Those who visit the crypt of the church of St Walstan see the lovely Norman vaulting, the modern well-cover with its pictures of East Anglian saints, and the richly decorated altar about which is a fine statue of St Etheldreda. Some may peer into the recess in the south wall, but the low stone tomb is almost concealed and the effigy of a cat cannot easily be seen.
I advance no theories in explanation of my story. The curious enquirer is referred to records of witch-trials in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He will there find many references to the common belief that witches could turn themselves into cats. For example the Aberdeen witches, in 1596, were accused of dancing around the Fish Cross ‘in the lykness of cats’. In 1607 Isobel Grierson was convicted of witchcraft and the main charge against her was that she assumed the form of a cat and, in such guise, did torment Adam Clark and his wife in their house at Prestonpans. Isobel Smith, tried at East Barnes in 1629, was said to have ‘come out of a hole in the roof in the likeness of a cat’. William Johnstone, a baillie of Edinburgh, made report in July 1661 upon Janet Allan and Barbara Mylne, ‘whom the said Janet did once sie come in at the Watter-gate in lykness of a catt’. Isobel Gowdie, in her confession dated April 1662, gave the magic formula by which she transformed herself into a cat. Marie Lamont, who was tried at Greenock on 4th March 1662, confessed that she, ‘Kettie Scot and Margaret Holm, cam to Allan Orr’s house in the likeness of kats.’ The celebrated Cotton Mather, in his Wonders of the Invisible World, tells of Susanna Martin who, in the ‘likeness of a cat’, attacked one Robert Downer and almost killed him.
Hundreds of similar examples, of this general belief in the power of the witch to transform herself into a cat, could be quoted from official documents and learned books. But I will leave the reader to form his own conclusions and to decide whether a curious event in the twentieth century had anything in common with the superstitious beliefs of three hundred years ago.
BROTHER JOHN’S BEQUEST
Arthur Gray
Tedious Brief Tales of Granta and Gramarye was published in 1919 by the Cambridge firm of William Heffer & Son, and it is now a very scarce book. The author, who called himself ‘Ingulphus’, was Arthur Gray (1852–1940), the Master of Jesus College, Cambridge, from 1912 until his death. All but three of the ten ‘tedious brief tales’ are ghost stories, and eight are set in Jesus College during the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Another goes further back to 1431 when the nunnery of St Radegund occupied the buildings which were later to become the College. The brilliantly evoked historical setting and Gray’s playful sense of humour combine to create an unusual book of considerable charm, as this story demonstrates.
On a certain morning in the summer of the year 1510 John Eccleston, Doctor in Divinity and Master of Jesus College in Cambridge, stood at the door of his lodge looking into the cloister court. There was a faint odour of extinguished candles in the air, and a bell automatically clanked in unison with its bearer’s step. It was carried by a young acolyte, who lagged in the rear of a small band of white-robed figures who were just disappearing from sight at the corner of the passage leading to the entrance court. They were the five Fellows of the newly-constituted College.
As they disappeared, the Master, with much deliberation, spat into the cloister walk.
To spit behind a man’s back might be accounted a mark of disgust, contempt, malice—at least of disapproval. Such were not the feelings of Dr Eccleston.
It is a fact known all over the world, Christian and heathen, that visitants from the unseen realm cannot endure to be spat at. The Master’s action was prophylactic. For supernatural visitings of the transitory, curable kind the rites of the Church are, no doubt, efficacious. In inveterate cases it is well to leave no remedy untried.
With bell, book and candle the Master and Fellows had just completed a lustration of the lodge. The bell had clanked in the Founder’s Chamber and in the Master’s oratory. The Master’s bedchamber had been well soused with holy water. The candle had explored dark places in cupboards and under the stairs. If It was there before it was almost inconceivable that It remained there now. But one cannot be too careful.
Two days previously a funeral had taken place in the College. It was a shabby affair. The deceased, John Baldwin, late a brother of the dissolved Hospital of St John, was put away in an obscure part of the College churchyard—now the Master’s garden—behind some elder bushes which grew in the corner bounded by the street and the ‘chimney’. The mourners were the grave-digger, the sexton and the parson of All Saints’ Church. Though brother John had died in a college chamber the society of Jesus marked its reprobation of his manner of living by absenting themselves from his obsequies.
Brother John had been a disappointment: uncharitable persons might say he was a fraud. He had got into the College by false pretences. In life he had disgraced it by his excesses, and, when he was dead, he had perpetrated a mean practical joke on the society. It is not well for a man in religious orders to joke when he is dead.
How did it come that brother John Baldwin, late Granger of the Augustinian Hospital of Saint John, died in Jesus College?
The Hospital of Saint John was dissolved in the year 1510, to make room for the new college designed by the Lady Margaret. Bishops of Ely for three centuries and more had been its patrons and visitors, and dissolute James Stanley, bishop in 1510, fought stoutly for its maintenance. But circumstances were too strong for the bishop. The ancient Hospital was hopelessly bankrupt. The buildings were ruinous: there was not a doit in the treasury chest: the household goods were pawned to creditors in the town. The Master, William Tomlyn, had disappeared, none knew whither, and only two brethren were left in the place. One of them was John Baldwin: the other was the Infirmarer, a certain Bartholomew Aspelon.
On the eve of the dissolution, bishop Stanley wrote a letter to the Master and Fellows of the other Cambridge society of which he was a visitor, namely Jesus College. He commended to their charitable care brother John Baldwin, an aged man of godly conversation who was disposed to bestow his worldly goods for the comfort and sustenance of the Master and Fellows in consideration of their maintenance of him in College during the remaining years of his earthly pilgrimage. It was a not uncommon practice in those days for monasteries and colleges to accept as inmates persons, clerical or lay, who wished to withdraw from the world and were willing, either during life or by testamentary arrangements, to guarantee their hosts against pecuniary loss.
Drawing by E. Joyce Shillington Scales
Report said that, though the Hospital was penniless, brother John in his private circumstances was well-to-do and even affluent. It did not befit the Master and Fellows to enquire how he had come by his wealth. They were wretchedly poor, and the bishop’s certificate of character was all that could be desired. They thanked the bishop for his prudent care for their interests and covenanted to give the religious man a domicile in the College with allowance for victuals, barber, laundress, wine, wax and all other things necessary for celebrating Divine service, as to any Fellow of the College. Brother John promptly transferred himself to his new quarters which were in a room called ‘the loft’, on the top floor above the Founder’s Chamber in the Master’s lodge.
The Master and Fellows were disappointed in brother John’s luggage. It consisted simply of two brass-bound boxes, heavy but unquestionably small, even for a man of religion. An encouraging feature about them was that they bore the monogram of Saint John’s Hospital. Brother John and his former co-mate of the Hospital, Bartholomew Aspelon, constantly affirmed that the missing Master, William Tomlyn, had decamped with the contents of the Hospital treasury. But the society of Jesus hoped that they were not telling the truth. Brother John kept the two boxes under his bed. They were always carefully locked, but brother John threw out vague hints that their contents were destined for a princely benefaction to his hospitable entertainers.