Extraordinary life and character of Mary Bateman:; the Yorkshire witch, traced from the earliest thefts of her infancy through a most awful course of crimes and murders : till her execution at the New Drop, near the Castle of York, on Monday the twentieth of March, 1809.
Leeds: Edward Baines, [ca 1810]. Sixth edition. 8vo, pp. 56. Engraved portrit by Topman, of Bateman holding one of her fradulent eggs lettered "Christ is Coming". Untrimmed and bound in modern cloth. A nice clean copy. Very scarce. OCLC locates the copies at Cornell and UPenn. Item #58828
Bateman (1768-1809) had several spurious careers before finally being executed in 1809. She worked as a seamstress but by the early 1790 she offered herself as "wise woman" offering magical cures. In 1806, she joined a group of followers of the prophet Joanna Southcott offering to show them eggs that her hens had laid that supposedly said "Christ is Coming". Many people paid her money to see these healing eggs. The final straw was when she extorted money from a couple named Perigo on the pretext of curing a breast ailment. After Bateman's portion ended up killing the woman, she she was tried and convicted of poisoning the victim. She was executed in 1809 and her story was told in this series of pamphlets, now all scarce. She was quite a scoundrel pusing one sceme after another.
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