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The changing face of Mother Shipton |
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The archetypal witch
Forest surrounding Mother Shipton's cave
© Copyright Mother Shipton's Cave |
Pamphlets produced after 1641 depicted Mother Shipton as an ever extreme caricature of a witch. She became synonymous with the unmistakable profile of a witch’s hooked nose and knobbly chin. When a butterfly was discovered with a pattern resembling that profile, it became known as the ‘Mother Shipton’. Her progression into the archetypal witch climaxed in 1667 with the bawdy novelist Richard Head’s publication: 'The Life and Death of Mother Shipton'.
In Head’s fanciful book, an illustration shows Mother bent double with extreme haggardness. Her age shows how her image was manipulated in order to conform to the stereotype of a witch. At the time of the prophecy she could not have been older than 48, however, she is depicted as older because those found guilty of witchcraft were generally old. In his study of Essex witch trials, 'Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England' Alan Macfarlane discovered that witches were likely to be aged between 50 and 70.
Mother Shipton's cave, Knaresborough
© Copyright Mother Shipton's Cave |
From 1700, the witchcraft fever which had overtaken England began to subside; in 1736 laws enabling the prosecution of witches were repealed. The age of enlightenment replaced an age when the occult was accepted as an everyday event. In this new era, Mother Shipton began to revert back to her original incarnation as a prophetess. Visual representations toned down the witch-like features of the hooked nose and warts, whilst her witch’s familiar was replaced by a scroll of prophecies. In the Fleet Street Rackshaw Museum, a figure of Mother Shipton was detailed in the catalogue in 1792 as a prophetess and not a witch.
The hook-nosed and wart-ridden face of Mother Shipton that appeared in pamphlets and books written about her became the stereotypical witch and led to the caricature that survives today. In Mother Shipton, scribblers and jobbing illustrators had a subject who could easily be demonised as a witch, satisfying the apparent appetite of society for witchcraft sensationalism. Her incarnation as a witch was as much a product of 17th Century England as the witch’s bridle and ducking stool, manifestations of the social tensions experienced by Tudor England.
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