But if the last officially condemned, Jane was not the last actually
destroyed, for a curious MS. letter to be found in the British Museum
"From Mr. Manning, Dissenting Teacher, at Halstead, in Essex, to John
Morley, Esq., Halstead," gives us a strange garbled account of a reputed
sacrifice; and the sadder and more brutal story of Ruth Osborne follows a
few years after.
"Halstead, August 2, 1732.
"SIR--The narrative which I gave you in relation to witchcraft, and which
you are pleased to lay your commands upon me to repeat, is as
follows:--There was one Master Collett, a smith by trade, of Haveningham,
in the county of Suffolk, who, as 'twas customary with him, assisting the
maide to churne, and not being able (as the phrase is) to make the butter
come, threw a hot iron into the churn, under the notion of witchcraft in
the case, upon which a poore labourer, then employed in carrying of dung
in the yard, cried out in a terrible manner, 'They have killed me, they
have killed me;' still keeping his hand upon his back, intimating where
the pain was, and died upon the spot.
"Mr. Collett, with the rest of the servants then present, took off the
poor man's clothes, and found to their great surprise, the mark of the
iron that was heated and thrown into the churn, deeply impressed upon his
back. This account I had from Mr. Collett's own mouth, who being a man of
unblemished character, I verily believe to be matter of fact.
"I am, Sir, your obliged humble Servant,
"SAM. MANNING."
The only falsehood, probably, in the history is the manner of the poor
fellow's death, for either he was foully murdered on a wild suspicion of
being concerned in the witching of a dirty milk vessel, or he died
suddenly of some ordinary organic complaint, and the circumstances of the
horse-shoe and the scarred back were purely imaginary. But again in 1751
was witch blood actually poured out on English soil, and the cry of the
innocent murdered sent up to heaven in vain for mercy. At Tring, in
Hertfordshire, lived an old man, one Osborne, and his wife; poor as
witches always were; old--past seventy both of them--and obliged to beg
from door to door for what, if the popular superstition was true, the
devil had given them power to possess at any moment for themselves. But
this was a point of view no one ever took. In the rebellion of '45, just
six years ago, old Mother Osborne had gone to one Butterfield, a dairyman
living at Gubblecot, to beg for buttermilk. Butterfield was a churlish
fellow, and told her roughly that he had not enough for his hogs, still
less for her. Says old Mother Osborne, grumbling, "The Pretender will soon
have thee and thy hogs too." Now the Pretender and the devil were in
league together, according to the belief of many, and old Mother Osborne
might just as well have told the dairyman at once that he was going to the
devil, or that she would send her imps to bewitch him; for soon
Butterfield's calves became distempered, and soon his cows died, and his
affairs went so far to the bad that he left his dairy and took a public
house, in hopes that the imps which could bewitch the one might be
powerless against the other. But he reckoned without his host, for in 1751
he himself was bewitched; he had fits--bad fits--and sent for a white
witch all the way from Northamptonshire to tell him what ailed him. The
white witch told him he was bewitched, and bade six men, with staves and
pitchforks hanging round their necks as counter charms for their own
safety, watch his house night and day. Doubtless they discovered all they
were set there to seek.
Suddenly there appeared a notice that certain and various witches were to
be ducked at Longmarston the 22nd day of April. A crowd assembled at Tring
to watch the sport; and but one thought went through that crowd--the
Osbornes were to be the ducked witches, and the sport they would have
would be rare. The parish officers had taken the old couple into the
workhouse for safety, but the mob broke through the gates, and crushed
down the doors, and searched the whole place through, from end to end,
even to the salt box, "lest the witch should have made herself little,"
and have hidden in the corners. But they could not find her, not even
there; so, in a rage, they broke the windows, smashed the furniture, and
then heaped up straw high against the house, threatening to burn it down,
and every living soul within it, if the Osbornes were not given up them.
The master was frightened; he had never faced such a scene before, and his
nerve forsook him--not unreasonably. He brought the old people from their
hiding place, and gave them up to that wild, tossing, furious mob. In a
moment they were stripped stark naked, then cross-bound in the prescribed
manner, wrapped loosely in a sheet, and dragged two miles along the road
to a small pond or river, where with many a curse and many a kick they
were thrown in, to prove whether they were witches or not. A chimney
sweeper, called Colley, was the most active of the crew. Seeing that
Mother Osborne did not sink, he waded into the water and turned her over
with his stick. She slipped out of the sheet, and thus lay exposed, naked,
and half choked with mud, before the brutal crowd, who saw nothing
pitiful, and nothing shameful, in her state. After a time they dragged her
out, flung her on the bank, and kicked and beat her till she died. Her
husband died also, but not on the spot. The man who had arranged this rare
diversion then went round among the crowd collecting money in return for
his amusement. But government took the matter up. A coroner's inquest was
held, and a verdict of wilful murder returned against Colley, the chimney
sweep, who, much to his own surprise and the indignation of the
people--many ranking him as a martyr--was hanged by the neck till he was
dead, for the murder of the witch of Tring, poor old Ruth Osborne. The act
against witchcraft, under colour and favour of which all the judicial
murders had been done, had been repealed a few years before, namely, in
1736, and Colley's comrades bewailed piteously the degenerate times that
were at hand, when a witch was no longer held fit sport for the public,
but was protected and defended like ordinary folk, and let to live on to
work her wicked will unchecked.
But the snake is scotched, not killed. So far are we in advance of the men
of the ruder past, inasmuch as our superstitions, though quite as silly,
are less cruel than theirs, and hurt no one but ourselves. Yet still we
have our wizards and witches lurking round area gates and prowling through
the lanes and yards of the remoter country districts; still we have our
necromancers, who call up the dead from their graves to talk to us more
trivial nonsense than ever they talked while living, and who reconcile us
with earth and humanity by showing us how infinitely inferior are heaven
and spirituality; still we have the unknown mapped out in clear lines
sharp and firm; and still the impossible is asserted as existing, and men
are ready to give their lives in attestation of what contravenes every law
of reason and of nature; still we are not content to watch and wait and
collect and fathom before deciding, but for every new group of facts or
appearances must at once draw up a code of laws and reasons, and prove, to
a mathematical certainty, the properties of a chimera, and the divine life
and beauty--of a lie. Even the mere vulgar belief in witchcraft remains
among the lower classes; as witness the old gentleman who died at Polstead
not so long ago, and who, when a boy, had seen a witch swum in Polstead
Ponds, "and she went over the water like a cork;" who had also watched
another witch feeding her three imps like blackbirds; and who only wanted
five pounds to have seen all the witches in the parish dance on a knoll
together: as witness also the strange letter of the magistrate, in the
'Times' of April 7, 1857; and the stranger trial at Stafford, concerning
the bewitched condition of the Charlesworths, small farmers living at
Rugely, which trial is to be found in the 'Times' of March 28, 1857; the
case reported by the clergyman of East Thorpe, Essex, who had actually to
mount guard against the door of an old Trot accused of witchcraft; while
the instances of silly servant maids, and fortune tellers whose hands are
to be crossed with silver, and the stars propitiated with cast off dresses
and broken meat, are as numerous as ever. And, indeed, so long as
conviction without examination, and belief without proof, pass as the
righteous operations of faith, so long will superstition and credulity
reign supreme over the mind, and the functions of critical reason be
abandoned and foresworn. And as it seems to me that credulity is even a
less desirable frame of mind than scepticism, I have set forth this
collection of witch stories as landmarks of the excesses to which a blind
belief may hurry and impel humanity, and perhaps as some slight aids to
that much misused common sense which the holders of impossible theories
generally consider "enthusiastic," and of "a nobler life" to tread under
foot, and loftily ignore.