Lore 293: Mother Knows Best

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Speaker 3 There are plenty of ways to tell the future. Tea leaves, tarot, palm reading.

Speaker 3 And most of these can be performed in a slick 15 minutes, easily scheduled back-to-back under the neon glow of a beach boardwalk fortune-telling booth.

Speaker 3 But sometimes, peering into tomorrow takes a little more patience, especially if you're working with onions.

Speaker 3 That's right, onions. It's called chromniomancy, and variants of this divinatory form have been practiced for centuries.

Speaker 3 But unlike a Zoltar machine, the answer has only come as quickly as an onion can grow.

Speaker 3 Let's say that you're stuck in a love triangle and trying to figure out which sweetheart is the keeper and which one to let go.

Speaker 3 Simply carve your suitors' names into two different onions, set them aside, and wait. The first to sprout reveals the partner that you are meant to be with.
Or how about this one?

Speaker 3 In Germany, there's a New Year's Eve tradition in which 12 slices of onions are arranged in a sort of onion-based calendar and then sprinkled with salt.

Speaker 3 The salt causes the onions to sweat, the amount of which per slice indicating the rainfall to expect in the corresponding month.

Speaker 3 If there's one thing that we humans hate, it's not knowing what comes next, which is why, throughout history, we've come up with some pretty creative workarounds.

Speaker 3 And sometimes when onions and tea leaves fail us, the best divination tool of all is just a kooky old lady.

Speaker 3 I'm Erin Mankey, and this is Lore.

Speaker 3 The year was 1488, and a vicious thunderstorm raged through the town of Naresborough, not far from York in England.

Speaker 3 Rain and wind thrashed trees and tore at the sky, and while most of the people were tucked away in the safety of their homes, one 15-year-old orphan named Agatha wasn't so lucky.

Speaker 3 Desperate for shelter, she hid inside a cave.

Speaker 3 It sat beside a magical well with the power to turn objects to stone, and it was there, screaming along with the vicious winds that young Agatha gave birth to a baby girl.

Speaker 3 As soon as the baby was born, it began to laugh. And with that, the thunderstorm vanished as if it had never even begun.
Or so the legend goes.

Speaker 3 Just one of many, many stories that would crop up around the infant, in fact. Because that baby would grow up to become one of the most famed and feared characters in British folklore.

Speaker 3 A witch slash prophetess named Mother Shipton. Now, if you're English, you probably already know of her.
But for the rest of us, a quick primer.

Speaker 3 Mother Shipton has permeated British culture for centuries. She appears in everything from folk tales and Christmas pantomimes to scary stories and pop culture references.

Speaker 3 Heck, in the mid-1700s, scientists named a freaky-looking moth after her. In the early 1800s, a London wax museum installed a Mother Shipton automaton that kicked visitors as they exited.

Speaker 3 And in 2017, a statue of her was erected in Naresborough's main square. In short, while here in America we have characters like Paul Bunyan and John Henry, in England, they have Mother Shipton.

Speaker 3 So, who was she exactly? Well, that's the thing. We don't exactly know.
Like her birth story, her whole biography is rife with dates and details that most historians agree are complete inventions.

Speaker 3 And yes, there probably was a woman known for making prophecies in the general York area at the time.

Speaker 3 But everything from her origin story and her name to the specific prophecies she supposedly made all came later.

Speaker 3 But I'm getting ahead of myself because at this point in the story, she's still just a baby.

Speaker 3 According to the Tall Tales, Agatha named her daughter Ursula and raised her on the outskirts of society in the very cave she had been born inside.

Speaker 3 But when Ursula was around two years old, the abbot of Beverly intervened, banishing the unwed Agatha to a nunnery. The teenager would soon die there, never to see her child again.

Speaker 3 Meanwhile, little Ursula was placed with a local family, which might have been a mistake, because it wasn't long before her new parents started noticing some, let's just say, questionable behavior.

Speaker 3 Take the time that her adoptive mother left Ursula home alone for an afternoon, only to find the door wide open upon her return.

Speaker 3 Fearing that she had been robbed, this mother called several neighbors for help, but as the party entered the house, the air filled with the sound of a thousand screeching cats.

Speaker 3 Suffice to say, this startled the hell out of everyone, and so they tried to run back out the door only to discover that they suddenly had yokes affixed to their necks.

Speaker 3 As the group panicked, the yokes fell off, only for the women's clothes to fly off as well, exposing them to everyone.

Speaker 3 Apparently, this chaos continued until a fryer happened upon the scene, at which point everything suddenly reverted back to normal.

Speaker 3 Or, well, almost everything, because when the lady of the house searched for little Ursula, she found her inside the chimney, naked and straddling the bar on which the cookpots dangled.

Speaker 3 The child was completely unharmed, by the way, and looked rather pleased with herself at that.

Speaker 3 There are also stories about little Ursula's appearance, which is to say rumors that lean hard on the ableist correlation between disability, physical attractiveness, and witchcraft, which is a can of worms fit for a whole episode of its own, to be honest.

Speaker 3 It's said that as she aged, she developed a humpback and a sharp, crooked nose, dotted with, to quote one author, pimples which, like the vapors of brimstone, gave such a luster in the night that her nurse needed no other candle to dress her by.

Speaker 3 She had plump, bulging eyes, and her legs bent and twisted in the wrong directions. Her cheeks were hollow, and two teeth stuck out of her mouth like boar's tusks.

Speaker 3 And given her unknown paternity, people began to whisper that her father was none other than the devil himself. Local children and adults alike taunted her for her looks.

Speaker 3 Once, a group of men on their way to a parish meeting called her hagface, and while she said nothing at the time, Ursula would soon get her revenge.

Speaker 3 Because as the men sat down to eat at an inn later that night, one of the men, who had always been rather vain about the fashionable ruff that he wore around his neck, found the accessory suddenly transformed into, and I quote, the seat of a house of office, aka

Speaker 3 a toilet seat. The fellow sitting next to him began to cackle, only to find that his hat had been replaced by a bedpan.

Speaker 3 As a modest young gentlewoman at the table attempted to restrain her laughter, she was horrified to find herself unable to stop loudly farting.

Speaker 3 Finally, the innkeeper himself ran in to investigate the commotion. Or, well, he tried to.

Speaker 3 But he didn't quite make it because he was prevented by the massive pair of horns that had sprouted from his own head. Horns that made it too wide to pass through the doorway.

Speaker 3 Mother Shipton's story, of course, didn't end in her youth. In fact, it was only just beginning.

Speaker 3 Because, you see, it's said that through her ostracized childhood, Ursula often retreated into the forest where she had been born, taking solace in the company of nature.

Speaker 3 And it was there there that she grew to speak the language of herbs and flowers.

Speaker 3 She learned what plants could heal a burn or soothe a fever, which berries could be ground into poultice for wounds, and what herbs could cure a headache.

Speaker 3 By the time she reached adulthood, the residents of Naresboro had come to value her as a powerful healer. And by healer, of course, I mean a witch.

Speaker 3 In one of my favorite Mothershipton tales, one of Ursula's neighbors was heartbroken to find a brand new smock and petticoat stolen from her house.

Speaker 3 Nothing if not loyal, Ursula assured her neighbor that not only did she know exactly who had taken it, but she would make the thief give the clothing back.

Speaker 3 During the next market day, make sure to go to the town square, she told her friend. Trust me.
Which is exactly what the friend did.

Speaker 3 And lo and behold, the entire bustling market crowd was treated to quite a sight.

Speaker 3 Because as Ursula, her pal, and all the shoppers looked on, the woman who had stolen the clothing clothing came dancing through the square singing, I stole my neighbor's smock and coat.

Speaker 3 I am a thief, and here I shoot.

Speaker 3 And shot she did, because she was wearing the stolen smock and carried the stolen petticoat, both of which she delivered to Ursula's neighbor before curtsying and waltzing away.

Speaker 3 And hey, if your friends aren't bewitching those who wronged you into acts of public humiliation in your honor, are they even your friends at all?

Speaker 3 It's said that at the age of 24, Ursula met a young carpenter from York named Tobias Shipton, and the two wed.

Speaker 3 Since she wasn't exactly known for being a looker, many suspected her of having enchanted him into marriage. Others that she must have a secret fortune Tobias hoped to get his hands on.

Speaker 3 But despite the gossip, the two shared a happy and comfortable life together. Tragically though, the joy wouldn't last.
Only two years after the wedding, Tobias passed away, leaving Ursula alone.

Speaker 3 Although a widow now, she kept her lost love's surname, and despite mothering no children of her own, she became known forevermore by the moniker Mother Shipton.

Speaker 3 After her husband's death, Ursula moved back to Ye Old Cave in the Woods where she had been born, and there, in addition to continuing to dispense herbal remedies, she also picked up a new little hobby, predicting the future.

Speaker 3 People began to journey out to her cave not only for medical help, but for the soothsaying.

Speaker 3 Often these predictions were minor, little fortunes about marriages or business matters, personal stuff, right? But other predictions weren't quite so little at all.

Speaker 3 In 1530, for example, England's Cardinal Woolsey intended to visit the city of York.

Speaker 3 According to legend, when Mother Shipton heard of this plan, she said that, sure, he might see the city, but he would never enter it.

Speaker 3 Now, when Woolsey got word of this, he wasn't exactly pleased, and so he sent three men in disguise to go suss out what this Mother Shipton character was all about.

Speaker 3 Well, it turns out that the disguises were not necessary, because when the men arrived at her cave, Mother Shipton greeted them all by name.

Speaker 3 And then she invited them in for cakes and ale and got them all good and drunk. Honestly, she sounds like a great hag.

Speaker 3 When they warned her that she might want to stop prophesying the Cardinal's failures or else he would have her burned when he got to York, she allegedly took the kerchief from off her head, held it up and said, if this burn, then I may burn, before tossing it into the fireplace.

Speaker 3 And I think you can guess what happened next. That's right, the kerchief resisted the flames entirely until she plucked it out and plopped it back onto her head.

Speaker 3 Thoroughly impressed, the men begged her to tell their fortunes, which she happily delivered.

Speaker 3 She told the first that he would fall from grace, the second that his head would be stolen from his grave and conveyed to France, and the third that he would go to war and shoot off a great gun that would, and I quote, do him no good.

Speaker 3 Oh, and by the way, those three men were identified as the Duke of Suffolk, Lord Percy, and Lord Darcy, all of whom were real people.

Speaker 3 The real Duke of Suffolk would fall from grace during Anne Boleyn's time at court.

Speaker 3 Lord Thomas Percy's head would indeed be taken to France after his execution in 1572, and Lord Thomas Darcy would lead an unsuccessful rebellion, all just as Mother Shipton had proclaimed.

Speaker 3 Oh, and when Cardinal Woolsey finally did reach York, only eight miles from the city entrance, Henry VIII had him seized and arrested for high treason for failing to successfully sway the Pope into letting Henry divorce Catherine of Aragon.

Speaker 3 En route to stand trial in London, Woolsey succumbed to dysentery or, as one account unfortunately put it, died of a violent looseness.

Speaker 3 He would never arrive in York, just as Mother Shipton had predicted. She is a strange character, Mother Shipton.
In hearing her stories, it can be tempting to forget that they're just that, stories.

Speaker 3 And it's it's an easy mistake to make, because what's unique about her is that while she is merely a folklore figure, many of the supporting characters in her tales were in fact real-life historical people.

Speaker 3 Cardinal Woolsey did face arrest and subsequent death on his way to York. The three men in disguise did succumb to the fates that she predicted for them.

Speaker 3 So how did an imaginary character espouse real-life prophecies? Well, that would have a little something to do with when the Mother Shipton tales were devised.

Speaker 3 Because the truth is, it's likely that most, if not all, of the Mother Shipton prophecies passed down to us were in fact later inventions, tailored to predict events that had already come to pass.

Speaker 3 In other words, storytellers inserted Mother Shipton into past historical events.

Speaker 3 In fact, the first Mother Shipton prophecies to ever appear in print hit the stands in December of 1641, 80 years after her supposed death.

Speaker 3 But whether the legends were true or not, these pamphlets would soon make her one of the most powerful women in all of England.

Speaker 3 It was a slim little volume, only six pages long, what we might call today a zine.

Speaker 3 But its contents would change British culture forever because inside it contained the first ever written record of Mother Shipton's prophecies. And this thing was about to become a bestseller.

Speaker 3 The Prophecy of Mother Shipton in the reign of King Henry VIII, as it was titled, was published in December of 1641.

Speaker 3 It collected a whole gaggle of predictions, including the Cardinal Woolsey story among others. And people went wild for it.

Speaker 3 This was an era, mind you, when England was boiling with religious and political tension. The English civil civil wars were about to start.
Uncertainty was fraying everyone's nerves.

Speaker 3 And lo and behold, for just a few coins, you could buy a booklet predicting the future.

Speaker 3 That's right, writers began making money off national anxiety by appropriating the folklore of none other than our old friend, Mother Shipton.

Speaker 3 By the 1660s, a bunch of different Mother Shipton pamphlets were in circulation. In fact, much of her alleged biography dates from a specific 1667 edition called The Life and Death of Mother Shipton.

Speaker 3 And naturally, with each new pamphlet came a new flock of prophecies. Prophecies, mind you, that most readers fully trusted as the cold, hard truth.

Speaker 3 One of those prophecies said, the Western monarch's wooden horses shall be destroyed by the Drake's forces. The prediction, of course, referring to the Spanish Armada.

Speaker 3 A widowed queen in England shall be headless seen was another fortune foretelling the beheading of Mary, Queen of Scots. Even the invention of the telegraph made an appearance.

Speaker 3 Around the world thoughts shall fly in the twinkling of an eye.

Speaker 3 Which would all be pretty darn impressive, if not for the fact that all of these, like the Cardinal Woolsey prediction, were published after the events took place.

Speaker 3 But not all the prophecies came out after the fact. One of the most famous, as it so happens, was published some two decades before the events foretold.
And it went a little something like this.

Speaker 3 A ship comes sailing up the Thames, till it come against London, and the master of the ship shall weep, and the mariners shall ask him why he weepeth, being he hath made so good a voyage, and he shall say, Ah, what a good city this was, none in the world comparable to it, and now there is scarce left any house that can let us have drink for our money.

Speaker 3 So, what destruction, you might ask, was this sailor lamenting? Well, according to the prophecy's true believers, it predicted none other than the Great Fire of London.

Speaker 3 Now sure, it doesn't actually mention fire, but the warning of a decimated London was so well known that as soon as the fire broke out in 1666, people immediately thought of Mother Shipton's words, which was a bit of a problem because according to one contemporary writer, people believed so fully in the prophecy that they were lackadaisical in actually fighting the fire.

Speaker 3 After all, Mother Shipton had already said London was a lost cause, so why bother?

Speaker 3 Now, no soothsayer would be worth her salt without a good doomsday prophecy, and trust me, Mother Shipton was no exception.

Speaker 3 One of the most oft-quoted Mother Shipton originals, and I use air quotes liberally there, printed nearly 400 years after her supposed birth, mind you, warned that, and I quote, the world to an end shall come in 1881.

Speaker 3 This was published in 1862, by the way, so the end was pretty seriously nigh.

Speaker 3 Fear of this forecast, as well as mockery of its believers, became rampant as the target year approached, so much so that the British Library even commissioned an exhaustive debunking of the legend to try and calm people down.

Speaker 3 Even when a man named Charles Hindley came forward and admitted to authoring the text as a hoax, people still wouldn't drop it.

Speaker 3 Now, fun fact, the world did not end in 1881, but it did for at least one family. Allegedly, a little girl was so terrified by the prophecy that she died from fear.

Speaker 3 Like so much of folklore, it's impossible to untangle fact from fiction, real from rumor.

Speaker 3 In the end, there's no way of knowing if any of the prophecies attributed to Ursula, aka Mother Shipton, were made during her lifetime. That is, if she had a lifetime at all.

Speaker 3 From scraps of history and oral tradition to widely distributed printed pamphlets, she has existed in many forms.

Speaker 3 But what we do know is that there absolutely was a sorceress of some kind living in the larger York area during the reign of King Henry VIII. How?

Speaker 3 Well, that would be because of King Henry VIII himself. In 1537, the king drafted a letter to the Duke of Norfolk.

Speaker 3 In it, he referenced a witch of York who he denounced as a traitor that must be apprehended.

Speaker 3 Now, I say drafted a letter because in the final version, the version he actually sent, the witch of York was mysteriously removed, the only name from his list of traitors, in fact, to be left out.

Speaker 3 Was it because King Henry VIII decided that she wasn't actually important,

Speaker 3 or was it that the great king himself was afraid of the witch's revenge?

Speaker 3 Today, Mother Shipton is a household name in England. She dances on stage as a pantomime character, appears on fortune-telling toys and playing cards.

Speaker 3 One late 18th-century children's book of rhymes and riddles even asserts that, according to Mother Shipton, a mole on the tip of your right ear means that you're afraid of drowning, while a mole on the left side of the stomach indicates greediness.

Speaker 3 Pretty useful information, right?

Speaker 3 While much of Mother Shipton's biography may have been pure myth, one part is very much real. The cave where she was born.
And not just the cave, but the magical petrifying well.

Speaker 3 Remember that part of the story, how the Naresborough cave was located next to a well with the power to turn objects to stone? Well, as it turns out, that well actually exists.

Speaker 3 And yes, any objects left hanging in its water will indeed appear to turn to stone. But what the people of the 17th century would have called magic, we have a different name for it, science.

Speaker 3 You see, as it turns out, the water of that well has an unusually high mineral content.

Speaker 3 So high, in fact, that when the water drips over objects, it leaves some of those minerals behind, similar to the way stalactites are formed.

Speaker 3 When the minerals calcify, it looks as if it is turning the thing to stone. But don't take my word for it.
You can see it for yourself.

Speaker 3 Today, a museum by the well contains objects that have been left to petrify over the years, including a shoe left by Queen Mary during a 1923 visit, John Wayne's petrified hat, and items left by multiple contestants from the Great British Bake-Off.

Speaker 3 And the gift shop even sells petrified teddy bears. According to the well's owners, a small teddy bear takes only three to five months to turn to stone.
Oh, and by the way, this place isn't new.

Speaker 3 The well has been a tourist attraction since at least the 1630s, over a decade before the first Mother Shipton pamphlets, were ever published.

Speaker 3 I hope you've enjoyed paging through the prophecies of this incredibly weird British legend.

Speaker 3 I think most of us assume that history is filled with people who built careers around taking advantage of the gullibility of everyone else but for me this one really lands at the top but mother shipton is hardly the only old mystical woman said to live in a cave in fact there was another one located right here in america and she's said to hold the fate of the world in her hands stick around through this brief sponsor break to hear all about it

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Speaker 3 The cave lies at the border between the prairie and the area known as Makoshika, aka the Badlands. At least that's where the old tales say it is.

Speaker 3 It's impossible to know for sure because according to the folklore of the Lakota Sioux, this cave has remained hidden for thousands upon thousands of years.

Speaker 3 And no matter how populated the region had become, no one has ever found it. But the cave isn't empty.
No, it's populated by a single ancient woman.

Speaker 3 And ancient isn't an exaggeration, because according to the legend, she has lived in this cave for some thousands of years or more.

Speaker 3 Her hair is long and white as snow, and her face is as wrinkled as a walnut shell.

Speaker 3 Even her clothes speak of her age, for she wears a traditional rawhide outfit, the type that hasn't been common since before European contact.

Speaker 3 And you would think that it might get lonely, spending a millennia hidden away in a cave. But luckily, the old woman has a companion.

Speaker 3 She shares her everlasting life with a large black dog, just as immortal as its master. And it's cozier there than you might think as well.

Speaker 3 Across the cave burns a warm fire, which, according to myth, the old woman set aflame long before the beginning of time.

Speaker 3 An earthenware pot hangs above it, filled with a bubbling red berry soup known as wajapi, which has been cooking for as long as the fire has been lit.

Speaker 3 Now, if I were to spend an eternity in a cave, I would hope that I could at least bring along a stack of books, a bottle of scotch, and maybe some paintable D ⁇ D miniatures to help me while away the hours.

Speaker 3 And as it happens, the old woman has a hobby of her own. That is, weaving.
All day she toils away, weaving a patterned blanket out of dyed porcupine quills.

Speaker 3 It might not sound like the comfiest material, but back before Europeans colonized the region, blanket strips made from red, yellow, and black dyed porcupine quills were a traditional ornamentation for buffalo robes, which is precisely what the old woman's creation will be used for when it's done.

Speaker 3 But it's no easy task. Her teeth are worn down to almost nothing from biting the quills to flatten them, and despite eons of labor, the textile still isn't complete.
And there's a reason for that.

Speaker 3 Because though the woman spends most of her time weaving, she does get up every now and then to stir the soup pot with a wooden paddle.

Speaker 3 And when she does, the black dog leaps up, sprints to the loom, and carefully pulls the porcupine quills out of the weaving with its teeth, undoing the woman's work.

Speaker 3 And this is how it goes day after day, year after year, century after century. The woman weaves all day, and as she weaves, the dog watches her, never looking away while even licking its paws.

Speaker 3 Eventually, the woman gets up, and given that she's roughly a bajillion years old, it takes her quite a while to hobble over from her loom to the fire.

Speaker 3 And in that time, the dog springs into action, and just like Penelope in the Odyssey, unravels the weaving which prevents it from ever reaching completion.

Speaker 3 By the time she turns around again, the dog is lying down, and the woman is none the wiser. And it's probably a good thing, too.

Speaker 3 Because if the legend is true, the dog's small act of sabotage may be the only thing keeping us all alive.

Speaker 3 Because you see, it's said that if the old woman ever reaches the end of her work and weaves in the very last of her porcupine quills, the world will come to an end.

Speaker 3 This episode of lore was produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with writing by Jenna Rose Nethercott, research by Cassandra DeAlba, and music by Chad Lawson.

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Speaker 3 Subscribers there also get weekly bonus episodes, discounts on lore merchandise, and direct access to my inbox.

Speaker 3 It's a bargain for all of that ad-free storytelling and a great way to support this show and the people who make it. Learn more about your ad-free options over at lorepodcast.com slash support.

Speaker 3 Of course, lore is much more than just a podcast. There's the book series available in bookstores and online, and two seasons of the television adaptation on Amazon Prime.

Speaker 3 Information about all of that and more is available over at lorepodcast.com. And you can also follow this show on YouTube threads, Blue Sky, and Instagram.

Speaker 3 Just search for Lore Podcast, all one word, and then click that follow button. And when you do, say hi.
I like it when people say hi. And as always, thanks for listening.