“The Devil came to me once, I think, like a Lyon”: the Bideford witches of 1680-2

Sources under discussion

I return to an old project for this blog: to write something about as many witchcraft-related pamphlets as possible. In this post I will look at three pamphlets on the Bideford witches of 1682. The Bideford case is fairly well known, as it was almost certainly the last group hanging of convicted witches in England. There are various sites on the internet about the events, many of them perfunctory. This is an attempt to make sense of the main printed materials:

 1. A True and impartial relation of the informations against three witches, viz., Temperance Lloyd, Mary Trembles, and Susanna Edwards, who were indicted, arraigned and convicted at the assizes holden for the county of Devon, at the castle of Exon, Aug. 14, 1682 with their several confessions, taken before Thomas Gist, Mayor, and John Davie, alderman, of Biddiford, in the said county, where they were inhabitants : as also, their speeches, confessions and behaviour at the time and place of execution on the twenty fifth of the said month (the account runs to forty pages, 1682)

2. The tryal, condemnation, and execution of three witches viz. Temperace [sic] Floyd, Mary Floyd, and Susanna Edwards. Who were arraigned at Exeter on the 18th. of August, 1682. And being prov'd guilty of witch-craft, were condemn'd to be hang'd, which was accordingly executed in the view of many spectators, whose strange and much to be lamented impudence, is never to be forgotten. Also, how they confessed what mischiefs they had done, by the assistance of the devil, who lay with the above-named Temperence Floyd nine nights together. Also, how they squeezed one Hannah Thomas to death in their arms; how they also caused several ships to be cast away, causing a boy to fall from the top of a main-mast into the sea. With many wonderful things, worth your reading (six pages, 1682)

3. The life and conversation of Temperance Floyd, Mary Lloyd; and Susanna Edwards three eminent witches (eight pages, 1687)

There is also a street ballad which has survived, though its straightforward moralising about the case adds no new insight or information. This had the heading Witchcraft discovered and punished. Or, The tryals and condemnation of three notorious witches, who were tryed [at] the last assizes, holden at the castle of Exeter, in the county of Devon: where they received sentance for death, for bewitching several persons, destroying ships at sea, and cattel by land, &c. To the tune of, Doctor Faustus: or, Fortune my foe.

The chief source is the longest pamphlet. The second 1682 pamphlet, which doesn’t even get the names right, might be taken to be freely invented by someone who had read the first and longer account, but it still has some convincing additional information. Five years later the subject was returned to – again, the anonymous author supplies convincing details, either from his own invention, or from some informant, about the demeanour of the convicted women at their execution.

Intellectual context

Witchcraft cases simmered on in the last two decades of the 17^th century. The author recommends his pamphlet as remarkable “in regard we have had no Conviction or Execution of any Witches for many years past”. That Joseph Glanvill was keeping the issue alive isn’t impossible: Saducismus triumphatus, or, Full and plain evidence concerning witches and apparitions in two parts was going through multiple editions in the 1680’s. Reports of Swedish witch Sabbaths at ‘Blockula’ kept it all going, and Scotland contributed its share. Then, of course in the early 1690’s, a blast of anxiety reached England from New England thanks to Cotton Mather’s hyperventilating tales of Salem.

Glanvill’s book, though it is described as “Dr. More’s learned Discourse” (Henry More had contributed material to the book about the recent Swedish panic) gets mentioned at the start of the largest pamphlet, which has the usual gambit of saying, in effect, ‘if you doubt the existence of witchcraft, the proof of its reality is to be found in these authorities’. Inevitably, first comes the bland and grand directive, “Study the sacred writ”, then the reader is invited to consider that there’s a parliamentary statute against witchcraft, and then to consult a brief bibliography: King James, Matthew Hales the judge, and Saducismus Triumphatus.

On the scaffold

The author warns his reader that if “any other” accounts do “creep abroad”, they will be “lame and imperfect”, whilst his is the “onely True, Authentick, and Exact Account”. Even so, the account is pitchforked together without any reflection: brusque summaries of the evidence given by the various accusers and their supportive witnesses against the three women in turn, and then “The Substance of the Last words and Confessions of Susanna Edwards, Temperance Lloyd, and Mary Trembles, at the time and place of their Execution; as fully as could be taken in a Case liable to so much noise and confusion, as is usual on such Occasions”. The interlocutors of the three women on the gallows amid the bedlam ‘usual on such occasions’ were the town clerk, John Hill, and the Sheriff.

Beneath the nooses prepared for them, the three women are faced by all the charges that have been made against them, and for which they have been found guilty: having carnal relations with the devil, suckling their familiar spirits, and a wide range of murderous malefice. All these charges, which they have had found against them, they deny flatly. Yet somehow they also give a muddled assent to their guilt: Mary Trembles half concedes “The Devil came to me once, I think, like a Lyon”. Temperance Lloyd, under the intense pressure of hoping at least to find mercy for her soul, tries to express her sense of what her conscience tells her to confess to: the devil, she explains, coerced her into some kind of malign action: “I did hurt a Woman sore against my Conscience: he carried me up to her door, which was open: The Woman’s name was Mrs. Grace Thomas.”

Up on the scaffold, amid the baying hubbub, the town clerk Mr Hill persists with the usual asinities of the demonologists: “Temperance, How did you come in to hurt Mrs. Grace Thomas? did you pass through the Key-hole of the Door, or was the Door open?” The door was simply open, Temperance affirms, either patiently or with some truculence. How the women got through doors seems to have been important to the case and perhaps to the guilty verdict.

Susanna Edwards came to these piteous extremes through poverty, but her final request was poignantly apt, and seems to show that she had been a pious women: those round the gallows “sung part of the 40 Psalm, at the desire of Susanna Edwards”. This psalm would have been asked for by her because of these verses:
¹¹ Withhold not thou thy tender mercies from me, O Lord: let thy lovingkindness and thy truth continually preserve me. ¹² For innumerable evils have compassed me about: mine iniquities have taken hold upon me, so that I am not able to look up; they are more than the hairs of mine head: therefore my heart faileth me. ¹³ Be pleased, O Lord, to deliver me: O Lord, make haste to help me. ¹⁴ Let them be ashamed and confounded together that seek after my soul to destroy it; let them be driven backward and put to shame that wish me evil. ¹⁵ Let them be desolate for a reward of their shame that say unto me, Aha, aha. ¹⁶ Let all those that seek thee rejoice and be glad in thee: let such as love thy salvation say continually, The Lord be magnified. ¹⁷ But I am poor and needy; yet the Lord thinketh upon me: thou art my help and my deliverer; make no tarrying, O my God.
It may be right to assume that the congregational singing stopped short of these fine biblical reproaches to those saying “Aha!” around the gallows.

The Usual Suspects

The Bideford case developed as English witchcraft tended to, fitting very well to the ‘charity refused’ model. The three women were old (Temperance Lloyd being the oldest) and very poor. Susanna and Temperance are widows, Mary a ‘Single woman’. Their small importunities were continuous. They keep turning up at the door (“the said Susanna would oftentimes repair unto this Informants Husband’s house upon frivolous or no occasions at all”), or you ran into them in the street. Susanna confesses in the end that she first met the devil when out (like Elizabeth Sawyer in Edmonton) gathering sticks. A gentleman approaches, and she gathers herself to ask him for a ‘piece of money’, dropping her usual curtsy. But he is the devil, who asks her if she is poor, and this she absolutely confirms.

Through the whole account, one keeps meeting the word ‘door’: it gives a sense of doors being shut in faces, puzzlement in official questions about how such people ever got into the houses of shopkeepers to torment family members, an idea of respectable households under siege by the devil in the shape of a ‘Braget’ (does this mean ‘honey-coloured’?) cat or a magpie, the devil’s human accomplices either passing through keyholes, or entering invisibly, or themselves in feline form. In the 1687 pamphlet there may be a hint that it was remembered that whether a door (to the house of Thomas Eastchurch) was open or shut had been significant in the trial. A witness seems to have asserted that one of the accused had got through a locked door, and this proved that she had diabolical powers. One accused woman cried out “that is false, for the door was open, which tacitly implied that she was then an Actor” (p.7). A denial of having passed through a locked door rebounded as an admission that she had gone into the house to do something nefarious.
Exactly as the historians have the general picture of accusations, Temperance Lloyd had been suspected of witchcraft before, and had been put on trial once, twelve years before, and at that time acquitted, and then strongly suspected once more in 1679, even to the extent of being searched for supernumerary teats, though the case against her was not pursued.

With these unfortunate women obtruding themselves on people’s notice, and regular refusal to them of charity, a trigger like this was always going to happen:
“She (Mary Trembles) this Examinant did go about the Town of Biddiford to beg some Bread, and in her walk she did meet with the said Susanna Edwards, who asked of this Examinant where she had been. Unto whom this Examinant answered, That she had been about the Town, and had begged some Meat, but could get none. Whereupon this Examinant, together with the said Susanna Edwards, did go to the said John Barnes’s house, in hope that there they should have some Meat. But the said John Barnes not being within his house, they could get no Meat or Bread, being denied by the said Grace Barnes and her Servant, who would not give them any Meat.”

The request for a small gift is repeated, and gets the same refusal – it is then reported that a curse was uttered:
“And afterwards on the same day the said Susanna Edwards did bid this Examinant to go to the said John Barnes his house again for a Farthings worth of Tobacco. Whereupon this said Examinant did go, but could not have any; whereof this Examinant did acquaint the said Susanna Edwards, who then said that it should be better for her the said Grace if that she had let this said Examinant to have had some Tobacco.”

A doctor speaks

Meanwhile, it seems as though the uselessness of 17^th century medical practices contributed to the problem. The local doctor, Doctor Beare “did repair unto this Informant. And upon view of her Body he did say, that it was past his skill to ease her of her said Pains; for he told her that she was Bewitch’d.”

This type of diagnosis gives you authority to find the person who is sending such preternatural torments, and as you have refused charity to the local poor women, they easily become the witches who are tormenting you. On the scaffold, as Temperance Lloyd tries to get across that the devil coerced her into harming Grace Thomas against her own conscience, the town clerk persists in trying to get her to confess to every premature, accidental, or suspicious death in the last few years. Those children died of small pox, she says, and no, she “never hurt any Ship, Bark, or Boat in my life”.

A visit to the Indignitas clinic?
But there is another side to all this fitting up of the most resented people in the parish as chief suspects. The women apparently had, prior to their last limited confessions on the scaffold, confessed to a whole range of diabolic activities. Temperance Lloyd in particular seems to have been suicidal, and if the author of the 1687 pamphlet has the Judge at the trial recognize as much of all three:
“At the Assizes being brought upon their Tryal, they all three pleaded guilty: Thereupon the Judge ordered the Gaoler to Secure the Prisoners, but in his charge to the Jury, “gave his Opinion that these three poor Women (as he supposed) were weary of their Lives, and that he thought it proper for them to be carried to the parish from whence they came, and that the parish should be charged with their maintenance; for that he thought oppressing Poverty had constrained them to wish for Death. Whereupon several neighbours, who had been great Sufferers by their diabolical practices, moved that if these Witches went home in peace, none of them could promise themselves a minute’s security, either of their Persons or Estates.”

That’s quite a moment. The Judge speaks up for Christian charity to the old, the parish rallies to see them hanged. Those who fancied themselves harmed by the three women lead the community, and backing them up are their corroborative witnesses, whose testimonies had been collected in pre-trial examinations. These people testified to various informal but demonologically florid confessions by the condemned. It’s a nightmare: every other person seems to be a reader of Sprenger and Kramer.

Popular demonological knowledge

“(Grace Thomas) upon the first day of this instant July, as soon as the aforesaid Temperance Lloyd was apprehended and put in the Prison of Biddiford, she this Informant immediately felt her pricking and sticking pains to cease and abate.”

Dorcas Coleman, given over as incurable by the facile Dr Beare, can see the spectral presence of Susanna Edwards around the bedroom where she lies suffering: “she this Informant would point with her Finger at what place in the Chamber the said Susanna Edwards would stand, and where she would go.” Elizabeth Eastchurch sees marks of pricking in one of the knees of her afflicted sister, Grace Thomas: “Whereupon this Informant afterwards, upon the same 2d day of July, did demand of the said Temperance Lloyd whether she had any Wax or Clay in the form of a Picture whereby she had pricked and tormented the said Grace Thomas?” Anne Wakely, tending on the preternaturally afflicted Grace Thomas, saw “something in the shape of a Magpie to come at the Chamber-window where the said Grace Thomas did lodge. Upon which this Informant did demand of the said Temperance Lloyd whether she did know of any Bird to come and flutter at the said Window.”

The good people of Bideford are determined to have proof that image magic has been practiced in their community against them. The day after their testimonies have been officially gathered, they return to the matter, “because we were dissatisfied in some particulars concerning a piece of Leather which the said Temperance had confessed of unto the said Elizabeth Eastchurch, in such manner as is mentioned in the said Elizabeth Eastchurch’s Examination, and we conceiving that there might be some inchantment used in or about the said Leather.” With the agreement of the Lord Mayor, they haul Temperance Lloyd off to the parish church for interrogation by the rector, Michael Ogilby. It’s the usual type of thing, featuring questions that are based on an assumption of guilt: “where the said Temperance was demanded by the said Mr. Ogilby how long since the Devil did tempt her to do evil.”

As would be the case at Salem, the legal proceedings are led astray by obvious impostures by accusers who have a firm notion of what they might do to secure conviction. Anthony Jones drew attention to Susanna Edwards’ involuntary bodily movements: “observing her the said Susanna to gripe and twinkle her Hands upon her own Body, said unto her, Thou Devil, thou art now tormenting some person or other. Whereupon the said Susanna was displeased with him, and said, Well enough, I will fit thee”. I think the words attributed to Susanna can be taken to be made up to fit the story. Jones has planted an idea, and later he will act out its proof:  “she the said Susanna turned about and looked upon this Informant, and forthwith with this Informant was taken in a very said condition as he was coming up the Stairs of the said Town-hall before the Mayor and Justices; insomuch that he cried out, Wife, I am now bewitched by this Devil Susanna Edwards.”

In response to all this, the women seem to have been acquiescent, almost ideal witnesses against themselves, readily responding to suggestions put to them with a willing compliance. It’s hard to see what is going on. Were the women just too old and confused to cope? (Temperance, the oldest, is said to be seventy in the 1687 pamphlet, the broadsheet ballad inflates this to eighty.) Was a long-harboured desire to strike back at their uncharitable neighbours gratified by a discovery that somehow, by some means mysterious to them, they had achieved exactly that? Were they indeed ‘weary of their lives’, and acquiescent because an end to their miserable existences was in sight?

The accused women have a general idea of what they should say. Once Temperance is being questioned, and confessing, the son of her victim from twelve years previously cannot understand her ready confession now, against her strong and then credited denials. Temperance knows that she is supposed to be party to a time-limited pact: “This Informant demanded of her the said Temperance, why she had not confessed so much when she was in Prison last time? She answered, that her time was not expired; For the Devil had given her greater power, and a longer time.”

Acquiescence and denial

Of course, there are moments when there is a mismatch between what the accusers want the women to say, and the stories they deliver. It is most obvious when it comes to their relations with Satan. They denied on the gallows things they had reportedly confessed to before, either before witnesses, or in their pre-trial examinations:

H. Had he any of thy bloud?

Mary. No.

H. Did he come to make use of thy Body in a carnal manner?

Mary. Never in my life.

….

H. Temperance Lloyd, Have you made any Contract with the Devil?

Temp. No.

H. Had he ever any carnal knowledge of thee?

Temp. No, never.

These denials can be compared to earlier examinations. (Mary Trembles): “after that she had made this Bargain with the said Susanna Edwards, that the Devil in the shape of a Lyon (as she conceived) did come to this Examinant, and lay with her, and had carnal knowledge of her Body. And that after the Devil had had knowledge of her Body, that he did suck her in her Secret parts, and that his sucking was so hard, which caused her to cry out for the pain thereof”.
“She (Joan Jones) did hear the said Susanna Edwards to confess, that she was suckt in her Breast several times by the Devil in the shape of a Boy lying by her in her Bed; and that it was very cold unto her. And further saith, that after she was suckt by him, the said Boy or Devil had the carnal knowledge of her Body Four several times.”

One has to wonder if Susanna wasn’t trying to make a confession that sounded impossible, putting out an invitation for someone to say, ‘this is absurd: a devil in the form of a boy, but still capable of having carnal knowledge of her?’ She repeated her de-sexualising formula at her pre-trial examination: “there was something in the shape of a little Boy, which she thinks to be the Devil, came into her house and did lie with her, and that he did suck her at her breast” – her demon-lover as baby. In a dim way, she is trying to forestall the salacity of the 1682 pamphlet: “She confessed also that the Devil lay Carnally with her for Nine Nights together, and that she had Paps about her an Inch long, which the Devil us’d to suck to Provoke her to Letchery”. This is alleged about Temperance Lloyd, but illustrates the tendency to impute demoniality.

An interesting moment is captured, where we see Temperance Lloyd starting to do her best with confessional material which is being suggested to her. She is bodily searched by Anne Wakely, who discovers “in her Secret Parts two Teats hanging nigh together like unto a piece of Flesh that a Child had suckt. And that each of the said Teats was about an Inch in length. Upon which this Informant did demand of her the said Temperance whether she had been suckt at that place by the black Man? (meaning the Devil).”
What Anne Wakely meant as an alias for the devil, Temperance obediently makes literal. She takes the prompt  - though even as she does so, she is perhaps trying to forestall the next imputation, for she miniaturizes the black man: “Being demanded of what stature the said black Man was, saith, that he was about the length of her Arm: And that his Eyes were very big; and that he hopt or leapt in the way before her, and afterwards did suck her again as she was lying down; and that his sucking was with a great pain unto her, and afterwards vanish’d clear away out of her sight.”
~ their bodily relationship she specifies as painful. It also took place out in the street, the very place where she had first met this devil. It is as if Temperance Lloyd was trying to make impossible and unthinkable the grotesque idea she is simultaneously acceding to:
“she also confessed, that about twelve of the clock of that same night the black Man did suck her in the Street in her Secret parts, she kneeling down to him. That he had blackish Clothes, and was about the length of her Arm. That he had broad Eyes, and a Mouth like a Toad, and afterwards vanisht clear away out of her sight.”

Very late in the pamphlet what Temperance Lloyd actually met in the street in Bideford becomes more clear: it was a black bullock. But as all living things can be the presence of the devil, a bullock was enough. The devil will appear as ‘braget cat’, or a magpie, anything can be made suspicious.

Temperance Lloyd made one final gesture that was remembered. It seems to be hinted at in the title of the 1682 short pamphlet: being prov’d guilty of witch-craft, were condemn'd to be hang’d, which was accordingly executed in the view of many spectators, whose strange and much to be lamented impudence, is never to be forgotten. 

This unspecified ‘impudence’ (one might relish the ambiguous syntax, but it was the impudence of the convicted women) is explained in the 1687 version: “As to the manner of their Deportment going to the place of Execution. It is certainly affirmed the Old Witch Temperance Floyd, went all the way Eating, and was seemingly unconcerned; but Mary Floyd was very obstinate, and would not go, but lay down, insomuch that they forc’d to tye her upon a Horse-back, for she was very loath to receive her deserved Doom.”

There were two types of ‘impudence’ here: Mary Trembles making a scene, Temperance Lloyd being impudently phlegmatic. It was quite usual for the condemned to halt outside a tavern, and be given ale (a good tongue-loosener for the last confession). But to be so unconcerned as to be able to eat, not to be dry-mouthed with horror! That was not acceptable. Seen as “the woman that has debaucht the other two”, Temperance was last to be hanged. She was, perhaps, ready to go, and appeared too composed, too willing to die. Did the witnesses sense that they were the abettors of her judicial suicide? There may also be in this general ‘impudence’ a memory that the choice of Psalm 40 by Susanna Edwards was just too apt, a hit at them.

I find, then, plausible some of the description of the demeanour of the women at their execution in the two short pamphlets. It is the kind of thing that might be remembered and reported. But most of what they allege looks like free invention. The short 1682 pamphlet garbles the names, and seems to invent and edifying tale of “Mr. Hann a Minister in those parts … these Hellish Agents intended mischief and misery to the person of Mr. Hann: but the Over-ruling Power prevented them”.

Both this short pamphlet and the 1687 one come up with the same final ‘proof’ of guilt: “being asked at their Tryal to say the Lords Prayer, they answered, that they could not, except it were backward” (1682 short pamphlet), “and [the minister] desired them to say the Lords prayer, of which the last could not repeat one word, but Temperance Floyd said all, with these alterations; when she should have said Lead us not into Temptation, she said Lead us into Temptation, and instead of Deliver us from evil, said deliver us to evil; and protested that she could say no otherwise” (1687).

Belatedness and mutual disdain

The Bideford case, in conclusion, has about it an air of belatedness. The townspeople are just too knowing, working for and getting the outcome they want, while the accused women accept the role that's imposed upon them, for their own private reasons. If this is the last English group hanging - some claim Temperance Lloyd was the last English victim of all, the fatal phase of the English witchcraft scare ended at that Exeter gallows with contempt on both sides: a community killing impoverished elderly women who had made nuisances of themselves, and the victims projecting a disdain that made its mark

Data mining for witches with Ngrams

So, the blog got neglected. I have been too busy at work, and following my vitrectomy at the end of last February, I slowly developed a dense post-operative cataract in my eye. This seemed to cause me eye-strain, as though I was over-taxing the properly functioning eye. Reading in the evening became very restricted, and so gratuitously working through texts on EEBO fell from my list of priorities.

Frustrated by this, and facing more months of the cataract getting worse before the NHS could schedule me, last Tuesday I had the procedure done privately, at Reading's weirdly luxurious new Circle Hospital. This has the ambience of a brand new hotel, an illusion only spoiled by the occasional medico shuffling past in ward pyjamas and plastic clogs. Art works are everywhere, and, astonishingly, a young woman with a concert harp was playing to relax those in the lounge area. At no point was she summoned up the lift into theatre to assist in giving a client-customer a reassuring departure, but it seemed a disturbing possibility ("Emergency, harpist to theatre 4, please!"). I had my original operation wearing beneath my plastic shroud my jacket, shirt and tie as usual; for this far less major procedure, Circle had me don a 'Patient Dignity Gown'. I thought this suited me a lot, and I will take to wearing it round my department, especially if the same suppliers can set me up with a 'Wounded Dignity Gown' to alternate it with.

But the chart above is nothing to do with my well-being. It's a Google Ngram, off Google Books. I just discovered these last week, when following an OED request for information into user responses. Someone had tracked a pre-dating (I think it might have been for 'Ironman Triathlon') using Ngrams, and I followed that up, not having heard of them.

Ngrams use the corpus of digitised books, and will plot you a graph for frequency of occurence of one word against another within the corpus. As all graphs would otherwise just show a fierce left to right ascent, the plotting is made proportional to the number of books being published within the period.

The results become more convincing if one plots related words in different graphs. My first effort, above, plotted 'witch' against 'conjurer', 1600 to 1800. It seems to indicate some quiet years after 1610, with not much chatter in print about the topic, and then, towards the end of that decade, a peaking concern (I wondered if it might be reflecting the Overbury case). Then, irregular peaks of concern between 1630 and 1650. There's a late 17th century minor peak (I wondered if one might see in that the late flurry of people like Glanville asserting the existence of witchcraft). Then a splendidly rational 18th century, before Gothic Romanticism brings it all back in.

These tentative results look a bit more convincing when a related graph looks quite similar. Here's 'witchcraft' plotted against 'magic':

Somehow, and perhaps it isn't entirely an artefact from the sample, the quiet years after 1610 show up, then the late decade rise, things going quiet after King James' death, until the 1630's take off again (Lancashire? Loudon?). Irregular peaks thereafter, the 1670's and 1680's still quite strong, an enlightened 18th century, and then Gothicism.

My third try just plotted 'witch' against 'devil': it merely shows the predominance of devil talk over witch talk:

Maybe the late 17th century peak in devil talk is as dissenting literature gets more widely published...?

The Renaissance course I teach on is called 'Love, Honour, Obey: Literature 1525-1660'. So I ran the key terms, this time between 1600 and 2000, with this result:

'Love', we see, goes up and down ("the way it does", as a colleague wittily remarked when I was showing this round). There may be a Cavalier peak, and a Restoration one. 'Honour' does well through the Stuart years, and then shows very solidly as the novel gets going in the late 18th century (a range established around the Richardson peak, as it were). 'Obey' is the interesting line. It's far less common as a word, but there just may be a peak around the end of the Civil War. Gradually, society loses interest in the idea, as people also did with 'honour'.

Are the results of this data-mining real? One obviously has to be cautious. I do not know if Google have had access to the work of the digital text creation partnership that's working through EEBO. When this happens, and also when all texts have been digitised, then the true detail will emerge. But this looks completely convincing to me:

This is 'prophecy' plotted against 'throne'. I couldn't use 'king', as that word appears so often that 'prophecy' gets flattened out. Anyway, just look at the peak in 'prophecy' before the Restoration, and the steep drop-off in interest once Charles II is installed. That looks like a very plausible result to me.

Zachary the slacker

Zachary Bogan, of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, was a consumptive (he lived to be just 34), and seems to have been subject to depression; “I have been in a manner buried alive in melancholy, and spent my dayes in vanity. My distemper was such, as did not onely render me indisposed, by study to gather more knowledge then I had before (being not able for whole moneths together, to perswade my selfe to take a booke in hand…” (One has to sympathise, even if only as a blogger who has neglected his blog for months.)

For a conscientious believer of the mid 17^th century, a depressed state must have been heightened by their sense of Christian duty, of how vital it was to use your God-given talents (and Bogan, a probationary fellow at Oxford , was undoubtedly learned): “It was one of those things, which in my melancholy, my dejected spirit dwelt longest upon, that I had done God, and my brethren no service, having lived so long.” 

His first attempt at what we would regard as pious self-therapy came after “a year or two” of depression: “It pleased the Lord (who, I cannot say, did ever hide himselfe in my trouble, or despise my affliction; but was ready to know me in all my adversity) to set me in a way, wherein I might spend my time better, and passe thorow with more ease, some of the rest of those wearisome dayes, which he had appointed for me.” So Bogan, suffering malignant sadness, wrote his first tract, Meditations of the Mirth of a Christian Life (1653).

These meditations his mother asked him to put into print, and he dedicated them to her. In his own rather ingenuous account, in the course of seeing the work through the press, he got talking to his bookseller while looking at a book about God’s promises (possibly The Saints legacies, or, A collection of certain promises out of the word of God collected for private use, but published for the comfort of God’s people, by A.F.), and “I asked the Bookeseller, whether he knew of any Treatise of his Threats. Being answered (contrary to my expectation) that he knew of none; I was the more earnest to inquire further. And so I did; but could heare of none. Whereupon I told my Bookeseller, that I resolved forthwith to read over the Bible, and make a collection of them my selfe; and, if it pleased God to incourage me in it, to print them.”

The work poor Bogan was inspired to write would appear in print, very rapidly, as A view of the threats and punishments recorded in the Scriptures, alphabetically composed (also 1653). Once started, he seems to have worked with manic intensity: “in very little more then a fortnight’s time, that by the help of God I read the Bible over: and reduced every thing that I observed, to a certaine head, in Alphabeticall order. After this, I examined every place of Scripture, by the Originall, and the most noted Translations.” 

He records for his general reader the “marvellous encouragement, which it pleased God to afford me all along in this worke”. While, in his sickness, he had barely been able to read for a quarter of an hour, now he found himself “supplyed with a constant delight in what I did, and a desire to goe further. If at any time I was weary (as sometimes I was quite tired, through infirmities of body, and want of spirits) as soone as I had but turned aside, but a few minutes, I found a sudden supply of desire to follow my businesse againe, as fresh as ever.”

Bogan’s book is interestingly unreflective. He does not make any explicit connection between his own situation and his subject; he does not consider what he might be being punished for. Here he is on what he, if pressed, might have considered his own sin, ‘Unfruitfulness’, and it serves as a typical entry from the treatise. Under the heading (‘Unfruitfulness’), he makes a list of how “God punisheth men for it”. The divine punishment for unfruitfulness proves to be just an infliction of more of the same:

1. With leaving them to the wide world. ‘What could I have done more to my vinyard, that I have not done in it? wherefore when I looked that it should bring forth grapes, brought it forth wild grapes? and now goe to, I will tell you what I will doe to my vinyard, I will take away the hedge thereof, and it shall be eaten up, and break downe the wall thereof, and it shall be trodden downe’ Isa. 5. 4, 5.

2. Taking away the means of making them fruitfull. I’t shall not be pruned nor digged: but there shall come up briars and thornes, I will also command the cloudes that they raine no raine upon it’, ib. v. 6.

3. Taking away the power and meanes of being fruitfull (gifts and talents.) ‘Take therefore the talent from him, and give it unto him that hath ten talents’, Mat. 25. 28. So that for unfruitfullnesse the sinne, they have unfruitfullnesse the punishment; ‘When he saw a fig-tree in the way, he came to it, and found nothing thereon, but leaves only: and said unto it, let no fruit grow on thee hence forward for ever and presently the figtree withered away’ Mat. 21 19.

4. Cutting downe, as trees that have left bearing. It was John the Baptist’s doctrine, ‘every tree which bringeth not forth good fruit is hewen downe and cast into the fire’, Mat. 3. 10. And it was our Saviours too, in the same wordes, chap. 7. 19. Luk 13. 7. He that had hid his talent in the ground, had his doome to be cast into outer darknesse, Mat. 25. 30.

I have said that the book is unreflective, from a modern point of view, in Bogan not seeing the connection between what he is doing, and his own condition as a man. He just doesn’t ask himself why he is suddenly energized by just this topic. A pious-minded consumptive and depressive somehow cannot see a connection between his list of God’s punishments and his own situation.

But the other unreflectiveness about the book is that Bogan does not seem to have considered the overall effect his work would have. From the point of view of any conventional piety, the book is crassly conceived (if we take the notion that ‘God is Love’ as the basic persuasion of the ordinarily pious). Bogan blithely ploughs on, assembling God’s punishments for the various failings of His accursed creation. (Maybe I am the naive one here, and that Bogan's work was at some level a subtle striking back at God.)

Of course, open the Old Testament at random, and you will generally find a whole lot of smiting going on. Assembled together, the vindictiveness, the indiscriminate retaliations, the irascibility, gross favouritism, the general moral insanity of the Godhead becomes the foreground, the middle, and the background - to say nothing of the continuous recourse of the Almighty to horrible threats.

So here’s a selection of Bogan’s examples. In brackets, I give the sin, and then examples of the punishments Bogan eagerly collected from the Bible:

(Whoremongering) “When the Israelites committed whoredome with the Moabites, God (by a disease, or fire, or some other extraordinary plague) slew no lesse then foure and twenty thousand of them, Num. 25. 1, 9.”

(Adultery) “If those that commit adultery escape death, a thousand to one that they escape these ensuing punishments, viz. 2. Retaliation, or being done to as they have done to others thus David was punished, Thus saith the Lord, behold I will raise up evill against thee out of thine own house, and I will take thy wives before thine eyes and give them unto thy neighbour, And he shall lie with thy wives in the sight of the sun’ 2 Sam: 12. 11.”

(Talkativeness, punished by) “2 Destruction (as by discovery, provocation, & an hundred otherwayes) ‘He that keepeth his mouth, keepeth his life but he that openeth wide his lips, shall have destruction’, Prov: 13. 3” 

(Not being improved by the punishment meted out to you) “And I also have given you cleannesse of teeth in all your cities, and want of bread in all your places: YET have yee not returned unto me saith the Lord.”

(Being a disobedient child, punished by) “Stoning to death. If a man have a stubborne and rebellious sonne, which will not obey the voice of his father, or the voice of his mother, and that when they have chastned him will not harken unto them: Then shall his father and his mother lay hold on him and bring him out unto the Elders of his city, and unto the gate of his place. And they shall say unto the Elders of this city. This our sonne is stubborne and rebellious, he will not obey our voice, he is a glutton, and a drunkard, Being rebellious is the maine crime, and being a glutton and a drunkard, are brought in as evidences, though crimes too) And all the men of his City shall stone him with stones that he die.” 

(Being an enemy to Christ) “He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh. The Lord shall have them in derision Ps. 2, 4. Oh fearfull threat! how sad is the condition of those men at whose calamitie God rejoyceth! or at whose wickednesse he laughes! suffering them to run on in their sinnes because he seeth that their day of punishment is coming Ps. 37, 13. Give me any anger, rather then a laughing anger, whether of God, or man. See the threats Ps. 59, 8. Prov: 1, 26.

(Curiosity) “He smote the men of Bethshemesh, because they looked into the Ark of the Lord: even he smote of the people fifty thousand, and threescore & ten men 1 Samuel 6, 19. wicked men commonly are more desirous to know the things of God in a way of curiosity then godly men”

(Murmuring in dissent) “while the flesh was yet in their teeth, ere it was chewed, the wrath of the Lord was kindled against the people, and the Lord smote the people with a very great plague”

(Incest punished) “With Losse of Birth-right. For thus Jacob (as he was dying) cursed Reuben, for lying with (his Concubine onely) Bildad. ‘Unstable as water, thou shalt not excell, because thou wentest up to thy father’s bed; then defiledst thou it: he went up to my couch.’ Gen. 49. 4.”

(Mocking of God’s ministers, punished with) “1. With Wrath unappeaseable … 4. Violent death by wild beasts. ‘As Elisha was going up to Bethel, There came forth little children out of the city, and mocked him, and said unto him, Goe up thou bald head, Goe up thou bald head. And he turned backe, and looked on them, and cursed them in the name of the Lord, and there came forth two shee beares out of the wood, and tare forty and two children of them’, 2 Kings 2. 23, 24”

(Injurious dealing, punished with, number 4) “Destruction of the whole world, (which otherwise perhaps had not come before God, so soone as it did:) ‘The earth is filled with violence through them, and behold I will destroy them with the earth’, Gen: 6. 13.”

Bogan industriously turns a basic tenet of his faith inside-out. God is hate.

We can only imagine what Bogan’s clerical contemporaries might have said about the exercise. His tract found its way into the library of Baron Brooke, among the ‘Divinity English in Octavo’ (Catalogus librorum ex bibliotheca nobilis…). Perhaps people we simply less sensitive – what was in the Bible, after all, was in the Bible, and so beyond question. Maybe it was in fact regarded as a valuable guide: if you wanted to denounce some sin or other from your own pulpit, as must have happened in most parishes on most Sundays, here was a quick route to the relevant divine combination.

And, of course, the Bible is just rather good at these things, infinitely wise, pithy, apt. Just look at the texts cited in this last list of God’s punishments:

Company of any too much keeping it punished with hatred: ‘Withdraw thy foot from thy neighbours house lest he be weary of thee, and so hate thee’ Prov: 25. 17.

Gluttons punished by “Loathing of that which they loved. ‘The full soule loatheth the honey-comb’ Prov: 27. 7.”

The Idle, susceptible to “Continuall desiring, and not having their desire: which must needs be a great punishment, because it is a great vexation. ‘The soule of the sluggard desireth, and hath nothing’, Prov. 13. 4.”

Lying, punished by “2 Discovery in a little time. ‘The Lip of truth shall be established for ever: but a lying tongue is but for a moment’, Prov. 12. 19.”

'Perfection fæminine' at Shorwell Church (or maybe not).

Life’s a bit too busy to trawl up oddities from the depths of EEBO, so another post about a Jacobean monument, one that I found remarkable. It’s a brass plaque in Shorwell church, on the Isle of Wight. It (just maybe) conveys a double message – alongside the quite sincere tribute-in-general, may be some hints of a more complicated story.

Top and bottom of the plaque are these two texts, which tell the facts:

“To the remembrance of the two most worthie and religious gentleweomen his late deare & loyall wives Mrs Elizabeth Bampfield who died the VIIth of March 1615 having bin ye mother of 15 hopefull children and Mrs Gartrude Percevall who died childless the XXII of December 1619 was this monument consecrated by their loving & sorrowfull Husband Barnabas Leigh Esq.”

I have re-lineated the lines at the bottom:

Since neither penne, nor pencill can set forth

Of these two matchles wives the matchles worth

W’are forc’t to cover in this silent tombe

The Praises of a chast and fruitfull wombe:

And with death’s sable vaile in darknes hide,

The ritch rare virtues of a barren bride.

Sweet saintlight paire of Soules, in whome did shine

Such models of perfection fæminine,

Such Pietie, love, zeale: That though we sinners

Their lives have lost, yet still [them]selves are winners

For they secure, heavens happiness inherit,

Whilst we lament their losse, admire their merit.

In between the two main texts, the pictorial part of the plaque shows the two women, Elizabeth with her shoal of fifteen behind her, kneeling in primary and secondary ranks by gender, the ten boys first, the girls behind. Her hand touches the bared head of the eldest son. From the normal post-Reformation ‘depiction’ of God, ‘Jehovah’ in Hebrew letters, the divine command ‘Crescite’(‘Increase’) shines down on the male children. Gartrude is of course on her own, but the 'Chi Rho' symbol for Christ shines down on her. 

Between the two women, a male gloved hand breaks the word ‘Sorrow=full’ in the memorial inscription, and is itself inscribed ‘vae soli’ – ‘woe alone’. The hand supports, with the left hand of Elizabeth and Gartrude’s right hand, a ring, with the motto ‘tres conjunxit’ (‘three joined, coupled’) around a heart, the heart with the motto ‘Unum’ – ‘one’. A chain descends from the ring to a death’s death (‘divisit’ – ‘it divided’), but, in a nice detail, both women have a foot, rather jauntily, on the death’s head, as a modest expression of their triumphant ascent to eternal life.

As is quite normal in portraits of the time, text is just about as important as depiction, and we have plenty more to read. Barnabas Leigh had searched his Bible for texts suitable to honour both his wives. Divine light shines on Elizabeth, and she gets “Sicut Plantulae Olivarum ps128” as one of her mottoes (on the scroll to her left), and above her head, “sicut vitis frugifera”. Both are from Psalm 128, verse 3: “Thy wife shall be as a fruitful vine by the sides of thine house: thy children like olive plants round about thy table.”

Gartrude was more challenging, perhaps, but an ideal text was located: “Canta Sterilis PS 54 1” – Psalm 54:

1 Sing, O barren, thou that didst not bear; break forth into singing, and cry aloud, thou that didst not travail with child: for more are the children of the desolate than the children of the married wife, saith the Lord.

2 Enlarge the place of thy tent, and let them stretch forth the curtains of thine habitations: spare not, lengthen thy cords, and strengthen thy stakes;

3 For thou shalt break forth on the right hand and on the left; and thy seed shall inherit the Gentiles, and make the desolate cities to be inhabited.

4 Fear not; for thou shalt not be ashamed: neither be thou confounded; for thou shalt not be put to shame: for thou shalt forget the shame of thy youth, and shalt not remember the reproach of thy widowhood any more.

5 For thy Maker is thine husband; the Lord of hosts is his name; and thy Redeemer the Holy One of Israel; The God of the whole earth shall he be called.

6 For the Lord hath called thee as a woman forsaken and grieved in spirit, and a wife of youth, when thou wast refused, saith thy God.

7 For a small moment have I forsaken thee; but with great mercies will I gather thee.

The other text for Gartrude is more interesting – but really sets a challenge about where to stop an interpretation. One notices that she is depicted pointing to the text with her free hand, in a balancing gesture to Elizabeth’s hand blessing her eldest son. Gartrude’s text is “An non ego melior tibi quam decem filii 1 Sam 18”.

This takes us to the start of the First Book of Samuel – the text is the last part of this extract:

1 [Elkanah] had two wives; the name of the one was Hannah, and the name of the other Peninnah: and Peninnah had children, but Hannah had no children …

… 4 And when the time was that Elkanah offered, he gave to Peninnah his wife, and to all her sons and her daughters, portions:

5 But unto Hannah he gave a worthy portion; for he loved Hannah: but the Lord had shut up her womb.

6 And her adversary also provoked her sore, for to make her fret, because the Lord had shut up her womb.

7 And as he did so year by year, when she went up to the house of the Lord, so she provoked her; therefore she wept, and did not eat.

8 Then said Elkanah her husband to her, Hannah, why weepest thou? and why eatest thou not? and why is thy heart grieved? am not I better to thee than ten sons?”

The Bible story is one of an awful rivalry over fertility between two wives: Peninnah/Elizabeth producing children, Hannah/Gartrude weeping, and not eating, always under the lash of her rival’s provoking tongue.

Obviously, Barnabas Leigh did not, like Elkanah, have two wives at once. He had found the perfect text for Gartrude in the splendid promises made by the Lord himself in Psalm 54. A further text was gratuitous: he could have quoted twice from the one Psalm, as was done with Elizabeth. Was it the intention to indicate that Elizabeth’s success in multiple births (and how eloquent of the uncertainties of child survival at the time is that regular locution about “hopefull children”) oppressed Gartrude as second wife? Out of a Bible context rich in implications (if implications were meant), chosen for the plaque was that strong affirmation of a husband’s love “An non ego melior tibi quam decem filii” – ‘am not I better to thee than ten sons?’

Look at how the artist depicted the ‘fruitful vine’ to the left of Elizabeth’s head: it’s actually a sprig of holly. I know holly has Christian meanings, but I do wonder at the substitution of spiky holly leaves for vine leaves.

In the Book of Samuel, poor oppressed Hannah prays in the Temple – Eli the priest thinks she is drunk, for her prayers are spoken in her heart – her mouth moves, but she makes no sound. Her silence in prayer contrasts her to the sharp-tongued Peninnah. The reward for her faith is the longed-for pregnancy – she will be the mother of Samuel, whom she dedicates to the Lord who lent him.

Of course, any woman who has endured fifteen (and possibly more) pregnancies is entitled to have a sharp tongue and (within the general parameters of an undeniable success at “perfection fæeminine” in regards to that divine command “crescite”) be rather a challenge to her husband.

I have most likely over-read this monument – but it went out of its way to invite reading, didn’t it?

At Boxgrove Priory: the de la Warr chantry

I managed to get along to Boxgrove Priory on Sunday, where the chantry chapel set up by Thomas West, “eighth Baron West and ninth Baron de la Warr” (1472–1554) is the big feature. It’s dated to 1532, and de la Warr intended it as a final resting place for himself and his wife, with a chantry priest to say masses for their souls in purgatory.

So far, so perfectly late-Medieval Catholic. History and Henry VIII overtook this project: Boxgrove was abruptly dissolved as a priory. Thomas West tried in vain to get it exempted, then settled pragmatically for retaining the main priory building as a parish church. But even then, the long-lived de la Warr was never to be buried in the beautiful personal shrine he'd had erected. Accused of playing a part in a conspiracy, he had to swap his local manor house, to which the king had taken a fancy, for a former nunnery at Whewell in Hampshire. That was the price of his pardon for an invented crime. Leaving Sussex, he left this chapel behind him, though I imagine he wondered about having it taken apart and transported.

It had been a daring piece of work just getting the chantry in the church and close to the altar: a whole pier was removed, with the double size arch above it strengthened – even so, load bearing vaults no longer sweep down to approach the absent column, but splay across almost horizontally. Everything hovers above this miracle of faith, and has done so without trouble for nearly 500 years.

What a piece of work it is, eloquent of so much. The decoration mixes the heraldry of the de la Warre family, Tudor roses, and faith. It its original state, viewers must have seen a structure that ascended up from a joyous motifs of the fleshly world – fat cherubs play lutes, two young men swarm up one column, throwing down fruit to a girl who holds out her apron. Hercules fights the Nemean lion, a King and Death stand either side of a tree, dragons writhe.

Then above this, the divine realm: the riotously decorated columns, turn into their structural negatives, niches for with saints topped with intricate Gothic canopies. Heaven is held up by faith, not stone. Sinuous movement turns to fixity, the contemplation of God - music might come from heaven without visible performers, certainly not from fat-legged cherubs. All the saints disappeared, of course: the empty niches conjure them up, spectacular victims of all that jostling life down below them, martyred again in effigy. I imagine their battered torsos will be in a pit somewhere close at hand, maybe dug down to the paleo-surface where Boxgrove man and his fellows slaughtered extinct animals half a million years before.

Decorative motifs for the carvings were apparently taken from a French Book of Hours. The lively realm of classical motifs, images from fabliau and moral tale, and stiff Tudor roses seem to be pushing the Gothic world higher towards heaven. Though to an extent, the  elaborate coats of arms and Orders of the Garter aspire towards joining the building’s divine realm: angels obligingly display dynastic honours.

The intricate vaulting within makes it seem as if the masons could extrude stone through an icing nozzle or fresh pasta maker. As decorative as a gypsy caravan, the chantry stayed where it was and journeyed forwards through time.

Sir Thomas Wyatt could have gone down to Chichester and seen this structure when it was new. Anne Boleyn was about to become queen. Of its time in its jollity, its Tudor patriotism, all of the certainties of its theology were about to be stripped away. The double sized arch held up: the metaphorical roof fell in.

A work of magenta-coloured imagination: Jeanette Winterson's 'The Daylight Gate'

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.