Newes from the Dead

I had the pleasure of attending a lecture by Prof. Jane Taylor at the Thackray Medical Museum last Thursday, on the creative processes which led to the creation of her play, After Cardenio, which drew its initial inspiration from the title of s lost Shakespeare play. Taylor's play dramatizes the events surrounding the supposed resurrection of Jane Greene, who was hanged at Oxford in 1650, but, when taken to be prepared for dissection by anatomists, it was discovered she was breathing and she was revived. She was thereafter pardoned for her crime - infanticide - and lived for another 15 years, bearing several children. The events surrounding her attempted execution led to much debate about the nature of resurrection from numerous scholars and surgeons at the time,

 After Cardenio uses puppetry as a means to explore the sense of disconnection between the physical and the metaphysical - how we apply definite boundaries to the notion of 'brain death' as a legal means to draw a line where none can physically be drawn. Prof. Taylor has also written a novel about the first heart transplant in the 1960s, which took place in her home land of South Africa, which necessitated the legal definition of brain death to be established so that heart donors could be found. The puppet in the play represents Jane Greene, as does the visible puppeteer and the female actress who voices her. 

We were shown video excerpts from the play, as well as experiencing a short theatrical interval by the Puppet Parliament, a local group using the puppet from the play. 

The lecture being held at the Thackray struck a chord with me: I have long felt the continued display of Mary Bateman's remains at the museum was a continuation of an outmoded form of posthumous punishment and the idea of a resurrection on the dissection table was highly symbolic to her story, being as her 'life' as anatomical model began at that point. I wondered if Prof. Taylor was aware of this synchronicity and planned to ask her at the event, which I did, but prior to the lecture I checked in the gallery where Mary was displayed and she had disappeared. 

Some discussion with Prof. Taylor and the Thackray curators provided us with some information. Mary had been removed from display at the end of July, and Leeds University will be conducting research on her before they decide whether to display her again. That evening I read this post by Marisol Solchaga, whose work placement at the Thackray whilst undertaking an MA in museum studies led to the discrepancies in the manner of Mary's remains being displayed being investigated and ultimately her remains being removed from display. I had flagged up the fact that her display was at odds with the current guidelines for museum displays of human remains to the Thackray for several years now, so it is a great relief to see something finally being done to remedy the issue.

 It is interesting to note that a male relative of Mary came forward to voice their unease at her treatment, I would very much like to get in touch with that person to discuss the best possible outcome for her remains. Leeds university, I am told, has a good track record with the proper treatment of sensitive materials, I hope to discuss the matter with them shortly. The physical afterlife of Mary has perhaps gone on too long. 

It was  a poignant moment for me from Prof. Taylor's discussion of the play that she described a newborn infant as a thing 'of cloth and bone', who she supposes is a blank canvas for us to gaze upon and imprint with our own ideals. The empty vessel of her description is a contradiction of my own experiences with a newborn, whose wants and desires are complex and insistent from the moment of birth, and even before. Birth is as much a liminal area as death, the moment we consider life to start and end is continually being reconsidered and re imagined - we now read about the chimeric cells of lost fetuses and siblings being mingled with those of future babies, and becoming part of the mother's genetic material too. The pathetic figure of the dead infant from the play is absent but for small gestures from the actress and puppet, wrapping two brass tankards in a blanket and cradling it, which the puppet, a more worldly creature, cannot pretend is it's child and throws the bundle across the room. The cloth and bone of Prof. Taylor's description reminded me of the creature from Eraserhead, dehumanizing the tiny infant as a means to cope with it's precarious mortality. 

The innocence of Jane in her child's death is ambiguous, the precarious position that women held in 17th century England demanded they declare a pregnancy or be accused of concealing it and therefore endangering the baby. Stillbirth therefore could be considered murder, as it was in Jane's case until her 'resurrection by god' absolved her of guilt. 

After Cardenio is sadly not currently being performed, however there is a lecture by Prof. Taylor available online, and her talk at the Thackray was both fascinating and inspiring so I highly recommend watching this in the meantime, while hoping the play may be performed again in the near future. 

GT/BQ 2013 - Jane Taylor - After After Cardenio - 09 May 2013 from GIPCA@UCT on Vimeo.

The Witch in the Woods - Part One

The film Antichrist, directed by Lars von Trier, made me want to write a little about the thoughts and feelings I had following my viewing of it. I can't say I often feel compelled to write about film in general, and it deviates a little from the usual subject matter of this blog but as I found it resonated with many of the subjects I cover here, here it shall be. I've split it into two parts, this and the latter which will deal with the locations used in the film.

The film, very beautifully, seemed to be unraveling the concept of the female sex and its inherent evil. The two main characters in the film are not specifically named, their distinction in the credits is only by their sex - they become representative of a historical, diametric struggle between reason and insanity, good and evil, male and female. However, the film shows the flimsiness of these concepts and the liminality of the primal landscape which the characters immerse themselves in. The woods, having been a sanctuary from urban noise, modernity and aggression become a primeval dwelling of our savage nature - chaos reigns. The indwelling spirits of the woods from the classical age, Satyrs, became the image of Satan to the Christian mind: the woods lost their sanctity and now appear as realm of evil.  

The title itself - "Antichrist" - reinforces the duality as female evil as the opposite of the male ideal of Christ, punctuated in the film by the T of the word becoming the astrological symbol for Venus. Simon Bradley has written in more depth here about the possible symbolism occurring in the title imagery for the film. There is a playfulness to these touches in von Trier's work, his sense of humour being infamous, but this little visual quip seems in sharp contrast to the darkness of the film. Perhaps this could be seen as an aside before we step over the threshold, a small reminder that these absolutes we pretend are real and concrete; from male and female, evil and good are in fact as fictional as the film itself.

The film begins with a graphic scene of the couple having sex, whilst their child falls from a upper floor window to his death in what appears to be a tragic accident. It transpires that injuries that she inflicted upon the child while writing her thesis on "Gynocide", alone with her son in a cabin deep in the woods, contributed to the fall.

The tension between the two lead characters becomes more than just a struggle between two individuals trying to resolve grief. The pain of centuries of mistrust and gender unbalance rises to the surface, along with all of the tortured hallucinatory madness that is rife in records of witch trials from the 16th century: the topic of the thesis written by the female character, known in the film as She.

Her research in the film appears as collages over the walls of the cabin loft, scraps of woodcuts alongside random snatches of text, history devoid of any imposed organisation or structure. Instead of forming any coherent study into the reasons behind witch-hunts it becomes a shrine to the evil and consequent persecution of Woman, the two inseparable in this vision. The chaos she created allowed her the forbidden knowledge that, as a race, if we find ourselves in times of hardship, the women will be scapegoats and the sufferers for all of the ills that befall us. We are doomed to this fate that our ancestors have bestowed on us.

The male character, He, is a psychotherapist, and is in denial of the possibility of a physical root to the illness of his wife. His self-aggrandizing act, to insist that he discharge her to his care when not a MD, seals his own fate with his insistence that he knows her mind better than anyone, that he owns her. Her vulnerability through her physical and mental weak state means he may govern her, and reinstate his authority over her when she has previously lived in the cabin in the woods, engaged both in intellectual study and the care of their infant, outside of his territory.  The film has been perceived by some as misogynistic, I see it as the opposite of this. Lars von Trier has stated that he feels closer to She than He; he has repeatedly with his films dealt sympathetically and with great insight into the mind suffering from clinical depression, his later work Melancholia being a very clear vision of what is a difficult illness to convey sympathetically onscreen. One striking aspect of Antichrist is it's critical representation of cognitive therapy, the clumsy, patronizing and inane sentiments that he proposes to use to fix her, only further alienate her from the 'masculine' rationality he is imposing upon her suffering. He then becomes the victim as her illness manifests in violent psychosis, although it is hard to sympathise with his character knowing that he has endangered his own life and that of his wife by removing her from appropriate medical care into his own, taking them both to a remote location that has uncomfortable personal significance.

Reading the Malleus Maleficarum, a text used by the Inquisition for hunting out heretics written in 1485, you can get a sense of the extreme persecution women have faced throughout history. Chapter eight is dedicated to "Witches who hebetate the powers of generation or obstruct the venereal act", the act of miscarrying or preventing the conception of a child is considered an act of witchcraft (which is perhaps why in Question/Chapter six there is special note given to midwives, "who surpass all others in in wickedness".) The power that midwives had in early modern society, effectively assisting those between life and death made them highly suspicious individuals to the Inquisition. The midwives' role included providing medical care in situations where all else had failed, including the provision of potions to induce abortion. This put them in a precarious position, open to accusations of evil-doing and witchcraft despite their essential role in keeping a village alive.

The animals that appear in the film are bestowed with strange gifts, as familiars are to a witch. The dark fairy-tale of the fox talking as it tears itself apart, riddling Him with doubt with it's maxim - "Chaos Reigns". Much less a warning than a curse. The idea that a curse delivered by a woman holds power regardless of her initiation into any kind of witchcraft is one that seems to be embedded in folk narrative, the most obvious being the curse of menstruation which Pliny the Elder, in the volume on human biology from Natural History, lists it's destructive nature - even the use of a menstruating woman as a pesticide. The act of attacking another with the evil eye is also endowed most potently to women: 

"It was anciently believed that women have more power of fascination than men. Varro accounts for their increased evil influence as the result of their unbridled passions..."

The gaze itself becoming a tool for supposed evil doing and persecution thereafter. In the last lines of the film She tells us: 

"The crying woman is a scheming woman. False in legs, False in thighs, False in breasts, Teeth, hair and eyes."

She believes in her depression that Evil resides throughout her, that the pain and misery she suffers gives her power. 

Elsewhere in the film, a miscarrying doe shows the female body imposing infanticide as a protective measure. We accept that animals under stress may abandon, kill or even consume their young, and the human body under stress may spontaneously abort a fetus as the cost to the woman's body of carrying the child to term would be too great. However the act of a mother killing a child is still one of the most shocking, even in cases of severe post-natal depression when the mother is acting in a state of severe psychosis. Acts of female violence remain a taboo, and the damaged individuals who commit them. She uses infanticide as test of herself to see she is truly capable of what history tells her she is. The violent mother becomes a motif throughout the film, birth and death repeated throughout. Later, the act of pulling Him from his hiding place in a hole mimics birth. Her almost nurturing gaze then is inverted, more cruelty is inflicted instead. 

The animals appear again inside the cabin, as He takes control and strangles Her, their appearance reminded me of the many accounts of witches taking animal guise to escape capture, accounts of shape-shifting continuing well into the 20th century. After She falls, He finds himself alone in the woods, mockingly named 'Eden', where the witches hold sway and the ghost of matriarchy marches through the trees.

Matriarchy is a powerful myth and we are instructed to live in fear of the ominous powers of the oppressed evil that the female possesses. The Prehistory of Sex by Timothy Taylor has a chapter, The Venus in Furs, which brought to light some interesting points for me. It seems to be the most widely accepted myth that Woman once held sway over ancient societies, was worshiped for her abundance but as Orestes slayed his mother, so the goddess was overthrown.

Figures like the Venus of Willendorf are often cited as evidence for a prehistoric goddess cult  but LeRoy McDermott's theory that the figures are self-representations of the female form rings true, as the way the female body appears looking down often seems distorted and large seems to be mirrored in many these figurines. This also suggests the radical notion that the creators of these figures were female themselves, rather than a male perspective allowing the female form to be idolised. 

The worldwide notion of an malevolent female cult is very pervasive, it is used to solidify the position of woman as the underdog and to explain why men must then take charge. In the mythology of the Selk'nam people, E Lucas Bridges recorded that the male initiation rites included a story about the spirits that women used to use to control men until they were overthrown for abusing their powers. Part of the rite was to play out fights with other men disguised as the spirits.

The myth was used as a valid reason for the outsider position of women in their society: the alleged ancient sins of their sex meant they were inherently evil and not to be trusted in a position of power. This inherited gender-biased blame resounds through our own culture today, for example as the measure to consecrate female bishops in the Church of England is rejected by the Synod. Attacks on alleged witches continue to this day throughout the world, the evil that women do is still considered far more terrible for the fact it is committed by a woman, Myra Hindley will always be the face of the acts that she and Ian Brady carried out regardless of her share of the blame. Repeating the ancient fears, we persecute midwives and women who, through psychosis, harm their children. Old habits die hard. 

To be continued. 

Mary Bateman's Skin

I located an article yesterday in an old issue of Country Life magazine relating to the remains of Mary Bateman, who, frequent readers may recall, was flayed after her body was displayed at the Leeds Medical School. I thought I would transcribe the article as, although it mostly repeats the well-known aspects of her life, it has some interesting facts I was previously unaware of including some details relating to the use of her skin to make various macabre trinkets.

MURDERERS' LEATHER By EDWARD ELMHIRST September 9th 1954

The last witch in Yorkshire, Mary Harker, who later became Mary Bateman, was born near Thirsk in 1768. According to the later accounts of her life, printed, wisely, after the events that had made her notorious, she soon gave evidence of a low cunning. She had what was then considered a good education for the daughter of an agricultural labourer, and went to school until she was 13; here she learnt to read and write, accomplishments she was later to use remorselessly against her more ignorant acquaintances. After a few years as a servant in Thirsk, she got employment making dresses in a shop in York, but she had to leave this post after her mistress had been robbed. She then moved to the new industrial Leeds and there set up as a rather inferior mantua-maker among the swarming factory workers.

When her business began to fail, she was happy to discover that she could supplement her income by telling fortunes. In 1792 she found another source of livelihood by marrying a wheelwright called John Bateman, a man both unlucky and unobservant. Next year a lodger lost two guineas, which were later found in the possession of Mary Bateman. No prosecution followed; "there can be little doubt," it was uncharitably recorded, "that the young man who she robbed made her infamy the price of his clemency." Her simple husband got a message calling him to his father's deathbed; but when he got there he was surprised and delighted to discover that the old man had never been healthier. When he got back to Leeds he was surprised again; Mary had stripped their house and sold everything that was movable.

In spite of this rather unsatisfactory married life, the Batemans again look up residence in the empty house, which Mary apologetically arranged to have refurnished as inexpensively as possible. This she did by the simple expedient of swindling local tradesmen. A new lodger was found - a bad choice on the part of Mary, who found him so insensitive and implacable that he actually made her refund money that he found her stealing. For this and other reasons the name of Bateman became locally so unpopular that her husband joined the Militia to get away from it all. Mary, not yet so confident enough in her abilities as a solo performer, trailed around the countryside in his wake.

After his demobilisation Mary entered into the second phase of her career. Her dilettante period of crime was over by 1798. For the next few years she found employment as a professional agent for a "screwer-down" a difficult art, needing explanation. Her victims were persuaded that some-body or other intended to do them evil, and that this potential evil-doer could only be prevented by "screwing down," which would stop them in their tracks. Mary did not claim to be able to exert this miraculous power of immobilisation herself, but she conceived of two phantom familiars, not like the two improbable little animals called Pye-wacket and Grizzel Greediguts, which had featured two centuries before in the witch-craft trials of Matthew Hopkins, but weighty and responsible ladies with respectable names. First was a Mrs. Moore, whose mere mouth-piece Mary claimed to be. Mrs. Moore was conjured up about 1799, and a man was enabled to have his creditors screwed-down by giving Mary money for the mythical Mrs. Moore . Mrs. Moore was also much employed as a screwer-down of husbands whose affections seemed liable to wander, and it was while acting for Mrs. Moore that Mary also started business as a part-time abortionist.

To be appreciated as an unofficial witch, Mary needed some widely recognised miracle. In Black Dog Yard in Leeds she announced that one of her hens had laid a phenomenal egg on which were clearly to be read the words CRIST IS COMING. The prophetic hen and its egg were then exhibited to anyone who cared to pay for the privilege. The mis-spelt and misbegotten egg achieved considerable local fame and Mary, by this time a skillful if unorthodox obstetrician, was able to stock the hen with other no less miraculous eggs for laying in the presence of witnesses. When the hen grew tired or resentful, it was sold to a neighbour who, finding no other mysterious messages vouchsafed, ate it in an unimaginative way.

Meanwhile Mrs. Moore, whose screwing-down had not been uniformly successful, gave place in 1803, without a protest, or perhaps with a simple metamorphosis, to the equally imaginary Miss Blythe, who could also rule destinies if suitably furnished with money. Two comparatively wealthy sisters were advised by Mary that their own futures and that of their business, a drapery, could be ensured by acting on the instructions of Miss Blythe. Miss Blythe sent a potion by the hands of Mary, which quickly eliminated one of the women. Another dose was needed for a curious mamma, and finally the other sister was poisoned a few days later.

Mary, though suspected, said that the plague had killed them all. Miss Blythe did not feature at the inquest, and, by the time Mary had been through the account-books, the dissolved drapery business could not pay its creditors more than eightpence to the pound.

This failure of the phantom Miss Blythe in no way made Mary Bateman desert her. After several minor jobs, Mary and Miss Blythe got together for the last time.

Rebecca Perrigo, living in Leeds, was much troubled with intestinal discomfort. Mary diagnosed this, not as indigestion, but as the effect of a curse which only Miss Blythe could counter. Mrs. Perrigo and her husband were convinced: thereafter this fatuous couple blindly obeyed letters of instruction handed to them by Mary, and alleged to be written in the hand of Miss Blythe herself.

In the following months a vast amount of goods and not a little money were extorted from the Perrigos. When they began to get restive, Miss Blythe advised them to eat some honey to which Mary would have added a mystic powder. This powder proved to be nothing more esoteric than corrosive sublimate, which killed Mrs. Perrigo very promptly and made her husband extremely ill. Their medical advisor a surgeon called Thomas Chorley, suspected poison, and very soon Mary Bateman was on trial for her life. Since she had a collection of arsenic pills in her house and was even carrying with her, at the time of her arrest, a bottle containing an unwholesome mixture of rum, oatmeal and arsenic, she made but a poor defence from the dock.

She was hanged at York, in company with another poisoner, on march 20, 1809. Her body was taken to the General Infirmary at Leeds where it was put on view at the charge of threepence a visitor, and no fewer than 2,000 people came to gape. It was afterwards dissected - this had been part of the sentence - and the greater part of her skin seems to have been tanned. Her skeleton, without the mandible but with an additional pair of ribs, remains in the Anatomy Department at Leeds Medical School.

Mr. Chorley, who had looked after the Perrigos and had analysed the brew that Mary carried with her, was also one of the dissectors at the Infirmary, and doubtless reserved various titbits for his friends. Among these was William Elmhirst, an eminently dull and upright Deputy Lieutenant for the West Riding. It seems improbable that so worthy a man would relish a portion of a murderess, but a folding cup made of Mary's skin certainly belonged to his son Robert, who possessed a certain appropriately sardonic humour. Other portions of Mary's skin were in existence, at least until the beginning of this century. Volumes bound in her leather were then in the library at Marlborough House; others were once in Methley Hall in Yorkshire; but recent search at both places has not discovered them.

Though Mary Bateman (executed 1809) seems to have been one of the earliest murderers to have her skin preserved, she was certainly not the last. Body-snatcher Burke (executed Edinburgh 1829) provided leather for a pocket-book, and Steptoe (Reading, c. 1810) furnished the raw material for a pair of gloves. Charles Smith (Newcastle, 1817) and William Corder (Bury st. 1817), the latter of whom achieved inexplicable notoriety for the very hum-drum murder at the Red Barn, both provided leather that was unfeelingly used to bind accounts of their respective trials. Johnson (Norwich, c. 1816) went to bind his namesake's great dictionary, and Kazia Westcomb (exeter, c. 1815) was used to cover Milton's Paradise Lost. Another edition of Milton was bound in Devon in the skin of George Cudmore (Exeter, 1830). Cudmore seems to have been one of the last to be tanned. In 1831 the practice was described as one that "cannot be too much reprobated: it engenders brutality, and has a tendency to make the most serious things objects of heartless sport or utter indifference."

Early in December 1945, a ripple of horror went round the civilised world at the revelations from the court-room at Nuremberg. There were there exhibited pieces of skin from a lampshade made of human parchment, and the judges heard authenticated tales of more household ornaments found in use in Buchenwald concentration camp, and of others made for the amiable wife of SS Standartenführer Koch.

To us in these islands, securely blanketed in our century of respectability, such happenings were horrible and incomprehensible. Yet in many libraries and elsewhere in our houses there remain similar relics, sometimes unrecognised, sometimes unrecognisable, to remind us that our great grandfathers were in no position to cast the first stone. They chose, it is true, the skins of the prosecuted guilty rather than those of the persecuted innocent, but there would seem to be little variation in the aesthetic standards involved.

~

It appears from this article that Edward Elmhirst had access to the skin cup when he wrote the article as it has a photo accompanying it which I haven't seen elsewhere and his name reveals that he was related to the family who originally owned it. I intend to discover if the family still owns the cup, if anyone has any information relating to the next of kin of Dr Edward Mars Elmhirst (who unfortunately died a few years after this article was printed) I would love to talk to them. It appears that Elmhirsts still own farm land  near their ancestral seat, Houndhill.  

The Angel and The Girl

I was wed by the Witch's stone last week to the most wonderful man I know, we were married by the talented poet Becky Cherriman with all our dear friends and family in attendance. Graham Vasey took this beautiful silver gelatin plate of us on the big day, our friend Rory played us to the stone and back again on his hurdy gurdy, Briggate danced with us in the streets by the Meanwood Institute and we were lucky enough to have a performance by Herb Diamante (with Emily Clavering on Piano and Backing Vocals!) for our first dance and entertainment. Phil's aunt wrote a lovely blog post about it here, which is probably a much better write up than I could manage of a day filled with bliss but one that went incredibly quickly!

I am so proud to be Layla Legard, the path we took to get to where we both are now was so full of light and dark, such great leaps of faith in each other and our pairing! This is the Edwin Muir poem Phil sent me the morning after we first confessed our love for one another:

See, they have come together, see,

While the destroying minutes flow, 

Each reflects the other's face 

Till heaven in hers and earth in his

Shine steady there.

203 Years

Today, on the 203rd anniversary of Mary Bateman's execution, Briony Yorke and I visited the Thackray Museum to play a song to Mary. The Yorkshire Witch, who is macabre entertainment for the visitors to the museum, received a short recital, on cello and voice of a Yorkshire dialect song.

Two days after Mothering Sunday, on the spring equinox, we play a dirge to the sad remains of a women who left behind four children to die on the gallows. Nothing is sacred - every emotion, every memory has a price. No forgiveness or peace for those who, through their misery, can bring financial gain.

Songs for the Dead

I'm very pleased to be working on a project (which is currently mostly a secret) with an old friend who is also billed as Aghartha for the Bang the Bore event mentioned in an earlier post. More on this soon!

 Tonight I went and sat by Meanwood Beck and listened for the low voices you sometimes hear in the rushing water, the moon was bright orange, low in the sky and dissolving from the top.

The melting snow had given the water a more oppressive sound though, Meanwood beck was in too much of a hurry to talk today. 

~

I'll be performing my first Morris dance out at the Field of Wakes on the last weekend of February for the Rhubarb Festival, one of the dances will be a NW Morris version (with stomping and whooping!) of Mona's Delight, a lovely dance collected from the Isle of Man:

I'll be the one messing up the last figure. 

Bateman Skin Book

from The Bookworm, an illustrated treasury of old time literature - 1891

Mary Bateman - Kirk White Poem

In addition, a poem written by Kirk White quoted at the time of Mary's death:

Sleep baby mine, enkerchieft on my bosom,

Thy cries pierce again my bleeding breast;

Sleep, baby, mine, not long thou'lt have a mother,

To lull thee fondly in her arms to rest.

Baby, why dost thy keep this sad complaining?

Long from mine eyes have kindly slumbers fled;

Hush, hush, my babe! The night is quickly waning,

And I would fain compose my aching head.

Poor wayward wretch; and who will heed thy weeping,

When soon an outcast in the world thou'lt be?

Who then will soothe thee when thy mother's sleeping

In her low grave of shame and infamy?

Sleep, baby, mine; tomorrow I must leave thee

And I would snatch and interval of rest;

Sleep these last moments, 'ere the laws bereave thee,

For never more thou'lt press a mother's breast

Mary Bateman in Northern Earth

Its been a tad quiet on the Mary Bateman front of late but I did write a small letter for Nothern Earth about my stance on the issue. This is published in NE 126, which looks to be an interesting issue!

Mary Bateman

Image by Simon Bradley

The Yorkshire Witch is on display at the Thackray Medical Museum in Leeds. Her incomplete skeleton, held together by sinew and flakes of mummified flesh seems to me to serve little purpose as an educational tool for children, more a spectacle of the kind supposedly abandoned along with side show 'freaks' and public hangings. A woman, who was nursing a baby at her breast in the hours before her execution at York, who has paid a far greater price than just death; not only was her corpse pickled, displayed, flayed and sold as strips for charms but now she is dealt further indignity as a permanent exhibit, an item of morbid curiosity.

I feel haunted by viewing her remains, I see little benefit in viewing them, more so an uncomfortable understanding that her status as 'cunning woman' alone resulted in the series of post-mortem assaults. She lived on Timble Bridge, near Leed's Parish Church, under which flowed the beck I see daily. I think of her every time I see the beck, and have traversed through the underground culverts to view the now-subterranean bridge, where once she too must have daily seen the water pass by.

I wish to free the Yorkshire Witch. I hope that within the next two weeks I can implore Leeds University, who own her remains, to give Mary Bateman's bones a burial. The 202nd anniversary of her execution falls on Sunday 20th of March 2011, the vernal equinox. I will write a letter, and post up a petition in the next few days to send to both the museum and the university.