By the 1590s, London’s population was very familiar with witches. The accusation, conviction, and execution of a witch brought with it all of the feverish local gossip and rumour that one might expect — which quickly spread across the country — but Londoners could read all about it in print, too.
One of the first women to be executed for witchcraft in England was Agnes Waterhouse — hanged in Chelmsford in 1566 after her own daughter’s testimony had helped convict her of using sorcery to kill her husband and a neighbour, as well as harming livestock.
A news pamphlet detailing the case is believed to be the first contemporary report of witchcraft printed in England, and is littered with crude woodcut illustrations of the accused woman and various demonic spirits she had colluded with, including “Cat Sathan”.
By the final years of Elizabeth I’s reign, narratives of witchcraft in print and oral culture tended to conform to a fairly generic formula whereby the witch was denied charity, quarrelled with, or suffered some other perceived slight and cursed her disputant. The effects of this curse ranged in severity from illness and death (of the target or a family member) to the inability of their cows to produce milk.
What witches did not typically do was orchestrate the aerial abduction of a person, seemingly unprovoked, and subject them to a four-day psychoactive experience which would rival even the strongest of our modern hallucinogens. Yet a short pamphlet published in 1592 reported that precisely this had happened to a servant in Middlesex only a few weeks prior.
A Most Wicked worke of a wretched Witch (1592)
A Most Wicked worke of a wretched Witch (1592) tells the unenviable tale of Richard Burt, a labourer employed by a local landowner, who lived in Woodhall, a small village in the parish of Pinner.
Like all of his neighbours, Burt knew about the local witch, Mother Atkins. The pamphlet’s author tells us she was known to him as a “notorious witch” to whom many “actions of extreame rage and crueltie” had been attributed.
These included cursing a farmer whose maids had ignored her request for alms by causing the cream they were churning to “swel and rise” out of its container and flood his kitchen. Another man who likewise disregarded her because he was busy tending to his lambs released the animals into his yard only for them to suddenly “skip and friske to and fro, that they never ceased after til they died”.
Richard Burt, however, never seems to have even trivially aggravated or provoked the woman. In February 1592, he was walking to work with his dog when he spotted a hare in front of him. Strangely, his dog appeared afraid of, or confused by, the animal — which it should by all accounts have chased away — and began running circles around its owner, as if about to faint. Burt followed the hare until it entered Mother Atkins’ house, a sure sign it was a witch’s familiar.
The following month, Burt happened to cross paths with the woman near his master’s barn and greeted her. But “like a perverse woman, like a perillous waspe, like a pestiferous witch, incensed with hate at the sight of him [she] held downe hir head, not daigning to speak”.
It was while eating his lunch the next day that Burt’s supernatural tribulations really began, for among the straw in the barn he saw “a monstrous blacke Cat” which appeared to command him to “come away”. Burt went to the barn door where, the pamphlet informs us, “suddenly hee was hoisted up into the aire, and carried over many fields”. He tried to call for help from other labourers he could see below him, but found himself unable to speak, and was partially submerged in a pond at nearby Harrow on the Hill, where he lost his hat, as the supernatural force continued its journey.
Eventually, the pamphlet claims, Burt was transported “into a place that was all fire, where was heard such lamentable howling and dolefull crieng” — as if he was in Hell itself.
This place was “exceeding hot”, filled with “filthy odors and stenches”, and “ful of noise and clamours” which overwhelmed his senses and caused “an unquenchable drought in his stomache”.
Fortunately for Burt, he was eventually released and was returned to Plinner alive — notwithstanding a few nasty scratches from thorns along the way and burns on his arms and legs which left him “singed and disfigured”. By this point he had been missing for four days and, as a parting gift, found his tongue “was doubled in his mouth”. With the help of the town’s minister, Burt regained his speech and angrily accused Mother Atkins of bewitching him.
No legal records exist to show that the case ever went to court, or indeed that Mother Atkins was ever hauled before a judge, but Burt’s ordeal — however exaggerated and untrue — must have sparked a great deal of local attention. Less than a month later, the story had not only reached London but was being prepared for publication.
John Kyd entered his account into the Stationers’ Register on 7 April 1592 — securing an early form of copyright which prevented other booksellers from producing competing reports — but ultimately traded his publishing rights to William Barley.
Kyd seems to have had a certain infatuation with sensational news during his brief career as a publisher, which began in 1591 and lasted little more than a year.
Among his other entries into the Stationers’ Register are reports concerning the haunting of a house in Oxfordshire by a poltergeist, the murder of a goldsmith by his unfaithful wife, the poisoning of a tailor, and a news pamphlet ominously titled “the murder of murders”.
The story of Richard Burt’s aerial abduction was by no means a typical story of witchcraft — not least because the alleged sorceress barely features in it. But Londoners couldn’t resist a spooky supernatural story; it was at about this time that Robert Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (c. 1590) and Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (c. 1592) were first publicly performed — both heavily featuring black magic. Indeed, Marion Gibson argues that the success of Robert Greene’s play may have caused the author to use it as a primary source when writing up (and further falsifying) Richard Burt’s alleged supernatural experience.
Interestingly, John Kyd never seems to have sold a single pamphlet or ballad from a shop of his own. Instead, he worked alongside booksellers to whom the responsibility of dispersal was delegated. Alternatively, having secured a scoop on an interesting story, he sold his publishing rights entirely — presumably for a handsome profit.
In July 1592, for example, Kyd entered into the Register an account of a stone-throwing poltergeist in an Oxfordshire village, but had sold the publishing rights to Edward White by the time the ensuing pamphlet was printed.
A True Discourse of such straunge and woonderfull accidents (1592)
A True Discourse of such straunge and woonderfull accidents (1592) is not overly dissimilar to the kinds of supernatural accounts we might find today on internet forums or, on occasion, in the newspapers and tabloids. This is because the narrative’s key elements can, for the most part, be explained rationally, making them a kind of “explained supernatural”.
Starting in November 1591, George Lee’s house in North Aston, Oxfordshire, was haunted — and not by the ghost of any particular person, but rather a non-corporeal poltergeist which hurled stones inside the building at night, as if chucking them through the roof.
But a later inspection of the roof showed it to be perfectly intact and none of its tiles out of place. And, to add further credibility to Lee’s supernatural claims, the spectral activities were also observed and vouched for by members of his family, the town’s vicar, and the county’s High Sheriff. Soon, the haunting was “well knowen to the honorable and worshipfull of Oxfordshire, and others of great credite that have heard of, and seene these accidents”.
The stones never seriously harmed any of the witnesses. In fact, the poltergeist seemed both harmless and quite playful; in one instance, a pair of incredulous men jokingly asked the spirit to toss them some stone rings which they could use in a game of quoits. “Presently there fell down a thinne broad stone, in just forme and proportion of a round quoite, such as commonly men play with,” the pamphlet’s anonymous author tells us.
Things took a stranger turn when one of Lee’s workers came to the house only to discover “a great blacke thing, in the likeness of a Dog, standing upright against the doore”, as if it were listening to the conversations being had inside. The man struck the dog and it fled over a nearby wall.
Shortly afterwards a maid discovered that the spirit’s talents extended to pyrotechnics, as a fire she had lit began to move strangely and change colours, “flashing foorth into sundry changes of colour” — these included “marveilous” hues of blue and black.
Terrified, the maid took refuge in her master’s bedchamber, but did not wake the sleeping man. Soon, the blanket covering him began “to be plucked off” and she wrestled to keep it on him. Eventually the spirit overpowered her and she “shriked out” in fear, waking George Lee.
At this point, footsteps could be heard from the floor above. Venturing upstairs, they found no culprit and a window left suspiciously ajar with an unsheathed sword “thrust” through it. This was strange because both Lee and his maid recalled that the window had previously been shut and that same sword had been next to Lee’s bed.
Stranger yet was the discovery in the parlour of footprints resembling those of a bear and, nearby, those of a hawk. Shortly afterwards, the maid saw a hare sitting outside the house but her master’s spaniels (like Richard Burt’s dog) refused to chase after it, “which made her imagine that it was no natural hare”.
The poltergeist’s stone-throwing activities abruptly ceased in January 1592, only to resume about a month later “in more fierce and stranger manner than before”. This was accompanied by the unexplained discovery of drops of blood on the large table inside the main hall. The blood could not be wiped away, but would “presently rise again in most wonderfull manner” — something the pamphlet’s author claims he had seen himself, alongside “divers of good and substantial credit”.
But the pinnacle of this supernatural tale is the discovery of a strange, monstrous creature in a boulting tub (used in the process of sifting grain). George Lee’s wife had been called for by one of her maids after the tub, and the sheet covering it, appeared to be moving. Removing the cover, “an ouglie blacke thing came creeping forth” and fell onto the floor.
Praying to God for protection and taking a closer look, they observed that the creature was “like a great brindled curre Dogge, with a broad face like an Ape, mightie broad eyes, having neither eares, feete, nor taile, but glided along upon his belly”. It soon fled and was not seen again.
George Lee died in May 1592 and the haunting suddenly stopped. In attempting to rationalise the story, we might suspect he had been perpetrating the hoax and thus his death put an end do it. Or perhaps he was the victim of a cruel prank which was discontinued after he died.
If the intent was to scare poor George Lee, then we might well imagine that a group of cunning, nimble conspirators could perform the task well enough. After all, the most inexplicable phenomena were not witnessed by Lee but others, who may have been lying (and this assumes none of the reported supernatural happenings were simply invented by the writer).
The Smithfield Ghost (1654)
Mercurius Democritus (1652-1654) was one of a few short-lived newsbooks produced by John Crouch, a Royalist journalist who was imprisoned by Cromwell’s government for his provocative, and at times quite smutty, reports.
The contents of his publications were “a mixture of ribald reports of debauchery, crude humour, and (superficially) fantastical or whimsical nonsense-stories and poems”, according to a Lancaster University project about one of his newsbooks.
Unlike the preceding two accounts, Mercurius Democritus’ supernatural claims were not supposed to be taken seriously or believed by readers, but rather satirised, in a deliberately ridiculous fashion, the superstitious reporting of its time. As I have previously written about, the Civil War and Interregnum years saw a massive spike in pamphlets reporting supernatural events, especially ghost sightings.
In February 1654, Mercurius Democritus reported that a peculiar ghost, wearing a lawyer’s cap and gown, was roaming London at night and inconveniencing tradesmen:
There is a great report of a Ghoast that walkes every Night amongst the Butchers at Smithfield Barrs, the Shambles, White-chappell and Eastcheap, in the habite of Mallet the Lawyer, pulling the meat off the Butchers Tainters; many have adventured to strike at him with Cleavers and Chopping-Knifes, but cannot feel any thing but Ayre, every Saturday night between 9 and 12 he walkes his stations in this very Habit as you see, doing more mischief to the Butchers than ever Robbin Goodfellow did to the Countrey Hindes.
Mercurius Democritus (February 8-15, 1654), p. 3
From this initial description, the spectre seems perfectly harmless, though the woodcut below it reveals the ghost to be an evil force; his hat is pierced by devilish horns and his shoes become hooves, a symbol also associated with Satan.
Moreover, the text below this image informs us that the phantom ate a young maid alive on Valentine’s Day.
Perhaps the message is to always read news articles to the end. But maybe the more general takeaway, when comparing this anecdote (and the reports it’s satirizing) to the two Elizabethan pamphlets, is that for all of England’s change over those 60 years — including a brutal Civil War — there was still just as much hunger for news of the supernatural.
