Who is Thomasine Read?
Exciting discoveries occasionally fall neatly into your lap. Often, what seems like a promising lead turns out to be a cul-de-sac. I have experienced both in my quest to find Thomasine Read, a woman accused of witchcraft in May 1647. This month’s blog post is about how research doesn’t always go the way you want it to, and the simple logistical challenges that can stymie your progress.
I suspected that Thomasine’s story would be low-hanging fruit when I started looking for her in the archival record. Though John Stearne does not mention her by name in his Confirmation and Discovery of Witchcraft, Thomasine’s deposition, and those of her neighbours, survive. Even more helpfully, Professor Malcolm Gaskill identified one John Read the Elder as her husband. I thought my task would be straightforward: quickly confirm what we already knew, then try to find any other documents relating to Thomasine and her husband. Reader, I was wrong.
Let’s begin with what we do know about Thomasine. She was examined for witchcraft in Haddenham, Cambridgeshire, in 1647. Several of her neighbours testified against her including Edward Mason, Ellen Pope and Robert Gray. According to the testimonies, she bewitched a boy called Robert Miller and killed Robert Gray’s sheep after the latter passed over Thomasine’s son for a job as a plough-driver. Thomasine confessed to both acts, and further claimed that she had sold her soul to the Devil in the shape of a mouse 16 years before, when she was living in Cottenham.
From these records we know that she was a mother, that she lived in Haddenham at the time of her confession, and that she lived in Cottenham (about 7 miles south of Haddenham) in the early 1630s. We also know that her son John was healthy enough to be considered for a labourer’s job, but not as strong as another boy in the village.
Building on this foundation, there are two things we assume about Thomasine: namely, that she was from Cottenham (perhaps moving to Haddenham following her marriage into the Read family), and that she was a widow by the time of her accusation (given that her husband isn’t mentioned in any records). Unfortunately, we can’t confirm any of this — it might, in fact, be completely wrong.
The discovery that fell neatly into my lap was the name of Thomasine’s husband and the age of her son. One brief line in Haddenham’s parish record tells us that, on 6th January 1634, ‘John the son of Steven and Tomasine Read’ was baptised. Eureka! This tells us that Thomasine’s son John was about 12 when he was passed over for the job of plough-driver, which is valuable context. The role required expertise and a good deal of strength, and as such wasn’t normally given to boys under the age of about 14. What we might have read as a slight against Thomasine, therefore, might have had a more pragmatic reason behind it.
Another thing that this record tells us is that Thomasine was married to Steven Read, not John. Though there is a John Read the Elder in the parish register who died in 1632, he was married to either a woman called Alice or Barbarah. There is no record of Steven’s death in the Haddenham register, which means that we should question the assumption that she was a widow.[1]
So far, so good: we are making discoveries that give texture to Thomasine’s narrative. But the problem lies in the fact that, aside from the two data points — the baptism record from 1634 and the witchcraft accusation of 1647 — I can’t find any reference to Thomasine, Steven, or their son John. There is no evidence of Thomasine and Steven getting married in Haddenham or Cottenham. There is no mention of them having any other children. There is no record of Steven’s death. There is a record of one Tomasinge Pepis baptised in Cottenham in 1594, which might be our Thomasine. But without a marriage record we can’t confirm that this is the Thomasine who grew up and married Steven Read. Without that confirmation, we can’t reliably know who Thomasine’s family were, and thus what her life was like before her marriage.
We also struggle to know much about her life after her marriage: she and her little family disappear for thirteen years. Did Thomasine and Steven move away from Haddenham after John’s birth? Did she return to the village to live with her in-laws after Steven’s death (location of burial unknown)? Were there other children, unbaptised or perhaps baptised elsewhere? The only way to find out is to trawl through the parish records in search of a clue, but given that they could have moved anywhere — the next parish over, Cambridge, even Flanders — this is a tall order.
I’m not giving up on Thomasine yet, but it’s important to be honest about how often historians meet dead ends. Research like this is logistically difficult. The parish registers are centuries old and often have pages missing — Thomasine, Steven or John could be on one of these missing leaves, and we’ll never know. On a practical level, is it possible to justify the time and funds it would take to look through the records of dozens of parishes in the hope of finding this one person, when there are many other stories which also deserve to be told? In an ideal world, yes; in practice, perhaps not.
I hope I can give an update in the future with more answers, but in the meantime I leave you with the question clanging around my head — who is Thomasine Read?
- Dr Tabitha Stanmore, June 2023
[1] There is another point of interest here: Thomasine was living in Cottenham in 1631 when she first met the Devil, and within two years she had moved to Haddenham and birthed a child. With my background in cunning magic, I am sorely tempted to suggest that she performed some sort of love spell to marry Steven Read, and she (or her accusers) later interpreted this as making a deal with the Devil. But this is pure conjecture.
