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Mother Shipton

The Wednesday following Whitsunday, for reasons unknown to your almanackist, is said by some to go by this name. Mother Shipton, whose real name was the rather un-English-sounding Ursula Sontheil, was a celebrated soothsayer in Cambridge, England and the wife of Toby Shipton, a carpenter. To some, she is also the patron saint of women working in laundries. 

Ursula was born in a cave at Knaresborough, Yorkshire (where Guy Fawkes once lived) in 1488, in the reign of Henry VII of England just fifteen years before Nostradamus, in an era in which prophetic utterances were widely sought – and just as readily condemned.

According to Yorkshire legend (and that is probably the true origin of her ‘life’), Ursula Sontheil’s birth was the result of a liaison between her mother and Satan. Perhaps as would be expected from such a union, she was a stunning but not attractive child, at least according to one antique biographer: 

Very morose and big boned, her head very long, with very great goggling, but sharp and fiery Eyes, her Nose of an incredible and unproportionate length, having in it many crooks and turnings, adorned with many strange Pimples of diverse colours, as Red, Blew, [sic] and mixt, which like Vapours of Brimstone gave such a lustre of the Night, that one of them confessed several times in my hearing, that her nurse needed no other light to assist her in the performance of her duty.

She is generally supposed to have sold her soul to the Devil for the power of foretelling future events. Although during her lifetime she was looked upon as a witch, she escaped the common fate of 16^th-Century witches, and died peacefully in her bed at the age of 73, near Clifton in Yorkshire. A headstone is said to have been erected to her memory in the church-yard of that place, with the following epitaph:

Here lies she who never lied; 
Whose skill often has been tried: 
Her prophecies shall still survive, 
And ever keep her name alive.

Despite Mother Shipton’s popularity in some quarters, the prophecies of the Knaresborough seer were most likely forgeries of the 17^th and 19^th centuries, and certainly some proved completely erroneous. One prophecy that can go in the ‘whoops!’ file proclaimed:

The world to an end shall come
In eighteen hundred and eighty one.

Not all her prophecies were duds, however, and some proved uncannily accurate (if they were not fabricated). Take, for example:

Carriages without horses shall go.
And accidents fill the world with woe.
Around the world thoughts shall fly
In the twinkling of an eye ...
Under water men shall walk,
Shall ride, shall sleep, shall talk;
In the air men shall be seen
In white, in black, and in green.
Iron in the water shall float
As easy as a wooden boat.

It is said she predicted the Great Fire of London in 1666, the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, and, like some others in history with a knack for seeing their own demise, she even foretold her own death which occurred in 1561.

Old and young, rich and poor, especially young women, visited the old ‘witch’ to know the future. Among the seekers was the Abbot of Beverley, to whom she foretold the suppression of the monasteries by Henry VIII and his marriage with Anne Boleyn; she told him of the burning of heretics that came to pass in Smithfield, and the execution of Mary Queen of Scots. She also foretold the accession of James I, adding that, with him, 

From the cold north, 
Every evil should come forth.

On a subsequent visit from the cleric she issued another prophecy:

The time shall come when seas of blood 
Shall mingle with a greater flood. 
Great noise there shall be heard –
Great shouts and cries, 
And seas shall thunder louder than the skies; 
Then shall three lions fight with three,
And bring Joy to a people, honour to a king. 
That fiery year as soon as o’er, 
Peace shall then be as before; 
Plenty shall everywhere be found, 
And men with swords shall plough the ground.

She predicted that Cardinal Wolsey would see York, yet never go there. This in fact happened in 1530 when Wolsey was travelling to that city. Just when he climbed to the top of a tower and saw York in the distance, he received a message from King Henry VIII commanding his to return to London. The cardinal died on the way home, and thus Mother Shipton's prophecy was fulfilled.

It must be borne in mind that we know of no edition of Mother Shipton’s prophecies dated before 1641, many decades after the deaths of both the prophetess and the churchman, and the most important editions of her work were published when she’d been 133 years in the ground. These were edited in 1684 by Richard Head, from whom we get the first biographical information about her.

Her clairvoyant verses about future technology, and about the failed global apocalypse predicted for 1881, first appeared in print three centuries after her death, in the 1862 edition. Shipton fanciers will not be delighted to learn that some claim that Charles Hindley, the editor of that edition, later admitted that he was the author of those prognostications.

Mother Shipton probably shares with the Oracle of Delphi the title of the most famous prophetess of all time. In England her fame as a seer is only exceeded by that of Merlin, King Arthur’s magician, and every year more than 100,000 people visit her cave at Knaresborough.

Mother Shipton (1488-1561) is a traditional English character with a reputation as a prophet. Among the most startling predictions attributed to her is a short poem which predicts that

Alas, this is a forgery written in 1862. In the 20th century an expanded version of this was circulated (revised to exclude the 1881 apocalypse, and include world wars I and II). Today, variations of this are uncritically posted at various websites, just as bogus Nostradamus prophecies circulated in the wake of the events of 9/11/2001.

This essay about Mother Shipton was written in the year 1881; it gives the text of the earliest Mother Shipton prophecies, which primarily concern events from the reign of Henry the Eighth. As it turns out, these were also spawned after the fact, penned by a notorious plagarist. The three earliest texts mention nothing about horseless carriages, submarines, the telegraph, iron boats, let alone predict the year the world will end.

So if there is any kernel of truth to the Mother Shipton legend, it can't be determined from any verifiable documentation. Mother Shipton belongs in the same category as Robin Hood or King Arthur: a legendary figure, possibly based on a real person, whose narrative has been enhanced by time and retelling.

Source

Title Page
Chapter First
Chapter Second
Chapter Third
Chapter Fourth
Chapter Fifth
Chapter Sixth

Index of articles on folklore and other topics

Alchemists in the Almanac:  Cornelius Agrippa  Roger Bacon  Count Cagliostro  John Dee
Edward Kelley  Robert Fludd  Isaac Newton  Paracelsus  James Price  Tycho Brahe  Raymond Lulle   Elias Ashmole

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