Mother red cap

From Traditional Witchcraft Wiki Project

"Mother Red Cap" was used as a generic title for ale-wives and witches alike. Of the women called by this title, the first well-known Mother Red Cap had a child at 15 by a man called Gipsy George. George was hanged at Tyburn for stealing sheep. (Tyburn was an extreme western suburb of London, and executions took place there for many centuries. As such some 50,000 people were put to death here over the 600 or so years that it served as a place of execution from the 12th century. The form of execution was often the ritual torture of being hanged, drawn and quartered.)

Mother Red Cap then took up with a man called Darby, who disappeared after a few months of drunken quarrelling and was never seen again. Then her parents were convicted of killing a girl by lame magic and were hanged. She took up with a third lover call Picher, who before long was found in her oven, burnt to a cinder. She was tried for his murder but was acquitted, after a witness declared that he often took refuge in the oven to escape her cruel tongue, and could well have been burnt by accident. She then became something of a recluse, but was occasionally seen in the lanes and hedgerows, collecting herbs and berries.

The night she died, people declared that they saw the devil walk into her cottage, but no one saw him come out. She was found the next morning, sitting by a pot on the fire, her cat beside her. When the cat was given some of the contents to drink, it's hair fell off in two hours, and the cat died soon after.