Well, if it’s 17 February, it must be… yes, of course: the anniversary of the day in 1596 when Thomas Darling was struck down by a witch’s curse because he had farted near her… according to The most wonderfull and true storie of a certain witch, Alse Gooderidge of Stapenhill, anyway.
You might guess from a look at that cover and the date of its publication that this source is more lurid than authoritative, so let’s turn to Philip Almond’s 2004 work Demonic Possession and Exorcism in Early Modern England for the Cambridge University Press instead. This tells us that young Thomas — somewhere in the region of 13 at the time — was struck down by a series of fits “which were to continue for the next five months”.
Earlier, in some woods, he’d come across an old woman in a grey gown with three warts on her face, and “as he passed by her, he passed wind”. Her response was immediate, so although the history does not specify whether it was sound or smell she objected to, we can assume it was an audible parp. Either way, object she did, and uttered some fateful and powerful words:
Gyp with a mischief, and fart with a bell.
I will go to Heaven, and you will go to Hell
This was the story which emerged later, anyway. At first, the fits were just something nasty which had happened after Thomas had come back from hunting hare with his uncle. They were accompanied by a tendency to point and say
Look where green angels stand in the window
…and to complain that he was being bothered by a green cat. He may also have lost the use of his legs at times.
Marion Gibson’s 2015 study, Possession, Puritanism and Print, says his aunt, Elizabeth, took a sample of his urine to a doctor, who could find nothing wrong with it. Elizabeth suspected epilepsy, and whether a 17th century physician could have diagnosed such a disorder from a sniff or sip of unadulterated child’s piss, who at this distance of time can say? Either way, Elizabeth had more sense than the quack, who — unable to offer any other explanation — suggested witchcraft.
Elizabeth remained sensible, but unfortunately brought in a local ‘cunning man’, Jesse Bee, who said it was definitely The Dark Magicks, and read St John’s Gospel to the boy (and took the notes which became The most wonderfull and true storie…).
It’s difficult to tell now, of course, but at some stage — and presumably prompted by the ‘diagnosis’ — Thomas ‘remembered’ the warty old woman, and a suitable suspect was identified. It must be 60-year-old Alice Gooderidge, who (back to Almond)
like her mother Elizabeth Wright, had long been suspected of devilish practices. She was arrested and confined in Derby gaol on 14 April.
A report of the torments and deliverance of Thomas Darling, a boy of thirteen years of age, that was possessed by Satan, at Burton on Trent, reprinted in Philip Almond’s book, says she and her mother were arrested, and stripped. Alice’s mother was found to have
behind her right shoulder a thing much like the udder of an ewe that gives suck with two teats like two great warts, the one behind under her armpit, the other a hand’s length off towards the top of her shoulder
… while on Alice, they
found on her belly, a hole of the bigness of two pence, fresh and bloody, as though some great wart had been cut from the place
Whether it was these ‘witch’s marks’ that convinced her to ‘confess’, or she was put under some other duress, we don’t know, but on 2 May, she said it was a fair cop, guv, and that the boy had called her the witch of Stapenhill, to which she’d replied:
Every boy does call me witch,
but did I ever make your arse to itch?
…which, I think we can all agree, adds some splendid colour to the story. The next day, she said she’d
sent the devil in the form of a little red and white dog which she called Minny to torment the boy.
After that, we don’t know much about what befell her. The pamphlet just says she died and
Had she lived, she would have been executed.
Whatever happened, the ‘possession’ outlived her. Thomas had visitors on 3 May: Puritan ministers who prayed for his soul. On 27 May, one of them returned to pray for the presumably still afflicted boy. He recommended prayer and fasting, and the day after that Thomas apparently vomited up some devils.
The boy’s ordeal finally ended on 8 June, when he was attacked again by Satan, but stoutly resisted. God “bound Satan fast in a chain”, the account says, and the young man was cured.
Weirdly, though, he didn’t stop troubling the history books. We next encounter him in 1599, when he must be around 16, and preacher John Darrell — the one who’d suggested prayer and fasting — was tried for fraud, and Thomas and Jesse Bee testified against him.
The same year, Thomas confessed (under interrogation by Samuel Harsnett, chaplain to the Bishop of London) that he’d made up the evidence against Alice, and then wrote to the Bishop to say: actually, no he hadn’t. He’d made the false confession under duress.
And then, in February 1603, in news which might have made Alice Gooderidge mutter something about ‘karma’, had she known the word:
he was sentenced to lose his ears for having libelled the Vice Chancellor of the University of Oxford, John Howson, a vehement opponent of Puritanism.
At that point, if the age in the records is correct, he would have been 20. All in all, something of an eventful young life.
