Month: October 2013

My article in this month’s Recusant History, entitled ‘Elizabeth Inchbald’s “Catholic Novel” and its local background’, has just been published.

Elizabeth Inchbald’s A Simple Story (1791) was the first novel written by an English Catholic with Catholic characters. It was set in the world of the Catholic gentry, a world that Inchbald knew well from her upbringing in Suffolk on a farm adjacent to the estate of an ancient Catholic family. Inchbald herself acknowledged that one of the book’s characters, the ex-Jesuit Sandford, was based on an individual from her childhood, and some effort has been made by Inchbald scholars (notably Patricia Sigl and Michael Tomko) to research her Catholic background and the Gage and Rookwood families whose history may have inspired aspects of the novel. However, the Gage family’s papers have not been considered for the light they can throw on Inchbald and the eighteenth-century Catholic community in Suffolk. These sources contain references to the Simpson family and have the potential to enliven our understanding of the immediate environment of Inchbald’s youth. This article corrects misconceptions transmitted by James Boaden and other biographers of Inchbald, proposes a new identity for the man who became the model for Sandford, and draws attention to possible correspondences between the circumstances and relationships of the Gage family and the characters in A Simple Story.

My study of Inchbald arose almost inevitably from my ongoing research into the papers of the Gage and Rookwood families. After all, Inchbald is the most famous person ever to emerge from the Catholic community of West Suffolk. Hopefully this article will see Inchbald located more firmly in her local context – after all, even after she moved to London she frequently returned to Stanningfield to visit her family.

This evening I officially launched my book Witches and Witchcraft in Ely: A History, with the help of Cromwell Cider, at Oliver Cromwell’s House in Ely. I delivered a presentation on the history of witchcraft in England, taking specific examples from trials that took place in Ely and beliefs peculiar to the Cambridgeshire Fens. I have uploaded a copy of my presentation to my site on Academia.edu. I was slightly alarmed to be surprised by a photographer from the Cambridge Evening News, who photographed me next to the Hallowe’en display in the shop in the Tourist Information Centre, so maybe something will appear in that local newspaper at some point.

On Wednesday evening I spoke to the Little Downham Society on the subject of the Bishop’s Palace in Ely, which gave me an opportunity to discuss my most recent theories regarding the layout of the Palace before 1667, when Bishop Laney remodelled the building to its present form. Little Downham actually has a Bishop’s Palace of its own, the surviving portion of Bishop Alcock’s favourite summer palace, but few have had the chance to visit this building. My talk took the form of a chronological treatment of the structure of the building, with occasional digressions into the historical events that took place there. Since writing my book on the Palace in 2012, I have made a more detailed study of John Speed’s representation of the building in his survey map of 1607, and produced a conjectural groundplan (see above) based on it. The pink lines are guesswork based on Speed’s drawing, while the grey lines represent existing walls.

This week has also seen both The Ely Standard and Ely Weekly News print articles on the publication of Witches and Witchcraft in Ely.

Today is the official publication date of Witches and Witchcraft in Ely: A History, my short account of Ely’s special place in the history of English witchcraft. The ‘witch of Brandon’, an old women who consulted with an oracle called the ‘guardian of the springs’, attempted to curse the army of Hereward the Wake in the Isle of Ely in 1071, shouting her imprecations from a high wooden gantry. She is one of the first ‘witches’ to appear in English history, although the Latin sources use a variety of appellations for her, none of them necessarily cognate with ‘witch’. In the fifteenth century, Ely was the scene of the trial of Richard Barker of Babraham, one of the best-recorded cases of necromancy from this period (the original record of the trial survives in Cambridge University Library), but again, it is unclear whether Barker was a witch in the early modern sense. Elizabeth Mortlock, tried at Ely in 1566, was described as a ‘witch’, but her crime was curing people and protecting them from the fairies using a magic girdle. It was not until the seventeenth century that Ely became the focus of a series of witch trials, culminating in September 1647 with the Isle of Ely assizes, at which the last victims of Matthew Hopkins and John Stearne’s witch-hunt were put on trial, and some were convicted and hanged. Hopkins himself was dead by this time, but his assistant Stearne lived to carry on his work. As late as 1679, a witch trial took place at Ely, although in that case the accused received a royal pardon. The final part of the book examines belief in witchcraft in the Fens around Ely since the seventeenth century; the Cambridgeshire Fens were one of the last places where people continued to genuinely fear witches until well into the twentieth century; the last instances of apotropaic practices and accusations date from the 1930s, although it seems likely that belief in some form probably lingers on in some areas.

I will be launching my book at Oliver Cromwell’s House on Wednesday 16th October.