At the risk of boring everyone with yet another local tale of murder most horrid, execution and hanging in chains 'til nowt left but happy maggot memories, I've found by accident a case that was quite a cause célèbre in its day:
Ruth Osborne was the last woman ever to be killed for witchcraft in England, and Thomas Colley the last man to be executed for carrying out such a crime.
In 1745 in Gubblecut (Gubblecote), a hamlet near Tring in Herts, an elderly woman named Ruth Osborne begged some buttermilk from local farmer John Butterworth. He sent her away, angrily claiming that ‘he had not enough for his hogs’, let alone for the likes of her. Words were exchanged. A few months later some of Butterworth’s calves died and by 1751 the farm had failed and he was running the Black Horse alehouse in Gubblecote. He was also suffering regular epileptic fits and suspected he was under a curse. Thomas Colley, a chimney sweep from Tring (same as Corbett mentioned in an earlier post), and a regular at the Black Horse, suggested that Butterworth consult a "cunning-woman" from Northhampton to get to the truth of the matter. Without naming any names, she identified ‘two of his neighbours, a man and a woman’ as the source of his bewitchment. This verdict was sufficient confirmation for Butterworth and his patrons to conclude that Ruth Osborne was a witch and her husband John a Vizard: further damning evidence was that they were both old and poor and probably Jacobites. This led Thomas Colley to agitate for the Osbornes to be tried by means of witch-swimming (ducking).
The last official execution of a witch in England occurred in 1682, the last conviction for witchcraft took place in 1712, and the law against witchcraft was eventually repealed in 1736. Although there were still some sympathetic local Magistrates , righteous retribution would have to be done obliquely. The Town criers in the nearby towns of Winslow, Leighton Buzzard, and Hemel Hempstead were given four pence and a sheet to give notice "on Monday next [22 April 1751] a man and a woman are to be publickly ducked at Tring, in this county, for their wicked crimes".
Upon learning the identity of the intended pair, Matthew Barton, Tring’s Overseer of the Poor, (who knew the Osbornes), lodged them in the town’s workhouse for protection. Fearing their location was compromised, the Workhouse Master Jonathan Tomkins, ‘believing both the man and his wife to be very honest people’, took the Osbornes to the vestry of the church of St Peter and St Paul in Tring (the one with the stupid waterspout), presumably hoping the old concept of sanctuary might save them from harm. It did not.
The appointed day of 22 April came, and a mob, some
five thousand strong
, advanced on the workhouse. Having broken into the building (ie tore the wall down), ransacked it and found no sign of the Osbornes, they threatened to burn it (and Tring) to the ground unless the couple were handed over. Tomkins reluctantly gave in and the Osbornes were marched from the church in Tring back to Gubblecote. It’s a distance of about three miles, down Tring’s High Street, along what are now Brook Street and Wingrave Road, past farmland and cottages and they were held at the Black Horse. With no suitable ducking pond in the vicinity (Tring reservoirs not yet constructed), they were taken later that afternoon to Marlston-Mere (the pond at Marlston-Green) , between Gubblecote and the next village, Long Marston.
Here, under Thomas Colley’s supervision, the couple were partially stripped and had their thumbs tied to their toes, cross-wise. They were wrapped in sheets and each was tied with a rope before being dragged through the pond. The procedure of witch-swimming was simple: a Priest blesses an expanse of water and if the suspect floated they were a witch (ie the water rejected them); If they sank and drowned, then there was some comfort in knowing that they were innocent. Initially Ruth sank because the water was less than 3 feet deep so she was turned over several times and pushed under the water with a stick. Both she and her husband were dragged several times in turn, but having ‘been suffocated with Water and Mud’, Ruth was unconscious by the time she was pulled back to the bank. She was brought to the Half Moon pub with her husband in another nearby village, Wilstone, where she was laid out on a bed by the landlord. Meanwhile outside the pub Colley was collecting money from the mob ‘for the enjoyment the ducking had provided’. Ruth died shortly after but her husband John survived .
In the weeks afterwards, the news of the events at Tring and Gubbelcote eventually making the London newspapers. Thomas Colley was one of a small number of the mob to be arrested (most fled across County lines), drawing most of the law’s attention as the ringleader and as the man who had collected money from the crowd afterwards. He was tried for murder at Hertford assizes on 30 July 1751, was found guilty and condemned to hang. The sentence was carried out on 24 August 1751 at Gubblecote Cross, the crossroads of the hamlet, with Colley and the hangman escorted by 108 men belonging to the Regiment of Horse Blue in case of crowd trouble. His corpse was gibbeted (hung in chains) there for months afterwards until it fell apart.
Crowds had gathered but kept themselves back - according to one witness: 'they would not be spectators of his death; yet many thousands stood at a distance to see him go, grumbling and muttering that it was a hard case to hang a man for destroying an old wicked woman that had done so much harm by her witchcraft.'
There are several versions of the story (look up Ruth Osborne) with inevitable embellishment and old place name changes but I've largely stuck to a reprint of the Court proceedings (ECCO Law and Reference : Thomas Colley)
There is almost predictably a ghost story associated with Thomas Colley (but none with Osborne), and it was said that a large black dog came to haunt the lanes around Gubbecote. Tring Brewery brew a "strong ruby ale" called "Colley's Dog"
A project for after lockdown is lifted.