Hannah Shorten's Cottage • Wells-Next-The-Sea

 

If you step onto Church Street you will be in the vicinity of Hannah Shorten’s cottage. The census of 1851 doesn’t specify individual addresses, but the entry immediately next to the church is that of Hannah’s home. I suspect it was one of the cottages that no longer stand opposite the church. You find cars parked there now. So, who was Hannah? Well, in Victorian times she was the local witch, or ‘cunning-woman’. She was well known for offering services such as fortune telling, but also offered folk remedies and spell casting. One of her methods to activate her spells was to burn arsenic with salt. It is the link with arsenic that saw her involved with two local murder trials.

 In December 1832 a woman named Mary Wright would poison her husband with arsenic laced plum cakes, which also, accidentally, killed her father too. The Wright’s lived in the nearby village of Wighton and Mary had travelled to Wells and met with Hannah just a few days before the crime took place. Whether Hannah gave further instruction on the use of arsenic to Mary, or whether she just helped Mary on a spiritual level, it was never known. Hannah was named, but not called as a witness in the subsequent trial. Mary was duly convicted and condemned to death. She was found to be expecting a baby at the time, so her sentence would have to take place after the birth. The baby was born the following July and her execution scheduled for August. In the intervening few weeks, however, her sentence was commuted to transportation for life. This never came to pass. Mary died ‘by the visitation of God’ in Norwich Castle in the November. Rather than burying her at Wighton with her husband and father, she was instead laid to rest in Thorn churchyard. Had she been executed she would have been buried with the other convicts in the grounds of Norwich Castle, but she was saved this fate by her ‘visitation’.

 The second notable appearance of Hannah in the annals of crime is just a couple of years later in 1835. The case of the Burnham Murders is quite well known. Hannah had once again been in contact with two women that would be accused of murder by arsenic poisoning. Catherine Frary and Frances Billing were neighbours and friends. Both were married and lived with their families. They lived either end of a row of cottages in Burnham Westgate. In the middle of this terraced row lived Frances’ lover, Peter Taylor, and his wife. Catherine’s lover lived elsewhere in the village. Like any small community, gossip abounded and Catherine and Frances decided poison was the reasonable way of making it stop. Catherine’s husband Robert was the first victim. Followed rather too quickly by Mary, the wife of Peter Taylor.

 When it was found that Mary had died by poison, there wasn’t any real doubt about who the obvious suspects would be. Frances was the first arrested. Soon after so too were Catherine, Peter Taylor, and Hannah Shorten as all had been perceived to be involved in the crime. Hannah and Peter would be released and Catherine and Frances sent to trial. On the 7^th August they were found guilty and condemned to death. On 10^th of August they were executed at Norwich Castle, holding hands as they dropped on the scaffold.

 Although Taylor had been released after his arrest, the women while incarcerated had implicated him, stating that he was fully aware of what they were about. He was re-arrested, tried and condemned to death. He was executed at Norwich in the April of 1836. The death masks of Catherine and Frances are on display at the Norwich Castle Museum.

 

Hannah lived until the age of 90 and was buried on 26^th May 1860 in the cemetery where we visited the sailors graves. Her grave is unmarked, but the plot number is listed on the burial register for anyone wanting to investigate further. On the 1851 census she is 80 years old and listed as a pauper and a widow. She was living with a lodger named Sarah Brett, who was 75 and also a widow. I do wonder how many husbands Hannah had helped leave this world by way of their wives cooking in all those years. The wise woman knows as many plants that will kill as will heal, after all.