The Witch Of Eye Next Westminster:An Evening With Margery Jourdemayne.

"There was a Beldame called the wytch of Ey
Old mother Madge her neyghbours did hir name
Which wrought wonders in countryes by heresaye
Both feendes and fayries her charmyng would obay
And dead corpsis from grave she could uprere
Suche an inchauntresse, as that tyme had no peere"

Does that make the slightest bit of sense to you? Don't worry too much if it doesn't because the story of Margery Jourdemayne, The witch of Eye next Westminster, doesn't always make a lot of sense either. She lived six hundred years ago and as the story has been passed down from generation to generation it seems the story has been updated, furnished, and corrupted depending on who's doing the telling.

I was lucky enough to be in the presence of something of an expert. Deborah Hyde is a folklorist, cultural anthropologist, and former editor of The Skeptic and so keen is she on the story of Margery Jourdemayne she occasionally uses the pseudonym Jourdemayne.

She's also, as I've witnessed several times before, a bloody good public speaker and, to be fair, she needed to be as the small side room London Skeptics in the Pub were using at The Miller (the upstairs room had been double booked) was some way short of being adequately soundproofed. So the small, but select, audience were not only treated to an evening in the company of the two Jourdemaynes but to the braying laughter of raucous pub-goers on the warmest evening of the year so far.

I'm not knocking them (it was a conducive evening for throat lubrication as I too discovered) but there were times I had to concentrate extra hard as Deborah told us that the evening's talk would show us how institutions change their behaviour over time. How, like your last boyfriend, they start off by trying to charm us and end up trying to control us.

So - was Margery Jourdemayne a 'beldame' and what even is a beldame? Well, a beldame is described as an old woman and especially one who is considered ugly and/or vicious. Jourdemayne was middle aged when she died (which probably would have been considered old in the 15th century) and accounts of her rarely focus much attention on her looks so it seems her propensity for witchcraft is the thing that ended up both getting her called a beldame and getting her executed.

"Let no one be found among you who sacrifices their son or daughter in the fire, who practices divination or sorcery, interprets omens, engages in witchcraft, or casts spells, or who is a medium or spiritist or who consults the dead. Anyone who does these things is detestable to the lord; because of these same detestable practices the lord your God will drive out those nations before you" - Deuteronomy 18:10-12

Deborah's talk came at Jourdemayne from several angles and if it was, at first, hard to get a grip on that it was at least fairly amusing. Not least when fellow attendee, and all round good sport, Professor Chris French took to the stage to play The Duchess in Shakespeare's Henry VI Part II (in which Margery Jourdemayne is mentioned). The Prof played his role with a voice that would be worthy of a Monty Python character playing a nagging wife. Or Brian's mum.

 

Further laughs were had when Deborah showed us an image of Margery in which she looked not unlike the footballer turned actor Vinnie Jones. More serious points were made when Deborah asked that if the world has weird powers then can those powers be harnessed? Or controlled?

In the post-Renaissance era, but before the era of Enlightenment and the advent of modern science, the church reigned supreme and they didn't like belief in fairies, werewolves, and witches. Either competing belief or complementary belief.

Such beliefs were considered to be idolatry and/or apostasy. Although cunning men and cunning women (practioners of folk medicine who combined 'magical' rituals with some more practical techniques) were just about tolerated by the church as part of the general landscape of the era.

The heretics, however, could do one. The word 'heresy' comes from the Greek for 'free choice' which is rather instructive in telling us what the church considered to be unacceptable. Deborah ran through a list of the gnostic heresies of the era. It was one I'd, more or less, heard her go through before but it took in the Bogomils of Bulgaria, the Waldensians and Albigensians from the south of France, and various other groups. Most of which were eradicated by the church. In some cases these have been historically categorised as genocides.

Not having an army, the church were unable to carry out the mass murders themselves so they had to wait until the secular powers were aligned with their interests. Or, and this is my take, cajole those secular powers to do their bidding for them. The church was, and remains, very powerful.

Dominic de Guzman (1170-1221), later Saint Dominic, set up the Dominicans, or Blackfriars (also nicknamed the "hounds of the lord") who had two aims. One was to teach people about the word of the lord - or more realistically to inculcate them with doctrine - and the other was to rid the world of heretics. You can probably guess what that involved.

Dominic de Guzman died before his Inquisition was set up but it seems like one, as a barmy fundamentalist man of violence - that's what gets you a sainthood, he'd have wholeheartedly approved of. As it was based on Roman law, it wasn't a case of someone having to prove you guilty. You had to prove your innocence.

This was made difficult by the fact that you were not allowed to employ an advocate, that witnesses were often anonymous, and that torture was allowed to be carried out on both the accused and the witnesses. Torturing witnesses ensured very few would recant a story that may have been made up in haste for all manner of reasons.

As the Inquisition had the power to take from you all your worldly goods, it comes as no surprise that those that most often fell foul of it were the wealthy. But in an era of royal courts (for crimes of theft, arson, and treason etc;) and church courts (slander, scandal, adultery) there were other disagreements. Like the one between Henry II and Thomas a Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury.

When Henry VI was on the throne, three centuries after Henry II, the next in line to take over - should misfortune befall the monarch - was Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester and Humphrey's second wife - a mere commoner by the name of Eleanor Cobham - had been unable to produce him a legitimate heir.

It is said they lived in a small village called Ey - roughly where Buckingham Palace is now. Margery Jourdemayne, as you have read, was known as 'the witch of Ey' (or Eye - spelling seems to have been more fluid back then) and she was no amateur witch but a professional, business like, and aspirational witch who was married to a man called William (born around 1399) whose father owned land near Acton.

It is believed Eleanor Cobham had used the services of Margery Jourdemayne in the first instance to seduce the Duke of Gloucester and, once married to him, she called on Margery again to use her powers to help her become pregnant.

But those who feared the growing power of the Duke of Gloucester became unhappy at this development and Margery was arrested and, eventually, executed by being burnt alive at the stake in Smithfield in 1441. Royal manouevres had brought about Margery Jourdemayne's premature end.

While the story of Margery Jourdemayne neither proves nor disproves she was a witch, what it does tell us is that the establishment (in this case the royals and the church) will use whatever powers they have to close down a threat, be it real or simply perceived.

That's something that's not changed as much as might like to think it has. Even if burning witches at the stake no longer happens. It was a strange evening and quite a rambling one - reflected in this blog I imagine - but a fun one. During the Q&A, and even in the talk, there were digressions that took in The Addams Family, John of Gaunt, Hussites, Joan of Arc, Bewitched (with Elizabeth Montgomery), Lollards, the rise of Islam, and the great schism between the Eastern and Western Christian churches in 1054.

I learned a lot - though I have no idea what practical use any of it will be - and I enjoyed a drink afterwards with Sid, Tim, David, Professor Chris French, and Deborah Hyde herself. Then I got the 63 bus home and fell asleep in front of the television. When I woke, thankfully I had not been turned to toad.