On 15 February 1686, a group of gentlemen—led by a Mr. Fawcett—went hunting in the woods near the north London parish of Finchley. What was supposed to be an ordinary hunt quickly changed as their dogs became distracted by something lying on the ground.
Approaching the animals, the men beheld a terrifying sight; In front of them lay a dead body, its eyes missing, and its insides devoured by animals which had left the body a hollow shell. The man was identified from some papers on his body but the perpetrator was never found.
All of that according to a pamphlet printed by George Croom that same year, at least. The details are fairly scarce and if any other record of Mr. Higgen’s [see amendment below] death exists besides this account, I cannot find it. The author does not speculate on the victim’s cause of death, in fact he doesn’t even imply any foul play.
If the details of the pamphlet are accurate (which is never guaranteed) then the death certainly stinks to high heaven. The man is described as wearing a ‘Black French Hat, […] a Black Suit almost New, […] a new pair of Shoes [and] a Bamboon Cane with a Silver Head.’ This clothing implies a degree of wealth which could present a motive (robbery), although ‘some small matter of Money’ was found in his pockets.
What exactly this apparently fairly well-off man was doing in the woods is unclear and if the woodland in question is Finchley Common, then the body was found in an area which would later become infamous for highwaymen, though this was not for another twenty years at least. Since no wounds are reported to have been found on the body, a natural death is certainly a possibility, though since the body had been there for at least six weeks, according to the coroner, it’s possible the wounds were simply no longer identifiable.
Among his personal effects were found ‘three written Sermons.’ It was from these documents that his name was uncovered. It wasn’t uncommon for those who could afford it to purchase printed sermons from booksellers, while many literate worshippers would scribble down notes from sermons as they were listening to them (and it is presumably the latter which is being referred to).
The verses which this pamphlet claims were included are from Luke, Isaiah, and Ecclesiastes. The latter is Ecclesiastes 11:9 specifically, which reads ‘Follow the ways of your heart and whatever your eyes see, but know that for all these things God will bring you into judgment.’ While many people did carry religious literature of some kind on them, possibly including this individual, it isn’t unreasonable to doubt the veracity of these details.
The verses cited as being on the victim’s person are eerily similar to the religious and moral message which any author would be keen to push from a case like this: ‘Liv[e] every Day as [you] were to die the next, and humbly supplicate the Almighty.’ Essentially, the author’s intention is to warn the reader of life’s fragility and transience in the face of a God who will judge us for what we do in life. Therefore, we’re warned to behave well because you never know when you’ll meet your maker.
[28/06/2021 amendment] The case is actually featured in another pamphlet from 1688, some two years after the discovery of the body. This pamphlet is in many ways similar to the other, offering a near-identical description of the state of the man’s body, his clothes, and the manner in which he was found.
The author claims to have been informed that the man was a student at St. John’s College, Oxford and moreover attests that he himself bore witness to the corpse after it had been transported to ‘a Barn in High-gate.’ One detail over which the two texts differ is the victim’s name.
The 1686 pamphlet claims that the man was ‘supposed by some Papers found about him to be named John Higgens’ but the 1688 pamphlet states that ‘The name superscribed on all Papers [i.e. John Higgens] may afford matter of doubt to some, whether F.D. (which are since discover’d to be the initial Letters of the Names of the Person found dead) were the Author of them yea or no?’, suggesting that the earlier pamphlet is incorrect and the ‘John Higgens’ is not the name of the victim but rather the name of a friend for whom the sermons were intended. The earlier pamphlet does note the ‘F.D.’ initials on an item of clothing but never entertains the possibility of those initials being the man’s name.
This also lends significant credence to the veracity of the claims made surrounding the religious literature on the man’s body. (The rest of this article uses ‘John Higgens’ as the man’s name for convenience, despite the fact he was almost certainly ‘F.D.’)
This case is very similar to one from the same year in Kent, where a ‘curious broadsheet’ (according to Historian Cecil Roth) describes the ‘Barbarous and Bloody Murder’ of a Jew. In this instance, the murderer was apparently apprehended, but once again the victim had ‘Scripture Texts’ on his body which, although in Hebrew, were translated into English. It’s certainly possible (probable, even) that both victims simply did have religious writing on them, but its inclusion in the subsequent pamphlets is a clear attempt by the authors to promote godly obedience.
In the case of Higgens, because no murderer was found and the death is therefore not one which can be blamed on an individual, the usual religious framework of the ‘murder pamphlet’ is disrupted. The chain-link religious motif of the murderer which ‘began with original sin, progressed through sinfulness to murder, condemnation, death and salvation through God’s divine grace’ had to be replaced with one which focussed wholly on the death of the victim.
In this case, the author begins his writing with a short pre-amble about how death can come at any time, ‘for who knows when Death will summon him’, and sees this body’s discovery as a message from God designed to remind us of our own mortality and prompt us to worship. The framework is much simpler, just a general statement of God’s providence, but it’s there nonetheless.
The second unexplained death shows a different approach, where the death of a supposedly evil figure is one to be celebrated, and the lack of an identified murderer shields a criminal who many 17th-century Londoners would probably have praised. It was Alice Fowler, of Shadwell in East London, whose strange death in 1684 was not viewed with any sympathy and this was for one simple reason: She was a witch.
Once again, a single short pamphlet is the only evidence of Alice Fowler’s death (or existence) that I can find but the story is certainly a plausible one, and even if untrue reveals contemporary attitudes towards witches and women alike. By 1684, witchcraft accusations were no longer at their peak.
The last confirmed execution of witches in England had taken place two years prior in 1682 at Bideford, but even that was surprising because witch trials and executions were no longer supported by many elites, from intellectuals to judges. Despite this, popular witchcraft beliefs remained strong. It was this ‘popular rage’, as James Sharpe calls it, which led to the 1682 executions and a similar mob mentality can be seen here.
Here’s what we’re told about Alice Fowler’s character. She’s an old woman (around 80 years old), an ‘ill-natured Woman’, a drunkard, a sexually promiscuous woman, a poor person, and someone who frequently murmured to herself.
You couldn’t get much closer to the quintessential stereotype of a 17th-century witch. The only thing missing is a black cat, black hat, and an ugly face (though her advanced age was probably supposed to imply that she was unattractive).
It’s no surprise, then, that Alice had been accused of practising witchcraft for a while. Apparently even her son accused her of bewitching him, leading to him murdering his wife in Barbados and subsequently being hanged.
One day, the elderly Alice was left alone in her home as her carer (a poor neighbour) had been sent out on an errand. The neighbour locked the doors to the house, taking the key with her, and went about her tasks. Upon her return, she stumbled upon a horrifying, but also really peculiar, sight: Alice had been killed, stripped naked, her big toes tied together, and a blanket flung over her. The neighbour called for others to help her and soon a crowd gathered. Some of the neighbours searched Alice’s body and found ‘five Teats’ in her private parts.
Described as ‘four small ones and one very big […] all black as Coal’, it’s pretty obvious that if the searchers weren’t just lying, then they were simply looking at moles. To be a woman in 17th-century London and have any moles, birthmarks, scars, skin blemishes, or warts was a very dangerous predicament because such marks, although completely natural, could easily be declared evidence of witchcraft. The neighbours also denied her a proper burial.
This death is certainly strange but not too mysterious. The most obvious conclusion to draw is that one (or more likely a group) of Alice’s neighbours decided that enough was enough and broke into her house, killing her in some fashion, and then stripping her to reveal the supposed ‘Teats.’ The pamphlet’s title stresses that Alice Fowler had been ‘left lock’d up alone by her nurse’ but because we never find out if the doors were locked upon her return or not, there’s no reason that this is suspicious. The door could simple have been broken down or willingly unlocked by Alice’s ‘nurse’ if she was a part of the murderous mob.
As in the first story, no wounds are reported on Alice’s body but it’s so apparent that this is a murder scene that this omission can be chalked up to either a lack of journalistic rigour on the author’s part, or a deliberate obfuscation of the facts by Alice’s neighbours, who the author claims to be his source of information and who are the most likely to have carried out the crime.
The author here doesn’t really make a religious point at all. In fact, the word ‘God’ does not appear at all in the account. There’s an implicit condemnation of witchcraft (along with the acceptance of its reality), although the obvious murder is never explicitly condemned.
Primarily, this pamphlet is the lowest form of print literature that was available at the time; a short, dramatic account of a recent drama designed to exploit local interest in order to generate profit. The author even admits that ‘in regard of the strangeness [of the case], I thought fit to Publish [the pamphlet]’.
During the 1680s, both John Higgens and Alice Fowler died. In each case, no one was even charged with their murder, and in the first it may not have been a murder at all. Higgens’ case shows us how even an unexplained death could be used to create a didactic pamphlet, whereas Alice Fowler’s demonstrates the willingness of some authors to capitalise on crime to make money.
We may never know for sure what happened to Higgens or Fowler, even if some likely conclusions can be drawn, but their unusual deaths, which might otherwise have been forgotten, live on in cheap 17th-century literature designed to shock, sermonise, and most importantly, sell.
