THE history of a woman born in St Teath, who claimed to have had encounters with fairies and subsequently was accused of witchcraft, has come to light.

Ann Jeffries — married name ‘Warden’ — prophetess and folk-healer, was born at St Teath in December 1626, to impoverished parents, Philip Jeffries (or Jeffrey) and Jane (nee Hick), writes Dr Anders Ingram.

At a young age she was apprenticed as a domestic servant in the household of John Pitt, a substantial St Teath yeoman. Most of what can be learned of her life comes from a work by Pitt’s son, Moses (1639-1697), who was in Ann’s charge as a young child. This was published in 1696 as an account of one Ann Jefferies — who was fed for six months by a ‘small sort of Airy People call’d fairies’.

According to Pitt, Jeffries first encountered fairies in 1645, when, sitting one day in a garden, ‘six persons of a small stature, all clothed in green’, hopped over the hedge in front of her (Pitt, 10). The immediate consequence was a serious and lingering illness, but as Ann recovered she began to manifest an intense religious devotion, and to display apparently miraculous powers of healing. Her first patient was the mistress of the house, who had injured her leg in a fall, and whose pain she eased by gentle stroking. As word of her abilities spread, sick persons began to resort to her from across Cornwall and as far afield as London. Jeffries attributed knowledge of their conditions to the fairies, who continued to appear to her, and to nourish her with special bread, after she gave up the consumption of ordinary food.

In 1646, Ann attracted the attention of local magistrates and ministers, who visited Pitt’s house to interrogate her about her dealings with the fairies, and to persuade her — unsuccessfully — that ‘they were evil Spirits that resorted to her, and that it was the delusion of the devil’. At the instigation of John Tregeagle JP, Jeffries was questioned before the sessions and by the Assize Judges. She was imprisoned for three months in Bodmin gaol, and subsequently in Tregeagle’s house.

More was at stake than popular ‘superstition’.

A newsletter sent from Bodmin in February 1647 reported that Jeffries had been summoned in front of the parliamentary county committee, and had told its members to ‘be good in theyr office, for it will not last long.’

As a prisoner in the mayor’s house in Bodmin, she was reportedly urging people ‘to keepe the old forme of prayer’ and predicting that ‘the King shall shortly enjoye his owne, & be revenged of his enemyes’ (Clarendon MS 29/2443, fol. 102). A second newsletter of April of that year confirmed that all her discourses were ‘strangely saucy against the parliament’, and noted official concerns that she might ‘trouble the peoples mindes’ (Clarendon MS 29/2478, fol. 165). Despite attempts to suppress her pronouncements, Jeffries came to the attention of the leading royalist Sir Edward Hyde, who urged his friend John Earle to find out more for him ‘of your prophetess of Bodmyn’ (Clarendon MS 29/2466).

Incarceration may have curbed open defiance, for Ann was released at some point in 1647. Ordered not to return to the Pitt family, she went instead to live with Mrs Francis Tom, a widowed sister of John Pitt, near Padstow. Yet she continued for some time to perform cures.

She subsequently went to stay with her brother, and married William Warden, steward to the eminent Cornish physician Richard Lower, and later to the Devon gentleman Sir Andrew Slanning, scion of a prominent royalist family.

After the Restoration, Moses Pitt had established himself in London as a successful bookseller and printer, and he remained fascinated by childhood memories of Jeffries’ dealings with the fairies.

In 1691, he asked his nephew to visit her and inquire about ‘those several strange passages of her life’, but she insisted she could remember little. A second approach in 1693, via Pitt’s brother-in-law, Humphrey Martin, elicited flat refusal to discuss these episodes.

Jeffries perceptively recognised that Pitt ‘would make either books or ballads of it’, and protested she would not have her name spread about in that way for five hundred pounds.

Having escaped draconian punishment for either sedition or witchcraft in 1646-7, she feared that ‘if she should discover such things now, she should be questioned again for it’ (Pitt, 8-9).

Nonetheless, Pitt went ahead in 1696 to publish his recollections. He did so at the urging of the pamphlet’s dedicatee, Edward Fowler, bishop of Gloucester, to whom he had first told the tale fifteen or twenty years earlier.

At Christmas 1695, Fowler seized Pitt’s hand and made him promise to write and publish an account. The story was the best part of a half century old, but in the 1690s Fowler was at the forefront of efforts to collect, verify and publicise providential and supernatural incidents as a means of countering a tide of atheism and unbelief which some churchmen feared was sweeping across the nation.

Pitt regarded Ann Jeffries’ fairy-given powers as evidence for how ‘the Great God has done as great and marvellous works in our age, as he did in the days of old’ (Pitt, 5). He sent a copy of the tract to the Sussex clergyman, William Turner, who reprinted it, along with affirmative letters from Pitt and his kinsman William Tom, in his Compleat history of the most remarkable providences – a work aimed at confounding ‘the abounding atheism of this age’ (Turner, ‘To the Courteous Reader’).

Pitt’s pamphlet was the only published work of the later seventeenth century devoted primarily to the subject of fairies — perhaps understandably, as interest in them was particularly susceptible to the ridicule of sophisticated elites.

In 1708, Fowler was roundly mocked by Anthony Ashley Cooper, earl of Shaftesbury, as a ‘learned and truly Christian prelate — who could have given you a full account of his belief in fairies’ (Marshall, 188).

Amid the cultural and religious debates of the later seventeenth century, Ann Jeffries’ own voice struggles to be heard.

Her date of death is uncertain, though local tradition places it in 1698. Nonetheless, as a young and uneducated woman, channelling — whether sincerely or manipulatively — the folk beliefs of her native Cornwall, she was able to accelerate both the hopes and anxieties of her social superiors. Visionary and prophetic female roles are often associated with radical and sectarian religion; Jeffries’ alliance with the fairies demonstrates that they could also assume royalist and Anglican forms.