A 'Southcottian' Scammer: Mary Bateman and the Prophetic Hen
written by Engagement Officer Victoria Kahl
Mary Bateman is known among historians as ‘The Yorkshire Witch’. She was born in north Yorkshire in 1768, moving to Leeds in her early adulthood and beginning a career as a dressmaker. She began to engage in many different profitable criminal activities, but chiefly theft and fraud.
She stole from individuals more than retailers, including scams such as house-sitting for a family and selling all of their belongings.
Mary often claimed to have magical powers, and charged customers high prices for her charms and spells, she told fortunes and offered to remove curses for people. She demanded payment in not only currency, but sometimes furniture, fabrics or luxury food. She also created a fictional ‘senior’ witch called Miss Blythe, with whom she claimed to correspond over particularly tricky curse-breaking.
In 1806, Mary took a very different path- attending Southcottian meetings and becoming a sealed member of Joanna’s sect. Whatever her initial belief, Bateman’s love of making money soon won out. Inspired by the Southcott follower seals, she began making and selling her own. She promised those who bought them that they would be one of the 144,000 as mentioned in the Book of Revelation.
After this comes the strangest part of Mary’s ‘Southcottian’ scams. ‘The Prophet Hen of Leeds’.
Interest in Revelation, heterodox Christianity and a general civil unrest continued to rise around Bateman. A new scheme began, wherein she claimed she had a prophetic chicken. She told local people that this hen was to lay 14 eggs, and with this 14th would come the End of Days. These eggs had a mystical message on them as they were laid: ‘Crist is Coming’ [sic] .
Mary charged visitors 1 penny to view the hen. A local priest grew suspicious, and early one morning caught her in the act of replacing the one same egg back into the chicken’s oviduct. It was discovered later that she had created the messages on it using a vinegar solution. Even after this, she managed to persuade a neighbour to purchase the hen from her, at a high price.
Of course, it never laid any more prophetic eggs.
Mary Bateman’s years of stealing and fraud finally came to an end in 1809, after a ‘magical’ scheme which involved dosing a woman to a slow death with a ‘cure’ made from arsenic. She was convicted of murder and hanged on Monday 20th March that year. Her body was given over to scientists, and eventually her skeleton was displayed in Thackray Medical Museum (Leeds), being removed from display in 2015, now kept at Leeds University.
Sources:
https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/regency-era-witch-mary-bateman/id1489560920?i=1000758586633
https://northernlifemagazine.co.uk/mary-bateman-the-yorkshire-witch/
