Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 52.djvu/130

 , and was reprinted by Edwin Pearson in 1871, was further developed in an anonymous ‘Strange and Wonderful History of Mother Shipton’ (London, 1686, 4to). It was there stated that she was born in July 1488, near Knaresborough, and was baptised by the abbot of Beverley as Ursula Sonthiel; at twenty-four she married Toby Shipton, a carpenter of Shipton, and, after enjoying a wide reputation as a necromancer and prophetess, died at Clifton in 1561. An undated play of Head's day by Thomas Thomson, called ‘Mother Shipton her Life,’ assigned to her those relations with the devil with which earlier writers credited her mother, but the dramatist eked out his comedy by thefts from Massinger's ‘City Madam’ and Middleton's ‘Chaste Maid of Cheapside;’ it was acted for nine days, apparently in 1668. In 1669 the editor of ‘Fragmenta Prophetica, or the Remains of George Wither,’ wrote with contempt of ‘Mother Shipton's’ assured reputation. Steele, in the ‘Spectator,’ No. 17, described the old woman who was the chief toast of his imaginary ‘Ugly Club’ as ‘the very counterpart of Mother Shipton.’

Innumerable chapbooks, chiefly published in the north of England, have since repeated ‘Mother Shipton's’ prophecies in various forms, and ‘Mother Shipton's Fortune-telling Book’ still maintains its authority with the credulous. In 1862 Charles Hindley reprinted in a garbled version the 1687 edition of Head's life, and introduced some verses the composition of which he referred to 1448, foretelling the invention of the steam-engine and the electric telegraph, and the end of the world in 1881. These verses attracted wide attention, but in 1873 Hindley confessed to having forged them (Notes and Queries, 4th ser. xi. 355).

Besides the so-called portraits—of a hideous old woman—which figure in the seventeenth-century tracts and in the later adaptations, many other spurious memorials of ‘Mother Shipton’ are extant. A sculptured stone, which was long supposed to mark her grave at a spot between Clifton and Shipton, Yorkshire, is really a mutilated effigy of a knight in armour, doubtless taken from a tomb in the neighbouring St. Mary's Abbey; it is now in the museum of the Yorkshire Philosophical Society at York. Another stone called ‘Old Mother Shipton's tomb,’ which stands on the high road at Williton, near the mansion of Orchard Wyndham in Somerset, has been proved to be a modern copy of a Roman tablet which was figured in Gordon's ‘Itinerarium Septentrionale’ (, Old Mother Shipton's Tomb, Bristol, 1879). A fanciful picture of the prophetess in a chariot drawn by a reindeer is engraved in the ‘Wonderful Magazine,’ 1793 (vol. ii.). A fine moth (Euclidia Mi) has been popularly called the ‘Mother Shipton’ moth, from the resemblance of the marks on its wings to an old woman's profile with hooked nose and upturned chin.

[Authorities cited in text; Mother Shipton's and Nixon's Prophecies, with an introduction by S. Baker, London, 1797; Harrison's Mother Shipton Investigated, 1881; Notes and Queries, 4th ser. passim, 9th ser. i. 163; Mother Shipton, Manchester, 1882; Journal of British Archæological Assoc. xix. 308; Hazlitt's Handbook.]

 SHIPTON, JOHN (1680–1748), surgeon, son of James Shipton, a druggist, living in Hatton Garden, was apprenticed on 2 Feb. 1696 for seven years to William Pleahill, paying 20l. He served his time and was duly admitted to the freedom of the Barber-Surgeons' Company on 7 March 1703. He served the office of steward of anatomy in 1704, and on 1 June 1731 he was fined rather than serve as steward of the ladies' feast. He was elected an examiner in the company on 27 Aug. 1734, and on 17 Aug. 1738 he became a member of its court of assistants. He then paid a fine of 30l. to avoid serving the offices of warden and master, to which he would have been elected in due course. He lived for many years in Brooke Street, Holborn, where he enjoyed a lucrative practice. He was called into consultation by John Ranby (1703–1773) [q. v.], when Caroline, the queen of George II, was mortally ill of a strangulated hernia. He sided in this consultation with Ranby against Busier, who was in favour of an immediate operation. Lord Hervey says of him that he was ‘one of the most eminent and able of the whole profession.’ He died on 17 Sept. 1748.

[Records preserved at the Barbers' Hall by the kind permission of the master, Mr. Sidney Young, F.S.A.; Lord Hervey's Memoirs, 1848, ii. 507.]

 SHIPTON, WILLIAM (fl. 1659), poet, perhaps identical with William Shipton of Magdalene College, Cambridge, who graduated B.A. in 1660 and M.A. in 1664, was the author of a collection of poetry and prose published by Charles Tyus, at the sign of the Three Bibles, London Bridge, in 1659, under the title of ‘Dia: a poem’ (Brit. Mus.). The introductory portion extends to thirty pages, comprising a dedication ‘to the Truly Noble Edward Trotter Esquire,’ and commendatory verses by ‘Jo. Cooke, Gent., Aulæ Clar.,’ and by Richard Shipton. Besides a series of poems in praise of his mistress Dia, the volume contains elegies on Thomas Shipton