book of reggelations
Or, the grifts, murders, and apocalyptic poultry of Mary Bateman, the Yorkshire Witch.
Hi friends!
I was teaching a writing workshop on Wednesday at which I was gently shamed for not having posted a newsletter in several months. (Hi, Jeremy.) And so, just like that, I’m back! Let this be a lesson for us all that gentle shame is an extremely effective motivator for me.1
Fortunately, I have a great story for you today, and I really have just needed a nudge to open the ol’ Stack and share it with you all, so let’s get into the tale of:
Mary Bateman, the Yorkshire Witch, and Her Magic Chicken of the Lord
Mary Bateman, née Harker, was born in give-or-take 1767 in Yorkshire, England. Mary’s parents were farmers and spent most of their time raising several other children, which left Mary free to run feral and pursue a life of child crime. Her first recorded theft was at age five: stealing a pair of shoes, which she hid in the barn and then produced dramatically several weeks later, claiming to have “found them.” What was the end game of this grift? Unclear, but it does provide us with appropriate “begin as you mean to go on” energy.
By the time Mary was twelve, she had pulled off so many baffling instances of childhood thievery that her parents threw up their hands and sent her off to work in service for a rich family in the nearby town of Thirsk.
Now, if you’re thinking “the best place to send a kleptomaniac child is probably not the house of a rich family and their many nice objects,” you are correct. Over the next eight years, Mary executed the following pattern:
Get hired by rich family
Steal from rich family
Get caught by rich family
Get fired by rich family
Skip town
Show up in new town
Find rich family
Get hired by rich family
And so on. Yet another example of the past being ideal for grifters because no one could google you and say “this bitch has been fired nineteen times for employer theft, please flag her application to HR.”
Man of La Mantua
Eventually, twenty-year-old Mary settled in Leeds, where she found work as an assistant to a mantua-maker. Some cursory internet searching informs me that a mantua is not in fact a Batman-looking sea creature like I expected, but rather one of those big trapezoidal dresses we’ve all seen and marveled at:
This, by the way, is the best possible dress for you to wear if you wanted to steal from your employer. Think about all the objects you could hide under that bitch. You could be walking out the front door2 with a full credenza under your skirts and no one would ever suspect a thing.
However, Mary was a twenty-something now, and that meant it was time to switch up the grift. Instead of hiding a pile of gold under her mantua, she set up a little side-business at the mantua-maker’s shop, selling love potions and telling fortunes for cash.
This wasn’t as out-of-pocket as you’d think, as there was a strong demand for fortune-tellers and general witches in Leeds. The most famous witch in the region at this point was Old Nan, a woman who had trained her guinea pig to pull tarot cards. (This is the only fact I know about Old Nan but it is enough and I would die for her.)
Most of the witches in and around Leeds charged extremely high prices and catered to wealthy clientele. Mary made witchcraft more accessible by offering her services at bargain prices for her poor and working-class neighbors. Of course—to be clear—she was still stealing from everybody in town. But at least she was pricing to market.
Witch Who Steals All Your Belongings: Do Not Marry
Mary got married at age twenty-four to a wheelwright named John Bateman, who I will be referring to hereafter as Jason Bateman because I have some restraint but not that much. Bateman was a real noodle of a man, as evidenced by my favorite anecdote of their married life together:
One morning, Mary ran up to Jason Bateman with a note that said his father was deathly ill in the next town over. Jason Bateman packed up and ran over to tend to his father, who of course was completely fine and very much not-dying. While he was out of town, Mary packed up all of the belongings in their house and pawned them all for cash.
I’ll say again: ALL OF THEIR BELONGINGS.
What would you do if you left town for 17 minutes and your wife Grinch Who Stole Christmas-ed you? My answer is “divorce,” but Jason Bateman’s answer was “absolutely nothing,” because she pulled this stunt on him NOT ONCE BUT TWICE.
Thank U, Hexed
Over time, Mary decided to scale up her witch business to go beyond love potions and fortune-telling. She became an expert in the art of “screwing down,” an absolutely delightful piece of magic that involves putting hexes on the enemies of the people who hire you. Sort of like an Evil Eye For Hire service.
And Mary was great at cursing her clients’ enemies. Jury’s still out on whether she regularly cursed them to come home and discover nothing but a crumb that was even too small for a mouse, but I have to assume yes.
As the screwing-down business took off, Mary enlisted the help of another witch, the infinitely more powerful Mrs. Moore, who lived out of town. Mary claimed to be Mrs. Moore’s intermediary, simply following the instructions of this head witch in charge and then ensuring Mrs. Moore received her payment. Mrs. Moore’s prices were very high, but hey, if you want the best magical revenge, you need to pay for the best.
Obviously, Mrs. Moore was imaginary. Even better, in my opinion, is that she’s completely unnecessary to the grift. One of my favorite things about Mary Bateman is how she always adds three dozen extra flourishes and characters to her schemes just for the love of the game.
For example! One of her early screwing-down schemes was on a woman named Mrs. Stead, who wanted Mary to screw down her husband’s mistress. Mary told Mrs. Stead that the fictional Mrs. Moore had a scheme to place two lumps of magic coal on the mistress’s doorstep. Why? Well, of course, so that the mistress would bring them inside, burn them, and end up with so much disgusting smoke in her house that it would make all her clothes smell bad, after which—logically—she would have no clean clothes to wear and wouldn’t be able to run off with Mr. Stead.
Like! Ma’am! The shortest distance between two points is NOT two lumps of magic coal, but I’m obsessed with the journey you took to get there.
Aside: it will not surprise you to learn that at one point in this ongoing grift, Mary convinced Mrs. Stead to give her all of the belongings in her house. Grinches gonna steal Christmas, after all.
If You Can’t Take the Heat, Murder Miss Kitchen
This brings us to about 1803, which as far as I can tell is the first time Mary took her magic grifting all the way to murder. It was a fairly straightforward murder-grift:
Mary moved into the house of two sisters named Miss Kitchen, which I’m aware sounds like a discount line of appliances but I can’t help that.
Mysteriously, one of the Misses Kitchen fell ill with symptoms that looked a lot like arsenic poisoning.
Mary committed herself to caring for Miss Kitchen full-time until her death of definitely-not-arsenic.
Ma Kitchen came over to see what was happening to her daughters and also immediately died of also-definitely-not-arsenic.
Mary claimed the household was dying of plague so no one would come over to investigate.
By the time the neighbors showed up to see what was going on, Mary was gone, all of the Kitchens were dead, and the house was mysteriously empty of all belongings.
Truly a mystery. The world may never know what happened here.
Born-A-Hen Christians
Fast-forward to 1806, and Mary Bateman did the only thing that could make this story more delightful to me personally: she joined a doomsday cult led by the apocalyptic prophetess Joanna Southcott. Southcott’s whole schtick was that she claimed to be the woman foretold in the Book of Revelations to herald the Second Coming, and she had 144,000 special tokens to give out to her followers to make sure they went straight to heaven when the end times started.
Mary took a look at this situation and quickly realized there was a way to make money off of it. Then she took a look to her immediate left, presumably, and saw a chicken.
The rest, Dirtbag Nation, is history.
One morning in 1806, Mary ran into the center of town with a remarkable piece of information: her chicken had laid a prophetic egg! She showed it to the townspeople. It was a normal chicken egg, except written on the shell (in handwriting that totally was not Mary’s) were the words “Crist Is Coming.”3
The Prophet Hen of Leeds (as the magic chicken was now called) was foretold to lay fourteen Christ-themed eggs. And as soon as the fourteenth egg was laid, the apocalypse would begin.
Mary charged people money to come and see the magical hen, which did indeed lay several additional “Crist Is Coming” eggs. However, a local doctor started to get suspicious and spied on Mary one evening, where—trigger warning for a chicken having a bad time—he saw Mary stick the same written-on egg back into the chicken to be laid dramatically the next morning.
This was the end of the Prophet Hen scheme, and also the end of Mary Bateman living in Leeds for a bit. She sold the chicken to her neighbor and moved with her (extraordinarily patient, noodle-of-a-) husband to York.
With Arsenic Sauce
In 1808, Mary and Jason Bateman moved back to Leeds, because apparently two years was long enough for everyone to forget the thing about the magic chicken. This time, Mary was approached by a couple named William and Rebecca Perigo, who wanted to enlist her magic services to help Rebecca recover from ongoing chest pains.
Mary was more than happy to help, of course. She declared that Rebecca had been hexed by an enemy, and her new magic partner—an imaginary out-of-town superwitch named Mrs. Blythe—demanded all sorts of things from the Perigos in exchange for her help.
Items Mrs. Blythe requested in payment included:
Money
Furniture
An eight-pound cheese
A goose
Three hundred eggs
Sixty pounds of butter
Two napkins
A new bed
Half a pound of tea
It is simply impossible for me to tell you which of these items is my favorite, but while we’re paused: 300 eggs is TWENTY-FIVE DOZEN EGGS. Even Gaston wouldn’t know what to do with that many eggs. Take a moment to contemplate the size of the quiche you could make with 300 eggs.
Eventually, Mary knew that she’d asked for too many eggs not to get caught eventually, and the Perigos would figure out she was conning them. So she turned to her favorite get-out-of-jail-free card: a little friend named Mr. Arsenic. Mary provided a hefty amount of arsenic to the Perigos and instructed them to mix it into a pudding and eat it every day for six days, otherwise everybody they loved would die.
Sure enough, Rebecca put the powder in her pudding and ate it every day for a week. William took one bite and said “this tastes terrible and also poisonous,” so he stopped, but Rebecca kept getting more and more ill. By the time William called a doctor, Rebecca had already died. The following conversation then took place:
William: Doc, what do you think happened to my wife?
Doctor, taking a look at Rebecca for half a second: Oh, that’s arsenic poisoning, buddy. No question. Hoo boy. I’ve never seen a body so obviously poisoned by arsenic.
William: Arsenic?? How is that possible??
Doctor: I don’t know, has anyone suspicious given you a weird little bottle of powder recently?
William, slowly scrolling up to look at the image I included in this newsletter not two paragraphs ago: You know what…now that you mention it…
William confronted Mary and told her Rebecca had died, but Mary immediately blamed Rebecca’s death on her not following the powder’s instructions properly. She grifted William out of a few more household items while she was at it, but eventually William went and got the magistrate and met Mary at her home. Sure enough, when the magistrate saw the house packed with all of the Perigos’ belongings, including the TWENTY-FIVE DOZEN EGGS that were supposed to have been given to Mrs. Blythe, the law figured out what was going on, and Mary was taken into custody.
Book ‘Em, Danno
Mary was charged with fraud and murder, and when she stood trial in 1809, the main question was whether the court could prove she’d intentionally given the Perigos arsenic. The trial lasted eleven hours, which is about ten hours and thirty-five minutes longer than I would have expected, before the jury found her guilty and sentenced her to death.
Mary wasn’t done, though—she broke down into tears in front of the judge and wailed that she couldn’t be hanged, because she was going to have a baby!
Reader, she was not. But the law in England at this time said that you couldn’t hang a pregnant woman after the baby was “quickened,” so this was a reasonable last-ditch effort. Unfortunately, the judge put together a Pregnancy Jury of twelve random ladies from town, all of whom looked at Mary for one minute and said “nah, that woman isn’t pregnant.”
Mary spent a few days in prison awaiting her execution, during which she sold a fake love potion to one prisoner and pretended to create a protection amulet for another while really stealing all of her money. One last grift, for the road.
Mary Bateman was hanged on March 20, 1809, in front of a crowd of as many as 20,000 people. Her body was then given to weird 19th-century scientists, who—trigger warning for bad things happening to a human body—dissected her in public, then flayed her corpse and used her skin as leather to bind multiple books, one of which ended up in the private library of Previously Featured Dirtbag King George IV. Other parts of her body were turned into magic charms and talismans and sold at bargain prices, which I have to believe she would have approved of on principle.
And thus concludes the story of Mary Bateman, the Yorkshire Witch, an irrepressible grifter whose life included entirely more eggs than I would have expected. I love her and support her in every decision she ever made.
All right, friends! That’s all for this time. Until next time, be well, and if you leave the house for any reason please make sure to lock your doors lest the angry ghost of Mary Bateman sneak in behind you to Grinch all your belongings,
-Allison
Putting the life updates and excuses in the footnotes so those who don’t care can skip them, but in the time since I last wrote a net-new Dirtbags Through the Ages post, I have: moved into an apartment with in-unit laundry, traveled to New York twice, won two literary awards, lost one literary award but in a way that still felt like winning, held my beloved 13-year-old cat while she crossed the rainbow bridge and cried about it a whole lot, saw the Tony-award-winning production of Ragtime, downsized at work from a two-person team supporting 60 consultants to a one-person me supporting same, written 16,000 words of a new historical novel about spooky lesbians that maybe one day I’ll be able to share with you, fought generative AI with my bare hands and lost spectacularly, looked many publishing secrets in the face and whispered “soon,” and watched 4.5 full seasons of Hell’s Kitchen because somehow the only thing that brings me peace these days is listening to Gordon Ramsay yell “this rack of lamb is RAW, now PISS OFF.”
Sideways.
sic. Also, sick (complimentary).
I shall not lie, my favorite part is that she only wanted half a pound of tea. 300 eggs? 60lbs butter? But only a measly half pound of tea????
So sorry to hear about your cat’s passing.