On the last day of October, Halloween is celebrated in Britain and many other countries, a buffoonery rooted in the Church's All Saints Day celebrations. This time of the year has long been associated with magic, witchcraft, ghosts and witches.
We decided to recall the most famous witches in London, and quite real ones.
The Hanged Witch Who Inspired the Play
Tourists who are overstocked at the generous sales of the famous Oxford Street, perhaps, do not realize that more recently, at the beginning of this street, at the very edge of Hyde Park, there was a three-legged gallows.
She stood there for more than six hundred years, and was named after the local village - Tyburn. There, in front of the esteemed public, they hanged many thieves, highway robbers and, of course, witches.
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On April 19, 1621, Elizabeth Sawyer was executed there, or, as she was called, the Witch of Edmonton, about whom evil tongues were told that Satan himself, in the form of a black dog named Tom, put her at his service.
Probably, the spectacle of the hanging itself was not enough for Londoners, because in the same year a group of authors, inspired by Elizabeth's story, wrote a play, which was then staged.
Moreover, it has remained in the repertoire of British theaters since Elizabethan times. The last time in 2014 it was directed by the Royal Shakespeare Company with the incomparable Eileen Atkins in the title role.
The witch who refused to make a reservation
Joan Peterson, or "the witch from Wapping," lived in peace, treated with herbs, helped women fight migraines, until one rainy day she was at the center of the intrigue associated with inherited money.
It all began with the death in 1652 of 80-year-old Lady Powell, who bequeathed all her money to one of her relatives - Anne Livingston - leaving everyone else behind. These "others" accused Anne Livingston of witchcraft, but since there was no real evidence of this, they decided to incite Joan Peterson to testify - after all, her aunt was versed in plants and was engaged in healing - which means that this is not clean.
And there were fables about her: how she turned into a black cat, how she scared the baker to death, how she "let slip" about her atrocities in the red squirrel - and all so that she slandered Ann Livingston in witchcraft.
It is not known for certain whether Joan talked to the squirrels (which in itself did not yet constitute a crime), but what can be said for sure is that she turned out to be a tough nut to crack, refusing to cooperate with the investigation, which ultimately led her to a sad end on Tyburn.
Witch in red cap
It was in the second half of the 17th century. Born in Kentish Town, London, in the family of a bricklayer, Ginny Bingham, by the age of 16, had already given birth to a child from a local rogue, who was soon sent “to the West,” that is, to the infamous Tyburn tree.
Then Ginny remarried, but soon husband number 2 disappeared without a trace, and Ginny got married for the third time - with a certain Mr. Pitcher, who after some time burned out in the home stove. Ginny was accused of murder, but it turned out that husband number 3 used to get into the oven and hide there from the endless reproaches of the annoying wife.
Either Ginny's oven was huge, or Pitcher was modest in size, but the story was considered believable, Ginny was acquitted, and she again married her husband number 4, who was not slow to go to her forefathers soon, providing the inconsolable widow with a fortune for the rest of her days.
Suspicions fell on Ginny again, they began to talk about her witchcraft inclinations, but she once again blabbed off. She no longer sought happiness with men, but she loved to sit and swear on the porch of her house in a red cap and a black shawl on her shoulders with a devoted cat curled up at her feet.
The neighbors nicknamed her "Mother Little Red Riding Hood"; someone threw insults in her face, and someone came to get drugs for various ailments. Ginny and her cat died on the same day as a result of poisoning, and whether it was the result of her own oversight or was injected by a "well-wisher" - the story is silent about this.
Today, on the site of her cottage, there is a world-famous pub and rock-playground, World's End, in the hippie area of Camden, which keeps the history of Mama Little Red Riding Hood.
Sorcerer from Gatwick
The 17th century was generous with accusations of witchcraft and black magic. They were put forward mainly against women, although occasionally men were unlucky in this respect. One of them was the English botanist, physician, astrologer Nicholas Culperer, who ran a pharmacy in the Shoreditch area.
He was an enlightened person, and not only for his own, but for any other time, who believed that drugs and medicines are national property, and not a trade secret, and that doctors and pharmacists simply want to keep power in their hands, using incomprehensible Latin and asking for huge treatment fees.
In 1643, after the outbreak of the English Civil War, through the efforts of a certain Sarah Linge, he was accused of devilry, since one of the drugs prescribed by him allegedly led to the fact that she began to waste away.
He was removed from medicine and, in frustration, went to war in the same year, where he began to conduct operations on the wounded.
He returned from the war and died at his home, in London, from tuberculosis at the age of 37, and his book The Complete Herbal, written in 1653, is still being reprinted.
What's more, when arriving or departing from London, you can have a snack and a drink at Gatwick Airport at a restaurant named after him - The Nicholas Culperer Pub and Dining, as the talented healer was born two miles from where this London airport is now located.
The Wiccan that drove the Nazis away from Britain
Another man on our list is Gerald Gardner, a lover of anthropology and archeology, who in the first half of the 20th century had the idea to revive the ancient folk witchcraft traditions - not only his own, English, but also other peoples' rich traditions.
He traveled a lot - and this is how the neo-pagan doctrine of Wicca magic was born (perhaps formed from the Old English word witch - witch).
In the 1950s, he was the director and chief sorcerer of the Isle of Man Museum of Magic and Witchcraft, which later spun off into another museum in Cornwall.
What, in fact, was the practical magic of Gardner is not very clear, but one of his rituals "the father of Wicca" described in some detail.
In 1940, in the New Forest area, Gardner conducted "Operation Cone of Power" to ward off Hitler's forces from invading Britain.
The "cone" meant a beam of magical energy, which, according to Gardner, was lifted from the ground and sent to Berlin with a slander: "You cannot swim across the sea, you cannot swim across the sea, you will not come, you will not come." In the end, the Germans did not swim across and did not come.
The last convicted witch
In 1736, the Kingdom of Britain passed the Witchcraft Act, which forbade anyone to declare or practice any magical powers. The last woman to be convicted under this law at the Old Bailey in 1944 was Scottish medium Helen Duncan.
It is known that in 1941 she held a seance in a church in Portsmouth (a strategically important port city in those years), during which the spirit of the deceased sailor allegedly told her about the death of the British battleship Barnham. It was indeed sunk in the same year by a German submarine, but this fact was not known to the general public.
The naval department became interested in Duncan's activities. The soothsayer was arrested during another seance in 1944 and charged with treason; she was sentenced to 9 months in prison.
Considering that at that moment World War II was underway, the government tried to hush up this case, but they say that Winston Churchill called it antediluvian buffoonery.
Witchcraft Croydon today
Wicca, launched by Gardner and later taken up by the hippies in the 1960s, has made its way into the 21st century.
According to a 2011 census by the UK's National Statistics Office, a fair number of residents in the London borough of Croydon listed Wicca as their religion.
But why in Croydon?
Like everything related to witchcraft, this question does not have an exact answer, but one of the versions says that this could have been influenced by the annual holding of the world's largest international festival of magic and witchcraft Witchfest there.
True, he recently moved to Brighton, but London is difficult to deprive him of magic: for some time now, the Victor Wind Museum of Miracles, Fine Arts and Natural History has opened in the Hackney area, and it is there that a special exhibition from the Cornish Museum of Magic and Witchcraft will arrive on November 3 …
Many interesting items are promised, including a witch's mirror.
