Folklore of Yorkshire Read Online Free

some flowers from the verge but unfortunately for both Mary and her cousin, Nanny noticed this snub and took offence. The alleged witch said she would not forget the insult, banged the ground thrice with her stick and disappeared. As Mary was wearing a sprig of rowan at the time, which provided protection from witch-work, she thought little of the encounter and a few days later when her cousin had regained her health, she returned to her home in Stokesley.
    Several nights later, Mary was surprised when Martha turned up at her home. She claimed to have taken a turn for the worse and would not live much longer, so she was travelling to Northallerton to bid farewell to her sister. She asked Martha if she could stay with her in Stokesley for the night before journeying on the following day. Mary agreed, and Martha sent her out for some items she wanted whilst she napped. Martha seemed so eager to be rid of her that Mary grew uneasy and returned before her time to spy through the window. To her horror, she saw her kinswoman dropping powders into a pan over the fire whilst muttering some incantation, at which point Mary realised that it was not Martha but Nanny in her cousin’s guise. She rushed and struck Nanny with a Bible, causing the witch to throw over the pan and flee. The next day, news came from Kildale that Martha Sokeld’s body had been found on the moors, three days dead.
    Whilst Mary Longstaffe was fortunate enough to have interrupted the spell-casting before it could take effect, others were not so lucky and many stories suggest that it required considerable effort to ward off the effects of maleficium once it had been directed at them. Typically the blood of the witch was needed to neutralise the spell, which was not an easy thing to procure: often it had to be taken whilst the witch was in animal guise and even then certain procedures had to be followed before the creature could be caught. In some cases, these measures were familiar. For example, when the squire of Goathland called on Nanny Pearson to bewitch his daughter to prevent her eloping with a suitor of whom he disapproved, a wise-man advised the young lover to track the witch as a hare and shoot it with silver bullets to obtain the essential ingredient for a counter-spell.
    In other instances, the instructions were more opaque. The folklorist William Henderson records that a Halifax man charged with obtaining blood from a local witch named Auld Betty was told to bake a cake before the fire of the household she was enchanting. This he did, and at length he noticed a black cat sitting by the fire, although he did not see or hear it enter. He was surprised to hear a voice from the cat purr ‘Cake burns’ to which he replied, ‘Turn it then.’ After a little while, the cat made the same complaint and the witch-catcher gave the same answer. This exchanged went on again and again, until the man grew so frustrated that he forgot that he had been warned against uttering any holy names in the witch’s presence and he responded with an oath. At the sound of this, the cat mewled and sprang up the chimney with the witch-catcher in hot pursuit. He emerged badly mauled but managed to wound the animal with a table fork and the bewitchment was undone.
    A belief in the efficacy of the witch’s blood in counter-spells was evidently deeply ingrained in the Calderdale region. As late as 1904, a local antiquary noted that people believed that victims of witchcraft only needed to scratch their tormentor’s back with a pin to break her hold over them. Two and a half centuries earlier, the Heptonstall witch trial intimated similar superstitions were held. It records that the minister of Cross Stones Chapel told Daniel Briggs of Wadsworth that if he wished to break the suspected bewitchment of a neighbour’s child, if anybody crossed his path on his way home, he should ‘maul them in the head’. Briggs did in fact meet Elizabeth Crossley on his return journey, who