Who was MOTHER SHIPTON? | A real Tudor witch? | Ursula Shipton, Tudor soothsayer | @HistoryCalling

Who was MOTHER SHIPTON? | A real Tudor witch? | Ursula Shipton, Tudor soothsayer | @HistoryCalling

WITCH, SOOTHSAYER, PROVEN PROPHETESS & DAUGHTER OF THE DEVIL? This is the story of the real Mother Shipton (aka Ursula Shipton, Ursula Southill or Ursula Soothtell), a legendary Englishwoman who even Henry VIII seems to have been aware of and who has been credited with predicting everything from the fall of Thomas Wolsey to the Great Fire of London. How much of her incredible story is true though?

In this Mother Shipton documentary from History Calling (which also doubles as a case study of the history of witchcraft in England) we look at the earliest surviving sources which tell the story of Mother Shipton to try to establish if she was a real woman, or a myth invented by the Tudors and Stuarts. Supposedly born in Knaresborough in Yorkshire, Ursula Shipton reportedly came into the world in what is now known as Mother Shipton’s cave which is near a local landmark called the Dropping Well. According to the stories, she was the daughter of a 15-year-old orphan called Agnes Shipton who refused to reveal the identity of her child’s father. There are virtually no sources from her lifetime to support her existence, bar one cryptic comment from Henry VIII, but in the following century a number of salacious pamphlets appeared which said she was deformed, the daughter of Satan, had magical powers including levitation and was able to predict the future. What were Mother Shipton’s predictions though and did any of them come true? I’ll look at a few of Mother Shipton’s prophecies in this episode and we’ll ask, did Mother Shipton predict the death of Thomas Wolsey and did Mother Shipton predict the Great Fire of London? I’ll also reveal what famed diarist Samuel Pepys had to say about this supposed English witch.

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LEARN MORE

The Prophesie of Mother Shipton in the Raigne of King Henry the Eighth (1641)
https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo2/A93157.0001.001?view=toc

Richard Head, The life and death of Mother Shipton … (London, 1667)
https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/A43162.0001.001?rgn=main;view=fulltext

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