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During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, witch trials swept through Europe like an out of control plague, and my little village of St Osyth was not exempt from the insanity—an insanity that was responsible for so many needless deaths of innocent women and, to a lesser extent, men and children.
Many children were left without mothers, husbands were left without wives, and mothers without their daughters, due to the ignorance and cruelty of fanatics such as Mathew Hopkins, the self-appointed Witch Finder General, to name but one. Hopkins was born in 1620, and in his twenty-seven years of life, he embarked on a crusade to rid the east coast of those he deemed to be heretics and also those who had made a covenant with the devil.
Most of all, Hopkins reserved his greatest ire for those he suspected were practicing the dark arts, particularly the witches he believed were laying curses upon the innocent with the ultimate aim of bringing them bad luck, ill health, and death.
Hundreds of years later, Hopkins is still a household name. Yet he was by no means the first or the last to persecute innocents for his own sick and perverted ends. In this day and age he would be classed and treated as a serial killer, possessing all of the ruthlessness and lack of conscience of the born psychopath.
In those days, when it was relatively simple to hide behind the cloak of religion while firing off accusations of devil worship at anybody who took his fancy, this twisted fanatic flourished and prospered. There was rarely a way out for the unfortunate innocents that Hopkins accused of witchcraft and put to death—no court of appeal, no possibility of parole or mercy.
A young woman of around twenty-seven named Ursula Kemp lived in the village of St Osyth in the 1500s. She was said to be an attractive woman with long brown hair and dark brown eyes, and was well known in the small community, which at that time would have numbered only around three hundred people.
Ursula was mother to one son (an eight-year-old boy named Tom) whom she loved every bit as much as he loved her in return. It wasn’t the easiest of times to live in, for money was hard to come by and their accommodation would have been no better than a shack. The winters were freezing cold, and most people possessed none of the home comforts that we take for granted today, not even a warm and cozy home to protect them from the elements. The combined warmth of Ursula and Tom’s shared body heat when cuddling up together was what kept them warm at night, with a little extra meager heat from the log fire to supplement it.
It is said that as a child, Ursula loved to play in the woods. She had great affection for all animals under the sun, and her happiest times were spent in the company of all the creatures that the woodland had to offer. It is there in her precious woods that she learned of the medicinal and healing properties of wild flowers, herbs, and plants that nature offered at no charge.
Her life as a young English girl in the 1500s would have been both hard and cruel. It was certainly a life that we can hardly imagine today, when many of us are obsessed with our “first world problems.” I like to think of her as a content child, though perhaps a bit of a loner—a child with her own ways and her own path to follow, a path that was not necessarily the same as the other village children’s path.
We know that at some point in her late teens, Ursula married a man named Mr. Rabbet, who fathered her son Tom. After Tom was born, both parents separated for reasons that are at best unclear. What we do know is that Tom stayed with Ursula, rather than with his father.
Ursula would have been the main bread winner (there was no such thing as child support in those days), and so she tried to eke out a living by working as a midwife and wet nurse for the women of the village. She also had a sideline in healing the sick, employing the various skills that she had learned over the years as a child in the woods.
On one occasion when Ursula herself fell ill, she engaged the help of an old woman from a neighboring village. Her name was Old Mother Cox, and she seems to have been the stereotypical old crone, a reputation that was aided considerably by the fact that she lived in Wesley Woods. She too used unusual and unorthodox methods of healing, and her knowledge of the natural ways was greatly respected in the region.
“Return to your home and make three holes in the underside of the kitchen table,” Old Mother Cox instructed Ursula, “and then stab a knife through each of them three times. If you do this, you shall be cured.”
Ursula obeyed without hesitation, and was indeed cured—though whether by placebo or by genuine means, I will leave it up to the reader to decide. Impressed with her knowledge and wisdom, Ursula occasionally visited Old Mother Cox at her shack in the woods, seeking to learn new methods of healing from the old crone.
Her apprenticeship with the wise woman of the woods soon bore fruit. Ursula learned many new ways to help the needy village folk, which she added to her own repertoire of tried and trusted methods, and before long her healing skills were called upon on a regular basis throughout the village of St Osyth.
I personally cannot help but feel that Ursula was a kind woman and a good mother, someone who wanted nothing more than to help folks and look after her beloved Tom, living in peace and happiness to the best of her ability. Ursula was actively involved in everyday village life and had several friends, one of which was a neighbor named Grace Throw (or Thurlowe).
Grace had one son, a boy named Davy, and was pregnant with her second child at the time her son became ill with convulsions; she asked Ursula for her help in curing the lad, and Ursula willingly agreed. After she had treated him successfully, Davy was once again the picture of health.
Ursula did not charge Grace for curing her son, but we understand that there was an agreement in which Ursula would be called upon by Grace to be her midwife and wet nurse when her second child was born. At that time, Ursula would be paid for her services, and all parties would be happy. Alas, Grace reneged on her word; she did not call on Ursula for help, choosing instead another local woman to deliver the baby and nurse it.
Quite understandably, Ursula was left feeling cheated by a woman she had once thought of as her friend. A few months later, Grace experienced another attack of lameness (a malady from which she suffered on occasion) and once again had the effrontery to turn to Ursula for help. Incredibly, Ursula did agree to help Grace a second time, but only upon the condition that this time, she was paid twelve pence for her services—a condition to which Grace readily agreed.
Once again, Ursula’s treatment was successful. The lameness had gone, and Grace by her own admission was happy and believed that it was Ursula’s skills that had cured her. Yet when it came time for Grace to pay her the agreed price of twelve pence, she predictably told Ursula that she could not afford to pay her any money.
Ursula countered that she would be happy to take cheese as payment instead, but Grace shrugged and claimed that she did not have any with which to pay her. Once again, Ursula was cheated out of fair recompense for her services. The two women exchanged heated words, but Ursula still left empty-handed.
During that era, times were hard and money was always short, and so the village communities relied heavily on one another to get by, trading and bartering both goods and services. If one person didn’t honor an agreement, it was frowned upon greatly by the community. Grace’s choice to refuse Ursula payment a second time round would have been no exception, especially as she had offered to take food instead of monetary payment.
It was a decision that she would soon come to regret.
When Grace’s baby girl was just three months old, she somehow fell from her cot, breaking her neck on the hard stone floor. Sadly, the infant died.
To make matters even worse, Grace’s lameness returned with a vengeance. In her mind, there was only one person to blame for the death of her child and the subsequent return of her illness: Ursula Kemp.
Grace was all too aware of the potential consequences if somebody happened to be accused of witchcraft: more often than not, imprisonment, torture, starvation, and ultimately death were all possible outcomes. The innocence or guilt of the alleged miscreant hardly came into it. Nevertheless, Grace had not the slightest hesitation about pointing the finger at Ursula Kemp, publicly stating that she was a witch and holding her responsible for both the death of her baby daughter and for her renewed lameness.
On the 20th of February, 1582, Ursula was ripped from the arms of her beloved son on the orders of Sir Brian Darcy, the local priory owner and magistrate. The charge: witchcraft. This meant that she would be thrown into the Cage prison, signaling the beginning of the end for her. Between the 20th and the 24th of February, Ursula was interrogated no less than three times by the powerful landowner.
During those interrogation sessions, it was made clear to Ursula that if she pled guilty to all charges (no matter how false or inflated they were) then she would be treated with leniency. Whether she truly believed Darcy’s promises or not is something that we shall never know, but one thing is for certain: every word of them was a lie.
Imprisoned within the Cage, the poor woman was denied all contact with her son and the outside world. Unbeknownst to her, Darcy’s men had also arrested young Tom, and he also was interrogated. We can only imagine the fear and grief that the little boy felt in having his beloved mother taken from him, and then being interrogated himself, especially when he was told that he would be forced to testify against her in a court of law.
I’m the mother of an eight-year-old son myself, and can feel nothing but horror at the thought of just how powerless poor Ursula and Tom must have felt, having no voice to protest or plead their innocence. They were all alone in the world, and things were about to get much, much worse.
During those desperate days of Ursula’s interrogation and incarceration within the Cage, Ursula is said to have told Lord Darcy in confidence that she was the owner of four familiars. Two were male spirits, which she used to kill those who displeased her (or their loved ones, such as Grace Thurlowe’s infant daughter) and two female spirits, who specialized in inflicting sickness on both people and cattle.
Tyttey was a male white lamb; Jacke was a male black cat; Pygine was a female toad, and Tyffin was a gray female cat. When pushed, Ursula broke down and confessed that it was Tyttey who she had sent to kill Grace by rocking the child’s pram until she fell to her death. Darcy knew that this was a blatant admission of witchcraft. Probing further, he convinced Ursula into giving exact details of the way in which she had caused the death and illness of many local villagers by practicing the dark arts.
Those words, doubtless uttered at Darcy’s urging in hopes of gaining clemency, would instead seal her fate.
Yet Ursula wasn’t going down without a fight, and she certainly wasn’t going alone. She told Darcy of several others in the village that she claimed also practiced witchcraft. It is written that Ursula made accusations against twelve other women. They were duly arrested and joined their accuser in chains within the Cage.
The trial of Ursula Kemp is the best documented witch trial ever held in the United Kingdom, thanks to the fact that Bryan Darcy made sure to keep highly detailed accounts of every meeting he ever had with Ursula. It seems likely that Darcy had always planned to use them against her at her inevitable trial. She was the one that he would make an example of. A guilty verdict against Ursula (and a subsequent execution) would bring him great favor with Queen Elizabeth, who had visited St Osyth Priory on more than one occasion. Darcy believed that the Queen favored his elder brother, and so he embarked on a crusade against witchcraft in an attempt to prove his loyalty to the crown.
Ursula and her fellow prisoners were transported from the Cage at St Osyth to Colchester Castle, where they were incarcerated in the cells to await their trial at the Chelmsford assizes on March 29, 1582. Unbeknownst to Ursula, events were about to take a gut-wrenching turn. When the first witnesses against her were called, her eyes widened in horror … for who should walk in but the one human being she loved most in the entire world: her only child, Tom.
This scared, frail little boy had to do one of the worst things that we could possibly imagine: testify that his mother was a witch, and that he had seen her practicing the dark arts and worshipping the devil on many occasions. The judge was a ruthless man, and one who cared nothing for the little boy, seeing him as little more than a pawn in a much bigger game. Among other things, Tom tearfully told the court that he had personally witnessed his mother feeding her familiars with beer and cake, and that she allowed them to suckle from her before feeding them her own blood.
The outcome was a foregone conclusion. Few were surprised when Ursula was sentenced to death by hanging, along with two other women, named Elizabeth Bennet and Alice Newman. Following an appeal, Alice’s death sentence was reduced to life imprisonment. In a twist of fate, she died after just five months spent languishing in prison. The remaining women received various sentences of prison time; some were freed without charge, whereas others died in prison while still awaiting trial.
Unfortunately, we have no hard facts regarding the timeframe of Ursula and Elizabeth’s execution; we don’t know where they were hanged or when. All that we do know for certain is that the records show that Elizabeth was still alive and in Colchester Gaol awaiting her execution some six months after the verdict. As for Ursula, your guess is as good as mine. It was traditional for condemned witches of that time period to be brought home to their village in order to be hanged in public on the village gallows, serving as a warning to others.
Some women who were executed as witches were then dismembered, and their arms and legs were buried in four separate places around their home village; others were strung up away from their villages, and their bodies were disposed of with no more respect than would be given to a bag of old rags.
Ursula’s capture and trial was heavily documented, but it is almost as if history lost all interest in Ursula’s plight once the inevitable guilty verdict had been passed. We can assume that the last time Tom ever saw his mother was at her trial, when he was forced to testify against her. He would have been denied any sort of close contact with her, deprived of even the chance to say one final goodbye.
The Cage was in Tom and Ursula’s own home village, and it may well be that the bereft young lad had gone there while his mother was incarcerated, perhaps to sit outside. It may at least have given him a sense of closeness to his mother, particularly as the walls were much thinner in comparison to today’s prison walls. I like to think that they were able to talk in secrecy on at least one occasion, and that they got a chance to say their last goodbyes in this world.
When all was said and done, Ursula did not escape the hangman’s noose. It is my hope that Ursula’s body was brought home to St Osyth and that her final resting place is somewhere out there in the woods that she loved so much. I also pray that she was reunited with Tom in the afterlife, but as you will learn later in this book, there is a possibility that her spirit still resides inside the Cage … or at least returns there, every once in a while. The presence of ghostly children has been reported by many visitors to the haunted old prison, and it may well be that one of them is Tom, looking for his mother all these centuries later.