John Wrightson
Stokesley, Yorkshire, d. uncertain, sometime after 1815
♦ King of Diamonds | Keyword: Extravagance
The stories told about John Wrightson are numerous, specific, and told by named people about named events, which is usually the sign of someone who genuinely did things that stuck in the memory.
He came to Stokesley at the end of the eighteenth century, the seventh son of a seventh daughter, which in the North Riding was considered to settle the question of his abilities before he had done anything at all. His public reputation began at the Stokesley Trinity Fair in 1808, where he appeared in a red coat, a white waistcoat and a drab hat, his face painted vermilion and his long hair streaming loose. No one at the fair that day forgot him, which was the point. He printed a trade card afterwards that called him simply “the seventh son,” and offered, in the driest possible language, to relieve any inward disorder, white swelling, scurvy, or shortness of breath, in man or beast, by the sending of water. A card very like it survives today in the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. It says nothing about witchcraft. He never advertised that part of the trade, not once, not in forty years, because it was the one service no cunning man dared put his name to in print, where a magistrate might also be reading.
He travelled the district in a long black cloak hung with bottles, jars, bundles of herbs, and a human skull, and received clients in his consulting room dressed in a long robe and a strange-looking head-covering, a globe and a skull arranged about him. On Sundays, dressed in scarlet and white, he stood as godfather to half the infants of Stokesley, despite a private character Henderson politely called very bad indeed. They asked him anyway.
The pattern that runs through every story told about him is the same: he knew before you spoke. Two cattle buyers arrived at his door having decided to test him by claiming they had lost a horse when they had actually lost two cows. Before they had spoken a single word, Wrightson called from the scullery where he was washing himself: if they were clever enough to turn two cows into a horse, he couldn’t help them, and they’d better make themselves scarce. In the end he relented, told them the cows had gone into the beck where the road crossed the River Leven in the dark, and they found them there exactly as he said. A young man named John Unthank was sent by his uncle to consult him about a sick beast. Wrightson told him, before a word was said, exactly what his uncle’s parting words had been and the precise symptoms the animal had shown. He said nothing could be done, but that opening the beast after it died would reveal the abnormal growth responsible. It did. A woman in South Durham was feared to be dying from a lump in her throat, and her family sent a rider to Stokesley in desperation. According to those who were there, Wrightson told the man as he rode up, before he had dismounted: bait your horse and go back, the lump has burst, she is all right now.
Two men came down from the moors specifically to have sport with him, to test him, catch him out, and walk away with a story about the fraud in Stokesley. They sat at his hearth. He heaped on the fuel. When they went to push their chairs back from a blaze that was getting uncomfortably close, neither chair would move, not an inch, not for one man and not for both of them together. He let them sit there until their discomfort had reached its pitch, and then spoke, quietly, almost kindly: he hoped the sport differed somewhat from what they had planned coming down West House Bank, and that another time they might think twice. Then he let them go. He offered no explanation for what had happened, then or at any point afterwards.
A quarryman whose tools had been stolen was shown them in the seeing glass in a darkened room, lying in bracken in a place he recognised. Wrightson told him on no account to touch them, and to bring him a live magpie instead. A live magpie proved impossible to obtain. Wrightson declared that without it he could work no harm on the thief, and the man would have to count his tools as lost. This is perhaps the most honest thing any cunning man ever said to a client.
The vicar who wrote most of this down did not, in the end, believe it came from nowhere. Canon Atkinson, who recorded these stories from the people who had lived them, also recorded what he was told about how Wrightson worked: that he kept an elderly housekeeper and an odd-job man in his own household, and an ally among the ostlers at the Stokesley inns, and a code of signals between them. A stranger arriving from out of town to stable his horse before going to find the Wise Man would, by the time he knocked, have already had every careless word he had spoken on the road carried ahead of him. Atkinson set this down in the same pages as the wonder, and never tried to choose between them. Neither did his contemporaries. Blakeborough believed in him entirely. His critic Tweddell thought him a swindler outright. Henderson, more cautious than either, wondered whether something like animal magnetism might be at work, knowingly or not, in those who practised this craft.
He tried to pass it on. His own son showed no aptitude for the craft. The books went instead to a nephew remembered locally as Jacky Dawson, who kept the trade going after him, with mixed result. Atkinson’s own notes record him diagnosing a Castleton farmer’s bewitched cattle by the same elder-knot and pierced-heart method Wrightson had used, the farmer’s stock recovering exactly as promised. They also record a failure: a Moorsholm woman, suspected bewitched, for whom Dawson’s remedy was undone when her husband left a door unlatched and the suspected witch walked straight in mid-ritual. The woman died within the year. Dawson did his best with what he had inherited. The gift did not come with a guarantee.
His legal record was colourful. In 1799 he was hauled before an enquiry into a poisoning. He spent time at Malton, and was bound over at the Northallerton Quarter Sessions in 1815 on a charge that may have been assault. Even his own death is disputed. One account has him found simply dead in the post-chaise taking him to gaol, no cause given. Another has him falling from the moving cart and expiring on the road. A third, less easily checked, has him taking poison near Hovingham rather than face the magistrates once his tricks were exposed. No one has found his grave.
He was, as Blakeborough put it, a man endowed with marvellous psychic power and with the smallest amount of charlatanry possible. His local critic George Markham Tweddell considered him little better than a huge swindler. Both of them wrote about him for decades after his death, which suggests he was at the very least impossible to ignore.
The image is a whimsical imagining based on the historical record, not an authentic portrait.