Rather contrarily, my offering for Mother’s Day weekend is not a warm, loving, and lovely caregiver but a prophesying crone: Mother Shipton, who most likely never existed. Supposedly born in the first years of the new Tudor dynasty in a Yorkshire cave (the product of a union between a poor wretch named Agatha and the Devil), Ursula Southeil or “Mother Shipton” rose to fame in the mid-seventeenth century, long after her supposed death. Just before the English Civil War, a time of high anxiety indeed, a series of Mother Shipton pamphlets suddenly appeared, containing predictions of things that, for the most part, had already happened, along with dire warnings of war and destruction.
The first prophecy on the second 1642 pamphlet is typical Mother Shipton: Joane Waller should live to heare of Wars within this Kingdome but not to see them. The Civil War broke out in the same year of as the tract was published, but of course Waller had died the year before. A similar assertion regarding Henry VIII’s chief minister, Cardinal Wolsey, that he would see York but never get there, was one of Mother Shipton’s most famous “predictions”. Her published prophecies continued through the Civil War (closely tied to current events) and after, and she joined the ranks of such legendary magicians as Merlin.
Shipton Prophecies from 1648 & 1661
In the later seventeenth century, Mother Shipton’s biography and predictions were embellished rather vastly by a series of publications entitled The Life and Death of Mother Shipton, and her story was adapted for entertainment purposes, thus cementing her now-legendary character. The transition from ominous witch-soothsayer to stock character is emblematic of the emergence of a collective rationalist mentality in the seventeenth century, with a corresponding decline in belief in magic and “wonder”, now assuming its more modern meaning.
And that would probably be the end of Mother Shipton, consigned to a relatively minor character in the long history of sibyls and soothsayers, if she was not resurrected in the Victorian era. It’s always the Victorians! Charles Dickens first referenced her in a 1856 story, and then the entrepreneurial bookseller Charles Hindley published a new set of rhymed and timely prophecies that were supposedly based on a newly-discovered manuscript in the British Museum (he later confessed to making them up). Now Mother Shipton was predicting railroads, ships made of iron, wireless communication and all sorts of industrial innovations, as well as the ominous warning that the world then to an end shall come/ In Eighteen Hundred and Eighty-One, which was changed to 1991 in early-twentieth-century reprints. By that time, she had evolved yet again, into a fairy-tale character and (later) a tourist attraction.
Charles Townley print of Mother Shipton and her familiar, 1800, British Museum, Linley Sanbourne and W. Heath Robinson illustrations of Mother Shipton on her broomstick for Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies. A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby (1888 & 1915); the entrance to Mother Shipton’s Cave in Knaresborough, “England’s Oldest Tourist Attraction” (shades of Salem!).
May 11th, 2013 at 4:11 pm
At Knaresborough, people used to hang offerings around Mother Shipton’s cave, which calcified in the limescale of the dripping water as in some pilgrimage sites. Taken there as a small child in the sixties, I spent years seriously dreading that, “The world then to an end shall come in nineteen hundred and eighty one” – I wonder what the “prophesy” says now?! Scary memory revisited!
May 11th, 2013 at 4:16 pm
Blimey she had a great honking snout on her in the early days! I suppose the nose is an easy target for the imagination.
May 11th, 2013 at 7:58 pm
I must say, as she evolved, her nose got nicer.. and the devil was her daddy, hmm, That is a pretty modern idea! c
May 12th, 2013 at 4:48 am
fascinating
May 12th, 2013 at 6:57 am
Nostradamus lived on the same dark time, in France. Eventually people were looking for hidden truth to fill up where religious faith lacked.
May 12th, 2013 at 8:45 am
If you are looking for a readable but academically rigous look at how Mother Shipton was presented in print that shows her transformation from sorceress to witch to diabolist during the middle decades of the 17th century, see Darren Oldridge “Mother Shipton and the Devil” in The Extraordinary and the Everyday in Early Modern England (2010).
May 12th, 2013 at 6:13 pm
Thank you, Brodie–I should have cited that article–it is great.
May 12th, 2013 at 10:32 am
Happy Mothers day!
February 24th, 2022 at 10:41 am
shipton is a name she married into…father shipton was referred to in northern england as a st nicklaus trope. ship-ton; is northern agricultural english, rooted from Sheep-tun; a stone (man-made) walled place of safety for the flock. So, benevolence and protection for the vulnerable; shipton is associated with altruism. Like all (so often misunderstood) magick/magi, she was p’raps a wise ugly old loner whom uttered her defences in mis-interpreted drivel. harmless veneration of old womenfolk is not a crime. it is comforting to have a faith/belief system; especially in auspicious time(s) of war/civil unrest. happy mother’s day from paulgeorgesomervilleshipton
February 24th, 2022 at 10:59 am
Thank you!