The Yorkshire Witch

by Strevens, Summer;

  The decade of Mary’s birth was a momentous one. In London, the new king, George III, came under increasing attack from the satirist John Wilkes at the same time that trouble was brewing in the thirteen British colonies in America. At home, the economic and social upheaval we now call the Industrial Revolution was beginning to gain momentum of its own. The Harkers were the last generation to live off the land – their children were city dwellers.

  The couple’s first child and Mary’s eldest sister, Jane, was born at Brompton and baptised there in the parish church of St Thomas, where her parents had been married, on 7 August 1755. The church we see today is much altered from the one they knew. It was still a chapel of ease to All Saints’ Northallerton at the time but was heavily rebuilt in 1867. Her subsequent siblings were all born at Asenby: Ann, named for her mother was baptised 28 April 1765; then after the birth of Mary came Elizabeth, baptised on 17 September 1770; Benjamin, named for his father, was baptised on 12 June 1773 and the youngest, John, whose birth date was recorded as 7 September 1778, was baptised on 11 October that year.

  Mary’s parents were noted as always having ‘maintained a reputable character’, a familial attribute clearly not passed down to their daughter, as from an early age Mary was said to have displayed ‘a knavish and vicious disposition’. At the age of five, it was reported that ‘she stole a pair of morocco [fine leather] shoes, and secreted them for some months in her father’s barn.’ Later she brought them out and pretended she had found them; an inquiry proved that this was only one of those instances of lying which so strongly marked her future life. Whether the accounts of her early nefarious nature are to be believed, or whether at this tender age Mary could be forgiven for merely being a mischievous little girl, she did in her early years mix with the gypsies who habitually descended annually in great numbers for the Topley Fair – a sheep and horse fair that had been held at Topcliffe on 17–19 July since medieval times, and a traditional rendezvous for gypsies and horse-dealers from far and wide. The ‘Egyptians’ as the Elizabethans called them a century and a half earlier were the ‘Moon Men’, a dangerous mob of vagabonds who were by law to be driven out of parishes. They had come to be accepted by Mary’s time, but no one quite trusted them.

  Today the small village of Topcliffe is a quiet place, though still larger and busier than neighbouring Asenby, and it is hard to imagine that this ancient settlement was once an important town, staging one of the largest annual fairs in the north of England. The charter which allowed this fair, and a weekly market, was granted by Edward III in 1327. Some vestiges of Topcliffe’s market square can still be seen, traces of where the stalls would have been pitched still apparent in the now narrow cordon of cobbles surrounding the Market Cross. While the sale of livestock was the primary concern, the first of the three successive days of the Fair was allotted for the sale of sheep and the second for horses. The third day was Lady Fair Day, for which the fair was renowned,when the lads would take their sweethearts around the trinket stalls. A kaleidoscope of sights and sounds, the fair attracted entertainers such as rope dancers, tumblers, acrobats, with the addition of food stalls, fortune tellers, freak shows, and musicians playing hurdy-gurdys and fiddles. Of course the ubiquitous pickpockets and prostitutes would have been there as well.

  Though the Topley Fairs ceased in the late 1960s, they must have been similar affairs to the long standing but still extant Appleby Horse Fair held in Cumbria each June. Attracting ten to fifteen thousand Gypsies and Travellers each year, who regard Appleby Fair as the most important date in their calendar, it remains one of the largest of their gatherings, as well as being a continuing source of controversy and complaint for the local residents. The past Topley gatherings would have been equally colourful occasions, with the opportunity for Romany families and friends to meet, to buy and sell horses, and for the young folk to find themselves husbands and wives; it was also the agreed time for enemies to settle old scores. It was customary and understood that every quarrel which had occurred during the year, no matter how trivial, had to be settled with a stand up fight at Topley Fair. And fights were continually in progress, often escalating into a general free-for-all, down Mill Bank, as well as bare knuckle bouts taking place alongside the riverbank – there was even a special arena set aside for the women to fight in, by the river on the Asenby side of the bridge. This long standing custom, and one that died hard, was doubtless fuelled by the ‘bough houses’ that came into existence on the fair days, during which time anyone could sell beer by licence, and where stout liquor was specially brewed for the consumption of customers ‘invited’ to the house for a drink, marked by green branches displayed above the doors, hence the name.

  With the increased opportunity for those attending the fair to quench their thirst, along with the damage to crops and broken down fences along Park Road and Sykes Lane where the travellers set up camp, and raced their horses along the road ‘frightening villagers in Asenby’, this was the less than savoury environment in which the young and impressionable Mary may have picked up some of the gypsy arts and skills that she was later to utilise in a criminal career. It may have been the early exposure to gypsy fortune telling that formed the bedrock of Mary’s criminal career. The gullible flocked to her, as they did to others, to buy potions and love draughts, easily convinced of her supernatural talents and the power of the charms she sold.

  Other than the annual excitement of the Topley Fair, we can assume that Mary’s childhood was no different to that of any girl growing up in rural north Yorkshire toward the close of the eighteenth century; running around the countryside with her brothers and sisters, perhaps over the old stone bridge spanning the Swale to Topcliffe, surrounded by farmland as it was. The freedom conferred by fine summer weather and long hours of daylight would have been precious before the year wore on and the candles were lit earlier and earlier along with the fires in the hearth. As a little girl, she would doubtless have been taught to clean and sew. Most rural cottages had a spinning wheel even if the families were not part of the ‘putting out’ system of Yorkshire woollens before the coming of the mills. In her spare time, Mary might even have played on the Maiden’s Bower, the site of a supposed motte and bailey castle to the east of the village of Asenby, on top of which are the remains of one of England’s mystical and forgotten turf mazes, and one of only ten rare medieval turf labyrinths in the country. The tradition of such turf mazes, convoluted paths cut into an area of short grass, is a very ancient one, and speculation as to the purpose of such mazes has thrown up various theories, one of which is that they were used by villagers for entertainment, particularly on high days and holidays such as May Day. Mary must also have been aware of the fable associated with the Maiden Bower maze, that on a summer’s evening, if you happen upon the centre of the maze and kneel down and put your ear to the ground, you can hear the fairies singing.

  Fairies aside, in her juvenile years, numerous ‘frauds and falsehoods’ seem to have been attributed to Mary, the extent of which caused her parents to place her in service with a family in Thirsk at the age of twelve in an attempt to mend their daughter’s ways. Thirsk lies in the Vale of Mowbray and was undergoing extensive changes in Mary’s day with a canal, never finished, adding to the chaos of the town. Domestic service was one of the few employment options open to unmarried girls and young women in the late eighteenth century and, in view of her youth, Mary would invariably have been employed as a ‘maid of all work’, at the very bottom rung of the household ladder. Despite this, we know from her subsequent criminal career that Mary was literate. This was unusual in an agricultural family, especially for a girl. The prevailing attitude at the time, considered sexist today, was that girls were not worth educating as they would always be subservient to men. It is possible that she was taught at Sunday School, but Robert Raikes’ drive to improve the religious knowledge of the poor did not take off until 1780, by which time Mary was already in Thirsk.

  She would have been living in modest quar
ters and working miserably long hours in return for the customary low wage paid for unskilled housework. Many domestic servants under the age of sixteen were unpaid, with bed and board being regarded as adequate recompense. Even if she did receive a salary it would not have been more than £1 a year. As the lowest order of servant, her work would have been hard; most houses had to be washed from top to bottom twice a week and staircases and entrances had to be scrubbed daily. Young maids like Mary would have shared the jobs of house-maid, kitchen maid and scullion. An almost continuous supply of water was required to keep the household clean as well as for ablutions and for the kitchen. There was no flush toilet and new-fangled inventions like piped water were the preserve of the urban rich so, many times a day, she would have staggered back with buckets filled from the nearest pump. Rising at five o’clock every morning, Mary would have cleaned the hearth and lit the kitchen fire and prepared the utensils for the cook to make breakfast if the household employed one. Otherwise this task may have fallen to her too in a more modest household. Before the family woke, she would have lit the fires in their bedrooms, and afterward emptied their chamber pots and fetched hot water for washing. While the family breakfasted, Mary would make the beds, put back the shutters, sweep the rooms, clean the grates and take the washstand water downstairs before clearing the breakfast plates and dishes, scouring the pans with a mixture of sand and soap and then start the round of laborious repetitive tasks of scraping the fireplaces and scrubbing, sweeping and dusting that would continue as the pattern of her day. Working hours would have been longer in summer because of the light, though in winter her day would still not be done until 7pm, and then only after all the pans had been scrubbed after dinner and the bedrooms prepared. Of necessity, clothes often had to be brushed and sponged daily as the streets were so filthy, and servants would also have been expected to launder, mend and sew. We can assume that Mary was at least a fair seamstress in view of one of her later employments.

  A servant’s duties might also encompass buying milk from the cows led by milkmaids into the town and shopping for provisions, though this might have proved a welcome break from a mistress who expected her servants to work like drones, all the time showing a meek obedience and deference whenever they encountered a member of the family, as well as accepting punishment submissively. Servants were beaten for laziness, untidiness, carelessness and insolence to their employer, or simply if their master or mistress were in a bad temper. Though we don’t know into which household Mary was placed, nearly every household who could afford to employed servants. Their number was a symbol of social standing, with the aristocracy employing as many as fifty, while the middle classes might employ three or four. Those lower down the social scale perhaps employed only one.

  Mary may well have been placed in one of the larger houses in the town, some six miles from her home in Asenby village, as Thirsk was experiencing growth as a busy market town at this time. Already the focus of trade for the scores of surrounding villages, and with an economy bolstered by the wool and linen industries, it was the building of the turnpike roads that led to the town becoming a staging post on the Royal Mail’s Edinburgh to London run via York. The Mail stopped in Thirsk to change horses every afternoon at 4 o’clock while the ‘Express’, the ‘Highflyer’ and other famous coaches kept an equally punctual schedule on the routes from London, Edinburgh, Newcastle, Leeds and Darlington. With coaches calling at The Three Tuns, adapted for use as a coaching inn around 1740, and The Golden Fleece, one of the oldest coaching inns in England, the sound of the four-in-hands as they galloped into Thirsk market place, hoofs and wheels clattering on the cobbled stones must have been familiar to Mary, and she may even have been employed in one of these inns at some point, as her tenures of employment in Thirsk turned out to be various and brief.

  While a high turnover rate of those in service existed due to innumerable grievances and disputes between domestics and their masters and mistresses, usually women could expect to continue working until marriage. Towards the close of the eighteenth century this was typically around the age of twenty-four or a little older. However, after several dismissals from households in Thirsk, quitting each situation under suspicious circumstances, perhaps for petty pilfering, Mary moved to York in 1787. The ancient Eboracum of the Romans, where the VI Legion was based, the city had become an important Viking centre (Jorvik) and was the seat of the Second Primate of England – the Archbishopric of York. It retained much of its medieval past in Mary’s time but was easily the biggest place she would have seen in her life up to this point. This was a smart move – gaining employment in another house in Thirsk would have required a character reference; unresolved ‘disputes’ were a serious obstacle to gaining a future position, especially in a town where Mary’s dubious employment history must have been known. Whether Mary was dismissed in each instance, or left of her own volition, she could have faced months of unemployment, and worse still, while those discharged by their employers were owed wages up to the date of dismissal, a servant who quit was owed nothing. Presumably through the guile which would later become a prominent character trait, Mary secured another position in service in York. Before the year was out she was again dismissed, for the theft of articles from her mistress, and departed in disgrace, and presumably in a hurry, as she left without her clothes or wages. Now aged twenty, Mary had been sacked from so many positions that no one in their right mind would employ her. Without hope of a reference, she shrewdly opted to move to Leeds where her dubious reputation was unknown.

  In 1788, Leeds was a large town. Already described in 1730 as one of the ‘largest and most flourishing towns in the country’, with the momentum of the Industrial Revolution its expansion had continued. Typical of the rapidly growing manufacturing towns that had long been established as markets for the sale of cloth, Leeds had all the characteristics of the burgeoning industrial environment. By 1801, the year of the first census, the population of Leeds had reached 30,000, almost double that of York. This increase was caused by a rise in the birth rate and an influx of people looking for work; a labouring multitude who supplied the new urban mills and factories with cheap labour and worked hard. They drove the success of industrial Leeds, but nevertheless endured poverty, overcrowding and little if any prospect of improving their lot. Where better, then, for Mary to become lost in the anonymity of the swelling crowd? In time she could exploit the gullible weaknesses of the poor and desperate, easily deceived into placing their simple trust in the hands of a compulsive liar, confidence trickster, thief and fraudster, who through her skill as an accomplished actress could make her victims believe that she had supernatural powers. The fact that she could write must have immediately impressed her target group.

  Though she remained without employment or friends for a considerable time, clearly Mary decided that joining the swelling ranks of factory workers was not for her, perhaps because she knew that the conditions in the factories were harsh. The work was very hard, and the hours long at up to seventy-two a week. Accidents were commonplace; exhausted factory hands carrying out repetitive tasks easily made mistakes, and with the absence of any health and safety precautions – there were usually no guards on the machinery – the work was also very dangerous. In some mills, especially in the flax mills which proliferated in Leeds where the flax spun was later woven into linen, the air was full of dust, creating and worsening many health conditions. There was also the risk of fire – the serious blaze which broke out in one Leeds flax mill will be covered in the following chapter. One young worker, James Carpenter, reported an horrific accident which happened to one of his colleagues at the mill he worked in:

  ‘Harriet Wilson worked at Mr. Tennant’s: her arms were taken off by the side gearing of a card, on the opposite side to where the straps run. I saw it done. She was picking the flyings off, just a little before 12 o’clock in the day; and the wheel caught her sleeve and pulled one arm in. In trying to extricate that the other went in.’

  Howe
ver, another determining factor in Mary not seeking such employment may well have been her age. Factory owners preferred to hire children because they were a cheaper source of labour than adults and easier to discipline. Children as young as nine were employed in the mills, though at one Leeds factory, Marshall & Co, older children of eleven or twelve were favoured, as they worked harder and did not have to be supervised.

  Nevertheless, Mary needed to earn a living and there was another option open to her – many women believed that prostitution was less dangerous than factory work and more bearable than the back-breaking servility of domestic service. Young girls frequently took to the streets without understanding the inherent dangers of their new profession. Living a hand to mouth existence, pawning their clothes to buy drink – most prostitutes were addicted to gin within months of starting work. The majority would be beaten by their clients and in this situation, the girls’ appeal to law would be pointless. Since most men in large cities had contracted venereal disease, nearly all working girls were infected within a year of walking the streets. Many turned to petty crime, and only those who stole from their clients broke even. If they escaped prosecution many died within five years from disease, assault by a client or as result of a botched abortion, a circumstance pertinent to Mary Bateman’s later career. Yet the path to the streets was one which Mary didn’t follow either. Instead, a friend of her mother got her a job in the shop of a mantua maker. This was a fashionable ladies over-gown of the period usually worn with a co-ordinating petticoat and it was here that Mary rather surprisingly remained for more than three years, obviously displaying some aptitude as a seamstress. If she was repeating her behavioural pattern of theft in stealing from this employer, Mary must have been very careful. But she began supplementing her earnings with a profitable side-line as a soothsayer, telling fortunes and making love potions for would-be sweethearts.