The tale of Mary Bateman, infamously dubbed the Yorkshire Witch, unfolds as a gripping exploration of fraud and manipulation in early 19th-century England. At the heart of this episode is how Bateman exploited the fears of a community desperately seeking answers during tumultuous times. We dive into her story, beginning with a seemingly innocuous hen laying eggs marked with divine messages, which spirals into a web of deceit leading to murder. This episode reveals not just the mechanics of her schemes but also the psychological tactics she employed to maintain control over her victims, ultimately culminating in the tragic death of Rebecca Perigord. As we dissect the layers of this dark chapter in Yorkshire's history, we reflect on the broader implications of belief and trust in the face of uncertainty, showing how Mary Bateman's legacy continues to resonate today.

Yorkshire Day kicks off our journey into the fascinating stories of Yorkshire's past, and what better way to start than with the tale of Mary Bateman, known as the Yorkshire Witch? For over 200 years, the story of the Yorkshire Witch has captivated audiences, intertwining themes of fraud, fear, and belief. It all begins with a simple hen in Leeds, laying eggs inscribed with messages that appeared to be divine warnings. This episode explores how Bateman, a seamstress and fortune teller, manipulated desperation and belief in an uncertain world. The narrative unfolds in 1806 as the townsfolk flock to witness the miraculous hen, unaware that they are being drawn into a web of deceit spun by Bateman. As we delve deeper, we uncover the psychological underpinnings that allowed Bateman to exploit her community's fears, drawing parallels to our own times where the need for certainty can lead to dangerous beliefs. Bateman’s story serves as a cautionary tale about the fragility of trust and the human tendency to seek answers, no matter how outlandish they may seem.

Takeaways:

• The podcast explores the life and crimes of Mary Bateman, known as the Yorkshire Witch, highlighting her rise from a seamstress to a notorious fraudster and murderer.
• It details how Bateman exploited the fears of her community, using a prophetic hen to manipulate people into believing in her supposed powers.
• Listeners learn about the psychological and cultural context of early 19th century Yorkshire, where fear and uncertainty drove people to seek answers from dubious sources.
• The episode reflects on the themes of belief and manipulation, emphasizing the dangers of placing trust in those who profit from fear and superstition.
• Mary Bateman's story illustrates how one person's deceit can impact an entire community, leading to tragic consequences and a legacy of folklore.
• The podcast also questions the ethics of storytelling, exploring how narratives can evolve and shape public perception long after the events have passed.

Foreign.

Welcome to Yorkshire Stories from England's Most Interesting county.

Or more simply, the Yorkshire History Podcast.

I'm Terry Cook and this is a podcast about the people, the places and the events that shaped Yorkshire.

And it feels right to launch this first episode on August 1st, Yorkshire Day.

So happy Yorkshire Day.

And there's few stories more Yorkshire based than the Yorkshire Witch, also known as Mary Bateman.

Now, that name has appeared in books, museums, local stories and true crime retellings for over 200 years.

This is a story about fraud, fear and belief.

It's about a woman who sold certainty to people who were desperate for answers.

It's about a couple in Bramley who trusted the wrong person.

And it begins, as all good witch stories surely should, with a hen.

Not the murder, not the trial, not the gallows at York, but a hen.

A hen in Leeds, laying eggs that appeared to carry a message from God.

And I think this is an excellent way to officially start this podcast.

But I am going to ask you one favor.

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And you'll help this show grow, because the Yorkshire Witch is just the beginning.

In a yard on the edge of a town, a hen lays an egg.

Now, that, on its own, is not history.

Hens lay eggs.

People collect them and eat them, or they sell them and trade them, and they think very little more about it.

Unless, of course, the egg comes with a message.

And this one does.

Scratched into the shell are the words that seem to come from somewhere far beyond the chicken cooping leads.

Christ is coming.

Or, as some accounts preserve it, Christ is coming.

Now, the spelling almost doesn't matter.

The message does.

Because to the people that heard about it, this wasn't just a curiosity or something to laugh at over a pint before returning back to your ordinary life.

This was a warning, and mournish from God.

And warnings from God were not to be treated lightly.

So word begins to spread.

Now, at first, it's local.

A neighbour tells another neighbour.

Someone hears it on the street.

A hen in Leeds, they say, is laying eggs marked with a prophecy.

The words are plain and the meaning is terrifying.

Christ is coming.

By the standards of a modern rumour, it's going to move slowly.

There's no photographs, there's no newspaper alert, no messages followed through a hundred glowing screens.

It traveled by voice.

And when there's fear, fear gives it speed.

So soon people came to see.

They gathered in cold, drawn by dread and curiosity.

This story is too strange for people to ignore, too frightening to dismiss.

And if they want to see the egg, they must pay a penny.

That's the first thing to understand about the prophet's hen of Leeds.

It was never only a miracle.

It was a business.

And standing somewhere near the centre of this strange little storm is Mary Bateman.

A seamstress, fortune teller, wise woman, fraudster and future murderer.

They may know rumors or they may know that she tells fortunes.

She offers charms, cures and advice on matters ordinary people cannot easily explain.

Some may even already mistrust her, while others seek her out precisely because they do trust her.

But they don't yet know that her name will become one of the most infamous in Yorkshire.

They don't know about Rebecca Perigord.

They don't know about the poisoned pudding.

For now, there is only the hen and the egg and the message, Christ is coming.

To understand why anyone took this seriously, we have to resist the ease and modern response.

We should not begin by laughing at the people who paid the penny.

We should not imagine that everyone in Leeds was foolish or naive, or that we, placed in the same world, would all have calmly seen through it.

That's just too simple.

This was a world under pressure.

Britain was at war with France.

Napoleon's shadows stretched across Europe.

Religion shaped daily life in ways both comforting and frightening.

Death was familiar.

Illness could enter a household without explanation and leave devastation behind.

For many people, the future felt uncertain because it was uncertain.

And in those uncertain times, signs matter.

Strange event in the natural world could be read as a warning.

Not by everyone, and not always, but often enough that a hen laying a prophetic egg did not fall into an empty world.

It landed in a culture already prepared to ask what God might be saying.

And Mary Bateman understood that that's what makes a prophet hen so important.

It's tempting to treat it as a comic episode before the darker story begins.

A bizarre little warm up act.

The ridiculous hen before the serious murder.

But that would be a mistake.

The prophet hen shows us Mary Bateman's method in miniature.

She does not create fear from nothing.

She finds fear already present.

Then she gives it an object, an egg, a message, a ritual, a price.

For the people who came, the penny was not merely the cost of looking at a trick.

It was the price of access to meaning.

For one coin, they could see the warning for themselves.

They could stand close to the sign.

They could say they witnessed it in a world where eternity felt real and judgment felt possible.

To witness that was to witness belief.

And Mary was there to collect.

The accounts that come down to us were written later, and some of them clearly enjoy the drama of the scene.

They give us a frightened crowd and a false miracle and the poor hen at the center of it all.

We do not need to treat every flourish as courtroom evidence.

But the core of the story is clear enough.

Mary Bateman claimed that a hen was laying eggs marked with a divine warning.

People came to see them, and Mary made money from the spectacle.

That's enough.

Because even stripped of any exaggeration, the scheme is extraordinary.

Think about what Mary had to do.

She needed the message to appear on the shell.

She needed the egg to seem newly laid.

She needed the crowd to believe that what they were seeing had not passed through human hands.

And she needed to repeat the miracle often enough to keep the rumor alive.

The explanation is an unpleasant one.

Mary marked the eggs herself, using some kind of corrosive substance to etch the words onto the shell.

Then, in an act that is both grotesque and cruel, she forced the eggs back into the hen so they could be laid again in front of witnesses.

That's an ugly image, but it tells us a great deal.

Mary was not simply telling lies.

She was staging evidence.

She understood that people believe more readily when they think they've seen something with their own eyes.

A prophecy spoken by Mary might be doubted.

A prophecy written on an egg produced by a hen?

Well, that felt different.

It seemed to come from nature, from God, from somewhere beyond human fraud.

That was the performance.

And Mary knew the value of the performance and of the distance.

The more she could remove herself from the mess, the more powerful the message became.

Mary was not saying, christ is coming.

The egg was.

The hen was.

God was.

Mary was merely the keeper of the miracle.

And the keeper gets to charge admission.

While this same pattern will appear again later in darker form, Mary often positioned herself between frightened people and some hidden source of authority.

Sometimes the authority was a mysterious wise woman named Ms. Blythe.

Here it was the hen.

Either way, Mary placed herself at the point of access.

If you wanted to see the warning, you paid Mary.

If you wanted protection, you went through Mary.

If you wanted to understand what was happening, Mary was there to explain it.

The prophet hen was absurd, but it wasn't harmless.

The hen itself suffered.

The people who believed were manipulated.

And Mary learned, or at least Confirmed something dangerous.

Fear could be organized.

It could be given a form and a setting and a fee.

And people would come, they would pay.

They would follow the emotional logic of the story if the story reached them at the right moment.

Mary Bateman's later crimes didn't come from nowhere.

They grew from that practice.

Before murder, there were smaller frauds.

Before the poisoned pudding, there were charms and household cons.

Before Rebecca Perigord, there were other people who trusted Mary too much, feared her too deeply, or realized too late that they'd been deceived.

And the hen belongs on that same pattern.

The miracle eventually broke.

Not everyone in Leeds was convinced that, too, was important.

The story is not one of a whole town losing its senses.

Without exception, some people doubted and looked more closely.

And eventually, according to the traditional account, Mary's method was discovered.

The miraculous egg was no miracle.

The message had been made by human hands, not a prophet.

Mary Brateman was a fraud.

There's a strange emotional turn in stories like this.

While the deception holds, fear fills the room.

Once it break, laughter comes in.

And people who have been frightened now want distance from their own fear.

So they laugh at the trick.

Perhaps they laugh at the neighbors who believe.

Perhaps they laugh at themselves, though, you know, maybe less openly.

The whole thing can then be pushed safely into the category of foolishness.

And this is what seems to have happened in Leeds.

The panic faded, the crowd dispersed, and the world did not end.

Mary was exposed, but not destroyed.

That's one of the most revealing parts of this whole episode.

In another version of this world, the prophet hen might have ruined her.

It might have marked her permanently as a fraud.

People may have refused to ever trust her again, and the authorities could have even stepped in more forcefully.

But that's not what happened.

Mary appears to have just moved on.

Her reputation was damaged, no doubt.

Some people very likely laughed at her.

Some must have cursed her.

And the story has been told for years that Mary Bateman was not to be trusted.

And yet she survived it.

Why?

Well, partly because allure did not have an easy way to deal with what she'd done.

She'd not been tried to witchcraft.

By this period, witchcraft was no longer prosecuted as a real supernatural crime in England.

Fraud could be punished, but it depended on the complaint and evidence and the willingness of victims to come forward.

A public embarrassment was not the same as a successful prosecution.

Partly, too, because people have short memories when they're frightened.

A person can laugh at one false miracle and still hear the next.

Unexplained illness.

They can dismiss the trick and still wonder whether something hidden is working against them.

They could call Mary a cheat in public and still visit her privately when ordinary help has failed.

It's not hypocrisy, it's human.

Fear doesn't always obey reason.

Nor does hope.

And Mary Pitman seems to have understood both.

The Prophet Hen didn't end a career, it revealed it.

Here was Mary in full bold, theatrical, practical, cruel and alert to opportunity.

She could read the mood of a community.

She could use religious language without reverence.

She could turn a living creature into a prop and a prophecy into a source of income.

Mary could stand close enough to the miracle to profit from it, but far enough away to pretend the message hadn't even begun with her.

It's almost comical until you know where the story goes.

Because the same qualities that made the Prophet Hen possible would later make Mary deadly.

The confidence, the performance, the invented authority.

The way she made fear feel like evidence and payment feel like protection.

Within a year, they would help lead Rebecca Perigord to her death.

And that's why this story begins with an egg.

Not because it's the most important thing Mary Bateman ever did.

It isn't.

Prophet Hen doesn't explain everything about her, but it does give us a clearest early glimpse of the machinery.

Mary Bateman didn't need real magic.

She needed people to believe that the magic might be real.

She needed anxiety in the air, religion in a language, uncertainty in a household, and a story strange enough to pull people towards her.

And the egg did just that.

It cried Apocalypse.

And the people came.

They came with their pennies in their hands and judgment in their minds, stepping into Mary's little theater of fear.

They came to look at a shell marked with the end of the world, not knowing that the true danger was not divine judgment.

It was the woman standing beside the hen.

Mary Bateman would later be labelled the Yorkshire Witch.

The name is not legally accurate, and we'll come back to that.

She was not hanged for witchcraft.

She was hanged for murder.

But the name stuck because it captured something people felt about her.

She seemed to stand at the meeting point between fault belief and fraud.

The place where neighborly help could become manipulation and fear could be made profitable.

The Prophet Hen was Mary's warning to Leeds, not the warning she intended.

She wanted people to see judgment in the egg.

But history lets us read a different message.

Not Christ is coming.

Mary is.

And that was warning enough.

Well before Mary Bateman became a Warning before Leeds knew her as a wise woman and before the prophet, hence, even before the name the Yorkshire witch fastened itself to a memory.

On the 15th of January that year, she was baptized at Topcliffe.

Her father was Benjamin Harker, her mother Ann Dunning.

And at that point, there was nothing in the record to suggest that the child being carried to the font would one day become one of the most notorious criminals in York's history.

And that is worth saying plainly.

Mary Bateman's life has often been told backwards.

Because we know where she ends at York, on the gallows.

It becomes tempting to search for childhood, for signs.

And later writers certainly did.

They present her as if she was born dishonest, as if every small act of childhood mischief pointed inevitably towards murder.

And that makes for its Heidi moral lesson.

But lives are rarely that tidy.

What we can say is that Mary Hark grew up in a rural world where work began, early reputation mattered and a girl's future was usually quite narrow.

If a woman was not born into money, they would need to work.

That work would most likely be domestic, practical and dependent on trust.

And trust, as Mary would later prove, was something she understood very well.

Around the age of 13, Mary went into service in Thirsk.

That was normal enough.

Young girls are often sent into households to work as servants.

Now, it could be hard work, but it could also be a step into the wider world.

A servant entered the private life of a family.

She saw what they owned, she learned where things were kept, she learned the rhythms of the house, who came and went, who was careless, who was kind and who was easily persuaded.

For most girls, service was employment.

For Mary, it seems to have been an education.

The early accounts say she was dismissed for theft.

We shouldn't linger too heavily over childhood accusation, because those accounts were written after her execution and they potentially wanted Mary to look wicked from the start.

But the pattern is relevant again and again as Mary moves through life.

Accusations of theft follower.

Not one grand crime, not yet, anyway.

Just small acts of dishonesty, missing items and household goods.

The sort of behaviour that damages a reputation before it ever reaches a courtroom.

And reputation Mad.

In a village or small market town, your name traveled ahead of you.

People knew who you were, they knew your family, they knew what had been said about you that could protect the honest and trap the dishonest.

For someone like Mary created a problem.

York offered something different to Azambi or Thirsk.

It was larger and busier and easier to disappear into.

It was a city of trade, religion, shops, inns and households.

People arrived there for work.

And Mary appears to have found work connected to clothing.

She's often described as a dressmaker.

In plain terms, she worked with women's clothing, dresses, gowns, petticoats, fabric, thread, the practical business of dressing respectable bodies.

It may seem like a minor part of this story, but it's not.

Clothing sits close to identity, Harry's status and intimacy and value.

A gown could be altered, horned, stolen or used to suggest respectability.

A woman who worked with clothes had access not only to the fabric, but to the private spaces and private conversations.

She might be invited into a household.

She might hear things.

She might learn who had money and who wanted to appear as if they had money.

Mary's later crimes would often involve domestic objects such as clothing and bedding.

Money hidden away.

Goods passed from one hand to another.

That world was not strange to her.

She'd been inside it for years.

York also placed her near the machinery of justice.

That's one of the sharper ironies of her life.

Mary spent time in a city that would later condemn her.

Long before she was brought to York Castle as a convicted murderer, she knew York as a young woman trying to make her way.

The same city that offered opportunity would eventually offer the scaffold.

But that was still far ahead.

For now, Mary was building a life out of work and movement and deception.

The stories from this period are not all equally firm, but the broad direction is clear.

Mary's time in York did not lead to settled respectability.

Trouble followed her.

There were accusations of pilfering, and at least one account links her to more serious theft or burglary.

Whether Mary was directly involved in everything later writers attached to Turton is difficult to know.

But by this stage, the picture is becoming hard to ignore.

Mary Harker could not stay still for long, and when trouble came, she left.

And her next move was Leeds.

And that move changed everything.

Leeds at the end of the 18th century, was not just another town.

It was growing, and growth gives cover.

People were arriving for work, the streets were busier, neighborhoods were shifting.

A person could bring an old reputation with them, but they didn't always arrive at the same speed.

Leeds offered Mary something.

She needed space to begin again, not necessarily honestly, but definitely effectively.

When Mary reached Leeds, she entered a place where her skills could be turned into something Larger.

The thefts and household tricks of her earlier life had taught her how to read people.

York had given her practice in movement and reinvention.

Clothing work had placed her close to private economies of women and families.

Now Leeds gave her a wider stage.

It gave her customers, not immediately as a Yorkshire witch, not yet as a woman with the prophet hen, but as someone who could become whatever the moment required, whether that be a worker, a neighbour, a wife or a wise woman.

That last identity would come later, but the raw material was already there.

Mary knew how to appear useful.

She knew how to get inside a household.

She knew that people often revealed more than they realized when they were worried, ashamed or in need of help.

She'd learned that a confident lie could move through a room faster than a doubtful truth.

And she'd learned one more thing.

If a place becomes too small for your reputation, move somewhere larger.

And Leeds was larger, large enough for Mary Harker to become Mary Bateman.

Her husband was John Bateman, a wheelwright, a practical man by trade at least, someone who had worked with wood wheels, carts, transport, the solid materials of ordinary life on paper.

Marriage might have offered Mary a new respectability, a new name, a household and a chance to settle into the role expected of her.

But Mary did not become settled.

She became harder to pin down.

The girl from Azenby had already moved through service, suspicion, clothing, work and flight.

She'd carried her habits from the rural Yorkshire to Firsk, from Firsk to York, from York to Leeds.

Each move widened her world and each new setting gave her more room to practice.

By the time she'd married John Bateman, Mary was not an innocent young woman waiting to be corrupted by town life.

She was already formed.

Not fully, perhaps, not yet the figure who would trick leads with a prophetic hen.

But the pattern was there.

Movement, deception, performance and the ability to use ordinary trust for.

For private gain.

This is why her early life is important, not because it proves that she was destined for murder.

It doesn't.

It matters because it shows.

Mary learned.

She learned in service that households had secrets.

She learned in clothing work that private objects carried value.

She learned in York that a larger place made reinvention easier.

And in Leeds, she would learn how far a lie could go when it was told with confidence.

The woman who arrived there was still Mary Harker.

The woman who would soon emerge was Mary Bateman.

And marriage would not restrain her.

It would give Mary new material.

Let's take a little look at John Bateman as John Bateman was a wheelwright.

That means that he made and repaired wheels, parts, wagons and the wooden machinery of everyday movement.

It was practical work, solid and honest work, at least in the way we imagine it now, using wood, iron, labour, trade, things that could be measured, mended and paid for.

A new name, a new household, a new chance, perhaps to become respectable.

But Mary did not use marriage as a fresh start.

She used it as a cover.

And that's how her life begins to sharpen after she arrives in Leeds.

Before this, we see a pattern forming.

Domestic service, accusations of theft, movement from place to place, and the habit of leaving when trouble comes too close.

Now, with John, the pattern does not end, it just becomes more personal, because Mary now had a household of her own and a husband of which she could also deceive.

The marriage itself seems to have been unstable from almost the beginning.

Later accounts describe John Bateman as a man repeatedly pulled into the chaos Mary created around him.

He was not her partner in crime, at least as far as the evidence suggests.

More often, he appears as another person forced to deal with the consequences of Mary's lies.

That doesn't mean John was a saint or that we should turn him into one.

We know far less about him than we know about Mary.

And much of what survives come through stories told because Mary later became infamous.

But the shape is clear enough.

Marriage did not tame Mary Bateman.

It gave her a wider stage for fraud.

One of the most striking stories from this period concerns John's father.

And the tale goes like John receives word that his father is seriously ill, perhaps dying.

It's urgent, so he needs to go visit his father at once.

Now, that kind of message would cut through ordinary hesitation.

Appearing at the edge of death is not something most people pause to investigate.

You just go, you leave your house, you leave your work and you hurry towards the bedside before it's too late.

So John goes.

But when he arrives, there's no emergency.

His father is not dying.

The message was false.

And while John has been away, Mary has acted.

She sold their furniture.

Not one little item like tucked into a pocket or a bit of pilfering that could be smoothed over as a misunderstanding.

Furniture, the contents of their home, the things that make a room habitable and a marriage visible to the world.

By the time John understands what's happened, the damage is done.

Mary has turned his family loyalty into an opportunity.

Now, whether every detail has reached us exactly as it happened is less important.

Than what the tale reveals about the Mary people remembered.

This is not the work of someone simply grabbing whatever's nearest.

It's planned.

It depends on the timing and emotion.

It depends on knowing that a person in fear will move quickly and ask questions later.

And that becomes one of Mary's great skills.

She learns how to create urgency.

A false deathbed does more than remove John from the house.

It makes him remove himself.

That's cleverer.

Mary doesn't need to push him out the door.

She gives him a story powerful enough to make him run through it.

And once he's gone, Mary profits.

And that's Mary bit.

When my father charms fully, take over.

Already she's learning that a lie works best when it attaches itself to something real.

John really has a father, a son that might really fear losing him.

And a household can be stripped while its owner is somewhere else.

Mary doesn't invent human feelings, he just uses it.

This is why the early domestic frauds matter.

They show Mary becoming a performer.

Not yet in the dramatic sense.

No prophetic egg yet.

No public crowds or talk of the end of the world.

Just a woman inside an ordinary life, finding places where trust can be turned into money.

Ordinary life gave Mary plenty to work with.

House in Leeds was not just walls and a roof.

It was a store of value.

Furniture, bedding, clothing, tools, utensils these were the physical savings of working people.

They could be sold or pawned or borrowed against.

Mary understood that world well.

She'd worked in service, she'd worked with clothing.

She knew what household goods were worth and she knew what household goods meant.

To lose furniture was not only to lose property, it was to lose standing.

A home stripped of goods made private failure visible.

Neighbours could see and reputation could suffer.

Mary's frauds didn't only cost money, they caused embarrassment and embarrassment would become one of her most useful weapons.

It's when people get embarrassed, they hesitate, they delay to complain, they explain things away.

They hope the matter can be settled privately.

And Mary appears to understood this long before she began dealing in curses and charms.

Domestic theft was training her in the power of shame.

Other stories from the marriage point in the same direction.

Goods disappeared, debts gathered.

Mary found ways to take, sell and conceal.

Sometimes the stories sound almost comic in their boldness.

One tale has her involving the theft of a leg of mutton.

And other places are among smaller household deceptions, the kind that will be ridiculous if they're not part of a much darker pattern.

But the humour is dangerous.

It tempts us to see Mary As a rogue, a trickster, if you like.

A woman getting away with little schemes in a hard world.

And perhaps at times, this is how some people did see her.

Not admirable, exactly, but clever.

Someone that could walk away through a scrape and appear again somewhere else with a fresh explanation.

And that's how fraud often survives.

Not because everyone believes the fraudster is innocent, but because doubt is messy.

People can suspect and mutter and they'll warn each other.

But unless someone is willing to force the matter into public view, the fraudster can keep moving.

And Mary kept moving.

The marriage to John gave her a new surname, but it did not give her stability.

The couple seemed to have moved repeatedly.

Sometimes that movement may have been driven by poverty, sometimes by opportunity.

Often, it seems Mary's conduct catching up with them.

For John, the situation must have been exhausting.

To be married to Mary Bateman was to live beside uncertainty, not knowing what she'd done or who might come to the door, what had been sold, what had been stolen, what debt had been created on, even what accusation might arrive next.

So eventually, John joined the militia.

The reasons could have been practical.

Many men joined the militia.

Britain was at war and service formed part of the military world at the time.

But later accounts suggest that John's decision may have also been tied to Mary.

Whether it was a skipping debt scandal or seeking a steadier income, his departure fixed the picture of a marriage under pressure.

So Mary left with more freedom.

She did not become more respectable.

She became more dangerous.

That might sound dramatic, but the change is important.

While John is part of the story, Mary's frauds still look mainly domestic.

She still lies and steals and sells and shifts blame.

She manipulates people close to her and takes advantage of household trust.

But as she moves further into Leed's life, her methods begin to widen.

She doesn't only steal goods anymore, she begins to sell belief.

This is the point where Mary Bateman starts to become more than the wheelwright's wife.

She becomes a woman people might visit when they're frightened.

A woman who can tell fortunes and prescribe charms or offer cures and speak with confidence about hidden dangers that didn't happen overnight from a single moment.

The false message about John's father had taught her the power of urgency.

Domestic theft had taught her the value of private goods.

Repeated accusation had taught her how much people disliked public scandal.

Her move through service, Shawk and Leeds had taught her how to reinvent herself when necessary.

And now she needed something stronger.

Mystery.

Because if Mary wanted a piece of clothing.

Yeah, she could steal it, but.

But if Mary said the clothing was needed for a charm, the owner might hand it over willingly.

Same with money.

Mary could take money if she wanted it.

But if Mary said the money had to be sewn into a bed or passed to a distant, wise woman, the victim might not only give it, but they're likely to keep the secret too.

And that's the difference.

Mary's earlier cons depended on deception.

Her later cons would depend on participation.

The victim would be drawn into the act.

They would follow the instruction, hide the charm, burn the letter, make the payment, and then feel trapped by their own obedience.

It's a more powerful form of fraud because it makes a victim a participant.

And Mary was learning how to do that.

And John Bateman, in one sense, had been one of her early subjects.

Not because she cast spells on him or because it belonged to the later world of charms and evil wishes, but because she practiced on the people closest to her.

First, she learned how to lie inside a household before she lied to strangers.

And she learned how to make emotion move people before she made the fear pay.

That's why the story of John's father deserves to be spoken about.

It's not just a colourful anecdote, it's a rehearsal.

A man is frightened by news he receives.

He reacts quickly.

His wife, Mary, takes advantage of the situation.

And by the time the truth catches up, the money is gone.

Later, the stakes will be higher.

A woman will fear an evil wish.

A husband will fear for his wife.

Mary will provide the explanation.

And by the time the truth catches up, someone will have died.

But that's still further ahead.

For now, Mary is still building herself, not with a grand announcement, but through repeated practice of dishonesty.

And this is where Mary becomes more prominent.

Not yet as the witch of the legend, but as the woman before the legend.

She was not yet standing beside the prophet hen, but the performer was already there.

And perhaps that's what made Mary so difficult to stop.

She didn't have just one fixed task.

She changed.

According to the room with John, she could be the wronged wife, the helpless wife, the busy wife, the wife with an explanation for everything.

With neighbours, she could be useful or sympathetic.

With her, frightened, she could be wise.

Mary had already learned how much people would tolerate before acting.

She'd learned that the suspicion was survivable.

She'd learned that if a lie served up immediate fear, many people would accept it long enough for her to benefit.

And those lessons shaped everything that followed.

Mary Bateman did not simply stay a Thief.

She became a seller of answers.

And in Leeds, there was a market for answers.

People had illnesses they couldn't explain or losses they couldn't recover, fears that they didn't want to speak aloud.

And Mary had no real power over any of it.

But she had something that could look like power to the desperate, the people in need.

That was confidence, and that was enough to begin.

Soon, Mary Bateman would create one of the most useful figures in her criminal life.

A woman of mystery and of distance.

A woman who could issue commands, demand payments, and remain safely out of reach.

A woman called Miss Blythe.

The trouble, of course, was that Miss Blythe didn't really exist, or at least not in the way Mary's victims were led to believe.

But for Mary Bateman, reality was never the most important thing usefulness was.

And Miss Blythe would prove very useful indeed.

Because for Mary Bateman, one voice was never as powerful as two.

If Mary alone told a frightened person that they were cursed, they might believe her.

If Mary Lorne asked for money, clothing or household goods, they may well hand them over.

But if Mary could say that the instruction came from somewhere else, from someone more mysterious and more powerful, the whole fraud changed shape.

It became harder to question and refuse, harder to trace back to Mary.

That was the genius of Miss Blythe.

She was useful because she was absent.

She wasn't real.

Mary's victims couldn't visit her.

They couldn't look her in the eye.

They couldn't ask her directly what money was needed or what garment had to be sent or why a charm couldn't be opened.

Miss Blythe existed at a distance, and that distance protected Mary.

Now, in many versions of this story, Miss Blythe is placed in Scarborough.

In others, details change.

Sometimes her name is spelled Blythe, with an e. Sometimes it's spelled Winnowee.

But the exact spelling matters less than the role that she played.

Miss Blythe was a woman who knew Mary, was a woman who could reach her.

And that made Mary indispensable.

By this stage in her life, Mary had begun presenting herself more openly as a wise woman.

That phrase sounds a bit quaint now, almost harmless, but it did carry real weight.

A wise woman was someone people would consult when ordinary folk had failed.

She may claim to tell fortunes, remove curses, or offer cures for strange illnesses.

And Mary stepped into that role with confidence.

She was already used to entering the private worlds of her people.

She knew the households, and she knew the value of clothing and bedding and possessions.

She knew that illness made people frightened, and that fear made them easier to lead and speak to.

Now she added a new explanation.

An evil wish.

And that became one of Mary's most profitable ideas.

If someone was ill, Mary could say that the illness was not natural.

And if ordinary remedies failed, maybe someone somewhere had wished harm upon them.

And that evil wish gave fear a shape, something to point at.

And once Mary gave it a shape, she could sell the cure.

Mary would ask people to bring them a personal item and a little money to begin the work.

It didn't always need to be a large amount.

In fact, it was better if it wasn't that small.

Surrender teaches obedience, and that was the pattern.

First the victim brings something.

Then they follow an instruction.

Then they keep a secret.

Then Mary asks for more.

By the time that demand becomes unreasonable, the person is already wrapped up well inside the story.

And Mary understood this long before anyone would have used modern language for it.

She knew that people who had already paid once are more likely to pay again.

People who had followed one strange rule were more likely to follow the next.

And if they'd kept a secret, they were already helping to protect the fraud.

And Mary made that secrecy feel necessary.

She would tell them not to tell anyone.

Don't show the letter.

Don't open the packet.

Do not disturb the charm.

Now, these instructions sound magical on the surface, but they also had a practical purpose.

It kept evidence hidden, and it kept relatives and neighbors from interfering.

That was the trap.

And the letters made the trap even stronger.

Because Mary could write, that gave her power.

A spoken instruction might just sound like gossip or advice, but a letter felt more official.

It created the impression that something serious was happening beyond the room.

You know, the victim could feel it and hold it and read.

Felt like proof.

So Mary used the letters to make Ms. Blythe real.

She wrote in the name of the woman victims couldn't meet and passed on the instructions as if they'd come from a higher authority.

She made herself the messenger, not the source.

So if Mary needed money, she could say that Miss Blythe asked for it.

If she wanted clothing, Miss Blythe required it.

If a charm had to remain unopened, Miss Blythe had warned it not to be touched.

Mary's hands took the goods.

Mary's words explained the danger.

Mary's letters created the authority for Miss Blythe.

Well, Miss Blythe carried the blame.

She was not the only figure Mary used in this way.

Another name appears in accounts of Mary's frauds.

Mrs. Moore, like Ms. Blythe Mrs. Moore seems to have functioned as a distant or shadowy helper, someone Mary could invoke when her own authority needed strengthening.

And this tells us that Mary was not merely making up lies from one moment's.

And that she was building a cast for her performance.

The victim's gonna meet Mary.

But behind Mary stood over names such as miss Blythe and Mrs. Moore.

Women of supposed knowledge, hidden just out of reach.

So if anyone questioned her, she could retreat into the role of the intermediary.

He'd only done what she was told.

It was a really useful lie.

And Mary used it again and again.

The objects she asked for were usually ordinary things, but she made them feel charged with meaning.

So a piece of clothing was not just cloth.

It belonged to the person under threat.

Heading was not just bedding.

It could hide a charm.

And victims would come to Mary with problems.

And Mary would reach out to Miss Blythe.

Miss Blythe would return a letter asking for goods and or money.

These would then be used to make charms to ward off evil spirits.

And those charms should remain hidden, hidden for months.

Opening it early may bring disaster.

So victims waited.

Amala waited.

Mary profited.

And that's how our systems worked.

She found fear and then she offered a cure.

Then she controlled the rules.

There was nothing accidental about it.

Mary knew when to sound grave, when to promise hope, and when to make that danger feel urgent.

And she knew how to delay work in her favour.

And that delay was essential.

The time bought Mary safety.

By the time a victim had realised nothing had changed, the money might be gone or the goods sold and the evidence burned.

And if Mary was questioned, she had answers ready.

Maybe the instructions hadn't been followed exactly, or the evil wish was stronger than first thought.

Often, Miss Blythe would need to be consulted again.

There was always another step.

And every step cost something.

And this is a point where Mary becomes more than an ordinary fraudster.

She wasn't just taking advantage of one person.

In one moment, she'd found a repeatable method.

A way of turning that belief into an income.

And it's easy to imagine this as something dramatic and theatrical.

But much of it was probably quiet.

And the quietness made it more dangerous.

A public miracle like the Prophet Hen could be exposed by a crowd.

But a private charm was harder to challenge.

It was protected by secrecy and shame.

And Mary had learned that lesson.

The Prophet Hen had shown her what fear could do in public.

Miss Blythe helped her to use her fear in private.

And Mary didn't need to Appear strange or wild.

Just needed to appear certain and confident.

This confidence and certainty can't be more persuasive than truth, especially when someone is frightened.

Mary could look at that person's confusion and offer them a story in which everything made sense.

This is no ordinary illness.

It is the work of an evil wish, and I cannot solve it alone.

I have to go to Miss Blythe for help.

And once that story had been accepted, Mary's in control.

And the details will change from case to case, whether it's the person or the illness, the object, the sum of money.

But the structure remained the same.

Mary stood between the victim and the thing that they feared.

She made herself feel necessary, then expensive, and then difficult to question.

And this was a system she carried into the Perigord case.

William and Rebecca Perigord did not meet Mary Bateman at the beginning of her career.

They were not dealing with a woman trying out a trick for the first time.

By the time Mary entered their lives, she had years of practice behind her.

She practiced on her employers, on her neighbours, on her own husband, and she'd practiced on the people leads with a hen and an egg.

And now she had Miss Blythe, the woman who wasn't even there, the woman who could demand anything, the woman who could never be challenged, because every word she spoke came from Mary's hand.

That was the machine that Mary had built.

And when Rebecca Perigord began to suffer, that machine was ready.

Rebecca did not need a miracle.

She needed help.

Mary Bateman offered both.

And that's where the story turns from fraud to murder.

So let's talk about the Perigoes.

This story begins in Bramley, which is a village just outside Leeds, with a husband and wife trying to understand what was happening inside their own home.

William and Rebecca Perigord weren't famous people, you know, they weren't rich or powerful.

They were just ordinary, respectable and vulnerable.

The kind of people history often only remembers when something terrible happens to them.

And something terrible was already beginning because Rebecca was unwell.

The accounts describe pain and distress, particularly around her chest and body.

Symptoms that troubled Rebecca a lot and resisted the help that she'd already sought out.

Now, I do need to be a little careful.

We can't diagnose Rebecca Perigo from two centuries away.

And the language used in the surviving accounts comes filtered through trial testimony, newspapers and, of course, later retellings.

But the central point is clear enough.

Rebecca believed she was suffering, William believed she was suffering, and the normal, ordinary explanations did not seem to be enough.

And that's where the fear grows.

In the modern setting, we might imagine a series of appointments, tests, referrals, scans, and second, third, fourth opinions.

But in Rebecca's world, the options were more narrow.

A doctor might be called, but medicine didn't always work and didn't always reassure.

The pain would often remain unexplained.

And when the condition doesn't improve, people sometimes look beyond the body for answers.

So we fall back to that evil wish scenario.

And that was the idea that began to gather around Rebecca's illness.

Someone had potentially done this to her.

Someone had sent dark harm into the Perigord household.

It wasn't simply pain she was suffering from.

It was an attack.

Now, that belief may sound strange now to some of us, but in Rebecca's world, it had logic.

If sickness didn't have a clear medical explanation, and if bad luck seemed to settle over a life and remain, then the idea of an evil wish offered something that medicine didn't.

A cause, an explanation.

Because once there was a cause or an explanation, there might be a cure.

And this is where Mary Bateman enters their lives.

The Perigo's reached out to Mary because they were afraid.

Rebecca was ill and William was worried.

And Mary had that reputation.

She was known as a woman who understood hidden things, such as curses and charms and remedies and, of course, evil wishes, the kind of troubles that lived underneath the surface of ordinary life.

For a couple already frightened by what they couldn't explain, Mary must have seemed not ridiculous, but useful, maybe even necessary.

And Mary would have understood that immediately.

By now, she knew how to behave when fear came knocking.

She didn't need to rush.

She didn't need to overwhelm anyone.

The first task she had was to listen, to appear serious, and to make the Peregos feel that the fear had been recognized by someone with authority.

As Mary offered validation, not just a cure, but validation, she could tell Rebecca and William that their anxiety wasn't foolish.

Something was genuinely wrong.

The trouble in their lives had a shape and a name, and most importantly, it could be dealt with, but not by Mary alone.

For a case like this, Mary would say, help needed to be from someone with greater powers.

Ms. Blythe.

The name had already become one of Mary's most useful inventions.

Because she didn't appear in person, it made her more useful to Mary.

She couldn't be questioned or contradicted, and everything she said arrived through Mary.

So Mary placed herself exactly where she wanted to be, between the frightened couple and the imaginary authority who would now govern their Lives.

From that moment, the Perigles were no longer dealing with one woman in Leeds.

They were dealing with a system.

Mary listened.

And then Ms. Blythe advised.

Mary then delivered the instructions.

And of course, the Perigord's obeyed.

Now, this was both simple and cruel, but it also worked.

First demands were about ritual.

The personal item was needed, something connected to Rebecca, something that carried the presence of the afflicted person.

Clothing was ideal for this.

A garment wasn't just fabric.

It had touched the body.

It belonged to the person under threat, so it could be worked into the cure.

So William brought Mary one of Rebecca's garments, trusting that it would help.

This small act is important.

You know, it doesn't financially ruin the Perigros.

But something from inside their household had passed into Mary's hand.

And once that happened, the boundaries start shifting.

Mary's no longer merely being consulted.

She'd begun to enter the private world of that couple that she would then destroy next.

Up comes the letters.

Ms. Blythe's instructions begin to arrive through Mary, each one carrying unseen authority.

Precise rituals described.

Money was to be handled in particular ways.

Items were to be placed specifically and sawn into bedding, left untouched for long periods.

And the letters were to be burned.

After reading, the Perigords were warned not to interfere with the charm, not to doubt the instructors, not to expose the work to outside eyes.

And that was all about control.

Mary knew that complexity can make this fraud feel more convincing.

A simple request for money might raise suspicions, but a ritual involving the secrecy and the letters and the clothing and spiritual danger creates the atmosphere where money becomes only part of this, only part of something larger.

So the victim will stop asking, why does she want this?

And begin asking, what happens if we don't obey?

So over time, the demands grow.

Mary requests money and bedding, household good clothes, item from the Perigord home that could be explained away as necessary for Ms. Blythe's work.

So Mary was careful to make the request feel purposeful.

These weren't thefts.

They were offerings.

The goods were there to serve the cure.

The money would help break the evil wish.

And, of course, it would all be worth it.

When Rebekah was well again and saw the Perigords give.

They gave because they were afraid, because they'd been given hope by Mary Bateman.

Now it's easy to look back at the amounts that were recorded and the sheer scale of things that Mary extracted and wonder why they didn't stop sooner.

But raw doesn't feel obvious when we're in inside.

Even by today's standards, it builds by degrees.

One payment justifies the next.

One ritual leads to another.

The deeper you go, the harder it becomes to admit that you've been led there.

And William and Rebecca were not simply fooled.

Once they were captured, they were enclosed.

They were brought into this world from Mary.

The letters written in the name of Ms. Blythe did more than demand goods.

They shaped the emotional atmosphere of this whole thing.

They told the Peregrals when to hope and when to fear.

And they made promises that never quite delivered.

They'll keep the couple waiting and watching and following the instructions given.

And always there was a threat of what might happen if they disobeyed.

And that threat was essential to this whole performance.

Without it, the whole arrangement would have collapsed under its own absurdity.

As with it, every strange instruction became dangerous to question.

If the charm had to remain sewn into the bed, opening it too soon might ruin everything.

So Mary wasn't only just stealing from the Perigirl, she was teaching them to police themselves.

And this is probably the darkest part of the conversation.

The victims begin to protect the fraud because they believe the fraud is protecting them.

They simply follow the rules because they want to get better and they don't know what else to do.

And Mary watched it happen.

Now, the sad thing is we don't have Rebecca's voice.

That's one of the great silences in this story.

We know her mostly through the accounts of others, through William's testimony, through court reports, and through writings that turned her suffering into evidence.

We do not have a diary.

We don't have her own description of her pain or the fear or what she thought of Mary Bateman as the months passed.

So we have to be careful not turning Rebecca into merely a victim shaped object in Mary's story.

She was a woman.

She was a wife to William Perigord.

She was in pain and she wanted to be well.

Someone who, like many people before her and since, reached out for hope when the certainty wasn't there.

When the answer wasn't there.

And William, too, deserves more than mockery that he sometimes gets.

It's sometimes easy to reduce into a gullible husband the man who believed too much and reacted too late.

But that's too simple.

William was watching someone he loved suffer.

He was trying to help her.

He was operating by the beliefs and the limits of his own world.

Mary didn't deceive him because he was stupid.

She deceived him because he was frightened.

And because fear can make even unreasonable Things feel necessary.

Unfortunately, that doesn't make the story less tragic.

It probably makes it more so.

See, Mary's genius was she understood which buttons to press.

She didn't need to appear monstrous or scary.

She needed to appear useful.

She needed to be the person who could still do something when everyone else had run out of answers.

And the Perigoes?

Well, by the time this fraud was well underway, they had more than money invested in Mary's promises.

They'd invested the hope that Rebecca's suffering could be both explained and reversed.

And that hope is hard to lose.

It's hard to abandon.

Month after month, Mary continued to draw from them.

The scale of it was extraordinary.

Later accounts placed her money at £70, alongside bedding, clothes, furniture, china and other goods.

And for a modest household, that's not a harmless loss.

It's potentially ruinous.

Whilst Mary didn't take it all in one go, she let the fraud and the deception breathe.

She let the Perigles become used to making that sacrifice.

Each payment made the next more likely.

And of course, at the center of it all was the original promise.

The evil wish could be broken.

But Mary's promise had a problem.

Rebecca did not get better.

Now, that's a point.

An ordinary fraudster might retreat and make other excuses and disappear.

They'll blame the client and run away.

But Mary had already taken too much.

And the longer the fraud continued, the more dangerous exposure became.

If the Perigoes lost faith, they might look inside the charms and find that money had gone or the charm wasn't really there.

So Mary needed control.

And for that control, Mary was beginning to move towards something far more dangerous than fraud.

The letters Mary was receiving became darker and the warnings are such more serious.

And as such, the Perigles were prepared for the idea that the illness itself might be part of the process.

If the suffering continued or came worse, it didn't mean the cure had failed.

It simply meant that hidden forces were moving.

It meant the work was taking effect.

It meant that they must continue to obey because the forces are getting more dangerous.

And this was a cruel piece of psychological preparation.

Mary was teaching them how to interpret the harm she was about to cause.

So when the final instructions came, that didn't arrive out of nowhere.

They came as the next step in a pattern the Perigoes had already been following.

And those instructors contained powders and food and strict instructions to make it look not like murder, but like ritual.

And that was another one of Mary's most dangerous tricks.

To make poison appear as protection.

Now, by 18 oh, 7.

William and Rebecca Perigord were deep inside the world Mary had built for them.

Their money, their goods, they'd all gone and their fears had turned into this system of obedience.

The imaginary Miss Blythe had become a voice of authority inside the home.

And Rebecca was still ill, still frightened, still hoping for relief.

She was about to be offered the cure that would kill her.

Now, the curse may never have been real, but Mary Bateman was.

And the next thing she placed before the Perigoes would not be a charm or a letter or a harmless scrap of ritual theatre.

It would be a pudding and it would be poison.

The latest direction from Miss Blythe warned that illness was coming.

The wording varies across the surviving accounts, and we should be careful with the exact phrasing, but the meaning is consistent.

They were told that something would happen in May.

They were told that the process had run its course.

They were told, in effect, not to be alarmed by the very symptoms Mary was about to cause.

And that's quite chilling, because Mary did not merely poison them, she prepared them to accept the poisoning as part of the cure.

Mary supplied them with powders, as if they were medicine or some necessary ingredient in the break of the evil wish.

All these powders were to be mixed into food.

A pudding, specifically, which was the kind of dish that belonged to a kitchen table, not a murder case like this.

And I think that's relevant because poisoning is frightening, because it almost hides inside trust.

You know, a person can refuse a weapon, they can see a blow coming, but food is different.

Food brings along care and routine and everyday household life.

The pudding does not announce itself as a danger, it's simply there to be eaten.

So the Perigords followed those instructions and at first, nothing dramatic happened.

That, too, may have been part of the plan.

Several accounts suggest the early powders did not contain the fatal dose.

So whether Mary was testing obedience or building confidence, or simply alerting what the relevant dose is, the effect was the same.

The Perigles learned that the strange instruction could be followed and survived.

William and Rebecca ate the pudding, prepared according to Mary's directions.

Rebecca ate more than William.

That difference might be the reason why one of them died and the other lived.

The sickness, well, that began quickly.

The accounts describe violent illness, terrible pain, swelling and discoloration.

We don't need to overstate this.

I think the truth is dreadful enough.

Rebecca and William had taken into their bodies something meant to destroy them, while believing they were obeying the very instructions they thought would save them.

And then that's where Mary's second layer of control appeared.

The honey.

Mary had also supplied a honey mixture to be taken if illness followed.

Again, it was presented a part of the remedy, a follow up, something to help them through the process.

But the evidence later suggested this too was dangerous.

The sources don't always describe the chemistry in exactly the same way.

Some refer to the arsenic in the pudding, others to the poisonous compounds in the honey.

So the safest reading is that the poisonous substances were involved in both the foods and the supposed medicine.

What matters for the story is brutally simple.

When the Perigords became ill, they didn't call for help.

They took more of what Mary had given them.

That's the full horror of Mary's control.

She'd built a world in which suffering didn't disprove her power.

It confirmed Mary's seriousness of the cure she'd given them.

The pain became part of the process.

The Perigords expected the illness, so obedience remained.

And Rebecca declined.

As you mentioned, we don't have Rebecca's own words.

We don't know what she thought in those hours and days, whether she believed the curse was working or whether the doubt simply came too late.

However, she simply suffered beyond the point of being aware.

But we do know the outcome.

She'd gone to Mary Bateman looking for help.

She died after taking what Mary supplied.

Now, William survived, but survival didn't mean escape.

At least not yet.

He had eaten less, and that's probably what saved him from Rebecca's fate.

But he was badly affected.

Later accounts described the poisoners leaving him weakened and damaged.

He'd lived, but he probably didn't understand yet.

And this is one of the hardest parts of the story to sit with.

William didn't immediately turn on Mary.

From our side of the history, the pattern seems obvious.

The powders, the pudding, the honey, the illness, the death.

But William was not standing outside the story, looking back with the evidence in hand.

He was right in the middle of it.

William had spent months being trained to believe that unseen forces were at work, that Ms. Blythe had the authority, Mary was the messenger, and that disobedience would very likely bring disaster.

William's wife was dead, and Mary still had control of the explanation.

She told him, in effect, that this was the work of that evil wish.

The cure hadn't failed.

Because Mary had lied, but because the forces had taken their course again.

The details changed depending on the source, but the emotional mechanism is clear.

Mary turned Rebecca's death back into the very story she'd already sold him.

And William, grieving and weakened, continued to listen.

That's not stupidity or gullibility.

It's the aftermath of manipulation.

It's the impact of fraud.

When someone has built a frame through which you understand, you fear they can sometimes keep control.

Even after the worst had happened and Mary had created the world in which Rebecca's death could be explained without Mary being framed.

And for a time at least, that world stayed.

And so the fraud continued.

Even after Rebecca's death, Mary continued to draw from William.

She asked for more.

She even took items that had belonged to Rebecca, Keeping the fiction of Ms. Blythe alive.

The cruelty of that is difficult to overstate.

Mary had not only caused Rebecca's death, she continued to profit from the grief that followed.

The dead woman's belongings became part of the ongoing conversation.

There's something especially vile in that.

It's one thing to steal from the living under the pressure of fear.

It's another to reach into the remains of a marriage and take from a widower who does not fully understand what's been done to him.

And Mary did both.

For months, William remained caught between grief, belief and doubt.

Something in him must have been unsettled.

Though the promises hadn't come true, the goods had not returned.

Rebecca was gone.

His wife was gone.

Ms. Blythe remained as unreachable as ever.

And Mary, still moving between explanation and demand, still held pieces of the story in her hands.

But eventually, William did something Mary had warned against.

He opened one of the charms inside.

He did not find what he'd been led to expect.

There was no powerful spiritual object, no meaningful protection, no treasure safely held for the promised moment.

Instead, he found scraps, worthless bits, a few coins of little value.

The physical remains of a lie, of deceit.

Now, for William, that must have been devastating.

Because a charm didn't only expose the fraud.

It reached backwards through everything that had happened.

The money, the goods, the letters, the rules, the warnings, the pudding, Rebecca's death.

If the charm was false, what else was false?

And if Mary had lied about the cure, then what had killed Rebekah?

And that's where Mary's story begins to change a little.

The spell, if we can call it that, finally starts to break.

William had been afraid of disobeying Mary's instructions.

Now he had something stronger than fear.

He had Evidence.

Not yet the full evidence that he would later be gathered, but enough to change what Mary was.

In his mind, she was no longer the woman standing between his household and that evil wish.

Mary was the danger.

That delay may well frustrate a modern listener, but it is essential to the story.

It shows the depth of Mary's control, the pressure of shame, and the difficulty of moving from private suspicion to public accusation.

William had to admit not just that he'd been robbed, but that he'd believed.

He had to revisit the death of his wife.

He had to bring into the open a story of charms, letters, hidden packets and poisoned food.

And that took time, but once it acted, the world Mary had built began to collapse quickly.

So William reached out.

When a constable became involved, Mary was confronted.

The details of the confrontation differ in later accounts, but the broad shape is again clear.

Mary tried to resist the accusation and redirect suspicion, but this time the old methods weren't enough.

A home was searched and there the fraud became visible.

Goods connected to the Peregose were found.

So were suspicious substances.

The paper trail of Miss Blythe began to look less like spiritual correspondence and more like evidence.

The woman who had made herself the interpreter of Miss Blythe and of hidden forces was now being investigated by the law.

For years, Mary had relied on secrecy and shame and the difficulty of making private fear known to the public.

Now those private things were being dragged into the official view.

All those household goods, all the letters, all the powders, the bottles, the cure had become the case.

And Rebecca Perigord, who had suffered in silence, would now become the centre of a murder trial.

Mary Bateman had survived accusations before.

She'd survived the gossip and even the absurdity of the Prophet Hen.

But the death of Rebecca Perigord was different.

This was no longer a matter of embarrassment or petty fraud.

This was poison.

There was a body in a grave and a widower finally ready to speak.

The business of belief had carried Mary a long way, but now it would carry her to York Castle and to the courtroom, where the Yorkshire witch would be judged not for magic, but but for murder.

He had to tell the whole humiliating story.

William had to admit that he and Rebecca had believed in the evil wish, that they'd trusted Mary, that they'd handed over money and goods and clothing, that they'd obeyed Letters from a woman that they'd never met and that they had eaten the pudding and that Rebecca had died.

And there's courage in that, though it's potentially easy to miss.

For nearly 18 months, Mary's version of reality had held them in place.

Now William had to step outside it and speak against the woman who had helped create it.

He had to bring private grief into public law.

And once he did, events moved quickly.

Mary was taken to York.

The story.

And Mary leaves Leeds, Anne Bramley behind and moves into the machinery of county justice.

York Castle was not merely a backdrop.

It was a place where prisoners were held, tried and, in many cases, taken from life to death.

Mary entered that world not as a witch in the legal sense, but as a woman accused of murder.

And she waited there for trial.

I think we should think about that for a moment, because Mary Bateman in York Castle, held in the woman's prison, the noise of the place around her, the knowledge of what might come next.

This was not Mary's first brush of accusation.

But it was different in the scale of danger.

Petty fraud could be talked away and theft could be repaid.

Has she done in the past?

Even the prophet hen had ended in embarrassment rather than punishment.

But Rebecca Perego was dead and Mary was now facing their gallows.

By then, Mary was already notorious.

The newspaper had fed the public appetite.

The language of witchcraft had begun to cling to the case and people were fascinated by the mixture.

A wise woman, a cursed household, fake letters, poisoned food, a dead wife, a surviving husband and a woman who seemed to have moved for years through leads like a shadow.

The courtroom must have carried that atmosphere with it.

But the law had to do something more precise than gossip.

I'm going to repeat again that Mary Bateman was not being tried for witchcraft.

That's essential.

The court did not have to decide whether Mary truly had supernatural powers.

It did not have to prove whether an evil wish existed.

It did not have to settle the question of charms, omens or prophecy.

The charge was murder.

The victim was Rebecca Perigord and the method was poison.

That is the tension at the heart of the trial.

Outside the courtroom, Mary was already becoming the Yorkshire witch in folklore.

Inside it, she had to be reduced to evidence, testimony, motive and opportunity.

When the prosecution laid out the case, William Perigord's evidence was central.

He could describe the illness, the fear, the approach to Mary, all the correspondence with the mythical Ms. Blythe William would talk about the money and the goods, handed over the instructions around the charms, and then lastly, the pudding and the honey and Rebecca's suffering.

And of course, the moment when he finally opened the packet and saw the deceit for what it was.

Imagine hearing that in court, not as a legend, not as a fireside tale, or even how you're hearing it stay on this podcast.

But hearing it from the man who had lived it.

William's testimony turned Mary's private system into a public narrative.

What had once been hidden in letters now had to be spoken aloud before the judge and jury and spectators.

Other witnesses came and added weight.

The goods found in Mary's possession linked her to the fraud.

The letters explores the fiction of Miss Blythe.

The medical evidence pointed towards poisoning.

Piece by piece, the world Mary had created was dismantled and reassembled as a case for murder.

And Mary's defence was weak.

And that's not surprising.

In this period, defendants in serious trials did not have the same rights or legal support we would expect nowadays.

Mary appeared to have largely spoken for herself, denying guilt and attempting to separate herself from the death of Rebecca Perigord.

She could still perform innocence, she could still deny the knowledge, and she would still try to turn that confusion into her advantage.

But this time, her performance failed her.

The evidence was too heavy.

Trial may have been a long one, but the jury's decision was not.

After hours of testimony, they took only a short time to return the verdict.

Guilty.

Mary Bateman, the wise woman of Leeds, the maker of charms, the voice behind Miss Blythe, the woman who had sold certainty to the frightened and desperate, now stood convicted of murder.

The sentence was death.

There was, however, one final manoeuvre available to Mary.

Mary claimed she was pregnant.

Now, this wasn't a random outburst on Mary's behalf, though with Mary it can often feel like it.

In capital cases, a condemned woman could plead pregnancy if she was found to be quick with child, meaning the pregnancy had advanced to the stage where movement could be felt.

Execution could be delayed.

The law recognised the life of the unborn child as a reason to pass sentence.

But the court followed procedure.

A jury of matrons was assembled.

Married women were called upon to examine Mary and decide whether her claim was true.

Now, to modern ears like us, the whole scene may sound almost medieval.

A convicted woman sentenced to death and a group of women brought in to inspect a body while the machinery of execution waited nearby.

But this was ordinary legal practice and it didn't save her.

The matrons found that Mary was Not quick with child.

Her claim had failed.

Whatever else Mary had managed to manipulate in her life, she could not manipulate this verdict.

The path to the gallows remained open.

There is something striking about Mary at this point in the story.

Even now exposed and condemned, she did not become what the crowd perhaps wanted or expected it to become.

She didn't offer the grand confession that would make the moral lesson Neeta.

She admitted frauds, according to later accounts, but she denied the murder.

She would not give the public the full satisfaction of repentance.

And that refusal has helped preserve the mystery around her.

A confession closes the story, but Mary's denial kept it alive.

It allowed some to imagine whether she still believed she could talk a way out.

And it gave the pamphleteers room to moralise and storytellers room to darken the edges.

But the law didn't need Mary's confession.

The verdict had been given and the sentence had been passed.

And because this was a murder conviction, death would not be the end of the punishment.

Under the law of the time, the body of a convicted murderer could be denied ordinary burial and handed over for dissection.

The punishment was designed to continue beyond the scaffold.

It was meant to mark the murderer with disgrace, even after life had gone.

Mary had spent years turning other people's bodies, fears and possessions into instruments of her own gain.

Now the state would take her body and make an example of it.

Outside the courtroom, the story was already spreading.

Princes and pamphleteers knew what they had A woman, a witch, a poisoner, a dead victim, a failed pregnancy plea, a coming execution.

It had everything a hungry public wanted.

By the time Mary left the court, she was no longer only a convicted murderer.

She was becoming a commodity.

Her name would sell newspapers and her crimes also solved the pamphlets.

Her death would draw a crowd and soon even a body would become something people paid to see.

The wise woman had been tried.

The witch, as the public would later remember her, had been condemned.

Now York waited for the spectacle.

Mary Bateman's trial ended with a sentence.

But the story did not end with the verdict.

In some ways, the verdict only moved her on to a larger stage.

Now came the public part.

Executions in this period were not hidden from view.

They were public events, attending to punish, to warn and to satisfy a crowd that often came in enormous numbers.

People gathered not only out of moral feeling, but out of curiosity.

They came to see justice done and they came to see the notorious die.

And Mary was Definitely notorious enough to draw them.

By now she was no longer simply Mary Bateman, convicted murderer.

She was the Yorkshire Witch.

And that name had force.

It carried all the things that made a case irresistible to the public imagination.

The wise woman and the false prophet, the strange courtroom scene, the failed claim of pregnancy.

The facts were terrible enough, but the title made them memorable.

And so the crowd came.

Now, we should be careful not to imagine every person there is bloodthirsty.

Public execution drew all kinds of people.

Some would come in horror, some would come because everyone else was going.

And some came because, in a world before photography, film or social media, this was how a notorious story became visible.

It seems that Mary herself remained composed.

And that composure runs through several accounts of her final days.

Though we have to remember that every description of her behavior was filtered through other people's expectations.

A condemned woman was supposed to repent.

She was supposed to confess.

Mary didn't give them that.

She admitted to frauds, according to later accounts, but she continued to deny the murder of Rebecca Perigord.

This meant that the crowd didn't receive the neat ending they wanted.

There was no full confession, no clear moment where the villain explains herself and allows her story to close.

And if you look at Mary's story and Mary's life, she'd spent much of that life managing narratives.

And even at the end, she did not surrender this one completely.

But the law did not need that confession.

And at the appointed time, Mary Bateman was hanged.

The woman who had once sought protection against unseen forces now stood entirely powerless before a very visible one.

The people.

The rope did what the court had ordered and Mary died in front of the crowd.

And for many watching, that may have seemed like the final act of justice.

And this is perhaps one of the most important parts of Mary's story, because it tells us something about the world around her as much as it tells us about Mary herself.

Under the Murder act, the bodies of executed murders were not simply released for burial.

The law allowed and in practice demanded a further post mortem punishment.

The body could be hung in chains or handed over for dissection.

And the point was not only medical, it was symbolic.

To be buried properly was to be returned to community, family and in Christian belief, to the hope of resurrection.

To be denied.

That was a serious disgrace.

The body of a murderer was marked after death as something separate, something available to the law, something that was made useful as a warning.

And Mary's body was taken from York to Leeds.

Let's think about that for a second.

The living Mary had moved between villages, towns, streets and households, always trying to stay ahead of accusation.

Now a corpse traveled under authority, no longer able to perform.

The woman who had once made others carry goods and messages for her was now herself being carried back into the town where she built a reputation at Leeds General Infirmary.

Her body became an object of public interest and people paid to see it.

Now that fact can feel shocking, but it was part of the punitive and medical culture at the time.

Mary's corpse was displayed before dissection and large numbers came.

Some came because she'd frightened them, while others because she'd fascinated them.

And some people probably wanted proof that the Yorkshire witch was truly dead.

In life, Mary had charged people to look at a false miracle in death.

Others charged people to look at her thinking back to that prophet hen that had drawn a crowd through fear and curiosity.

Mary's body did the same.

The criminal body became a spectacle, a medical resource and a kind of grim entertainment.

And surgeons examined Mary's body before audiences.

This wasn't a private, clinical act in the way we imagine an autopsy now.

It belonged to a world where anatomy and punishment and public curiosity kind of overlapped each other.

The body of the murderer could serve science, but it also served the sentence.

It showed that justice had not stopped at death.

Mary had been cut off from an ordinary burial.

Her body was divided, studied and displayed.

And then, over time, parts of her became stories of their own.

And this is where fact and folklore begin to knit together.

We know that Mary's body was taken for public display and dissection.

That belongs to the firm historical car of the case.

We know that her skeleton was preserved and much later displayed for many years as part of the medical and museum collections in Leeds.

That too is part of the documented afterlife of Mary Bateman.

But other details need a bit more caution.

Stories grew around her skin and her tongue and objects supposedly made from her remains.

Some later sources say that strips of her skin were preserved and circulated, or even treated as charms.

Others speak of books bound in her skin.

Now, these stories are not simply modern inventions.

They have fruits in later 19th century retellings.

And scholarship has taken them seriously as part of the history of the criminal corpse.

But they're not the same kind of evidence as a trial, the execution or the confirmed public dissection.

So we should tell them carefully, not as courtroom fact, but as legacy as a strange afterlife.

A woman whose reputation made even her remains seem powerful.

And there is an irony here that's almost too dark to miss.

Mary had sold charms against fear.

After her death, pieces of Mary herself were said to have become charms.

The woman accused of exploiting superstition was put back into superstition.

Her body became part of the same world of beliefs that she had manipulated.

And that's not just a gruesome detail.

It's the whole story turning back on itself.

The authorities had meant to punish Mary by denying her a peaceful body after death.

The surgeons had used her for anatomy.

The public had used her for spectacle.

Later, storytellers used her for folklore.

Each age took something from her, and each age made her useful in a different way.

Mary Bateman had spent a life taken from others, and after death, others took from her.

It's easy to look at Mary and see only the criminal, the woman that committed fraud, the poisoner, the woman who murdered Rebecca Perigord.

And she was all of those things.

But a human body on display is never simple.

Even when that body belonged to someone guilty of those terrible acts.

The display of Mary's skeleton asked questions that go beyond her guilt.

Who gets dignity after death?

Who decides when punishment is finished?

And at what point does justice become a curiosity?

These aren't modern questions forced onto an old story.

They're already present in the way Mary was treated.

The crowd at the gallows are paying visitors at the infirmary and the audiences at the dissection and later the museum.

All of them show how quickly justice can become a spectacle.

And Mary's case was especially suited to spectacle because she'd already been turned into a character.

The Yorkshire Witch.

That name made her more than a person.

Murderer is human.

However terrible they are, they're still human.

But a witch is something else.

A witch belongs to story.

And once Mary belonged to story, people could keep using her.

Chat books used her newspapers used her crowds used her museums used her later ghost stories, and local legends used her.

Even now, in telling this story, we're using her too.

That doesn't mean we shouldn't tell, means we should know what we're doing.

Because at the center of the spectacle was a real death.

And before that, another real death.

Rebecca Perigord, whose suffering made the case possible and whose voice is almost entirely missing from the record.

Mary's body became famous.

Rebecca's body became evidence.

Mary's punishment was in public, and yet Rebecca's was in private.

And yet it's Mary who became the legend.

By the time her name had settled into Yorkshire memory, Mary Bayman had crossed from criminal history into folklore.

She'd been tried by the law and killed by the state, opened by surgeons and remade in print.

The woman was dead, but the Yorkshire Witch was not.

What remained was a story people could return to whenever they wanted to talk about gullibility or superstition, female criminality or the dangers of trusting the wrong person.

Some versions would make Mary darker than the evidence allows.

Others would treat the Perigords with cruelty, as if being deceived made them ridiculous rather than vulnerable.

Some would blur the line between fact and folklore until Mary seems less like a person and more like the curse that had once walked through Leeds.

But the truth is more unsettling than legend.

Mary Bateman did not need real magic.

She needed a world that believed magic might be real.

She needed illness without explanation and people desperate enough to trust her.

And she found that.

And after her death, the world that condemned her continued to do something very similar to what she had done.

It turned fear into story.

It turned story into profit.

Mary Bateman divided other people from their money and, in Rebecca's case, their life.

Then Mary's own body was divided, and from those fragments, a legend was made.

But the Yorkshire Witch was only just being born.

And this is where Mary becomes a character.

Not just Mary Bateman, convicted at York for the murder of Becca Perigord, but Mary Bateman, the Yorkshire Witch.

A warning, a curiosity, a monster moral lesson.

The title is powerful because it did several things at once.

It made the case sound older than it was, as if Mary belonged to the age of witch trials and fireside curses.

It made her crimes feel darker, and it gave the public a simple way to hold a messy story in their mind.

But Mary wasn't convicted of witchcraft.

She was convicted of murder.

But the public memory does not always care about legal precision.

The word witch stuck because it explained the feeling of the case, even if it distorted the facts.

Mary had used charms and curses and prophecies and false spiritual authority.

She'd made people believe unseen forces were at work.

And she'd exploited a world where folk beliefs still mattered.

So the label was inaccurate in law, but irresistible in story.

And that's how the legends begin.

Not usually from pure invention, but from learning of the lines.

One part of the truth is made brighter, another part is pushed away.

Complex person becomes a symbol.

And in Mary's case, the process began almost immediately.

The early printed accounts were not neutral histories.

They were written for an audience hungry for crime and punishment.

They leaned into the drama and made much of Mary's supposed wickedness from childhood.

They shaped life as if it had always been moving towards the gallows.

That doesn't mean that these accounts are useless.

The preserved details we don't want to lose.

They carry the atmosphere of the time.

They show us how Mary was understood by the people closer to the event.

But they also have to be handled carefully.

Mary's childhood is a good example.

Later accounts delight in presenting her as corrupt from almost infancy.

The girl who steals becomes a woman who poisons it makes evil look visible from the start, but.

But real life's rarely that neat.

What we should treat more cautiously is the idea that every childhood misdeed was a sign of monstrous destiny.

That probably tells as much about the writers as it does about Mary.