

The American folklorist, writer and humourist Charles Godfrey Leland was in Tuscany when he heard about the witch’s ladder. His curiosity kindled, Leland made some investigations and claimed that local witches used a similar item called a ‘witch’s garland’ to inflict curses.

Leland’s research about this object found its way into his book Etruscan Remains in Popular Tradition (1892). The garland, Leland wrote, was made of a cord, platted together with strands of the victim’s hair, into which black hen feathers were knotted (a slight difference to the Somerset version, which had the feathers braided in). The Tuscan witch would pluck the feathers – one-at-a-time – from a live black hen and, as she tied each feather into the cord, would utter a curse. She’d then place an image of a black cock or hen – made of cotton or a similar material – next to the garland and lay a cross of black pins upon it.

The witch would hide these items in the mattress of the person she wanted to harm. Secreted there, the garland – or ghirlanda, as it was known in Italy – caused aches, pains, illness or even death, depending on what hexes the witch had put on her victim.

To break the curse, Leland stated, the sufferer should search out the hen that had donated the feathers as well as the garland itself and fling them into running water. The victim then had to enter a church while a baptism was taking place before bathing in holy water and reciting a certain spell.

Colles’s Folk-Lore article also attracted the interest of James George Frazer, the author of the vast and hugely influential study of myth, religion and folklore The Golden Bough. Frazer suggested the witch’s ladder might have been used in magical rituals to steal milk from neighbours’ cattle, citing similar practices he’d researched in Germany and Scotland.

The Witch’s Ladder Makes Its Literary Debut

It’s hardly surprising that an odd and intriguing artefact like the witch’s ladder was soon cropping up in the literary output of excitable Victorians. The Devon vicar Sabine Baring-Gould – an energetic hymn-writer, folksong collector, antiquarian, author and eclectic scholar who churned out at least 1,240 publications – included a witch’s ladder in his 1893 novel Mrs Curgenven of Curgenven.

Baring-Gould’s witch’s ladder is made of black wool and white and brown thread, with alternate cocks’ and pheasants’ feathers woven in every two inches. The novel describes how the ladder will curse a particular character: ‘There be all kinds o’ aches and pains in they knots and they feathers … ivry ill wish ull find a way, one after the other, to the jint and bones and head and limbs o’ Lawyer Physic.’

Baring-Gould – who, many assumed, would have heard of similar items during his research in Devon and Cornwall – has his witch cast her ladder cast into Dozmary Pool, a gloomy lake high on Bodmin Moor that’s linked to Arthurian legends and said to be haunted by a demon.

Sabine Baring-Gould had a character cast a witch’s ladder into Dozmary Pool, Cornwall. (Photo: Amanda King)

The witch’s ladder skulks on the pool’s bed and – as the water gradually rots it and undoes the knots – the curses are released and rise to the top as bubbles.

Another novel, The Witch Ladder by E. Tyler (1911), features a witch’s ladder curled up under a roof, from where it works its evil magic to weaken its victim and cause their death.

The Witch’s Ladder Is Honoured with a Place in a Prestigious Museum

The witch’s ladder discovered at the old Wellington house, now in the Pitt Rivers Museum

The Wellington witch’s ladder now hangs in the Witchcraft and Magic Case in the Pitt Rivers Museum. Part of Oxford University, this museum houses important anthropological and archaeological artefacts. Perhaps this prestigious place of display honours the impact the witch’s ladder has had on studies of magic and folklore.

The ladder was donated in 1911 by Anna Tylor, the wife of Edward Burnett Tylor, who lectured in anthropology at Oxford and was the Keeper of the University Museum. When she sent the ladder to the Pitt Rivers Museum, Mrs Tylor included a note:

‘The “witches’ ladder” came from here (Wellington). An old woman, said to be a witch, died, this was found in an attic, & sent to my Husband. It was described as made of “stag’s” (cock’s) feathers, & was thought to be used for getting away the milk from the neighbours’ cows – nothing was said about flying or climbing up. There is a novel called The Witch Ladder by E. Tyler in which the ladder is coiled up in the roof to cause some one’s death.’

Mrs Tylor’s note is more-or-less faithfully summarised on the label that accompanies the witch’s ladder in its case today:

‘Witches’ ladder made with cock’s feathers. Said to have been used for getting away the milk from neighbours’ cows and for causing people’s deaths. From an attic in the house of an old woman (a witch?) who died in Wellington.’

But is there more to the tale than this? Is this treasured artefact really a witch’s ladder or might it be something else? And – despite the confident declarations of Frazer, Leland and Baring-Gould – were Colles and Tylor always convinced about the uses of the strange object they’d stumbled across? Continue reading for controversy, doubts and dissentions among Victorian folklorists and even folk healers.

Doubts Raised about the Witch’s Ladder

On Friday 2nd September 1887, Edward Burnett Tylor presented the witch’s ladder to a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Manchester. As Tylor held up the ladder and began explaining what he thought it was, two audience members abruptly stood up and challenged him.

They claimed the object was a sewel – a stringy, scarecrow-like item made from a cord and feathers, which is hung up to discourage deer from breaking into gardens and fields. Taken aback, Tylor said he’d try to find a sewel in order to compare it to the witch’s ladder though there’s no evidence he ever did.

Disheartened by his Manchester experiences, Tylor was reluctant to display the witch’s ladder at the 2nd International Congress of Folklore in London in 1891, stating, ‘From that day to this I have never found the necessary corroboration of the statement that such a thing was really used for magic.’

Edward Burnett Tylor – the great scholar was intrigued by the discovery of the witch’s ladder.

The witch’s ladder is, however, noted in the catalogue for the congress, suggesting that Tylor did in fact bring it, probably because attendees fascinated by the object urged him to. It’s also recorded that a Mr Gomme exhibited a photo of the ladder – perhaps this was done in case Tylor couldn’t have been persuaded to bring the artefact.

The question of the ladder’s authenticity continued to torment Tylor. After all, he had a reputation to protect. He was the first Professor of Anthropology at Oxford University and the founder of the discipline of cultural anthropology. James George Frazer was one of his followers and from 1883 Tylor served as the Keeper of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History (otherwise known as the Oxford Museum).

In 1891, Tylor mused that though ‘the popular opinion’ was that the ladder was a magical artefact, ‘unsupported opinion does not suffice, and therefore the rope had better remain until something turns up to show one way or the other whether it is a member of the family of sorcery instruments.’

Tylor was, however, still eager for any information that might determine whether the artefact was a magical tool. He hit on the idea of writing to Sabine Baring-Gould to ask what sources he’d used for the witch’s ladder in his novel. Perhaps such a learned folklorist and seasoned researcher would be able to assuage his doubts. In a letter of 1893, Baring-Gould replied, ‘I wish I could give you any thing certain about witch ladders.’

Baring-Gould, somewhat sheepishly, went on, ‘What I put into Mrs Curgenven about sinking the ladder in Dogmare (Dozmary) Pool so that, as it rotted, the ill wishes might escape was pure invention of my own. I felt they must be got out somehow & so created a fashion for liberating them.’

Sabine Baring-Gould took literary inspiration from the witch’s ladder.

To try to help Tylor, Baring-Gould made enquiries among his contacts. He spoke with Marianne Voder, a woman rumoured to be a witch. Baring-Gould told Tylor that when he asked her about the witch’s ladder, Marianne ‘professed to know nothing about such a thing and thought what you got at Wellington was nothing but a string set with feathers to frighten birds from a line of peas.’

Few other historic examples of witch’s ladders have turned up. The only other one – as far as I know – was a similar feathered rope that the Tylors donated to the Pitt Rivers Museum, also in 1911. The feathers on that one look newer and neater than on the witch’s ladder from the Wellington attic, perhaps indicating this second ladder was a recently made sewel.

But What about Charles Godfrey Leland’s Discovery of the Witch’s Garland?

But what about the customs around the witch’s garland that Charles Godfrey Leland unearthed in Italy? Don’t his findings suggest that the garland’s English cousin – the witch’s ladder – was put to similar uses?

It might be wise to take Leland’s claims with a dose of scepticism. Leland was a fascinating character who – as well as fighting in both the American Civil War and the 1848 French Revolution – undertook wide-ranging studies that encompassed folklore, Neoplatonism, Hermeticism, linguistics and ethnography. He was an important influence on the Arts and Crafts movement and researched the languages and beliefs of the European Gypsies, even serving as president of the Gypsy Lore Society.

Leland is perhaps most famous for his book Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches (1899). In this text, Leland claimed to have discovered that the traditional practices of Italian witches were evidence of an age-old alternative religion, which – in opposition to Catholicism – had continued to worship the goddess Diana into modern times. Leland maintained that ‘there are entire villages in which the people are completely heathen’ and even asserted that his book incorporated a ‘lost ancient pagan scripture’. Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches has been influential in the development of Neopaganism and the Wicca religion.

Charles Godfrey Leland – a scholar and wizard?

Many of Leland’s ideas are disputed today. These include his claim that there was a cultural link between the Native American Wabanaki peoples and the Vikings and his theory that the language spoken by Irish Travellers – which he named Shelta – was the ‘fifth Celtic tongue’. In one particularly tall story, Leland asserted that not long after he was born his nurse carried him to an attic. There a ritual was conducted with a Bible, a key, candles, a knife, money and salt, with the aim of granting him a long life as a ‘scholar and wizard’. Historians have questioned his Aradia, with Elliot Rose stating that the book is merely a collection of incantations masquerading as a religion. Ronald Hutton argues that – rather than basing his work on a lost pagan scripture – Leland may have made the whole thing up.

Leland – as an intelligent and scholarly man and experienced researcher – may indeed have discovered that Italian witches knotted their curses into garlands. But – in the light of his tendencies for inaccuracies and exaggerations – his claims can’t be considered entirely reliable.

The title page of Charles Godfrey Leland’s Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches

So What Was the ‘Witch’s Ladder’?

A sceptical account of the discovery of the witch’s ladder in Wellington might run like this. The local community already associated the house with witchcraft so when workmen found broomsticks in a difficult-to-access attic, their imaginations were inflamed. Also finding a sewel – and not knowing what it was for – they decided it too must be a magical device and named it a ‘ladder’. But those brooms may have been used for nothing more astonishing than sweeping the floor and the witch’s ladder may have simply had the purpose of frightening curious deer. It’s noteworthy that the workmen also connected the utterly everyday item of the armchair to witches, claiming they sat in it to rest between flights.

When over-excitable Victorian folklorists and anthropologists heard about the find, they elaborated on the workmen’s theories and when novelists got hold of the notion of ‘the witch’s ladder’, it was forever embedded in popular culture. Thus, folklorists had themselves managed to invent a piece of folklore.

Tylor presenting the witch’s ladder to a sceptical Manchester audience

Then again, the Wellington house was linked to a witch and there may have been some truth in Leland’s assertions about Italian garlands. Placing knots in cords and strings is a well-established folkloric and magical practice. Witches used to sell fair winds knotted in pieces of string to sailors and fishermen. When the seafarers needed a good breeze, they’d untie a knot. There’s also evidence of knots being undone to cure sickness and aid childbirth and there are examples from Africa and the Arab world of sorcerers cursing people with illnesses by tying knots in strings.

Ironically, witches’ ladders may be more widespread today than they ever were in the past. Some Neopagan and Wiccan groups use them, though mainly for well-intentioned goals rather than causing harm. While chanting, the witch may knot their wishes into the ladder and objects such as bones, stones, trinkets and feathers may be bound up in it. The witch’s ladder can also, like a rosary, serve as an aid to meditation and a means of keeping count during rituals. The development of Neopaganism was influenced by writers like Gerald Gardner, Margaret Murray and Charles Godfrey Leland, all of whom were keen members of the Folk-Lore Society and all of whom would have known about the discovery of the witch’s ladder.

That worn and feathered piece of string stumbled across by Victorian workmen in that old Somerset attic has – in one way or another – had quite an impact. Unless more evidence appears, however, it’s unlikely we’ll ever know whether the ‘witch’s ladder’ really was an instrument of magic.

(This article’s main image – showing the second witch’s ladder presented by the Tylors to the Pitt Rivers Museum – is courtesy of England: The Other Within, as are the image of Tylor in Manchester and the photo of the original witch’s ladder.)

The post The Witch’s Ladder – a Creepy Discovery in an Old Somerset Attic appeared first on David Castleton Blog - The Serpent's Pen.

There it is, a little battered, but looking as if a knowledgeable practitioner of magic could soon get a fire going and start brewing a potion in it. Authentically aged and well-used, it’s just the sort of cauldron you could imagine the Weird Sisters cackling around on Macbeth’s blasted heath.

But what’s an item many would associate with witchcraft doing in a place of Christian worship? Unsurprisingly, many legends have grown up around this incongruous object – a heap of intertwisted tales involving a chaotic collection of characters.

The cauldron has been linked to the Devil, Saxon chieftains, Celtic and Norse gods, a witch’s cave, burrowing monks, fairies, broomsticks, rustic peasant knees-ups, prehistoric burial mounds, healing waters and sacred wells. Let’s try to unknot this convoluted mass of myth and find out why this cauldron stands in St Mary’s Church, Frensham.

A landscape of woods and heathland surrounds the village of Frensham, which lies near the towns of Farnham and Guildford in Surrey’s commuter belt. (Photo: weesam2010)

Some Say the Frensham Cauldron Once Belonged to the Fairies

Near Frensham are three hills known as the Devil’s Jumps. A person climbing the highest of these – Stony Jump, formerly also called Borough Hill – would have once encountered an outcrop of rock crowning its summit. A deep crack scarred this rock and – if you whispered down into it – it was apparently possible to make contact with a colony of fairies that lived inside the hollow hill.

These fairies seem to have been a reasonably benevolent and human-friendly variety of the little folk, because they loaned out utensils to anyone who needed them. All you had to do was scale the hill, knock on the rock, whisper into the crack and tell the fairies what you wanted to borrow. A voice would then issue from deep within the hill, telling you when and where to collect the object and when it should be returned.

One day somebody asked to borrow a cauldron. He duly found the cauldron waiting at the appointed time and in the designated spot, but made the error of bringing it back late. Enraged, the fairies refused to accept it. They announced they would never again lend any implements to ungrateful humans and that night ‘the people saw a great fire’ though they later found no evidence any heathland had been burning.

The fairies inflicted a special punishment on the cauldron’s borrower. They cursed him to be followed by the cauldron wherever he went. The stands of its tripod morphed into legs and it pursued the man everywhere.

Driven into anxiety by having his every movement dogged by an animated cauldron, the man’s mental and physical health crumbled. He eventually sought sanctuary in St Mary’s Church, where he collapsed and died. The cauldron had, of course, followed him in there and so it remained in the church.

St Mary’s Church, Frensham, Surrey, said to house a ‘witch’s cauldron’ (Photo: Edward Simpson)

As the historian Keith Thomas shows in his Religion and the Decline of Magic, fairy lore was widespread in England in the early modern period and Middle Ages. And there are certain things about the Frensham area that may have especially linked the local landscape to fairies. Though fairies were often thought to inhabit the insides of hills, they were also frequently believed to live in burial mounds. Four such mounds stand on Frensham Common. In addition, Neolithic arrow heads are often found around Frensham. Known as ‘elf bolts’, such artefacts are seen as weapons of fairies in folklore.

Fairy legends associated with the burial mounds on Frensham Common may at some point have transferred themselves to Stony Jump (Borough Hill) or intermingled with existing tales connected to that landmark. One version of the cauldron story has the borrower knocking on ‘a great stone lying, of a length of about six feet’ across the mouth of a cave on Stony Jump. Though such barriers are a widespread feature of burial mounds, there’s no evidence such a stone has ever existed on Borough Hill. Local folklore also claimed that ‘some have fancied to hear music’ coming from the Borough Hill cave and music issuing from barrows is a common characteristic of fairy legends. Even the name ‘Borough Hill’ suggests a possible connection with burial mounds and therefore fairies. The term ‘borough’ can refer to burial mounds as well as to hills, ancient earthworks (also considered places of fairy habitation) and human settlements.

Round barrows on Frensham Common, Surrey – could they have contributed to local legends of fairies and cauldrons? (Photo: Simon Burchell)

Perhaps the fairy lore around Frensham was used to explain why such a strange object as a cauldron was kept in St Mary’s Church. We know this link had been made as early as 1673, when the antiquarian John Aubrey recorded the belief that ‘an extraordinary great cauldron or kettle’ in Frensham Church had been transported there by the fairies long ago. This idea seems to have persisted down the ages. It’s mentioned in Nathanial Salmon’s Antiquities of Surrey, published in 1736. A 1985 article in The Farnham Herald – entitled Condemned to Be Chased by a Three-Legged Cauldron – has a man recounting a version of the legend he heard in his 1920s boyhood.

But, alas, anyone wishing to climb Stony Jump today to whisper to the fairies would have little success, even if the fairies were still inclined to help us humans out. Stony Jump is now private property, its rocky outcrop has been flattened and a house has been built upon it. How the fairies have reacted to this indignity is not known.

The Frensham Cauldron, Mother Ludlam’s Cave, a White Witch and the Devil

According to some legends, it wasn’t the fairies who were responsible for placing the cauldron in Frensham Church, but a local ‘white witch’ – or folk healer – called Mother Ludlam. Mother Ludlam’s home was said to be Mother Ludlam’s Cave, located in a sandstone cliff above the River Wey in Moor Park, near Farnham, Surrey.

Mother Ludlam, like the fairies, lent out utensils to her neighbours. One version of the story claimed that anyone needing to borrow an item had to go to Mother Ludlam’s Cave at midnight, turn round three times and three times repeat their request. They also had to promise to return the article within two days. (The fairies were more liberal, sometimes allowing people to keep objects for a year.) Another take on the legend said people merely had to go to the cave and drop a coin into Mother Ludlam’s cauldron, after which they could borrow whatever implement they desired.

Mother Ludlam would sometimes even loan out the cauldron itself, the cauldron she used to brew her potions and cook her concoctions of healing herbs. In the simplest version of her legend, Mother Ludlam became enraged when somebody borrowed her cauldron but didn’t bring it back. The offender – terrified by the witch’s fury – took refuge in Frensham Church, which is where the cauldron stayed.

More elaborate accounts bring the Devil into the scenario. One story states the Fiend visited Mother Ludlam’s Cave in disguise and asked to borrow her cauldron. Mother Ludlam, however, spotted his hoofprints in some sand and refused his request. The Devil stole the cauldron and the witch set off in pursuit – according to some tales – bestride her broomstick.

As Mother Ludlam chased him, the Devil made three great leaps. Each time he touched the ground, he kicked up some earth, forming a small hill. These hills, the Devil’s Jumps, can still be seen today. The Devil dropped the cauldron – or kettle – on the last of these hills, which is why it’s called Kettlebury Hill or just Kettlebury. As the Devil fled, he landed one more time, forming the natural amphitheatre known as the Devil’s Punchbowl, a small valley close to Gibbet Hill.

The Devil’s Jumps, near Frensham, supposedly created by the Devil as he fled with Mother Ludlam’s cauldron. (Photo: Peter S)

After recovering her cauldron, Mother Ludlam placed it in St Mary’s Church, where it would be protected from Satan’s grasping claws.

The Mother Ludlam legend is recorded in an account written down in 1869 and also from an interview with a local lady who lived until 1937. Though the Mother Ludlam legend likely stretches back earlier than these dates, it seems the version with the fairies is the more ancient one and that later stories then linked the cauldron to Mother Ludlam. Could Mother Ludlam have been an interesting local character and herbalist whose fame later appended itself to an older tale?

The Devil’s Jumps and the Norse God Thor

There’s an alternative account as to why the three hills are known as the Devil’s Jumps. Apparently, the Devil would amuse himself by leaping between their summits. He did this so often he annoyed the Nordic god Thor, who hurled a huge stone at the Fiend, which became the rocky outcrop on Stony Jump.

It’s possible that the introduction of Thor into this whole tangle of myth is a romantic, early 20th century addition, but a nearby village does have the name of Thursley, suggesting a local connection with the god.

As for the Devil, tales of him adding features to the landscape and leaping around are commonplace in Britain. The Colwell Stone – a large chunk of limestone in the centre of Colwell, Cornwall – was apparently put there by the Devil. The Fiend is also said to have created the whole of the Cotswolds by tipping a wheelbarrow of earth upon the land. With regard to his leaps, he’s reputed to have sprung down from the spire of Newington Church, Kent, leaving a smouldering 15-inch footprint on a stone near the churchyard gate. At Marston Moretaine, Bedfordshire, he jumped down from the church before joining some lads in a game of leapfrog. A hole in the ground opened into which they all leapt and they were never seen again. Perhaps the Devil’s leaping abilities have lived on in later folkloric characters, such as the Victorian London demon Spring-heeled Jack. In Victorian times, the Fiend also got the blame for the Devil’s Footprints: a miles-long trail of hoofmarks in single file left in the snow across Devon in 1855, a trail that appeared to have been made by a hopping demon.

Unusual landscape features – like boulders dumped by glaciers and oddly shaped outcrops – often attract strange tales. Another one from Frensham states that there was once a boulder on one of the Devil’s Jumps that a person in need of any object – even a yoke for oxen – could approach. The person just had to touch the boulder, pray and promise to return the item. One day someone requested a cauldron, but – as the loaned implement was then kept in Frensham Church for too long – it couldn’t be given back and the boulder’s lending capabilities ceased. It’s not clear if this ‘boulder’ was thought to be the same chunk of rock Thor hurled.

Mother Ludlam’s Cave, Holy Wells and a Long History of Healing Waters

Mother Ludlam’s Cave, once home to her famous cauldron? (Photo: Weydonian)

The name Mother Ludlam’s Cave (also known as Mother Ludlum’s Cave and Mother Ludlum’s Hole) may have interesting origins.

Suggestions for its etymology include a Celtic term meaning ‘bubbling spring’, and the area around the cave is thought to have been home to a spring known as the Ludewell. The name may also derive from a Saxon king called Lud, who is said to have washed in the Ludewell’s waters to heal his wounds after a battle.

But – according to the writer of semi-legendary history Geoffrey of Monmouth (c. 1095-1155) – Lud (or Ludd or Llud) was a ruler of Celtic Britain and London’s founder. Lud is linked to the mythological Welsh figure Lludd (or Nudd) Llaw Eraint and the legendary Irish King Nuada. Both these characters are thought to have emerged from memories of the Celtic god Nodens, who – among his other attributes – was a god of healing. A temple to this deity is said to have stood near Ludgate in the City of London. (Geoffrey states this is where King Lud was buried. It’s not uncommon in myth for gods to be associated with earthly kings.)

It seems the Ludewell spring was thought to have medicinal properties. It could, therefore, have been regarded as a holy well by pre-Christian peoples and perhaps linked with the healing god Nodens (aka Lud). This association could have survived in the name Mother Ludlam – also a healer – and become mingled with memories of a much later herbalist.

All this is, of course, speculation. Other possible origins for the cave’s name are the Saxon words for ‘meeting place’ and ‘loud’, perhaps in reference to the stream that ran from the Ludewell. But it’s interesting to think that some sort of connection with healing may have lingered around the cave from Celtic times through to Saxon warriors bathing their wounds through to an early modern herbalist brewing her potions in a cauldron.

The cave’s associations with pure and curative waters do seem to have continued into the Christian era. Nearby, on the banks of the River Wey, stand the picturesque ruins of Waverley Abbey. Walter Scott visited the ruins while researching his biography of Jonathon Swift and was enchanted – this experience may have inspired the title of his famous book Waverley. The abbey also inspired Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel Sir Nigel.

Waverley Abbey, Surrey, one of whose monks enlarged Mother Ludlam’s Cave (Photo: Antony)

Founded in 1128, the abbey appears to have relied on the stream issuing from the Ludewell for its drinking water. However, this source dried up around 1218. In response, a monk called Symon searched for a new source, probably expanding Mother Ludlam’s Cave in the process, until he found – according to the Annals of Waverley Abbey – a ‘living spring’. With ‘much difficulty and invention, labour and sweating’ he enlarged it and – through an ingenious system of channels – brought its waters to the abbey. The monks christened the new spring St Mary’s Well. The original Ludewell probably started off in a cavern – a little above Mother Ludlam’s Cave on the cliff – known as Father Foote’s Cave (see below).

The esteem in which the monks held their new well – which probably boasted the same health benefits as the Ludewell – can be seen in the name they gave it (St Mary’s is also the name of Frensham Church). Healing wells in the Middle Ages were often named after saints and some became sites of pilgrimage.

St Mary’s Well had healing associations in quite modern times. The political radical William Cobbett (1763-1835) recalled that in his boyhood Mother Ludlam’s Cave contained ‘basins to catch the little stream’; ‘iron cups, fastened by chains, for people to drink out of’; and ‘seats for people to sit on, on both sides of the cave’. So it seems at that time the cave was a venue for people to imbibe medicinal waters. After revisiting the cave in 1825, however, Cobbett complained it was in a dire condition, with the seats torn up, the basins and cups gone, and ‘the stream that ran down a clear paved channel now making a dirty gutter.’

A depiction of Mother Ludlam’s Cave from 1785

What has all this, we might ask, to do with the cauldron in Frensham Church? The Mother Ludlam story was likely an invention to explain the presence of that unusual object in St Mary’s, but it’s worth pointing out that cauldrons have long had connections to healing, religion and magic. In Celtic times, cauldrons were crammed with votive offerings and left at holy sites. A story of King Arthur has him travelling to the Welsh Otherworld to steal a cauldron that could only be heated by the breath of nine virgins and would never cook food for a coward – a possible early source of the Holy Grail legends. A cauldron possessed by the Welsh hero Bran the Blessed is said to have had the power to revive dead warriors cooked in it overnight, though in the process they lost the ability to speak. In Frensham, can we see some tangled links between mythical notions of cauldrons, religious and magical sites, and caves and springs associated with healing?

The Gundestrup Cauldron (made between 200 BCE and 300 CE) – a silver vessel decorated with Celtic motifs discovered in a Danish bog. (Photo: Rosemania)

Mother Ludlam’s Cave was made into a grotto, probably during the 18th century, and in Victorian times an ironstone arch was added to its entrance, perhaps indicating a revival in the attraction of its medicinal waters after the desolation William Cobbett witnessed. In 1962, a roof collapse reduced the cave’s length from 200 feet (61 metres) to 192 (58.5 metres) and another collapse occurred in 1976. Today the cave is a roost for a number of bat species, with efforts being made to encourage the rare greater horseshoe bat to take up residence. Perhaps Mother Ludlam’s Cave can continue to be a place of healing, but for nature rather than humans.

Father Foote’s Cave

Father Foote’s (or Fooke’s) Cave – a small cave located above Mother Ludlam’s – also has a story attached. An old man named Foote – after staying for some time at the Seven Stars Inn in Farnham – is said to have dug the cave out of the cliff and made it his home. One day in 1840, Father Foote was found lying next to a stream, obviously unwell, and was taken to Farnham Workhouse, where he died. His last words were: ‘Take me to the cave again!’

It’s likely the cave is older than this, however. The cave may well have been the source of the original Ludewell, though it is now completely dry. The cave apparently has side alcoves that look manmade, perhaps suggesting it too was once frequented for its waters. I’m tempted to think that the ‘Father Fooke’ figure might have arisen from a folk memory of a saint or hermit or even water spirit once associated with the cave and the healing waters of Ludewell, whose legend was perhaps grafted onto stories of a much later person. I cannot, however, claim any evidence for such an assumption.

Father Foote’s Cave, a little above Mother Ludlam’s Cave on the cliff and maybe the source of the Ludewell. (Photo: BabelStone)

So Where Did the Cauldron in Frensham Church Really Come from?

As entertaining as the above stories are, I think we can discount the tales of the cauldron being borrowed from fairies or being placed in the church by a white witch after she’d snatched it back from the Devil. The cauldron’s origins are really quite simple and practical.

The cauldron was almost certainly used to brew ale for weddings, church festivals and other social occasions in the Middle Ages. The cauldron is made of hammered copper and is nineteen inches (48 centimetres) deep and three feet (91 centimetres) in diameter – a common design for medieval ale making.

Though it may seem strange today, churches were once venues for drinking parties – festivities known as ‘parish ales’. Parish ales had a number of subcategories – the church ale (which raised money from the sale of food and beer to maintain the church building), the leet ale (which took place on the manorial court day, a kind of village fete), the lamb ale (held at lamb sheering time), the Whitsun ale (held at Whitson) and the bride ale (a wedding feast that raised money for a newly married couple).

In addition to drinking beer, these events included plenty of feasting, as well as dancing, games and sports, activities that took place either in the churchyard or on the village common. Most churches would have had a cauldron to brew the ale and the profits from selling the beer were a vital source of income.

The poet Francis Beaumont (1584-1660) wrote:

The churches must owe, as we do all know,

For when they are drooping and ready to fall,

By a Whitsun or church ale up again they shall go,

And owe their repairing to a pot of good ale.

During the Reformation (1517-1650), parish ales aroused the disapproval of Protestant leaders, who disliked drunkenness and frivolity being associated with the Church. Though parish ales were never banned, they became less common, often being limited to Whitsun. In some places, the custom gradually faded away while in others parish ales continued in some form until quite modern times.

At Frensham, the parish ale custom probably declined, but the cauldron remained in the church. Wondering what the strange object was, locals are likely to have created stories, stories that meshed with existing tales of fairies, witches, the Devil’s shenanigans and healing wells.

The chroniclers who wrote down these legends – while charmed by them – quickly dismissed such yarns. Writing in 1673, John Aubrey could clearly see the cauldron was ‘an ancient utensil used by the villagers in their love feasts.’ In his Antiquities of Surrey (1736), Salmon refuted the suggestion the cauldron had been brought by fairies, insisting the object was ‘used for the entertainment of parishioners at the weddings of poor maids.’

Despite its non-mystical – though I hope not uninteresting – origins, what fascinates me is how such a complex knot of folklore has been woven around the Frensham cauldron, pulling in tales from various eras, cultures and traditions. Around this kitchen implement stories of Nordic gods, Saxon heroes, sacred wells, Victorian paupers, folk healers and Celtic myths have all been entangled, as well as – of course – legends of the Devil and his fondness for landscape architecture. It’s incredible how such a humble device has managed to get enmeshed in such diverse tales, in such a ravel of imagination and myth.

(This article’s main image – showing Mother Ludlam’s cauldron in Frensham Church, Surrey – is courtesy of BabelStone)

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