Old mother wheaton history
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Mother Shipton and Her Prophesies
In North Yorkshire, along the River Nidd, one can find the birthplace of Ursula Southeil, better known as the soothsayer Mother Shipton.
Within her lifetime she had several premonitions about some of the largest historical events to take place in England, such as the Great Fire of London and the Spanish Armada. After passing away in 1561, aged seventy-three, she remained an important local phenomenon in her hometown of Knaresborough and the remnants of a cave in which she lived, situated close to the Petrifying Well, can be visited.
Mother Shipton began her life in this cave in the Knaresborough woodland in 1488. She was born during a dark and stormy night, the daughter of a fifteen-year-old called Agatha who named her only daughter Ursula.
As soon as she was born, her life would be the subject of scrutiny and controversy, particularly when her mother refused to reveal the identity of Ursula’s father.
Within no time at all, speculation about this mysterious child began to circulate with later sources describing the child’s appearance as ugl
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Mother Shipton
Legendary English soothsayer and prophetess
Mother Shipton | |
|---|---|
An 1804 portrait of Shipton with a monkey or familiar, taken from an oil painting dating from at least a century earlier[1] | |
| Born | Ursula Southeil c. 1486-8[2] Knaresborough, North Yorkshire, England |
| Died | 1561 (aged 72–75) |
| Other names | Ursula Soothtell, Ursula Sontheil, Ursula Sonthiel[3] |
| Occupation(s) | Fortune-teller, prophetess |
Ursula Southeil (c. 1487 – 1561); also variously spelt as Southill, Soothtell,[4]Sontheil,[5][6] or Sonthiel,[7] popularly known as Mother Shipton, was an Englishsoothsayer and prophetess according to English folklore.
She has sometimes been described as a witch and is associated with folklore involving the origin of the Rollright Stones of Oxfordshire. A king and his men were said to have transformed to stone after failing her test, as reported by William Camden in a rhyming account in 1610.[8][9]
The first known edition of her prophecies w
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MotherShipton
Authored By: Michelle Levy
Edited By: Kandice Sharren and Sara Penn
Submitted on: 04/26/2019
Citation: Levy, Michelle. "Mother Shipton: The Oldest Woman in the WPHP." The Women's Print History Project, 26 April 2019, https://womensprinthistoryproject.com/blog/post/4.
Figure 1. Rauner Special Collections Library, Dartmouth College.
The oldest woman whose titles appear in WPHP is Ursula Southeil, who appears to have lived in York, England in the Tudor period. I say "appears," since, according to Arnold Kellet, “The only historical support for her existence as a woman living in Tudor York is found in the slim pamphlet The Prophesie of Mother Shipton in the Raigne of King Henry the Eighth (1641), which opens with an account of the prediction which apparently brought her national fame.” This prediction was in relation to Cardinal Thomas Wolsey (1473–1530). Wolsey, who had planned his first visit to York in 1530, had been in trouble with Henry VIII due to his failure to negotiate an annulment of his (Henry's) marriag
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