Witch Violence in Nineteenth-Century Cumbria August 14, 2015
Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern , trackback
A modest attempt to shed some light on a peculiar act of near murder from Yorkshire, August 1874. We are at Garsdale in Cumbria in one of the wildest parts of the UK and Levi Abbott an excavator on the railway (navvy?) is in court because he has wounded Ellen Bowers, his landlady who kept what sounds like a doss-house aka a ‘hut for the accommodation of lodgers at Blackmoor tunnel’. 18 July Abbott was sitting quietly in the corner of the hut when… Light, action, cameras…
he suddenly ran to the fireplace, took up a formidable-looking poker, and with it struck [Mrs Abbott] savagely four times on the head, knocking her down and seriously hurting her, so much so that erysipelas was feared by her medical man.
Erysipelas is St Anthony’s Fire, a skin condition and quite what the connection is with blunt force trauma Beach is not sure. Abbott (it is always cathartic to address thugs by their surname with an airy nod of judicial disdain, particularly when they are a century dead) claimed that Mrs Bowers had ‘bewitched him and his pigs’. The newspaper that reported the case was outraged:
Mrs Bowers, who was exceedingly stout, weighing nearly twenty stones, looked as much unlike a witch as it is possible to imagine.
This begs all kinds of questions but as with erysipelas there seems to be some problems: often the witches of the imagination are rather stout and diabolically maternal. It would be interesting to know just what the classic nineteenth-century image of a witch was: Bewitched and nose waggling lay a good seventy years in the future. As to the assault was this the traditional bloodletting that we’ve encountered before where witches are concerned? Or was it just a desperate act of a drunk? Certainly the defence argued that Abbott ‘had been drinking for a fortnight prior to the assault, and was so drunk or so jealous about his wife that he was for the time perfectly crazy’. Also bloodletting is usually one discreet action: running brambles or a needle across the witch’s cheek. We have fragments of Cumbrian witch belief here, but probably Abbott was as confused about those beliefs as he was about his wife, his life and the steadying emptying beer bottle: in short the kind of man who should be pitied and sentenced.
Other modern witch crazes? Drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com Or other Cumbria clues?
