Mother Shipton

If you go to North Yorkshire and walk along the River Nidd, you will find one of the most mysterious places within Britain. Or so it was when a nearby cave became the birthplace of Ursula Southeil, the girl who would eventually become known as Mother Shipton. The nearby waterfall and the pool beneath it have the ability to turn items left in the water to stone. Naturally, this has been explained by science in the centuries since, but in 1488, the Petrifying Well was a place of magic.

Infancy

Mother Shipton was born to a fifteen year old girl called Agatha, although Agatha’s reasons for choosing to give birth in the cave are sadly lost to history. Folklore tells us that there was a great storm the night Ursula was born. It is certain that Agatha never revealed the identity of Ursula’s father, and that Ursula was born deformed in some way.

It is believed that Agatha was an orphan herself, and it is certain that she lacked the ability to support herself and her bastard daughter. And so the pair were forced to remain in the cave, ostracised from the close-knit society of the medieval village. Perhaps under the circumstances, accusations of witchcraft are unsurprising. Thankfully, this was years before the hysterical witch-burnings would start.

Agatha must have been a truly remarkable young woman. Even when put under pressure from the local magistrate, she refused to tell anyone who had fathered her child, and instead raised the girl alone in the forest. It seems likely that the location of the cave and the Petrifying Well would have enhanced the reputation of the baby as being the child of the Devil.

It was two years later when the Abbott of Beverley stepped in and offered assistance in the form of a local family who would take in and look after Ursula, whilst Agatha was sent to a nunnery in Nottinghamshire. I can only imagine how difficult that decision must have been for Agatha, but she eventually accepted. She died a few years later in the nunnery.

Early Years

True to his word, the Abbott of Beverly arranged for Ursula to have been taken in by a local family, finally giving the two year old girl a taste of normal village life. This did nothing to stem the gossip that surrounded her.

After an early childhood living alone with her mother in the forest, it isn’t too surprising that the villagers found her behaviour strange, and whatever deformity she was born with – most sources seem to suggest it was some form of hunchback – ensured that she attracted both attention and ridicule.

Once, she was found cackling in her foster mother’s kitchen. She was all alone, surrounded by pots and pans. She also seems to have had an impish sense of humour, as she once disrupted a parish meeting when she played tricks on the people who mocked her through the window.

Strange and unexplained phenomenon occurred frequently enough in apparent retaliation of those who ridiculed her helped to cement her reputation. It soon became well known that if you dared to publicly mock Ursula, you would soon experience her wrath.

I can’t blame the girl for deciding that time alone was better spent, and she began journeying frequently into the woodland and to the cave where she had been born. It was here that she studied the local woodland in great detail, and somewhere along the line she learned to devise potions, remedies and concoctions from the local flora.

Adult

Ursula’s reputation as a herbalist began to spread, and she soon became the person turned to when anyone – human or animal – needed a cure for their ailments. This helped her to truly find her feet among society. No doubt it was this security that helped her come into contact with a carpenter from York called Tobias Shipton.

Now twenty-four, Ursula and Tobias soon married and she became Mrs Shipton. Naturally, there were rumours that she must have cast a spell on him.

A month after their marriage, Ursula helped out a neighbour who had had some items of clothings stolen from her home. The following day a woman went walking through the town singing “I stole my neighbour’s smock and coat, I am a thief,” before handing the items over to Shipton and leaving with a curtsy.

As such tales do, these stories spread and grew with the telling. However, life would never be that good or easy to Ursula. Only two years after their marriage, Tobias Shipton passed away, leaving her to become a social outcast once more, as people now gossiped that she must have had something to do with his death.

These rumours, combined no doubt with grief, led her to flee once more to the only place she had ever been truly secure. The woods and cave beside the Petrifying Well.

Mystic

Now, Mother Shipton came into her own. She continued healing those who came to her to ask for her help, but she began to offer more. She began to predict the future.

These predictions began with small things, noting minor occurrences that would happen locally before moving on to larger predictions with greater ramifications.

When she told people that water would come over Ouse Bridge and reach a windmill that would be set on a tower, people reacted with confusion. At least until a water system was introduced, bringing water across the Ouse Bridge in pipes that reached a windmill.

Another local prophecy said that Trinity Church would “fall in the night, till the highest stone in the church be the lowest stone of the bridge”. Not long after this statement, the steeple of the church was destroyed in a terrible storm and it landed on the bridge.

The fact that her prophecies were as accurate increased her profile so much that she was even referenced in a letter by King Henry VIII to the Duke of Norfolk, where he calls her ‘a witch of York’. In Samuel Pepys’ account of the Great Fire of London, he includes the details of hearing the Royal Family discuss Mother Shipton’s predictions of such an event.

But the biggest prophecy she gave in her lifetime was focused on one of the most important people in the country. Thomas Wolsey.

It is clear that Mother Shipton did not have a high opinion of Wolsey. She refers to him as “the mitered peacock”. Her prophecy said that he would never see the city of York. And, true to form, he was arrested on the journey from London.

The ever elusive figure of the Witch of the Well died at the advanced age of seventy three.

She had a difficult life, constantly dominated by ridicule and the superstitious dread of her supernatural powers. I have been fascinated by her and her work since I first visited the Petrifying Well at Knaresborough, and I have come to see her as a sensitive, kindly soul. Whatever the truth of her prophecies, she has certainly managed to entrance me.