Welcome back to David Aneurin Morgan! He’s a regular contributor to Weird Wiltshire and we share a particular interest in the tale of the Four Witches, the story of the Handsel sisters, the poor unfortunates that were said to have been murdered in Grovely Woods, Wilton, on account of them being ‘witches’.
If you haven’t yet seen the original Grovely blog, I suggest you have a read here, so you are up to speed with the tale before you read David’s article:
He has been delving deep into the history behind this grisly tale and uncovered some important facts which shed light on the mysteries of Grovely Woods.
But, it’s not for us to say whether these stories are true or not. It’s for you to decide!
THE HANDSEL SISTERS – YES THEM AGAIN
As with my exposure of Molly the Pyt House skeleton in an earlier post, Emma is OK with me adding a more down to earth interpretation of some of her cases even though it may cast doubt on some of her spooky facts. It will give people two versions to choose from, so here goes with the Handsel sisters.
DANES IN THE DEVERILLS
My first reaction – unlike Molly who felt fraudulent from the start – was that the story had the ring of truth. This was confirmed when I read that red-haired people in the Deverills were known until recent times as ‘Daners’. So the four sisters hadn’t arrived out of thin air in Wilton; they must have been the descendants of Danes already established in the area. For them to have been branded witches, they needed to have lived in a cottage a bit out of town where their goings-on could become a matter of gossip and I guessed at somewhere halfway between Wilton and Wishford.
I imagined them with their hands tied in a cart being dragged up onto the First Broad Drive, either by the track from the Ditchampton end of Wilton or via one of the bridleways along the Wishford road. Our next stop is the row of beeches which were planted to mark the spots where they were said to have been buried, far enough apart to stop them conspiring against their murderers. And these four (now three) trees present us with a problem that could be our first pointer AGAINST the truth of the legend.
ARE THE FOUR BEECHES REALLY GROVELY BOUNDARY MARKERS?
Their story grabbed me when I moved to Tisbury 20 years ago. Emma has already outlined it so I won’t repeat it. What I want to do is to list bits of it that I think are either FOR or AGAINST it being true and like me, you will see how the balance swings between the two.
The First and Second Broad Drive run east/west the length of the wood and bisect it. Close to the Drive are the remains of Grim’s Ditch parallel with it. In 1604 the forest court gave the Ditch as the boundary between Barford south of the wood and Wishford north of the wood. When Barford and Wishford had their ancient right to gather wood in their respective halves re-confirmed in the early C18th it would have become crucial to make the boundary clear. So were the beeches planted in a row to do this, and just co-opted as grave markers by the legend?
THE IMPOSSIBLE COINCIDENCE OF ‘FOUR SISTERS’
It took me three goes to find the witches’ trees and like many others, including Emma, I was thrown off the scent by ‘Four Sisters’ to the west of the right spot. This section of the wood is nowhere near the site of the beeches and plays no part in the legend but it is surely beyond coincidence that the name occurs twice. At first I thought ‘Four Sisters’ must refer to the murder of the sisters and that it had happened there and not at the Wilton end as the legend says. But then I checked on old maps and found that the section was called ‘Four Sisters’ as far back as the mid 1500s, way earlier than the legend. An obvious conclusion is that the legend is false and the name was probably the starting point for the whole thing. A further coincidence is a section called ‘Himsel’, strangely close to the sisters’ surname ‘Handsel’.
THE PROBLEM OF THEIR SURNAME
That first big point FOR the legend – that there were Danes in Wilts – got weaker when I looked in the International Genealogical Index and found no ‘Handsels’ there. But it will only pick people up who are born, marry or die in a parish so the sisters could simply have been below the radar. But neither did the name appear in a list of 1000 Danish surnames, so it looks as if it’s made up. Perhaps ‘Himsel’ like ‘Hansel’ of the Hansel and Gretl story both played a part in suggesting their name, the way that ‘Four Sisters’ in another part of the wood gave a name to the legend itself. One can only wonder what on earth happened there – perhaps a real tragedy unlike ours which is beginning to feel more and more like fiction.
PSYCHICS CLAIM TO HAVE CONTACTED THEM AT GROVELY
I am not claiming this as a ‘FOR’ but it’s interesting. A seance under one of the beeches has produced names for two of the witches – ‘Christine’ and ‘Natalie’ and even a name of one of their murderers – ‘Vernon’. When they were asked how they were feeling, the answers were ‘We are in hell – We are trapped’. One witch said her throat hurt and moaned in pain. This adds a twist to the legend – traditionally witches were hanged. Could attempts have been made to hang them first?
YES – THERE WAS AN EPIDEMIC
The legend gives 1737 as the date of the murders. For it to have a chance of being believed, it needs the smallpox epidemic as the motive. So was there one? Yes there was!
The British News Archive has an entry from the Kentish Weekly Post, Sept 21st 1737 praising the Earl of Pembroke for his work ‘in the current epidemic that has been raging since July.’ So a big plus in the legend’s favour. But if smallpox starts in July and is reported in late September,
it has probably run its course and the Handsels would have been murdered when it was at its peak midway in that time span. But the Kentish Post in September says NOTHING on the subject. Nor does any other newspaper.
HOW DID WILTON KEEP IT SECRET?
The problem with trying to discredit the story is that we WANT it to be true because it makes the Wood a tragic and mysterious place. But then common sense takes over and we ask ourselves, ‘How can Wilton have kept so schtum that no whisper spread to neighbouring villages or to Salisbury on its doorstep? How come no mention has found its way into the many books of Wilts folklore prior to 2000 and it only seems to surface in current YouTube videos of ‘Walks in the Woods to find the Grovely Witches’ Trees’. Surely this points to it being a modern creation?
IT HAS THE WRONG ‘FEEL’ HISTORICALLY
The 1600s were the terrible century of witch persecution, not the 1700s. By the early 1700s the old superstition were dying out. One can just about accept that they lived on in the odd backwater but Wilton was a busy market town with an MP and a mayor, not somewhere so out of touch it dared lynch four women. Had it happened three years earlier it would have been just inside the Witchcraft Act that made witchcraft punishable by death but the Witchcraft Act was abolished in 1735 denying the reality of witchcraft. Surely Wilton would have hesitated before lynching them without trial.
A TEST
So in the end – for me – common sense wins and my gut feeling is that although it thrills me to bits, it really must be fiction and fairly recently fiction at that – a country version of an urban myth. I just can’t pin down exactly when and who got the story going. Whether they were a New Ager, or tree-hugger or something darker we should thank them for getting us away from our laptops and into the woods where we can feel a bit at least of our old awe of forests.
There is of course a way of testing the story once and for all. The fourth Grovely beech decayed and blew over a few years ago exposing its roots. If the Pembroke Estate gave permission a quick dig in the roots should reveal or not reveal a skeleton. Similarly, a tree-ring count on the dead tree will or won’t reveal a planting date of 1737.
David Aneurin Morgan
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