Posted on 04/12/2022 8:54:53 PM PDT by CheshireTheCat
On this date in 1652, Joan Peterson was hanged at Tyburn for witchcraft.
Joan is a long time in the ground, and her dying refusal to be cowed by the officious prelate ordained to badger her into self-incrimination would alone stand her in very worthy stead in these pages. Even the hangman got annoyed when Joan, at the gallows,
was by the Ordinary nine on ten times earnestly pressed to confesse something against the said Mrs. Levingstone: Whereupon the Executioner told the Ordinary, he might be ashamed to trouble a dying woman so much, to which he replyed, he was commanded so to doe, and durst doe no otherwise. And afterwards the said Ordinary still insisting in his discourse, and very often pressing the said Peterson to confesse and discharge her conscience before God and the world; she answered that she had already confessed before the Bench, all she had to confesse; that she had made her peace with God; and therefore desired to dye in quiet, for now she was to appeare before God who presently would Judge her, and that God was witnes, that she dyed Innocently, and was in no wise guilty of what was laid to her charge.
Go, Joan.
This account comes to us from one of the surviving pamphlets (pdf) about her case, a document that, were it produced today, would probably draw a severe sanction under Britain’s nasty libel laws for its scandalous indictment of Joan’s persecutors.
It lays out an unscrupulous conspiracy of local grandees scrabbling after inheritance money, in which the “Witch of Wapping” swung for being the only honest broker in the room. Sure, we can’t prove it. But the rival, anti-Joan pamphlet (also at that same pdf link) has a lot of rot about our woman damningly chattering....
(Excerpt) Read more at executedtoday.com ...
I am generally impressed with how well written these articles are. They are clear, interesting and concise. Thanks for posting.
if you remember the movie, “the princess bride”, when tyrone (six fingers) had wesley ( the man in black) attached to “the machine”, after a short period of operation, was taking notes, and said to wesley, “tell me what you are feeling, and remember, this is for posterity!”
The English language has changed so much in almost half of a milennium that it’s astounding.
And to think, for nearly a decade, many public schools stopped teaching cursive.
Keyboards.
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