Magdalen Holyday was the eighteen year old daughter of Rendham couple Phineas and Martha Holyday and was a live-in servant-maid to Mr. Simon Jones, minister of Saxmundham. She had been in his employ for three years when this tale came about and had earned a reputation of being a well behaved and decent young lady, civil in her speech and dutiful in her religion. She had been brought up as a loyal subject to the king and had renounced the likes of Oliver Cromwell and all what he stood for.
This tale starts in the year of 1672, on a day known as Lammas, the festival of the wheat harvest, August 1. This particular year it occurred on a Monday and at noon of that day, as expected, she was serving dinner to the parson, his wife and their daughter Rebecca who at the time was about to be married to a gospel minister from Yoxford. As Magdalen placed a suet dumpling down on a plate, she let out a loud shriek and stooped down in pain complaining that she had felt a sting on her upper leg as if a pin had pierced it. When she investigated she could see and feel a pin just under the surface of her skin but there was no break in the tissue for it to have gotten there. The pain was unrelenting and from this point on tormented her both day and night.
In these bygone days Suffolk was renowned for the number of witches who practised in the black arts and Magdalen had soon connected the fact that only a few days previous to her affliction she had denied an old crone who had come to the door of the house and begged a pin. This, she had assumed, was the repayment for her actions, a hex brought about by the witch she had denied.
It wasn't many days before the ministers wife, concerned for Magdalens welfare, sent for the assistance of two local doctors, both of high repute and well experienced in their professions. Despite their qualifications neither was able to detect or trace any evidence of a pin within Magdalens leg. She insisted that the pin was there but had worked itself deeper into her skin. As was the custom of those days, the doctors prescribed leeches to draw the blood but to no avail. The minister, meanwhile, offered his godly prayers and rang the church bells to try to chase the demons away but Magdalen's pains continued unabated, getting worse, now giving her dreams and apparitions at night. Sometimes she would see a creature resembling a mole scurrying into her bed, sometimes a terrorizing naked arm grasped across her body as she lay in bed.
Eventually, after much discussion, the doctors took her to the Baronet Sir John Rouse of Henham, a Member of Parliament for Dunwich and Eye and upon his jurisdiction they gave her a concoction consisting of southernwood, an antiseptic plant with a strong camphor-like odour, mugwort, commonly known as wormwood and vervain. This she was then required to drink. They also anointed her leg with an ointment made from four ounces of Dog's grease mixed with two ounces of bear's fat, eight ounces of capon's grease, 24 slips of mistletoe, cut in pieces and powdered with gum of Venice turpentine. This mixture was mixed and left in a phial exposed to the sun for nine days until it formed a green balsam. She was then required to rub this into her skin daily for three weeks.
She carried out the prescription as required but her ailments became worse, causing constant sickness during which she vomited a variety of items including parings of nails, bits of spoons, triangular pieces of brass, crooked pins, bodkins, lumps of red hair, broken egg-shells, parchment shavings, a hen's leg bone, 1200 worms, pieces of glass, bones resembling the great teeth of a horse, some unidentified luminous matter and sal petri (this is the name for nitrate of potash, a salt which produces dreadful effects when largely taken). After all this, as the medical practitioners were giving up hope she brought up with a violent retching, a whole row of pins stuck on blew paper.
After this the vomiting ceased and she began to recover. Naturally the Doctors perceived that it was their potent drugs that had been the cure. But who knows, maybe it was the witches curse, how else did so many and varied amount of items manage to get lodged into her stomach to be vomited up. Magdalen went on to live a happy life, her afflictions never to return. She married an honest but poor man who was the steward to Sir John Heveninghara to whom she bore four healthy children.
References
- Official website for The Strange Tale of Magdalen Holyday
