The Blue Eyed Witch

Author’s NoteParts of Essex are still known as the Witch Country. In the last century the whole population, irrespective of social position, was obsessed by a fear of the unknown. Ghosts haunted the fields. The Devil had been known to chase a Parson from the pulpit. In 1860 an old woman in Somerset was accused of inflicting fits upon a child and thrown into a pond with a rope round her middle. In 1924 a smallholder was summonsed for attempting to draw blood from an old woman with a pin and then trying to shoot her. He said she had bewitched his pigs. Bristol possessed a ‘cunning woman’ as recently as 1930. She was a white witch, who discovered lost and stolen property with a needle suspended over a map. Ipswich had a ‘cunning man’ or white wizard who could hypnotise a thief from a distance, so that he wandered round the scene of his crime unable to make his escape. In 1950 the Witchcraft Act of 1735 was replaced by the Fraudulent Mediums Act. Witchcraft was one of the great tragedies of the human race, consuming thousands in a h*******t of blood and torture. Yet deep in the human mind there still lingers the desire for persecution and the need for a scapegoat. The details relating to the ‘Feast of Venus’ at The Cloisters and the Prince of Wales’s difficulties with Lady Jersey are factual. As is the huge party given by Mrs. Fitzherbert to celebrate her reunion with the Prince in June 1800.