The Prolonged Persecution of North York Moors ‘Witches’

At Saltburn Folk Festival 2021 in the North of England our folk group Patchwork performed S.J. Tucker’s song, Witch’s Rune, in tribute to ‘witches’ killed or mistreated. The performance and tribute inspired me to find out about the ‘witches’ of the North York Moors where I live: their names and lives, how they were treated, their legacy and how to fairly present them today in educational and artistic projects. Records consulted ranged from books of local folklore to unpublished handwritten historical documents. Two first-hand accounts in particular – George Calvert’s (1823) and Rev. J.C. Atkinson’s (1891) – provided names, locations, living conditions and stories of some of the women who were branded as ‘witches’ during the nineteenth century. ‘Wise men’ (‘wizards’) from those times were also named and recorded; wise men were believed to have supernatural powers that could counter the witches’ influence.

Healing potions and magical practices of North York Moors ‘witches’ recorded in the nineteenth-century were found to be similar in kind to those recorded from much earlier Anglo-Saxon communities (fifth to eleventh centuries), indicating a continuity and adaptation of traditional practices handed down over 1,000 years or so. Resistance to change in this remote moorland area is presented as one reason for the practice of witchcraft surviving so long despite the rise of science and modern medicine.

Fear of witches and belief in magic was rife in the local community in the mid-nineteenth century. The witch stereotypes passed down to us today were initiated through the demonisation of witches by the medieval Christian Church in an effort to stamp out paganism.

The isolation of the North York Moors helped to insulate the area from the famous witch hunts and witch trials happening elsewhere, but close reading of collected local witch stories hint at ostracisation and violence at a village level towards powerless, generally older women branded locally as ‘witches’, who had few alternatives for making a living.

A legacy of the healing practices of local historic ‘witches’ is found in the herbal and alternative health practitioners in the area today, and spiritually in modern nature-based philosophies and religions, including modern Paganism. 

This paper strips away witch stereotypes to reveal real people practising witchcraft in the North York Moors well into the nineteenth century and their prolonged persecution. It supports fleshing out their historical records, bringing justice to the ‘witches’ by re-presenting them through educational and artistic initiatives, and re-education to stop witch-hunts within local communities around the world today.

‘Patchwork’ will continue to sing S.J. Tucker’s song together with a tribute, informed by this paper, to the local witches of Blackamoor.

 

Keywords: witch, witches, healers, herbalists, wise man, wizard, witchcraft, witch-hunt, witch-lore, magic, Devil, folklore, myth, legend, pagan, belief, religion, social history, tradition, stereotypes, superstition, continuity, community, nineteenth century belief, Anglo-Saxon medicine, medieval medicine, alternative medicine, green witchcraft, folk music, performance, Whitby, Saltburn, North York Moors, North of England, Blackamoor, Ryedale Folk Museum, Saltburn Folk Festival, Whitby Folk Festival, persecution, violence, abuse, aggression towards women, women’s rights, patriarchal society, powerless, justice for women, land enclosure, S.J. Tucker, Doreen Valiente, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Canon Atkinson

Saltburn Folk Festival was established in the 1960s, along with Whitby Folk Festival. Located on the North East Coast of England and separated by twenty miles of rugged coastline, both are important dates in the North of England folk festival calendar. It is thanks to the folk revival of last century that we have them, and other festivals in England, and also thanks to the early collectors of folk music that many traditional folk tunes have survived and can be sung on these occasions.

One collector was the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958). In his youth Ralph travelled the English countryside visiting pubs collecting folk music as it was sung by local people. His handwritten notes and lyrics are fascinating and can be viewed via a link to the online Vaughan Williams Memorial Library.^[1] They record several songs performed at The Duncombe Arms on 13 July in 1904 in the village of Westerdale, the most westerly dale of the North York Moors, not far from where I live. One of them ‘A Yacre of Land,’ was sung by a Mr Greenwood, a schoolteacher. Another, ‘Young William’ (sometimes known as ‘Kiss me in the Dark’), about a roving sailor boy, was sung by Willy Knaggs, a labourer and church sexton who played the ‘bass fiddle’ (Palmer, 1983). Sea shanties were typically included in local repertoire, with the port town of Whitby just a few miles to the east of the moors.

The Duncombe Arms no longer exists, but in 2015 I began singing at a folk session held at The Duke of Wellington pub in the village of Danby, a few miles away. Three other female singers from the North York Moors area were present and we formed a group known as ‘Patchwork,’ now recognised for harmony singing and arrangements of folk songs, many reflecting the area’s history and people.

At the 2021 Saltburn Folk Festival, Patchwork performed an a cappella arrangement of S.J. Tucker’s song ‘Witch’s Rune.’ The song spoke volumes to us, with echoes of witchcraft practices still resonating across our moorland area.

S.J. Tucker’s song is itself based on a poem by Doreen Valiente (1922–99), ‘The Witches’ Chant.’ The witches in the poem use magic to answer their needs and wants, summoning the help of Melusine, a female spirit of fresh water in European folklore, in some literature a fertility figure, or a bringer of prosperity to a rural area. Also summoned are Lilith, who was demonised after being banished from the Garden of Eden for not obeying Adam, and Diana, goddess of the countryside, hunters and the moon. The witches’ chant harnesses the power of nature and a magical realm, lifting these otherwise powerless women from their earthly fate. We performed our arrangement of S.J. Tucker’s ‘Witch’s Rune’ as a tribute to women who have been branded as ‘witches’ and ill treated or killed for their beliefs and work.

The performance inspired me to discover more about ‘witches’ from the North York Moors where I live so we could extend our tribute to them. By all accounts, there were many moorland ‘witches.’ My objective was to find out who they were, the context of their lives, their treatment by the local community, the origins of their practices and how close to our current times they operated. Also, whether there were legacies of their work visible today and how we should present the ‘witches’ in current-day educational and artistic projects.

I discovered that the method would not be straightforward. Unlike the famous English ‘witches,’ such as Mother Shipton who lived in a cave at Knaresborough, or the Pendle ‘witches’ of Lancashire, the typical ‘witch’ I was interested in discovering was more akin to a colourful village character, known only locally. Records and evidence of witches from this remote corner of North Yorkshire were minimal and depended mainly on a handful of nineteenth and twentieth-century local ‘collectors’ of witch-lore and witch artefacts. Some of the records were hand-written and unpublished; most relied on the memories of people interviewed. An understanding of the context of the lives of the collectors and interviewees would be needed to fully appreciate the significance of the records left behind.

I also found that I needed to delve back in time to a period before the famous seventeenth-century witch trials in Europe in order to investigate the origins of witchcraft practices.

Appreciation of the particular features of this moorland area and its people was essential to understand the lives of the North York Moors ‘witches’, and for this I turned to some fantastic books written by people with a strong connection to the moors.

I knew it would be an exciting journey. The county of Yorkshire was well known for its ‘witches’ but the ‘witches’ in its northerly corner, the North York Moors, were deeply hidden beneath layers of folklore and legend.

‘If rumour be true, some of the English rural districts, especially Yorkshire, are overrun with fraudulent astrologers and fortune-tellers.’  Madame Blavatsky (1888–1889)

The old name for the North York Moors is ‘Blackamoor’. Martyn Hudson’s moving evocation of this moorland, On Blackamoor (2020), brings to mind its darker features: windswept peaty surfaces, the browned heather and charcoaled twisted roots from autumn burnings, a westerly roll of menacing storm clouds and the silent dim light of a blanket fog. At sundown, the great black hulk of the moor rises up and in its shadows lurk ghosts of long-abandoned cottages, hobs (fairies) and fearsome witches.

At the heart of this landscape the Ryedale Folk Museum.^[2] at Hutton le Hole boasts an impressive collection on the moor’s folklore and social history. Museum founder Bert Frank (1919–1996) was fascinated in local ‘witch-lore.’ His unpublished notebooks held in the museum archive record the memories of older inhabitants and the contents of a manuscript – ‘The Calvert Manuscript’ – belonging to George Calvert. Calvert is thought to have been living on the edge of the moors at Kirkbymoorside when he wrote it in 1823. The original Calvert Manuscript has now disappeared, making Bert Frank’s translation (and copies by a handful of others) an extremely important document in the investigation of the North York Moors ‘witches’..^[3]

In Calvert’s time, ‘every village had its witch,’ and the ‘witches’ in the region were ‘great in number’. Calvert describes them as ‘old women… called witch-haggs or witch wives… mostly single, or widows with no family, often ugly, the hardships they were compelled to undergo in order to live having contributed to this.’ Their homes were called ‘hovels’. The local vicar of Danby from 1847 to 1898, Reverend J.C. Atkinson, presents a similar picture when he first arrived in the village: ‘the whole atmosphere of the folklore firmament in this district was so surcharged with the being and the works of the witch, that one seemed able to trace her presence and her activity in almost every nook and corner of the neighbourhood.’ (Atkinson, 1891, p. 73)

Closer to our times, Percy Shaw Jeffrey (1862–1952) in 1923 relates a story showing the entrenchment of ‘witch-lore’ beliefs of local people living in his day. His friend, Dr. Thomas English (1865–1937), was treating a patient suffering from influenza who was convinced that his affliction was due to a woman at Whitby market who had given him the ‘evil eye’. He thought she had bewitched him so had asked Dr. English for a ‘Wise Man’s’ remedy to counteract her magic. Dr. English could see that his patient truly believed he was under a spell and proceeded to tell him that he would give him an ‘old remedy’ that dealt with such things, but he shouldn’t tell anyone else or the remedy wouldn’t work. In the bottle prescribed of course he mixed the usual remedy for influenza and the man soon recovered.

Another example is the unfortunate man from Fylingthorpe who believed he himself had the ‘evil eye’ and was so afraid he would harm someone that he walked everywhere with his head bent and eyes fixed to the ground.

Fear of witches fed into the everyday life of fishermen in nearby Staithes. It was customary for them to blame a run of bad luck on a witch and to perform a ritual to flush her out: at midnight they would kill a pigeon, take out its heart, stick the heart full of pins and burn it. Whoever came to the door after the bird had turned to ashes would be deemed the witch responsible for their misfortune, drawn by the spell the fishermen had cast. But rather than punish the witch they would offer a present. And when their luck changed for the better they knew the witch was satisfied with their gift (Williams, 1987).

By the time Calvert and Atkinson were collecting witch stories in the nineteenth century it was an offence in England to claim that any human being had magical powers or was guilty of practising witchcraft. This was the directive of the 1735 Witchcraft Act, replacing previous witchcraft legislation that had criminalised witches. The newly enlightened state professed to be rooting out ‘ignorance, superstition, criminality and insurrection’ (Owen, 1999). However, this cultural shift appears to have had little impact on the remote moorland communities of North Yorkshire. Local people willingly gave to collectors the names and localities of real inhabitants they believed to have been, or were still, ‘witches’ using magical powers.

 

Shakespeare’s play Macbeth (1606) is believed to have been written to please King James I of England, who was fully in favour of the death penalty for witches..^[4] Its depiction of the three ‘weird sisters’ has a devilish flavour: they lurk in the shadows with potions of ‘eye of newt and toe of frog,’ speak in rhyme and demonstrate a power to summon supernatural powers to cause mischief and evil. These and other fearsome images of witches became part of the collective imagination and continue to inform witch stereotypes of today. But where did they come from?

Keith Thomas’s influential book Religion and the Decline of Magic traces the roots of witch persecution and the demonisation of witches in England to persistent attempts by Church reformers and other organs of state to stamp out pre-Christian pagan magical beliefs.

‘Witches’ condemned to die by hanging or burning were allegedly practitioners using ‘black magic’ for what were considered evil or malevolent purposes. But caught up in the sights of the Church and others wanting to stamp out pagan survivals were those offering magical solutions to everyday problems suffered by others (misfortune, ill health, unrequited love, economic difficulties, theft, etc), the so-called ‘white witches.’ Their proffered solutions from outside the auspices of the Church were seen to threaten the Church’s monopoly of the truth, encouraging faithful parishioners to believe in magical powers of ‘witchcraft’ to solve life’s woes. It became imperative for the Church and other organs of state to distinguish between the miracles from God associated with the Church and the magical powers of ‘witches’, and so it was deemed, and popularly accepted, that ‘witches’ of all kinds were in league with the Devil. The Witchcraft Act of 1541, the first Act in England to make witchcraft a crime punishable by death, did much to colour the population’s views towards practitioners of magic. Subsequent acts refined the legislation.

The witch hunts and trials that followed were at their most intense during the seventeenth century. When the last witchcraft trial was held at Leicester, in 1717, around 500 people, mainly women, had been executed in England during the previous 150 years. This figure reflects England’s relatively low intensity of official witch hunting and execution compared to Scotland, where around 2,560 were tried and executed, and Europe as a whole where an estimated 40,000 people were put to death for witchcraft between 1400 and 1800 (Sneddon, 2012). However, the figures do not include deaths of people branded as ‘witches’ who were killed outside the auspices of the courts, or take into account persecution and ill treatment of ‘witches’ amongst local communities, deaths through village ducking-chair incidents and harassment through localised witch hunting..^[5]

Remote Blackamoor was spared the worst trauma of the famous organised witch-hunts and there were no local burnings of ‘witches,’ although one case of ‘witch’ murder is recorded, of Meg Collett, drowned in 1719 in Iburndale Beck near Sleights as part of a local ducking (Linton, 1861). Witchcraft practices and beliefs on the moors of North Yorkshire appeared to carry on relatively undisturbed, away from the gaze of the authorities. This might have been a peaceful continuation of tradition, but fear of local witches, set in motion by demonic associations introduced by the Church, continued to feed the collective imagination. In the harsh living environment of the moors there were plentiful opportunities for pointing a finger of blame – for ill health, poverty, death of a child, theft, bad luck, a cow’s loss of milk, even the poor weather – on women living alone who were believed to be practising ‘black magic’ and causing mischief.

‘The witches were enmeshed in the same landscape as the Norse goddesses and the Celtic spirits of the becks and rivers. Like the rock strata these mythologies were sedimentary, each successive layer laid down upon another in erratic ways . . ..’            (Hudson, 2020, p. 37)

 The collected witch stories of Blackamoor confirm that witchcraft and magical beliefs continued to be a way of life for people living on the moors well into the nineteenth century, with local ‘witches’ providing inhabitants the services of prophecy, treatment for illness and other remedies. A continuity of tradition was emerging, but where did it come from?

Bald’s Leechbook, written in the tenth century and now held at the British Library in London, gives an insight into early medieval healing remedies. Julian Walker uses the text to reveal the state of medicine in Anglo-Saxon England (fifth to eleventh centuries) and finds remedies ranging from the remarkably progressive to unusual combinations of prayers, charms (magic spells), remnants of botanical studies and medical practices from antiquity, folklore and faith-healing. An example of the progressive type is a recipe for a nettle-based ointment for muscular pain that is similar to ointments available today. The more unusual include a treatment for swollen eyes (put the cut-off eyes from a live crab against the neck of the patient, after returning the blinded crab to the water), and one for ‘fiend sick’, or demonic possession (drink an infusion of herbs out of a church bell) – Walker (2013).

The knowledge, skills and magical practices of the ‘witches’ of Blackamoor as recorded in The Calvert Manuscript and other collected stories have remarkable similarities in kind with those of the ‘healers,’ ‘herbalists’ and ‘wise men and women’ of Anglo-Saxon communities.

Practitioners of witchcraft on Blackamoor no doubt created their own vernacular versions of the remedies, flavoured by traditions of Norse and other settlers, but there is strong evidence that they were carrying on traditions and using an accumulation of knowledge passed down over a thousand years or so.

Over time, legends and folklore have grown up around the local people accused of practising witchcraft, their stories embellished over generations.

Nanny Pierson is a famous name associated with witchcraft in the village of Goathland. She could have been a woman named Ann Pierson who appears in the local burial register in 1849. In local witch stories Nanny Pierson is portrayed as fearsome and manipulative. She was blamed for many misfortunes, including the crippling of an unborn child.

The story of Nan Hardwick, a famous ‘witch’ of Danby folklore, is recorded by Canon Atkinson. She could have been the daughter of Matthew Hardwick, baptised in 12 May 1765. In the story, she is an isolated woman living in a hovel in a hillside. She is picked on by local youth who, though fearing her, derive fun from chasing her. Canon Atkinson records one such ‘Nan-chase:’

‘Down this cause it was the witch’s custom, when she was thus chivvied, to run at headlong speed, and as she wore clogs… the clatter of her footsteps could be heard long before she arrived near the foot of the slope’. One lad, Thomas Prudom, standing by the running water at Ainthorpe and blocking her path, was shocked to find she had disappeared and yet had the feeling of something rushing between his legs, enough to knock him over, the ‘thing’ uttering ‘a weird sort of chuckling laugh’ (Atkinson, 1891, pp. 84–7).

The idea was the traditional one of the witch having turned into a hare. A typical example of these stories, shared with Scandinavian repertoires, is that of a witch-hare stealing milk from cows in their pasture. Usually the hare can only be destroyed when shot by a silver bullet. If it is injured, accusers find the ‘witch’ sheltering in her hovel in human form suffering from a wound similar to the wound inflicted on the animal.

A legend about nearby Howe Wood, Kildale, associating the Devil with witches is referred to in this nineteenth-century rhyme: ‘The Devil with his imps, His pleasure in the Kildale woods, Three summer days to take.’ The traditional story finds Yeoman Stephen Howe boasting that if he caught the Devil with his imps poaching on his manor he would punish him, at which Satan appears in a coach drawn by six coal-black steeds. Stephen flees but his wife, Nanny Howe, who was reputed to be a ‘witch,’ strikes out at the Devil with her broomstick. However, she soon submits to his superior power and agrees to go with him. Richard Blakeborough, writing in the 1890s, spoke to elderly Great Ayton folk who were sure they’d seen Nanny Howe riding her broomstick over Howe Wood near to Kildale church in their youth..^[6]

A witch-hare story features in a remarkable incident at Scaling on the northern edge of the moors, reported in the Whitby Gazette as recently as 1907. The article refers to the destruction by burning of a gigantic old oak tree near the bridge over Greenhow Beck near Scaling Mill, named Mally (Molly) Harbutt’s Tree on a local postcard. It was once the home of Molly Harbutt, a Scots lady, known locally as the ‘witch of the woods’, who lived in its large hollow. She prepared potions and was the early equivalent of a homeopathist; she also read fortunes. According to legend she was able to change her shape into a large brown hare, which was finally shot by a hunter, and was subsequently found dying in human form in the branches of the tree..^[7] The report in the Whitby Gazette states that an old farmer of Scaling, Mr Hutchinson of Clover Hill Farm, ‘recollects quite plainly having personally seen this woman when he was a boy, and he is able to give a very vivid and interesting description of her life’. The tree is marked on maps dating from 1856.

With the real fear of ‘witches’ came methods to protect folk from their powers. Many of us still have a horseshoe nailed to a door or fire surround. Horseshoes were originally made from iron, which was considered magical as it withstood fire, so it was used as a charm to ward off evil spirits.

‘Witch posts’ are thought to have been another means of protection from witches. They are a peculiar feature of a number of houses dotted around North Yorkshire, and three examples are held in the Ryedale Folk Museum.

Canon Atkinson collected first-hand accounts from his parishioners on how they protected themselves. It was common to place pieces of rowan wood (known as ‘witch-wood’) around the house and outbuildings; the wood, in order to become a wood-charm against witches, must be cut on St Helen’s day from a tree that the cutter had never seen before, and brought home on a different path from the one used to discover the tree. Atkinson knew an old lady who took measures to expel the ‘witch’ from her butter churn, by sprinkling salt into the fire and into another churn nine times, or alternatively by sweeping the inside of the churn nine times with a red hot poker.

One ‘formidable-looking weapon of defence’, a charm or spell to hamper ‘the witch,’ was used by a Danby parishioner who was a personal friend, a farmer named Jonathan, a ‘right good sort, and a fair specimen of the old untutored, unschooled Yorkshire yeoman’ with a ‘lively sense of the actuality of the witch’ and her malice. The charm Jonathan employed to protect himself and his beasts was found in his bureau when he died, written on a folded and sealed sheet of letter-paper, with ‘a hackle from a red cock’s neck’ inserted between two of the seals (Atkinson, 1891, pp. 93–6). A depiction is given in Bert Frank’s notebook:

Atkinson notes that ‘witch antidotes’ and punishments inflicted on witches are generally ‘left to inference’ rather than ‘specified’ in the collected witch stories, including ‘modes of permanent or sustained annoyance or mortification of the witch’. A farmer in Farndale unlucky with his livestock noticed that ‘whenivver a lahtle black bitch wur seen i’ t’ grip o’ t’ cov-’us, or i’ t’ calf-pen, then, for seear, yan iv ’em took bad and dee’d.’ The black ‘female dog’ was duly shot with silver shot, and the suffering ‘witch’ was later found in bed with ‘a terrible series of shot-wounds’ (Atkinson, 1891).

The collected witch stories sometimes talk of alleged victims of witch spells seeking a remedy from a ‘Wise Man’ (or ‘Wizard’), who would invariably cast a magical spell that was believed to defeat the witch’s power. ‘T’ Wahse Man o’ Stowsley’ (Wise Man of Stokesley), a Mr Wrightson, was well known for making a living as a ‘wizard’ in these parts during the nineteenth century. He was believed by many to have extraordinary insight, knowledge and power, though some were less convinced. 

A ‘Yorkshire gentleman’ in 1819 is quoted as saying: ‘Imposters who feed and live on the superstitions of the lower orders are still to be found in Yorkshire. These are called ‘Wise Men,’ and are believed to possess the most extraordinary power in remedying all diseases, to discover lost or stolen property, and to foretell future events. 

‘One of the wretches was a few years ago living at Stokesley in the North Riding of Yorkshire; his name was John Wrightson . . . To this fellow people whose education, it might have been expected, would have raised them above such weakness, flocked … All the diseases which he was sought to remedy he invariably imputed to witchcraft…’.  Wrightson was accustomed to issuing a drug as a remedy and it was ‘always enjoined with some incantation to be observed’, and sometimes ‘an act of the most wanton barbarity, as that of roasting a game-cock alive, etc’ (Brand, 1849).

Canon Atkinson, though kinder in his estimation of Wrightson, sees him as a charlatan with the ‘power of influencing men’s minds and imaginations’. Atkinson records conversations with John Unthank who, in his youth, had visited the Wise Man of Stokesley and found him wearing a long robe and head covering, his consulting room filled with paraphernalia such as a skull, globe and dried herbs. His uncanny insight and mesmerising powers, Atkinson deduces, were aided by apprentices who gained knowledge about his clients prior to the consultation, giving Wrightson the appearance of a man with extraordinary prescience (Atkinson, 1891).

To step across Blackamoor today, its bare weatherbeaten lonely hills, is to immerse yourself in the echoes of its past. Folklore and a history of oppression and instability buried in its dark roots draws interest from historians, artists, writers, campaigners for oppressed peoples, environmentalists, feminists and today’s white witches and herbalists.

The collected stories of local witchcraft around North Yorkshire indicate that moorland communities were still fully immersed in traditions of magic well into the nineteenth century. They hint at a prolonged persecution at village level of vulnerable people branded as ‘witches’ who were increasingly marginalised in a changing world. Targeted in particular were older women living alone, in poverty, who had been excluded from land work after the land enclosures and were trying to make a living using traditional herbal and magical practices. 

At Ryedale Folk Museum researchers are working hard to tell stories of local people accused of witchcraft. If they can tell the stories of the real historic people featured in local witchcraft tales, they can avoid the risk of continuing the injustice of portraying them in stories based largely on stereotypes – in the villainous role of the witch in popular culture.

Rosie Barrett, Marketing and Events Coordinator at the Museum, explains how some of the objects in their collection can help them move closer to knowing these women, though the process is not without difficulty:
‘We have, for example, a magic book which belonged to a moorland ‘witch’ known as Peggy Devell. As well as symbols and spells, it also contains her accumulated ‘magical’ knowledge on plants, flowers and the stars and planets. Often, these objects only add to the confusion as we seek to find a way to understand them whilst rejecting our forebears’ use of the label of witch.

‘Three ‘spell tokens’ within the collection, dating from the early and mid-eighteenth-century (much later than the intense witch-hunting of the early modern period), are generally interpreted as love ‘charms’. These are likely examples of transactional magic, by someone trying to make a living – what historian, Professor Ronald Hutton has termed a ‘service magician’ (Hutton, 2018). Adorned with hearts, initials and dates, they speak to us of the desire of women to marry and bear children.’

 

Martyn Hudson’s reflections on Blackamoor bring together a wealth of historical detail, including the lives of the nineteenth-century collectors of witch stories. The George Calvert manuscript, for instance, was commissioned by an obscure antiquary called Martin Stapleton of Ayton. Richard Blakeborough (1850–1918) – who found the manuscript and whose son Jack (John) Fairfax-Blakeborough (1883–1976) lent it to Bert Frank at the Ryedale Folk Museum – was an antiquary, poet, medic and dramatist who died in active service at the close of the First World War.

Uncovering the secrets of Blackamoor will not be easy. Lack of power and voice of many moorland women who suffered oppression at the domestic and village level are likely to prevent their stories ever being told. But discovering the true stories of those named in the collectors’ records is an essential first step towards challenging stereotypes and stopping injustice for both the women maltreated in history and those caught up in witch-hunts happening around the world today.

Key sources for this paper – George Calvert’s Manuscript (1823) and Rev. J.C. Atkinson (1891) – record names, locations and stories of ‘witches’ of the North York Moors (‘Blackamoor’) who were known during the nineteenth century. Some of the ‘witches’ were operating within living memory of the people interviewed by collectors Calvert and Atkinson, and all of those named were women. Some work has been done to match the women with parish birth records. Further work is needed in this respect and to fill out details of their individual lives. ‘Wise men’ (‘wizards’) are also recorded to be working in the area at that time.

Some of the collected witch stories, especially the older ones, have passed into the realms of folklore and legend, and as such are not accurate historical records of what happened on Blackamoor, but they can offer insights into the thoughts, rituals and fears of our ancestors and hint at hidden truths. Jeremy Harte describes folklore and myth passed down over generations as a complex ‘lattice’ and collective work of the imagination that is constantly being reworked.

The named ‘witches’ identified in the collectors’ records typically lived alone. Their exclusion from social circles is a common theme and could have been due to being unmarried  – single women were scorned and viewed with contempt in the 1800s (Bild, 2017) – or having a disfigurement, or because the local community feared their witchcraft practices.

Their accommodation was typically crude, ‘a hovel’ or shelter, suggesting they had little money, land or power within the patriarchal society of the time. Land enclosures following the Inclosure Act of 1773 resulted in land dispossession for many and the ‘witches’ are likely to have been victims of this accumulation of power by landowners, forced to make a living away from working on the land.

Items belonging to local nineteenth-century ‘witches’ have been found and preserved in local museums. Some ‘witches’ were said to sell their services of fortune telling in local towns and the collected crystal balls and recipes for magic cubes suggest that prophecy was a popular form of witchcraft locally. ‘Spell tokens’ collected and thought to be love ‘charms’ suggest there was local trade in magical services to assist people in their relationships. The witch stories generally indicate that women known as ‘witches’ fully believed they possessed magical powers which could be used to assist their clients.

Local ‘wise men’ provided services to counter the witches’ power; the stories suggest there were far fewer ‘wise men’ than there were witches in this area in the nineteenth century. The North York Moors community clearly valued the services of a Mr Wrightson, the Wise Man of Stokesley, travelling 5–10 miles to the town of Stokesley for his services. He presented himself as possessing supernatural powers, though some records indicate knowledge that he was a charlatan.

Some of the recorded healing potions and magical practices of North York Moors nineteenth-century ‘witches’ were found to be similar in kind to those recorded from earlier Anglo-Saxon communities (fifth to eleventh centuries), suggesting the ‘witches’ were adapting traditional practices handed down over the last 1,000 years or so.

The collectors’ records and stories show witchcraft practices in this area of Yorkshire carrying on well into the nineteenth century, and superstitions and fear of witches still present in the early twentieth century, despite the rise of science and modern medicine. The longevity of the practice is likely to be due to a combination of factors, for instance, a typical insular  character of people living in a remote area with little education and a community that observes tradition and resists change. A local example of resistance to change were the moorland Catholics during the Reformation who, despite the threat of high penalties, are known to have continued spiritual rituals in secret locations around the North York Moors..^[8] Catholic priest and martyr Nicholas Postgate (1596–1679) was arrested carrying out a baptism in secret at a house at Little Beck and was condemned for being a priest on English soil under the Jesuits Act 1584. He was hanged, drawn and quartered at York.

The existence of ‘witch posts’ and other paraphernalia to ward off evil ‘witches’ in this district show that fear of witches was keenly felt by villagers. Local fear was driven by demonic witch stereotypes developed in the collective imagination and inspired by the Church’s association of witchcraft with Devilry. Canon Atkinson found that his parishioners still feared witches well into the nineteenth century. Fear and a basic instinct of self preservation are likely to have provided a motivation to counter the power of a ‘witch’ or destroy the ‘witch’ herself.

Official records of violence towards the moorland ‘witches’ includes one murder in a ducking incident. There are no records of large organised witch hunts, or ‘witches’ from the North York Moors being tried and killed. However, bullying, aggression and violence towards local ‘witches’ at a village level is a regular theme in the collected witch stories, their persecutors experiencing a genuine fear of ‘witches’ and acting in self-defence. Home (1905) and Hudson (2020) talk of a local witch hunter – Roland Barden – who challenged and was a bane of ‘witches’ on Spaunton moor and in Farndale. The actions of the ‘Wise Man of Stokesley’ were aimed at thwarting the power of witches and the stories suggest that he usually succeeded with the ‘witch’ being ‘made to suffer for her misdeeds past’ (Atkinson, 1891, p.125).

Atkinson deduces that in the witch stories the ‘witch antidotes’ and punishments inflicted on witches were generally ‘left to inference’ rather than ‘specified’, including ‘modes of permanent or sustained annoyance or mortification of the witch’ (Atkinson, 1891, p.93). To what degree the women were in fact harmed is difficult to prove without historical records, but the dehumanisation of witches through the promulgation of such beliefs as they were in league with the Devil or could change into a hare would make them vulnerable to violent reaction on most theories of violence.

Dehumanisation is generally accepted to break down moral inhibitions by reducing perceptions of victims as fellow human beings worthy of concern (Rai, Valdesolo & Graham, 2017). Examples include the Nazi treatment of Jews, and witch murders that are continuing within local communities around the world today.

Ninety-year-old Akua Denteh was beaten to death in Ghana’s East Gonja District in November 2020 – after being accused of being a witch. Historian Wolfgang Behringer estimates that between 1960 and 2000, about 40,000 people alleged of practising witchcraft were murdered in Tanzania alone. There are no laws against witchcraft in Tanzania, but village tribunals determine whether those branded as witches should be killed (Müller, 2020). The collected stories of ‘shapeshifting witches’ turning into hares are likely examples of how violence was motivated against ‘witches’ in the past, and recorded similarity of injuries sustained to both ‘witch’ and animal an accepted way to report that a ‘witch’ had been vanquished.

The findings of this paper help to strip away witch stereotypes and reveal the real people practising witchcraft in the rural environment of Blackamoor well into the nineteenth century, and associated superstitions and beliefs continuing into the twentieth century. A prolonged persecution of these rural ‘witches’ is indicated in the witch stories and highly likely given the hostility generated towards them through the fear-mongering of the Church and other authorities. The paper supports fleshing out the historical records of the women branded as ‘witches’, bringing justice to the ‘witches’ by re-presenting them through educational and artistic initiatives that are responsive to their motives, beliefs, environment and historical context, and supporting education to stop witch-hunts within local communities around the world today. A legacy of the witches of Blackamoor can be seen in the continuing tradition of herbal remedies, alternative medicine and spiritual relief provided by many practitioners around the area today, although without magical elements. Also, in followers of alternative nature-based religions, such as modern Paganism, influenced by ancient pagan cultures and myths.

Folk music has an important social role to remain flexible and relevant to people over time. Through sharing stories and music on local themes our folk group Patchwork aims to acknowledge people who have shaped our local area and communities, to pass on new messages and to support bringing justice where it is deserved. Giving more power to women in a world where many are subjugated and often mistreated, in some cultures, barbarically, is close to our hearts. We will continue to sing S.J. Tucker’s song together with a tribute, informed by this paper, to the local witches of Blackamoor.

Thank you in particular to Rosie Barrett for access to archive material at The Ryedale Folk Museum and her guidance on the presentation of ‘The Witch’, to Martyn Hudson for a copy of his inspiring book On Blackamoor and to the East Cleveland Image Archive for use of the rare image of ‘Mally (Molly) Harbutt’s Tree’, Grinkle Woods. Also, to Dennis Finlayson for attending Patchwork’s performance of S.J. Tucker’s song at Saltburn Folk Festival and for suggesting that I contact Coreopsis Journal. And to my family for putting up with long hours of witch talk!