Margery Jourdemayne

Margery Jourdemayne was burned alive at Smithfield in 1441 for supplying potions to the Duchess of Gloucester, and is the only woman executed in England for witchcraft in connection with a treason case of that period. She was known as the Witch of Eye, from Eybury near Westminster, and she was not a marginal figure: she had a respectable husband, moved among the gentry and the court, and had a clientele that could pay. Her business was the ordinary cunning-craft of the fifteenth century, which the church disapproved of and everyone used - remedies, charms, and above all help with conception. She had already been arrested once, in 1432, and released on condition of good behaviour. In 1441 Eleanor Cobham, Duchess of Gloucester, was accused of employing the astrologers Roger Bolingbroke and Thomas Southwell to predict Henry VI's death, which was treason because foreknowledge was held to invite the event. Eleanor admitted going to Jourdemayne, but only for medicines to help her conceive, and that admission was enough. The men were dealt with as traitors and heretics: Bolingbroke was hanged, drawn and quartered, Southwell died in the Tower. Jourdemayne, having relapsed after her earlier release, was burned. The distinction is worth noting - the noblewoman did public penance and life imprisonment, the scholars were executed as traitors, and the practitioner from Westminster was burned as a witch. Her husband was a cattle farmer and the property at Eybury is now under Belgravia. She appears in Shakespeare s Henry VI Part 2 as Margery Jourdain. Records of her earlier arrest survive in the close rolls.

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