The mysterious powers of the wise woman, or bean feasa, Biddy Early were renowned throughout the province of Munster. She could cure animals of ailments, commune with ‘the little people’ (fairies) and predict the future. WB Yeats called her ‘the wisest of wise women’ and Lady Augusta Gregory went to her house in person to collect stories about her. She is still remembered in story and song.
The facts of Biddy’s life have become confused in the telling and retelling. It seems she was born on a farm in Faha, near Feakle, County Clare, to Thomas O’Connor and his wife, Ellen Early. It is said she married six times, once to her own stepson, and had three children, but she always retained her mother’s name as it was through her mother that she had received her gifts.
When she was only sixteen, Biddy’s parents died and she went into a hellish workhouse in Ennis. To get out of it, she started travelling the roads and visiting fairs. On her travels she met her first husband, a widower named Malley or O’Malley from Feakle way. Her husband was elderly and Biddy was widowed quite soon, whereupon she promptly married her husband’s son.
It was in the 1820s that Biddy’s reputation as a wise woman began to spread. She knew how to use wild herbs to treat people and cattle. The well-being of livestock could often mean the difference between life and death for a poor family in the southwest, so Biddy’s skill was invaluable, and people came to her from far and wide. It was at this point that Biddy also came into possession of her famous blue bottle. This charmed object was variously said to have come either from the Sídhe (fairies) or from a baby son of hers who had died. By gazing into this bottle she could see the future. Such was her fame that, in 1828, no less than ‘the Liberator’ himself, Daniel O’Connell, came to visit her cottage – no doubt wondering how he would do in the forthcoming Clare by-election. (He won.)
In 1840 Biddy married yet again and settled in Kilbarron, County Clare, the place that today is most associated with her memory. Here she continued with her treatments and mediated between the locals and ‘the little people’.
Although devoutly Catholic, most country people believed in the Otherworld and went out of their way to placate the fairies. Biddy would look into her magical bottle and proffer advice: for example, do not allow animals to graze near a fairy fort; leave out food for the fairies; cut back bushes from a fairy path, and so on. Biddy’s reward for predicting the future, lifting curses and curing animals usually took the form of food or, better still, a jug of poitín, to which she was rather partial.
This sort of behaviour made Biddy unpopular with the local clergy, who tried to ban her neighbours from consulting her and even denounced her from the pulpit. One apocryphal story relates how a priest came to rebuke Biddy, whereupon she cast a spell on his horse, making it incapable of movement. After a few minutes of beating the horse, the priest had to return to Biddy’s house and ask her to lift the spell he didn’t believe in.
In 1865 the combination of severe clerical disapproval, the efficacy of her cures and a minor role she played in protecting local rebels, landed Biddy in court in Ennis, accused of witchcraft under a 300-year-old Elizabethan law. She was luckier than many others before her who had gone to the stake for similar ‘crimes’ – her case was dropped due to ‘lack of evidence’, in other words, none of the locals would testify against her.
Widowed again in 1868, Biddy managed to bribe a final husband into marrying her when she was in her seventies. He was a sickly young man who had come to her looking for help. Biddy promised to cure his illness on condition that he marry her. The young man agreed, but he passed away shortly after the wedding. Clearly, Biddy’s powers were on the wane.
Biddy Early spent her final years living quietly in her cottage in Kilbarron and saying her rosary. She died after a short illness in April 1874, aged seventy-six. Before her death she made her neighbours promise to throw the supernatural blue bottle into the middle of Kilbarron Lough, where people continue to look for it to this day. A reconstruction of her little cottage has been built, overlooking the lake, and is open to visitors.