This is how our forebears were meant to think of witches: they must despise them; they must shun them, as they would an ogre or the Prince of Darkness himself.
Anti-witch propaganda was as subtle as the bluntest of cudgels. Women cavorted naked in clumsy woodcuts with horned demons. The women were often hook-nosed, always up to no good.
The stories of witches – at Pendle, and Salem, and wherever else the trials were held – reveal wild estimates of the witches’ magical abilities. They carry all the strangeness of the lore of the mid sixteenth century – women able to assume other shapes, to curse and kill, to create potions which could change lives permanently, for good or for bad.
They leave an unsavoury taste in the mouth, and they are meant to. For a witch could be a scapegoat for the intolerable, the incurable and the unexplainable.
There have always been women who dabbled in the unexplained, who learnt extraordinary algorithms at their mother’s knee and continued to practice them when they grew to adulthood, because, well, they worked.
And we must peer very carefully through the myths to the person who once stood at their centre. Strip away the bigotry and examine what is left.
Let us put a witch on trial.
Cardinal Wolsey – that notorious power-player for Henry VIII – was the subject of a prophecy by a strange creature who, though she looked the very image of what a witch should be, managed to cheat the gibbet, and the torture and cruelty that preceeded it.
No one’s quite clear exactly when Ursula Serail was born. I’ve heard 1486. And she died peacefully in 1561, at the height of witch hunting.
Her mother, Agnes, was the poorest of the poor in Knaresborough, a barely fed waif who like so many others found herself pregnant with no father to be found.
Yet Agnes had a string to her bow. She alleged that Satan himself came to woo her; that he showed her a magnificent vision of his palace and all that could be hers. And she was his utterly.
The townspeople were predictably terrified and shunned her; but nor did they torment her or torture her. The young woman fled to a cave outside town and died in the act of childbirth.
They found the child next to her, a strange, deformed creature, who nevertheless found a devoted foster mother in the village. And she stayed devoted, legend says, despite regular – and at the same time most irregular- paternal access arrangements. Satan would wait out in the garden for the child, and the little gargoyle playing on the kitchen floor would cackle as objects flew unbidden through the air at his behest.
One day baby and cradle were missing and on ransacking the house, were found three feet up the chimney.
At school, she distinguished herself: highly intelligent or enchanted, she took one look at the alphabet and knew each letter: there was not a book which could baffle her.
And then she began telling people the future.
While it does not seem the wisest of strategies in those witch-sensitive times, she got away with it. Although her prophecies were messed about with by a nineteenth century writer, her original ones seem all to have been fulfilled by the middle of the seventeenth century: among them, apparently, the fall of Cardinal Wolsey in 1530.
Marrying a carpenter called Shipton, she became known as Mother Shipton. She foretold the time of her own end, lying on her bed to await Death because, of course, witches get prerefential terms. No witch hunter dared come near her: she must have been quite a presence.
So now; crane through the mists of folklore which tell you fantastical things about what she was. Shed the wild extemporisation of generations. And you will be left with Mother Shipton herself.
Who was she, really?
Time to deliver your verdict.