John Chapman’s New Year’s Gift: documenting the Westerham landslip, 1596.

John Chapman presented his pamphlet A most true report of the myraculous moving and sinking of a plot of ground, about nine acres, at Westram in Kent, which began the 18. of December, and so continued till the 29. of the same moneth to Margaret, Baroness Dacre as a New Year’s gift early in 1596 (she was the sister of the Gregory Fiennes, Baron Dacre, who had been executed for murder in 1594).

It’s an interesting pamphlet, carefully written and unsensationalised, about a creeping landslip near Crockham Hill, in Kent. 27 male witnesses verify the account – the local JP, the vicar, a physician, 12 gentlemen and 12 yeomen. As far as I can pick up from local village websites, there does not seem to be any current local knowledge of this historical happening in their pretty landscape.

Chapman supplies everything we need to understand what happened, geomorphologically. We are in 1596, and Shakespeareans all remember how at that time

the winds, piping to us in vain,

As in revenge, have suck'd up from the sea

Contagious fogs; which, falling in the land,

Hath every pelting river made so proud

That they have overborne their continents.

The ox hath therefore stretch'd his yoke in vain,

The ploughman lost his sweat, and the green corn

Hath rotted ere his youth attain'd a beard;

The fold stands empty in the drowned field,

And crows are fatted with the murrion flock;

The nine men's morris is fill'd up with mud,

And the quaint mazes in the wanton green,

For lack of tread, are undistinguishable.

Chapman confirms this at local level, writing finally of how by “the great aboundance of water, and continuall rayne which have fallen so many months together of late, sundry great bowrnes (bournes), and violent streames have broken out in many places of this land, and at the least seaven such within xii miles of this place every way, the least whereof is able to drive a corne Mill”.

That’s a lot of ground water. England was saturated, and if you look at this map, my best guess as to where the landslip occurred, you can see (switch to the OS map) the spring line beneath the higher ground to the north.

http://www.multimap.com/s/PE4ZqMSR

Chapman makes, for his own reasons, which I will come to, a big point about how the rain water did not increase the flow of two ‘gozelles’ in the area that slipped (for ‘gozelle’, the OED cites 1695 KENNETT …a gutter is in Lincolnshire a Gool, in Kent a Guzzle, in Wiltshire a Gushill, and Gooshill”). I imagine some feature of the local geology saturated the top soils, which maybe traveled on a slippery clay layer below. As far as I can judge by my geological map, Crockham Hill seems to be precisely at the northern boundary of the Weald Clay, which is succeeded by the overlying Lower Greensand. I think that would be the impermeable layer which prompts the spring line upslope.

This Wikipedia page has a nice animated gif of a similar slump landslide over several days:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landslide . Though that’s on a far steeper slope, with no saturation. As Chapman writes, vividly, the two ‘closes’ or fields that slipped and merged into one further downslope “were Adant (sic? Not in OED), and upon the shoot (= rising?) of an hill, but not so much that a bowle being cast up against the hill might easily have layen and settled without tumbling backe againe perforce”. The ground was not steep enough for a sudden slide, but just gave way in a gradual slumping.

On the 18^th of December, the whole area (nine acres!) started to move, leaving a scar at the point of detachment of six and a half feet. On the 19^th December, there was thirteen feet more of slippage, then eighty feet on the 20^th. People stood on it, experiencing how it managed “to move, slide, and shoote southward, not with any suddaine shot, but creeping by little, and little, so as the motion and stirring thereof was not discerned nor perceived, by them that were presently standing upon it, but onlie by the sundrie effects that followed, as the cracking of the roots of trees, the brushing of boughs, the noise of the hedge-wood breaking, the gaping of the ground, and the riving of the earth asunder”.

The slide was measured at one stage as fourteen “handfulls by measure in one houre and a halfe” – 56 inches, nearly 6 feet. After eleven days of movement, Chapman outdoes the Beatles’ count of ‘10,000 holes in Blackburn Lancashire’ with a conscientious tally of “eleven thousand furrows, riffes, cracks, and clefts in diverse places here and there”. The nine acres of ground had moved by eight perches or more (a perch is that useful old English measure, of sixteen and a half feet, or coincidentally close to five metres). He describes the way the upslope material ended up on top of the lower lying ground: “the hinder ground coming faster forward … then the former ground did give way unto it, caused it to swell uppe in rounde hillocks like unto graves, the green turf remaining still whole and unbroken above”. In other places, the higher material had gone like a broken wave over the lower.

Everything went with the topsoil layers: a hedge that ran across the slip was displaced southward by seven perches, its trees either still upright and apparently growing, or overthrown. There had been “two standing water pools” in the upper of the two fields. These also moved “four perches south, with their tuftes of Alders still standing upon them, but withal, they are mounted up aloft, and become hilles, standing yet to be seen with their sedge, flags, and black mudde upon the toppe of them still”. In their place, dramatically, a “great hole made by sinking of the earth, to the depth of 30 feet” opened further down the slide.

This gentle slumping after a very rainy year hardly seems unaccountable. But what is interesting (from the early modern mindset side of things) is the way that Chapman sets out to interpret all this: as he saw no increase in the runoff through the ‘gozelles’ (the flow in each could be accommodated by an auger hole of one and a half inches, he says, and it didn’t rise at all during all the deluge), the landslip, he firmly decides, “cannot be imputed to the aboundance of water enforcing it as the cause thereof”.

The great Crockham Hill landslip is in fact for him a tremendous act of God, through which the deity gives ‘unto our eies a sencible testimony of his most certaine being”. We do not have to travel far, Chapman says, to have stirred up in ourselves “a strong and fruitfull impression of the great deitie”. Fifteen miles south of London will do.

This local and rather quietly impressive event is a manifestation of the God who “hurleth downe hilles … and exalteth the lowe vallies”. “Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low” said Isaiah, and here it is locally, as Chapman triumphantly, and piously, concludes his description: “By means of all which confusion, it is come to passe, that where the highest hilles were heretofore, there the deepest dales be now. And where the lowest dales were then, now the ground lyeth mounted heist”.

As the creeping earth was moving so slowly, people had plenty of time to get aboard for the ride. Chapman says that 4,000 people have visited the site, from London and elsewhere: “to whom it hath seemed to be a very strange and fearefull sight, giving occasion unto some of them, to thinke upon that great opening of the earth that shalbe in the latter day when she shall yeelde up her dead, that be in her to come to the resurrection”. He makes their experience one of supernatural, not natural, wonder.

So it was, in Chapman’s eyes, as though the visitors were on a slow ride in a divine theme park. He remarked at the start of his pamphlet that God by his “wonderfull and unsearchable providence … doth from time to time … alter and change” the world He created. Here was the local instance, though it is rather evident that Chapman would have liked it rather better if God could have contrived to swallow up a few atheists, those who ‘in their own hearts … saye plainely … that there is no God at all’. He has an excellent Bible example in mind. Chapman says “this damnable impiety deserves to be punished”: either with the fires that fell on Sodom, “or the sudden gaping of the ground that swallowed up Corah.”

He refers to Korah, in Numbers 16, who complained to Moses about having left behind one land flowing with milk and honey, and not having arrived in the promised land: Moses refutes these objections to his handling of the wilderness years, remarking to the Israelites: “But if the LORD make a new thing, and the earth open her mouth, and swallow them up, with all that appertain unto them, and they go down quick into the pit; then ye shall understand that these men have provoked the LORD. And it came to pass, as he had made an end of speaking all these words, that the ground clave asunder that was under them: And the earth opened her mouth, and swallowed them up, and their houses, and all the men that appertained unto Korah, and all their goods. They, and all that appertained to them, went down alive into the pit, and the earth closed upon them: and they perished from among the congregation.”

Chapman emerges well from the pamphlet. I think he has to be the ‘yeoman’ of the same name listed among the witnesses. He is a credit to local education: meticulous, observant, and capable of writing very vividly. But this bit of local slope instability cannot for him be accounted for by secondary causes: the primary cause is the important one. God is reshaping his world. Or rather, bible texts fill out Chapman’s response to what he witnessed: it’s Isaiah, The Book of Numbers, and what the earth will look like when the dead awaken. His religious beliefs give meaning to what he saw.

The martyr in the fool's coat: Edmund Geninges, 1592

I approach once again my annual lecture on the religious poetry of John Donne. I will talk, again, about the third satire, and its difficult admonitions to seek true religion, while doubting wisely, dismissal of the available choices, and (to crown all this), earnest insistence that you must hold the truth you find at any cost, even if it means your death.

However eager to encourage others to martyrdom, Donne chose to opt out of it himself, while trying to establish that in his special cases like his own, ‘not to be martyrs is a martyrdom’.

A Catholic martyr local in time and place to the young Donne is Edmund Geninges, whose avid and successful pursuit of martyrdom is told in his brother’s biography, The life and death of Mr. Edmund Geninges priest, crowned with martyrdome at London, the 10. day of Nouember, in the yeare M.D.XCI.

Whoever drew up the title page had read carelessly: Geninges died on Friday 10^th December 1592. The print house over in St Omers also over-inked the woodcuts provided for the volume, at least in the EEBO copy – you can see squeezes of ink forced off the side of the prints. But the resultant crepuscular images are very appropriate for a story of darkness on the earth, and for a young man imprisoned in his last days by Topcliffe in the notorious ‘Little Ease’ cell in Newgate, in complete darkness with no room either to stand or lie down. (My composite image above is of his arrest and trial, and then his execution.)

Jennings was born in 1566 in Staffordshire. His biographer leaves such details unspecified, for obvious reasons, though the family were protestants. His brother-biographer tells instead of Edmund being born with a tooth, to the discomfort of his wet nurse, and the prophecy made about this by a venerable Catholic doctor of divinity who happens to be in the house, to the effect that the tooth meant that the boy would travel, and return to bring comfort to all. There’s even a tenebrous woodcut of the miraculous infant Edmund biting the wet nurse’s nipple.

Jennings’ mother was a widow, and when he was 16, she allowed him to enter the service of a gentleman who was looking for a ‘handsome youth’ to act as his page. This man (Richard Sherwood) was a Catholic, travelling in England to perform secular, quasi-legal services for Catholics, before escaping danger abroad. Without a father of his own, Jennings was immensely susceptible to his master’s influence, and when Sherwood entered a religious order, Jennings begged him to sponsor him in training for the priesthood.

Jennings had his way, as he did throughout his lonely and self-destructive course. He studied so intensely at Rheims, especially in his ‘spiritual exercises’, that he became ill. An attempt to send him back to England without a priesthood, for the sake of his health, foundered when Jennings prayed his way back to better vigour while waiting for passage.

Poor Jennings was so devout, and so ill, that he was allowed special papal dispensation to become a priest at just 23. Without his priesthood, he might miss out on his martyrdom, and he was clearly ill enough that they didn’t want to disappoint by condemning him to a merely natural death. At the thought of his status and what it meant, Jennings succumbed to a shaking that lasted till his death, and duly set off to England, ‘like a sheep to the slaughter’, as his brother-biographer rather unguardedly writes.

After being attacked by local pirates off Scarborough, Jennings landed, like Count Dracula would, under a cliff near Whitby. He has a companion priest with him, they part to make converts, with Jennings taking the long road to London, and to death.

He has learned that all his family are dead except a brother, who is in London. Jennings knew him only as a blonde haired child, eight or nine years before. After a long search in London has almost been despaired of, Jennings sees a dark haired youth in a brown cloak, thinks nothing of it, goes to pray, is suddenly convinced it was his brother, and miraculously runs into the same youth later on that same day, and it is his brother. John Jennings, talking to a man who has introduced himself as ‘Ironmonger’, and who opportunely discovers that the two of them are relatives, repudiates his brother as a ‘notable papist’. ‘Ironmonger’ confesses that he really is that Catholic convert brother, but sees that he cannot do anything with John, who (retrospectively narrating this after his own eventual conversion) says that Edmund went his way to convert souls, while his brother went off to ‘meditate how to corrupt his own’.

Did Protestant John Jennings betray his brother? He does not say so. But Edmund was swiftly caught, serving mass at the house of Swithin Wells in Holborne. Probably the house was already watched: the awful Richard Topcliffe arrived, and caught two priests, and a congregation of ten. Topcliffe was pushed down the stairs, breaking his head. Violently intemperate though he was, he seems to have allowed the mass to finish rather than start another struggle. His ghastly triumph comes when “They carried them all to Newgate, and were not ashamed to leade M. Geninges through the streetes in his Priestly vestements, for greater shew of this theyr insulting triumph, and the more to make him a laughing stocke to all the beholders, who are commonly ready (as they well knew) exceedingly to scoffe at such an vnwonted spectacle”.

Swithin Wells was not actually in his house at the time of the arrests, but courageously tried to get his wife released, talking himself into trouble as he did so. This has to be authentic dialogue: the ‘Justice began to storme when he found him so resolute, and therefore told him in playne termes, he came time inough to tast of the sauce, although he were ignorant how the meate savoured’.

Imprisoned, Jennings was seen as young enough to be broken. They use ridicule:

“especially M. Geninges was scorned and reviled, because he was a very young man, and had angred them with disputes. Nay the more to make him a scoffe to the people, they vested him agayne, not with his priestly garments, but (almost as King Herod and Pilates souldiours did our Sauiour) with a ridiculous fooles coate, which they found in M. Welles his house, and when they had so altered him, they laughing told him, he was more fit in that attire to be presented to the Queene for a jester, then to a Nune for a Confessor.”

Jennings is offered mercy in return for renunciation, but he says that he cannot accept the Queen as spiritual head of the church. He is kept in ‘little Ease’ until his execution. The others die at Tyburn, Jennings and Wells suffer in Gray’s Inn Fields opposite Wells’ house. The death is brutal, and best told in the author’s own words. Jennings confesses his priesthood, and says he would follow the same course at the hazard of a thousand lives:

“Which wordes M. Topliffe hearing, being much troubled therwith, scarce giving him leave to say a Pater noster, bad the Hangman turne the ladder, which in an instant being done, presently he caused him to be cut downe, the Blessed martyr in the sight of all the beholders, being yet able to stand on his feete, & casting his eyes towardes heaven, his senses were very little astonished, in so much that the Hangman was forced to trippe up his heeles from under him to make him fall on the blocke. And being dismembred, through very payne, in the hearing of many, with a lowde voyce he uttered these wordes, Oh it smartes; which M. Welles hearing, replyed thus: Alas sweete soule thy payne is great indeed, but almost past, pray for me now most holy Saynt, that mine may come. He being ripped up, & his bowelles cast into the fire, if credit may be given to hundreds of People standing by, and to the Hangman himselfe, the blessed Martyr uttered (his hart being in the executioners hand) these wordes, Sancte Gregori ora pro me, which the Hangman hearing, with open mouth swore this damnable oath; Gods woundes, See his hart is in my hand, and yet Gregory in his mouth; ô egregious Papist! Thus the afflicted Martyr even to the last of his torments cryed for the ayde & succour of Saynts, and especially of S. Gregory his deuoted patron, and our countries Apostle that by his intercession he might passe the sharpnes of that torment.

And thus with barbarons cruelty our thrice happy Martyr finished the course of his mortall life, and purchased no doubt a crowne of immortality in the glorious Court of heaven.”

After this ghastly scene, the quarters of the body are loaded onto the hurdle to be taken back to Newgate for boiling (before being placed on London Bridge, or wherever the authorities thought to put these mementos of their justice). The crowd follows, and Jennings’ first miracle occurs: “Amongst the rest there was a Virgin who had wholy dedicated her selfe to the service of God”. She is seeking a relic, and the text marginally annotates what happens with ‘A Miracle’:

“And comming to the prison, the people flocked togeather to behold the fresh bleeding quarters, according to theyr wonted custome, when any such thing is to be seene, before they were carryed vp to boyling, desiring the executioner to shew them peece by peece, that so their curiosity might give censure (as they said) whether he was fat or leane, blacke or fayre. To satisfie theyr request, by chance Bull the Hangman tooke up one of his forequarters by the arme, which when he had shewed to the People, he contemptuosly flung it downe into the baskett agayne wherin it lay, and tooke up the head that they might see his face. And (as God would have it) both arme and hand of the foresayd quarter hung out over the sides of the basket, which the said virgin espying, drew neare to touch it, and approaching warily with feare lest any should take notice of her so doing, having a determination and vehement desire to touch his holy & annoynted thumbe which then appeared next her, if it were possible; and because it was a part of his hand which so often had elevated the immaculate body of our B. Saviour Jesus Christ, she purposed not to leave it unhandled for her last farewell.

This her determination and purpose she presently performed, and taking the thumbe in her hand, by the instinct of Almighty God, she gave it a little pull, only to shew her loue and desire of having it. The sequele was miraculous: for behold she not imagining any such matter would have followed, by the divine power, the thumbe was instantly loosed from his hand, and being separated she carryed it away safely both flesh, skinne, and bone without sight of any, to her great joy and admiration. O strange and miraculous separation! O benefit past all requitall! The thumbe of a man newly dead and quartered, to depart from the hand, as it were, sponte sua, of it owne accord, to pleasure a friend, that loved him so entirely, and that in the middest of so many hundreds of people, of a different Religion, yet not espyed by any. But the strangnes therof I leave to your pious consideration, confessing my selfe altogeather unworthy, and not any wayes able to explicate the worthines of the same.”

John Jennings had ‘rejoiced’ at the death of his brother, though (counter to the ODNB account, which says he was present) he by his own account “neglected, yea rather scorned to go to see his brother, eyther imprisoned, arraigned, or martyred; such was the froward blindnes of his heresie”. But he continued in his bad courses of life for just ten days, until a night came when he fell into reflections which contrasted his late brother’s life with his own, and converted.

John Jennings went abroad, and became a Franciscan friar. He wrote his brother’s biography and published it in 1614. Edmund Jennings was canonized in 1970.

As for the unspeakable Topcliffe, here’s another of his executions of 1592, that of the priest Thomas Pormort (from the ODNB):

“During the proceedings Pormort informed the court not only of Topcliffe’s proposed deal, but also about the bizarre sexual fantasies with which his tormentor had regaled him: fantasies which focused on the person of Queen Elizabeth, whose legs, breasts, and belly Topcliffe claimed to have frequently fondled. Pormort was condemned to death. On the day of his execution in St Paul's Churchyard, 20 February 1592, he was ‘enforced to stand in his shirt almost two hours upon the ladder in Lent time upon a very cold day’ while Topcliffe ranted at him in a vain attempt to make him retract the accusations he had made in court.”

At Wolf Hall

Having recently finished Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, one of this last weekend’s small excitements was a visit to Wolf Hall, Wiltshire.

My images are two composites: aspects of the monument to Jane Seymour’s father John in the church at Great Bedwyn (moved there in 1590 by his grandson, the memorial states, from Eston Priory Church, which had by then fallen into ruins), along with a window there containing some armorial stained glass derived from the former Wolf Hall. Sir John lived to see his daughter Queen of England, but not to be a grandfather to a future King, dying a couple of months before his daughter’s pregnancy was announced. Of his sons, one became Lord Protector, and had to allow the execution of his brother Thomas, who had plotted to capture the young prince, and marry the young Elizabeth Tudor.

The other image comprises two views of the present day Wolf Hall itself, which seems perhaps to be an 18^th century house with large Victorian accretions. The rear view is framed by a catalpa tree – and there is what seems to be an abandoned walled garden, as there should be in a lost domain like this. The original house of the Seymour family has vanished, though there are apparently brick lined tunnels running from the present buildings to where the old house stood. A 16^th century house down the gently sloping valley side to what is now the Kennet and Avon Canal survives, and Henry VIII is supposed to have stayed there while on his first visit to Wolf Hall with Mantel’s hero, Thomas Cromwell, in 1535. Back then, the (Hampshire) River Avon rose close by the house, and flowed west into the Vale of Pewsey.

I talked with a couple of the tenants occupying parts of the Manor (and they are currently, should you want to take up what would seem likely to prove an interesting stay in a house full of associations of one kind or other, looking for a new sharer). I was told that the landlady was currently reading Wolf Hall itself, which ends precisely when Cromwell (imagined by Mantel to have his own eyes on Jane) works out that he can escape Henry’s demands on his time for a visit of some days to Jane Seymour’s family home.

Mantel’s remarkable book prompted all this literary and historical tourism, of course. There’s so much to admire in it: the intelligently hostile portrait of Sir Thomas More, Henry VIII seen through the eyes of his brilliant counsellor, and I liked the way the narrative is paced, making us all wait, as they did, for the product of Anne Boleyn’s pregnancy. Then there’s the gracefully lucid writing. Mantel admits scarcely any archaisms: her point is partly that Thomas Cromwell was a modern man, interested in information and its storage, acutely aware of how money works and makes all things possible: so he cannot be distanced by what he says every time he speaks. She has, in line with this policy of making Cromwell our contemporary, partly secularized a man who was probably far more in league with the reformers than the sympathetic fellow-traveller depicted here.

In the second volume, Mantel has to repeat what she did so well in A Place of Greater Safety, show idealism and remarkable personal capacities turning to bloody oppression, to unleash the murderer latent in her measured and highly intelligent Cromwell (the inner murderer glimpsed in the novel by Cromwell in Hans Holbein’s portrait). Her hero has, in the second part, to set about destroying Anne Boleyn and her circle to save his own position. The axe and the block will feature like the guillotine did for the French revolutionaries in the earlier novel: Mantel’s characters cannot be unaware of their likely fate, how close it always is, how they can appease the terrible wraith with other people’s blood for only a limited time.

As it is, in this volume about his rise to power, Wolf Hall deploys Cromwell as a very gifted novelist’s ideal protagonist: a master of language, either in persuasion, threat, or charm, and a witty appreciator of costumes, food and style. Cromwell here is also a man preoccupied with memory - both haunted by his own memories of having been the child of a brutal father, and the adult administrator determined to possess, so as to augment his own prodigious powers of recall, a mechanical memory theatre. So always he allows Mantel to demonstrate her own prodigious gifts of imagination and language.

http://www.burbage-wiltshire.co.uk/historic/wolfhall.html

Mistress Beast has her husband murdered, 1582

Mistress Beast did exist, and we will come to her in a moment. This post might have been titled ‘The Worcestershire Murders’, as my source is a well printed and rather well written pamphlet, A briefe discourse of two most cruell and bloudie murthers, committed bothe in Worcestershire, and bothe happening vnhappily in the yeare 1583.

Another possible title for this post might have been ‘Murder most foolish’, for both killings were carried out with reckless disregard for consequences. In the case of Thomas Smith, resentment at a rival mercer’s popularity seems to have blinded the perpetrator to all consideration of what would happen next, while Mistress Beast and her lover seem to have occupied a fantasy realm of amatory conceits where reality scarcely impinged.

On New Year’s Eve in Evesham, 1582, Thomas Smith invited a successful rival in trade, Robert Greenoll, over to his house to share a pint of wine and some apples roasted in the fire. Greenoll, a bachelor, popular both socially and as a tradesman, suspected nothing about Smith, who, if not so successful as a mercer, had a well off family behind him, and was married to a gentlewoman.

But Smith had listened to “the persuasion of the evill spirite with him”, and had already, down in his cellar, dug a grave “about sixe or seven inches deepe” (this has to mean that the body placed in it would be that far below the surface).

Evesham, on this New Year’s Eve, was in a state of rather uptight festivity. There’s to be a play performed (its nature regrettably unspecified in the pamphlet), but the town had made special seasonal provisions against disorder: “In Evesham, all the time of Christmas, there is watch and ward kept, that no misorder or il rule be committed”:

“It grew toward night, when as a play was cryed about the Towne, whereto both old and young did hastely repaire: and this Smith having a boye that served him in his Shop, fearing lest the boye should perceive anie thinge, gave hym money, and bade him goe see the Play: and bring him a whole report of the matter.”

Smith’s Boy fetched the wine and apples, then ‘ran merrily to see the Play’, leaving the two men alone: ‘at last, Greenoll stouping to turne an apple in the fire’, Smith struck him over the head with an iron pestle he had left to hand. Here, the anonymous author half emerges into the narrative, for he has himself heard from Smith about how awfully protracted the killing was: “Smith hearing him to give such a woful groan (as himselfe said to me, when I came to him in prison) began to enter into some sorrowfulness for the deede”. But judging his victim to be beyond help, he struck him three or four times more: but poor Greenoll was still trembling on the floor. Now Smith produced a knife, and stabbed him in the neck ‘but as Smith himselfe said, he did not cut the wezand, but pierced the skin somewhat’, then tried to stab him in the heart. First time, he hit the shoulder blade, then finally killed Greenoll with a second blow at the heart.

Smith then set about the plan which he thought would clear him of the deed, dragging the body down to the cellar, and placing it in the shallow grave, which he smoothed over with a plasterer’s trowel, then shook ‘shellinges’ from the bales of linen flax he kept down there all over the floor, finally placing ‘drifats and chests’ over the fresh and shallow grave. Smith then meticulously washed the house clear of bloodstains, and dried where he had cleaned.

[A ‘dryfat’ is ‘A large vessel (cask, barrel, tub, case, box, etc.) used to hold dry things (as opposed to liquids’, those ‘shellings’ are the pods which would have held the seeds of the flax, i.e., linseed OED.]

At this point, Smith started to behave like a man who now wanted to be caught for his crime he had just committed. He has already told the local night-watchman, ‘See and see not’, and on this slender security he took Greenoll’s keys and robbed his shop: the stolen goods he placed in his own house.

On the next morning, Greenoll’s shop was found to have been robbed, and inquiry was made as to ‘who was abroade that nighte that might be suspected, because of the Playe that was in the Towne’ (one notices again this extreme caution about having a play performed in the community!). The watchman says Thomas Smith was 'abroad somewhat late', and that Smith had sent him that inexplicable watch word, ‘see and see not’.

Smith was fetched in, to be asked where Greenoll was, because there was already “A shrewd presumption against him to be somewhat faultie in the matter”. The authorities say that they will search Smith’s house. Smith says his house cannot be searched, as his wife is away in King’s Norton with the keys “but (quoth he) if you will search my Sellar you maye and so tooke the keyes from his girdle and threw them unto them”.

The insane bravado of this suggestion led to the unravelling of Smith’s crime. The search party at first found nothing. Curiously, there seems to be no inclination to break into the house itself, despite the implausibility of Smith’s claim about being left locked out (apart from the cellarage). But as they are about to give up, one of them sees “A little piece of earth, as it were new broken out of the grounde, lying under the nethermost staire”. They decide they must investigate more closely to find where this fresh soil might have come from, move the chests and dryfats, beneath them, they found the ground to be soft, where digging, “Presently they found Greenoll buryed, not past six or seven inches deepe”.

By the earnest entreaty of his friends, Smith was not hanged in chains, but hanged to death, and afterwards simply buried. The pamphleteer observes that we must shun “Repining at our neighbours prosperity”, and says of Smith’s crime amidst this anxiously Christian community, full of alarm at allowing a play to be performed, that “the verie conceite whereof is able to astonish the heart of a Jew, or a Mahomitans recreant”.

To come to Mistress Beast at last, Greenoll's death was not the only murder in the vicinity of Worcester: in the same year, at Cothridge, west of the city, an honest husbandman named Thomas Beast had in his house a handsome serving man called Christopher Thomson. In time, Mistress Beast decided that she preferred Christopher to her husband, and, as the pamphlet disapprovingly puts it, “often times they would carnally acquaint them selves together”. With “the Neighbours not suspecting, but credibly perceiving, the common and unhonest behaviour of this wicked woman and her lusty yonker”, Thomas Beast eventually was apprised of what was going on under his nose. He told the servant to leave, but his wife intervened, and somehow persuaded her husband to keep the man on. The affair then continued until Mistress Beast decided that ‘her sweet dallying friend’ must kill her husband, “whereto a great while he would not consent”.

Here’s the full extent of her reported thinking about getting Thomson off from the charge of murder: ‘with mony and friends I will warrant thee to save thy life, and then thou and I will live merrily together”. The narrator, who seems to be local enough to know something about these people, interjects in horror: “Oh most horrible and wicked Womon, a woman, nay a devil: stop your eares you chaste and grave matrons, whome Gods feare, dutie, true love to your husbandes, and verture of your selves hath so beautified as nothing can be more odious unto you, then such a graceless strumpet should be found, so much to dishonour your notable sexe.”

Finally, fired by her implausible persuasion that he could get away with the crime, the credulous and love-smitten Christopher solemnly promised over a cup of posset that he would carry out the murder. As the murder weapon, he first took a long pike - hardly the least conspicuous of weapons to be wandering around with - but his mistress gave him instead a woodman’s tool, a “Forrest Bil, which she her self had made very sharp”.

Thus equipped, Thomson went and found his master ploughing in a field, started a quarrel, and killed him with a single blow. Thomson fled the scene of the crime, but was soon caught, and was taken to Worcester Castle, where in a brief recognition of the depth of trouble he was in, he exclaimed against his mistress, ‘how she was cause that he committed the deed.”

Mistress Beast was also arrested, but somehow contrived to bombard her lover in his cell with gifts of “Mony, handkerchers, nosegays, and such like amorous and loving tokens”.

Perhaps both of them, faced with inevitable and dreadful punishment for their crime, took refuge in a strange amatory fantasy world: “he besotted in his naughtie affection … made a triumphe, as it were, in carrying a locke of her haire about him, & would sit kissing and delighting in any token she sent him: beside, one day he desired the jaylor, that if he were a man, or one that regarded the extreme afflictions of those, whom the tyranny of love possessed, that he wold doo so much for him, to rip foorth the hart of him, & cleaving the same in sunder, he should there behold the lively Image of his sweet mistresse (as the cheefest Jewell he had) hee desired him to make a present of that precious token.”

This kind of talk to a jailor, in an age when executioners would chop out the hearts of some malefactors, brings to mind the grotesque literalism of John Fletcher’s Memnon, in the play, The Mad Lover, who decides to send his beloved Callis his heart, and commissions a surgeon to do the necessary operation.

The authorities might have been tempted, but they didn’t take Christopher Thomson at his word. He was simply taken out of jail and hanged where he did the murder, then his body was drawn on a hurdle round Worcester, and finally hanged in chains at Cothridge.

Mistress Beast was drawn on a hurdle to a field just outside Evesham, and burned at the stake.

1582, Worcestershire: who would have thought conceits about having the image of your beloved in your heart would be so important to a servant and his mistress? Sidney is perhaps writing Astrophel and Stella, but love poetry seems to be already received by the audience who are, as it were, waiting for his works. Against this, in the Smith-Greenoll case, the reservations of the Evesham civic authorities about festivity and plays: dangerous stuff, imaginative writing or performance.

My image is part of a woodcut in Thomas Cooper, The cry and reuenge of blood, 1620 - the familiar trio of victim, murderer, and instigating devil.