After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - The Servants' Revenge: Arsenic & a Poisoned Pint of Beer

Episode Date: March 3, 2025

Why did two servants living in Plymouth, England, poison their whole household in 1675? How did they sneak arsenic into the food? And what on earth is pottage?Today Maddy Pelling and Anthony Delaney talk to Dr Blessin Adams, author of "Thou Savage Woman: female killers in early modern Britain".Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal is a History Hit podcast.

Hi, we're your hosts, Anthony Delaney and Maddie Pelling. And if you would like after dark myths, misdeeds and the paranormal ad free and get early access, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries with top history presenters and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. It's August 1675, and along the south coast of England the choppy waves are swilling. A shoal of silver fish called pilchards are swimming past.

From the fisherman's boat, the shoal looks like a greasy purple smear. Out goes the net to gobble the fish up into the boat where they lie and gaze at the clouds. The boat heads for home, the harbour of Plymouth, finest port in all the land that bristles with masts and bright flags. It was from here that the Mayflower left for a new world in 1620, where Sir Francis Drake set off to circumnavigate the world. It's also a port that dozens of privateers call home. Eventually the catch are unloaded and sold off to merchants, maids and housewives. Some go one way, some another. And some end up in a house two streets back from the Quay, where William Weeks, the dyer, lives with his family and servants. This is where the trouble starts.

In a sentence, it's all the fish's fault, because as their silver corpses lie there in the kitchen, an argument erupts over how they should be fried. The mistress of the house, Elizabeth, is giving the nursemaid, Philippa, a piece of her mind. Things escalate as comments about housekeeping spiral into more serious, well, personal words. Elizabeth in frustration calls Philippa a whore, saying she knows that she is sleeping with her husband William. Her words hang in the air like poison, darkening the room.

Sometimes, you see, there is not more mysterious than the mundane, particularly when the mundane turns, as it so often does, to murder. This is a story that will take us from Plymouth and Pilchards to poison and petty treason. This is After Dark and in this episode, we're taking you to the heart of a 17th century family home that quickly turns to a crime scene. And guiding us is an expert who has a very personal understanding of how these ghastly locations can unravel the most intimate histories. Hello and welcome to After Dark, I'm Maddie. And I'm Anthony. Now, in the early modern period, there was an obsession with the female killer. Despite being less likely to be murderers

than men and nothing changes there, accounts of female killers fill early modern pamphlets and broadsides. No method of murder was more closely associated with women than the insidious, pernicious and downright treacherous dark art of poison. Which is exactly what happened in 1675 in the town of Plymouth. We've just met two women allegedly poisoned not by their mistress but by the whole household. This is the story of arsenic poisoning. Not the first one we've done though, you can go back to our episodes on Mary Ann Cotton and also Palmer the Poisoner but this time we are going back to the 17th century a little bit further and joining us today is our guest, Anthony and I have been pushing for this guest for a really long time, we are genuinely so excited.

We are joined by Dr. Bolesin Adams. Now, Blesin, before I introduce her, is the author of a new book all about female killers in early modern Britain and it's called Thou Savage Woman, such a great title. Her first book, and you may have seen this around because the cover, I mean don't judge a book by its cover, but this cover is excellent. Her first book was called Great and Horrible News and it is incredible. It's a history of murder more generally in that period. Fascinatingly, not only is Blessin an incredible historian, she completed her PhD in history, but before that, she served two years as a police constable in Norfolk. Blessin, first of all, and you're about to get bombarded by a million questions. Welcome to After Dark.

Thank you so much. And thank you for such a kind introduction. We are genuinely so happy to have you here. Your book, Great and Horrible News, is just so fantastic. Let's talk a little bit first of all about how you've served as a police constable and then moved into this world of being an author, being a historian. Was that a natural transition for you? Is there any crossover there? Or was it a complete U-turn in terms of career trajectory? It was a bit of a weird unplanned adventure that sort of happened to me. So yes, I was a police officer just for a couple of years. And it was an incredibly exciting job, but it was also incredibly

difficult job. And I knew very quickly after a few years that I just didn't really sort of like have them have the gumption to stick it out for the rest of my life and casting around really not knowing what to do with myself because I didn't have much in the way of grades, I didn't really know what I could do for a career. I just ended up going to community college and learning how to be a student from the very beginning and I just sort of stayed there and then went to university and stayed at university until I ended up with a PhD and the very beginning. And I just sort of stayed there and then went to university and stayed at university until I ended up with a PhD. And the reason I ended up doing a PhD, because I did my PhD in law and literature in the early modern period, and really it was because my supervisor said, well, you used to be a cop, so this might be interesting

for you. And that's how I ended up doing it. And it was during my PhD that I was digging down into the legal archives and digging up these incredible things like coroner's inquest records and court records describing the examination of bodies and the examination of murder scenes and the trials of murderers. I thought, wow, this stuff's really, really cool. As soon as I got my PhD out of the way, I just hopped straight onto writing Great and Horrible News because I thought, yes, this is so cool. I have to bring this stuff out of the archives and show it off really.

Let's head into the story then because we are in 1675 in England in Plymouth. A little bit of context, we've had the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 and listeners will know we've done episodes on the Great Fire of London and the plague from 1666 so do go back and check out those episodes if you haven't listened already. We are in a specific household, in a very specific place, the head of the family, William Week. Tell us a little bit about this family, Bless, and who are these people? So yes, we've got William Weeks. He's the head of the household, the patriarch, and he's a dire. And he's mostly absent from the earlier stages of the story, other than the fact that the women in his household tend to be arguing over him a fair bit over these

pilchards. And then we have his wife, Elizabeth, who we are to understand is quite a horrible woman. She's quite fierce, she's quite strict with her servants, so she's quite unpopular. And then they also have their daughter Mary Pengley and her son, John Pengley, living in the household as well. So we have sort of like this household of three generations, the parents, the child and the grandchild all living together. This is very normal in the early modern period to have households like this. And it was also normal to have your servants living in your household as well. So we have Philippa Carey, who was young John's nursemaid, and she would have been in the household for quite a while, I think.

And then we have Anne Evans, who was a very young girl. I believe she was about 15 or 16. And she was rescued by William Weeks from the workhouse and she was given a position in his household. So she would have sort of like been the newest one on the scene still finding her feet perhaps in the household. But yeah, as you described in your introduction, it was a most disharmonious household. Lots of arguing, lots of bickering, lots of ill feeling going on. It must have been quite an oppressive atmosphere, I imagine. Another thing that's quite, and maybe this isn't that surprising, but another thing that's quite apparent is the

female presence in that domestic space as well. And some of the tensions, be they somewhat fabricated maybe afterwards or heightened afterwards, some of those tensions tend to turn inward that there are women against women in this house. So can you tell us a little bit about, you just said as a scene of why this tension is bubbling underneath and why was that so fascinating to people at the time? I think that the tensions between women and women, it was more perhaps because of forced proximity. They lived and worked in the same domestic spheres, whereas the menfolk of the

house would have been out and about living their life outside of the household, only coming back for meals and evening and sleeping and things like that. So perhaps there was a lot of strife between the women in this house because they spent all their time together in this enclosed space. So I can imagine that's probably why there was a lot of tension going on there. It's interesting as well, isn't it? The sort of, I suppose, the class dynamic that is it and the teenage girl, as we would sort of term her today, you know, you say that she's come from a poor house and she's been brought in to this household. And I wonder if there's a sense of the other women in the household wanting her to sort of know her place and to sort of mark

her out as being separate from them in some way, and that she has these different origins. Do you think that's also going on? I wasn't getting any of that through the records, but I have a suspicion that you're probably right because the households in the early modern period were very hierarchical, they were very strictly structured. And absolutely as the youngest servant and as the newest servant she absolutely would have had to have known her place and kept her place. Especially if Philippa being much older had the more senior position in the servants sphere of the household, there would have been a very strong awareness of know your place within this household within this area.

Actually finding testimony of that in the records, I didn't come across, but I think your hunch is right. It just says so much, doesn't about the early modern period and sort of reading in between the lines and what we can access of these domestic spaces that so often, unless actually we come across a crime, are not recorded. And you know, sort of filling in those gaps and how far we can go with that is such an interesting one. It's interesting as well, because as you say, a lot of this stuff isn't recorded. Servants, people in the lower classes, they weren't, you know, they weren't writing an awful lot. Well, they weren't writing at all really if they were if they were literate, they were hardly literate. So we very rarely sort of like hear their voices coming through any of like the written records,

but what I love about the criminal records that I look through is especially with court records, witness testimonies, child transcripts, is we often get their voices written verbatim. So we can actually hear, and sometimes these voices are written in dialect as well, which is absolutely fascinating. So these are the few records from the early modern period where you really feel like you're hearing voices of people you never normally get to hear. But as you say, it's because something horrific has happened. Well, let's talk about the kind of kernel of that horrific detail that's about to transpire. And the starting point for us as we entered this story was this argument. And in the narrative at the top, we heard that Elizabeth calls Philippa a whore.

Can you tell us a little bit more about this accusation? Tell us what we do know, Blessin. I mean, really that's it. We just have a testimony that says that they had that argument. She accused Philippa of being her husband's whore. Philippa then sort of like has an awful lot of problems in her own marriage because her husband hears about this. It just compounds the strife.

Sowing the seeds of suspicion between married couples. It's not going to go anywhere good, is it? Yeah, as you say, this is sort of like the flashpoint that sort of leads on to the more dramatic sort of like goings on within this household. Mary is absolutely furious that Elizabeth, one, made this allegation and two, somehow got news to her husband that apparently she's sleeping with other men. And she swears that she's going to take vengeance on Elizabeth Week, she's going to have her vengeance. And I think in sort of like she's standing in the kitchen, and she's loudly

telling everybody else in the kitchen, I'm going to have my revenge on her. I think she says something the lines of I'll fit her. Anne Evans was in the room at the time, perhaps quite innocently listening in, who knows, perhaps gleefully joining in, but this is where the idea of Philippa the servant and Anne first get the idea that they want to kill their mistress Elizabeth. And it all stems from this argument over the Pilchards and being called a whore. It's so interesting to me just how quickly that escalates, you know, that the servants response to being degraded and put back in their place

in this way is and to have these accusations thrown at them is to, you know, in a really short space of time think, well, let's get some revenge. We know that this is going to be a poisoning and we know that arsenic is going to be involved. So blessing, as I understand it, there are two different types of arsenic common in this period, right? There's yellow and white. So what's the difference between these and how freely available are they? So they're both freely available. White arsenic, I suppose, is the more desirable for poisoners looking to commit murder. It was water soluble, which meant that it was much easier to disguise

it in food and drink, you could just mix it in and it would dissolve and you wouldn't even know it was there. And it was also flavorless. So again, you wouldn't really get the sense that you were drinking anything suspicious or eating anything suspicious. So that's really the advantage. Oh, and also it was much stronger. It was much more deadly. You were guaranteed to administer a fatal dose if you were to put some in food. We're not guaranteed, but you are far more likely to administer a fatal dose. I also believe it's not as easy to get as yellow arsenic. So yellow arsenic is a less refined form of white arsenic. It comes as like a bright yellow stone, which needs to

be ground down into sort of like a powder or gravelly substance. It's not water soluble. If you put it into food, you're gonna see it, you're gonna crunch it in your teeth. It's so much more obvious. And it's not as potent as white arsenic. So you have to sort of like put more in. And when it's so obvious,

you don't really want to be having to do that. You don't wanna be having to put more of this weird, bright yellow crunchy stuff into someone's food. They're more likely to see it. But unfortunately, this yellow stuff was the only stuff that Philippa could get her hands on at the time. And then to answer your second question, how commonly available was arsenic in the early one period? Yeah, commonly available. Anybody could buy it. It wasn't a controlled substance. Or it was mildly controlled in that if you went to the apothecary and you wanted to buy arsenic, he'd jot your name down in a book, but he'd still sell it to you. It

was used in very benign, everyday household things, makeup for killing pests in your home, for making pesticides and things like that, so for pest control. It was normal to have arsenic in your home in the early modern period. Normal and all as it is. Philippa and Anne come up with, or at least Anne does as far as I understand, comes up with a kind of a fantastical idea as to how they got their hands on it, right? Which if they just said, oh, we got it at the apothecary, then that might be very suspicious. But what they describe is a bit suspicious. Can you tell us about that, Lesin? Yeah. So Anne says that she's in the garden gathering flowers or doing something quite bucolic and she sees something being logged over the wall and it's the yellow arsenic in a twist

of paper and she peers over the wall and sees some children talking to Philippa. So in her mind, as she says, she believes that some apprentice boy from the apothecary or somewhere just threw it over the garden wall. I don't know. I mean- Why not? Bless and I feel like you will have come across a lot of excuses like that in your two years as a police constable, right? Yes, all the time. It was usually the, I didn't steal it, I found it to defence. Yeah, absolutely. What's so fascinating, I think here is that this is primarily a story about the domestic space and about women. And we get this association between women and poisoning,

particularly in this period. And this continues well into the 18th and certainly into the 19th and early 20th centuries. The preparation of the arsenic then in this space is something, I suppose, of a woman's alchemy in that they have access to the kitchen, to the equipment, and of course, they are the ones preparing the food that is going to be eaten. Can you tell us a little bit about how this arsenic, whether it's come over the garden wall or it's been purchased from the apothecary, how it's actually treated once it enters the home because there's a sort of chemical treatment of it that needs to take place right. You mentioned sort of grounding it up and things but this is quite a complicated process that requires significant knowledge and practical

experience. Yes and this is something that women would have had as well, they would have been practiced in the arts of working with these sorts of chemicals in their still rooms, in the preparation of potions, medicines, cosmetics, things like that. So I think what you talk about here is when Philippa takes the yellow arsenic and then she puts it in the beer, and it's the carbonic acids in the beer that breaks it down into the more soluble form of white arsenic. It's interesting that she does this because it does require some knowledge. I mean, I didn't know about this until I started reading about it, but this is

something that would have been more commonly practiced in the early one period, this sort of pharmacology in the home. But I also thought it was strange as well that she went to all this bother of breaking down the yellow arsenic and making it into the more potent sort of like form of white arsenic. But then they also use the yellow arsenic. They grind it up and they put it into the food. And I'm thinking to myself, this is strange. They use both the poison. They use the converted arsenic and the original form of the yellow arsenic. I don't know why. I don't know if they just feel like they need to just double down and just put as much as they can. Maybe they thought the beer wasn't acting fast enough, it wasn't being efficient enough. And then they just thought, right,

let's just put it all in. I don't know. But yeah, she does this quite complex sort of like chemistry in her still room, which would have been attached to the kitchen. So again, it's these spaces in the home that are feminine spaces. The still room in the kitchen are these feminine spaces where poisons are used and processed and turned into other things. Which is why, as you said before, women are associated with poison because it's part of their day-to-day domestic routine

is to work with these sort of substances. If you're like me and you love history, but in particular you love the smutty, salacious, gossipy history, then do I have the perfect podcast for you. If you fancy finding out about the slippery origins of lube, or how Vikings linked sex and magic together, then listen no further. Join me, Kate Lister, on Betwixt the Sheets, where I delve into the most outrageous, the most taboo, and the downright sexiest parts of our history. It's the kind of history that you probably wouldn't bring up at a family lunch, but you might bring it up down the pub. From the history of swear words to answering important questions like just how incestuous were Neanderthals and so much more. Listen every Tuesday and Friday wherever it is that you get your podcasts. A podcast by History Hit. Correct me if I'm wrong here, Blaise, just on that point about the association between

women and poisoning, and we get that well into the 19th century and even into the 20th century as well, where women who murder their weapon of choice, shall we say, is poisoned. From what I understand, and again correct me if I'm wrong, women aren't necessarily statistically more associated with poisoning at all. It's an equal opportunities form of murder. Yes. I mean, from the secondary material that I was reading, time and time again, it was coming up that it was very much an equal crime committed by men and women in this period. But you wouldn't know that from just reading the true crime literature of the day, you would think it was exclusively a female crime.

And that's very much how it was perceived by the public as well. And that was for several reasons, as we discussed before, because it was just part of the women's domain. Women just worked with poisons. They had access to poisons. The other reason it was so popularly believed that women were more likely to be poisonous than men was because it's a passive form of murder. There's no confrontation, there's no strength required. It can be done secretly, it can be done covertly, and it's non-confrontational. It was believed to be very much a women's crime because women, those weak cowards, were more likely to sneak around in shadows and strike a man when he doesn't know what's going on.

And one of the great fears that men had about female poisoners was this isn't something that you could anticipate and it wasn't something you could fight back against. So all their strength and their physical superiority meant nothing in the face of a female poisoner. That I think was quite terrifying to men when you believe that if you're going to be attacked, you're going to be in a fight, or you're going to be in any other situation where you might be killed, at least you've got a fighting chance. But you don't have a fighting chance when it comes to poison. I suppose not only that, but the fact that the threat is coming from inside the home,

the patriarchally organized space of which the man is at the head and that the threat is coming from within his own family. I think that's fascinating. Yeah, I think the characterization of women as crafty poisoners is something that particularly comes out in the early modern period. I'm looking at an image here and I think Anthony and I should try and describe this for our listeners. It looks like maybe the title page of a book, would you say, Anthony? Yeah, it is some words and an image, a woodcut image. It's from 1616 from the cover and it

says, a discourse against painting and tincturing of women, wherein the abominable sins of murder and poisoning, pride and ambition, adultery and witchcraft are set forth and discovered. And then there's an image of somebody who looks very like, for all intents and purposes, Elizabeth I, I suppose, although it is slightly more 17th century because we are pushing in a little bit more there. So it's just a woman, she has a painted face. And I think, Maddie, what they're doing here is linking this idea that Bleson was talking about, about women painting their faces, using makeup essentially, to get this alchemical knowledge and what they may then do with it I suppose.

Yeah, I mean that's the thing isn't it? That these chemicals can be used to decorate and adorn the body as well as to end someone's life. And there's something there about women creating their own masks, being in disguise, not being what you think they are. You know, the sins that they're accused of here, murder and poisoning, yes, but also pride and ambition, adultery and witchcraft, these are all things that take place after the lights have gone out. They are the things that you do in the shadows that you do in a way that is untrustworthy and sinister. And that's exactly what we're getting here, this kind of, you know, the fakery of women. I can see at the bottom that this particular pamphlet or book is printed in 1616. Blessin, is this a text that you've come across in your work?

Yes, I've dipped in and out of this one. It had some really juicy quotes that I think I might have actually included in the book. The parallels being drawn between everyday female domestic arts, such as cosmetics, and then murder, poisoning, pride, ambition, adultery and witchcraft. I mean, it couldn't be clearer that the author of this particular pamphlet or track to whatever this is, is really keen to hammer down the message that women are just inherently like the things they do are just going to be inherently lead to sin unless they're kept under tight control. They'd be very different get ready with me videos, wouldn't they get ready with me as I do my makeup and poison my husband. Oh my gosh this. Watch every moment of it. Oh my gosh. I would follow and hit that follow button so fast.

The other cool thing about this image is she's so fancy. Everyday women did not dress like this. This is the height of fashion. This is the fanciest, most expensive outfit that women could possibly put together. This is something husbands really didn't want their wives to paint their faces and be sexually attractive to other men. It was sort of like, you need to be modest in the home, no makeup really. It's anything like this. You need to sort of like heaping it low key. It's again that idea of women in makeup overly sexualized, why are they sexualizing themselves? And then it brings into this whole idea of

adultery, deceit, the betrayal. It's all these sorts of things that just caught up under the umbrella of womanhood really, isn't it? Yeah. And there's, you know, there's all these issues of sort of disguise and untrustworthiness, but also just of women's agency, you know, all the things, again, there are things of murder, poisoning, adultery, witchcraft. These are all things that require, you know, girls to do it for themselves.

You've got to go out and do that witchcraft or whatever, you know, that these are these actions that can take place, yes, under the cover of darkness or in terms of disguise, but also without men, importantly. Absolutely. Yeah. And I think that's where a lot of the fear comes from as well is, is the these are very female activities done in female spaces. I can imagine men looking from the outside and looking on with much suspicion. What are they up to? What are they talking about? Are they making foundation or a pie? Let's return to two of those suspicious women then in our story in the shape of Sylopa and

Anne. And, Besson, you've already told us that they've laced the beer with a bit of a disappearing version of the arsenic, but they also don't stop there, do they? They put some of this into a stew or a pottage. Yes, the pottage. The yellow arsenic is ground up between two tiles and then put into the family supply of oats, which is used to make the pottage. And that's what's so, I think, quite shocking about this particular case is, Philippa and Anne, they only hated Elizabeth. She was the one they wanted to kill. But in order to go about killing Elizabeth, they put poison into the family supply of beer and into the family supply of oats. And then this would have been served, well,

it was served to the family as a whole on Sunday. They'd all come back from church and they sat down for the family meal. The servants were included in this. So you had the whole household sat down together and Philippa and Anne start serving the beer. They start serving the pottage and they give it to everybody. And then they sit there and they either pretend to eat or they don't eat at all. And they're quite happy to watch young Mary, the daughter, John, the child, eat this poisoned pottage and to drink the poisoned beer as well. And I think that's why this crime was so shocking and so sensational because not only was poison being used to commit a murder, it was being

used to indiscriminately slaughter innocent people in the quest to period between the hierarchy and stability of the nation and the home itself both being kind of patriarchal structures. What I find so ironic about the scene is that is it true that William actually comments while he's eating the pottage that there's yellow gravel in it? But I suppose because he's a man, he's not familiar with these alchemical, pharmaceutical ways of the ladies, he just carries on eating. I know, I was wondering the exact same thing because he's crunching down on this gravel and he makes a comment about how, God, this is crunchy. Does anybody know what this is? And

the server's just like, I don't know. Don't know what that is. But he also mentions that the meat in the potage has been sort of like stained black. I wasn't too sure what this meant. I'm sure sort of like some of the more scientific listeners will go, ah, I know what that is. I know what's causing that. So yeah, let me know. But I just thought it was odd that he kept on eating and I was wondering, is it just because it was normal to have grit in your food in the early modern period? I'm not a culinary historian, so I wasn't too sure. But yeah, I did think it was odd that when later on he's speaking to one of the investigators, he's describing how crunchy and disgusting he found the meal, but he kept eating it. ALICE But speaking of unusual turns in this story,

I'm going to come back to Anne because Philippa is the one who was wronged, if she was wronged, but Philippa was certainly the one that Elizabeth targeted with her potential slander of calling her a whore, shall we say. Anne, however, is absolutely determined to kill this poor family because when they're complaining of having, you know, airy side effects, and like, gosh, I'm really thirsty, something that dinner didn't agree with me, she's like, do you know what you should have? You should definitely drink as much of this beer as possible. Anne is really active. Like it feels to me, Philip is going, right, Anne, whatever you want to do. You know, and Anne's the one that's getting this arsenic over the wall as well. So I'm

just intrigued by Anne's real push for this. You know, I think that's such an interesting question because as you say, the feud was between Philippa and Elizabeth, but it seems like Philippa was using Anne and Anne was quite a willing accomplice in this. You have to wonder why. I mean, she was very, very young. Maybe she was impressed by Philippa. Maybe she had her own grudge against Elizabeth that we just haven't heard about in any of the surviving records.

But there was some talk about Anne wanting to run away with a sweetheart that she had waiting on the sidelines, but there's no reason for her to commit mass murder before she ran off with a sweetheart. So as to what's going on with Anne, why she's participating so enthusiastically, I don't know. I mean, sometimes you just can't get into the heads of people when they're doing stuff like this.

But I think you also make a really good point is the fact that when, I think it was Mary who was upstairs in bed parched because of the purging and the vomiting, the lack of fluids. Anne is giving her the beer, the poisoned beer, to relieve her suffering, thus poisoning her more. And this goes on for a long time.

This goes on for days and days and days. And Philippa and Anne are scurrying around after the family. They're mopping up their vomit. They're looking after them as they're deteriorating. And poisoning by arsenic is horrific, it's excruciating. It manifests itself in the most violent way with the vomiting and the purging. And it's just crazy to me that they can stick around

and nurse this dying family while administering more poison as they're going along. And you have to think to yourself, the fortitude, I guess, if that's the right word, to stick it out for this long, to stick around your dying victims for this long, it's really hard to think about. They're certainly determined, aren't they? I wonder if there was a fear that they had that if they had got the dose wrong, the family might recover and then point the finger of blame at them.

But you would have thought, you know, after a few glasses of beer per family member, and the potage that you'd be in pretty safe hands, you could sort of sit back and relax and let it unfold. And yeah, there's something quite unsettling about the fact that they continue to nurse them. It's quite strange. So how long, I mean, I sort of don't want to ask really after you've said how, how sort of graphically violent this end is, but how long is it before the family members start to die and what order do they die in? Oh, gosh, Elizabeth dies first. She was I think administered the most poison she was administered the higher doses. It's mentioned in one of the testimonies that the

poisoned beer is poured into her pottage as well. So she's sort of like given a double dose at the beginning, whereas everybody else is just eating the single dose of the less effective yellow arsenic. And then Mary Pengley, who eventually dies a few days afterwards. Luckily luckily young John and William survive, but it would have been such an ordeal for these two to go through something like this. And then at the end of all their suffering, they then have to grieve as well, for William has lost his wife and young John has lost his mother and grandmother. I may have seen one too many crime dramas, but in those dramas when something happens in a house,

the first place they'll go, or one of the first places the police investigating will go, is to the neighbours and see if they can gather any information from them. Feels like, or it seems to me that in the 17th century things weren't all that different necessarily because it's the neighbours who start maybe suggesting that there's some foul play happening within the house. Isn't that right? Yes. It's funny as well because the neighbors are involved almost every step of the way because

these early modern households, you'd have your neighbors coming in and out of the kitchen. They're very involved. People were very sort of like community minded back in them day and there was very strong relations between neighbors. So yes, Elizabeth's neighbors were popping in and out all the time and they were also popping in and out during their sickness. And it's as the sickness was progressing and getting worse and worse that they did start to suspect. And I think that they first started to think something was really wrong when they noticed one of the dogs in the house vomiting. And this was something that was very commonly associated with poisoning,

was if people in the household are becoming very ill and dying, it could be something like food poisoning, it could be gastroenteritis, it could be some normal everyday sickness. But when the dogs and the cats start dropping dead, people have to start asking, what's going on? So it's when they notice one of the dogs vomiting that they suspected and they conducted their own little sort of investigation. It sounds quite horrible to us, but what they decided to do was start feeding the dog things that they suspected the family had eaten the day that they fell ill. So they started feeding the dog doses of the potage. Potage is something that would have been bubbling away

in the kitchen for days and being refreshed and refreshed. So it wasn't thrown out and then started at scratch. So they were just working with what they had with the family supply of oats. And yes, they managed to get the dog to vomit a fair few times. And this is when they started checking the oats, checking the potage.

And that's when they're finding the yellow gravel. And then they're finding the yellow gravel. And then they're showing this yellow gravel to the local doctor who confirms their suspicions, yes, this is arsenic. So something's going on here. And this is when the coroner is summoned and the investigation begins. There's so many things to say here. First of all, I was on the side of the servants poisoning the mistress until they poisoned the dog and then I'm out at that point. Also, can we just say that dog would have been thrilled about being fed the family

meal. Honestly, so happy, which makes it sadder. I mean, it's so interesting that the two female servants do not get rid of the evidence. And as you say, Blessin, because that potage would have been something that was just constantly added to and constantly expanded and then eaten and expanded again, that evidence doesn't go. I suppose that's one of the great things, the most effective things about poisoning someone as a crime is that the evidence is eaten. Even though nowadays, I suppose with toxicology,, etc., you can confirm what's happened in the early modern period. It's sort of a pretty good way to get rid of someone, but then you've left the evidence on the stove that it's sort of hard to conceive of. And again,

it sort of speaks, I suppose, to the question mark over what their plan was, Philippa and Anne. What are they thinking here? They're still nursing the family, they've left the evidence there for everyone to see. They're allowing the neighbors to come in to the extent where they're getting suspicious and they're doing little tests of their own. And then they're now calling in the authorities. It's not looking good for them. What happens next? Yeah, they're still sticking around, aren't they? Before I quickly go on and talk about what next, I just wanted to make a comment. I think we often think of criminals as being smarter than they actually are. And I don't know if this is something that we get from our own crime fiction and crime

media, is the criminal has to be an incredibly clever, sophisticated person because that's the foil for the detective. That's who they have to sort of figure it out. But in reality, criminals can be incredibly stupid and they don't have a plan. And they just go and they just do it without thinking. And you wonder like, why did they even stick around? Especially when the coroner was summoned and suspicions were being thrown around, they didn't run off. As simple as it sounds, sometimes it is just stupidity. People aren't as clever as we like to imagine they are. I remember talking to my auntie who used to photograph crime scenes and she was describing to me some particularly grisly murder scene. And then she said that the guy who committed the crime, he stuck around for hours eating things out of the fridge, making

cooking dinner, doing all sorts of things that were guaranteed to leave forensic evidence behind and get him caught. And I said, but why on earth did he do that? Why didn't he get away? And she just shrugged and she said, you will not believe how stupid some of these people are. And I just thought, yeah.

So anyway, after that little aside, so yes, what happens next? Well, after Elizabeth passed away, William and John are still desperately ill. So they're still upstairs in bed fighting against the ravages of this poison. And this is when the coroner is summoned and he examines the body. And he also examines the possibly dying potential victims. It's interesting because in this period the coroner wasn't just somebody who examined bodies. They conducted murder investigations as well. And part of that was interviewing suspects, interviewing witnesses.

William and Mary and John are still alive. So Elizabeth has succumbed to the poison. And it's William and Mary who give the information and say, this is what happened when we ate the meal. This is how desperately ill we've become. This is what Philippa and Anne have been doing since we've been struck with illness. So they were able to give really valuable and incriminating testimony to the coroner while they were possibly in the process of dying themselves. So it was, it was almost like they were giving their dying message, but luckily William and John pulled through. Unfortunately, Mary did later die die but she was able to give some really detailed testimony about Anne giving her the beer and she's actually quite reluctant to drink the beer at first and

Anne talks her into it. She sort of like persuades her into drinking the beer which is just even more damning against Anne. So yeah it's at this point that Philippa and Anne are well and truly suspected of poisoning the Weeks family in the Pengalis and they are arrested and shut into prison awaiting trial. This would have caused quite the stir, wouldn't it, Blessing, in that these are people in your household and as you and Maddy have been saying throughout this episode, it's also turning the world upside down slightly. I love what you're saying about, and we've had criminologists on this show before who have said, don't ask why certain criminals do things. It's the wrong question because we cannot understand that mind frame. And sometimes it's just acting out, sometimes it's just whatever. And I think that's really interesting in this context as well.

So there's a threat inside the house, but we were talking about society and the neighborhood and Sometimes it's just acting out, sometimes it's just whatever. And I think that's really interesting in this context as well. So there's a threat inside the house, but we're talking about society and the neighborhood and how a case like this will impact all of those people. And again, it's the world turned upside down as the servants attacking the masters. No household is safe, right? So this is a story that can travel. Absolutely. I mean, this sort of crime in any community would have been explosive,

but this was something I think that was affecting people on a national scale. You're absolutely right in that a case like this would have been explosive in these communities where it's happening. And what you're talking about there is with the servants rising up against the masters, people of lower orders killing people of higher orders. It went against everything that the early moderns believed in when it came to society, when it came to the Commonwealth, when it came to the order of things, and not just societal order, but God's natural order as well. It was almost unbelievable that these events could take place. And when they did, it was incredibly shocking, and it provoked a great deal of fear, because you don't want to imagine that your

servants can rise up against you, especially if you're the sort of master or the sort of mistress that treats your servants poorly, which would have been commonplace in this particular period. So yeah, there was that real fear. And sort of like as well what you're talking about there is this particular crime of servants killing their masters, this would have been petty treason. So this was a specific offence that encompassed servants and wives who committed acts of murder against those that they owed subjugation to. So it was treated as a species of treason rather than just murder. It was treated so seriously that it had its own law to cover

it. One thing that we see in the aftermath of the arrests of Anne and Philippa then is, I suppose, the different layers of storytelling that become attached to the case. We've got Anne and Philippa themselves, who I believe I'm right in saying, both claim that they're innocent but blame the other person. So they instantly, they've been a team up to this point, but they're now separated and they've turned on each other. But then we have another character who enters the story in the form of a man called John Quick, who seems to arrive quite opportunistically to narrativise and I suppose sell their story. So what happens when you're researching a case

like this, Blessed, and you then come to this point in the story where everyone is now saying different things about what happened, what the motivations are, you're getting this quote unquote official contemporary account written down and published, which of course comes with its own caveats and problems. How do you wade through all of that storytelling? And is there one narrative in particular that you followed over some others? It can be really difficult because a lot of the time, the only narrative you have is the narrative of someone like John Quick. So you really have to learn how to read between the

lines and sort of like try and tease out things that are not saturated with so much of his own biases and things like that. So in this particular time period, you are sometimes quite limited with the archival material you're working with. So you're absolutely right in that you need to exercise caution in that when you are telling these stories and you're presenting these stories, you have to be aware of who's writing these accounts and why. And John Quick is a really interesting character. He was a minister whose job it was to squeeze post-trial confessions out of convicted criminals. In that space between trial and execution, that's when he would step in. In an official capacity,

he would be visiting the prisoners in jail and he would be working on them quite hard. And that's something that really comes through in his account of when he's involved in this particular story, is he seems to take a lot of pride in the fact that he was quite oppressive, and he broke these women down as best he could while they were awaiting execution. And what he really wanted out of them is he wanted them to be penitent. So as a minister, he wanted them to express regret and to acknowledge what they had done. And then from a legal perspective, these post-trial confessions are quite important because they legitimize rulings. It can often be in many cases that,

although the courts had found people guilty and sentenced them to death, there could still be a lot of suspicion or a lot of sort of like disagreement from the public. And these sorts of post-trial confessions are just the extra thing where they can publish it and they can say, see, they were so guilty that they even provided a confession before execution. So they were sort of like part of the process of justice. Post-trial executions were just really common. It was expected that you were to give a post-trial

confession and that you were supposed to be penitent on the scaffold. So John Quick is there in the prison working hard on Philippa and Anne. Philippa is really stubborn and she refuses to give a post-trial confession. And she's actually quite aggressive with John Quick, which he absolutely despises. And he seems to take quite a hatred against Philippa. And then young Anne, she folds very quickly. She's incredibly frightened. She's incredibly tearful. It's quite shocking to read John Quick's account. He seems gleeful to the extreme that he has pushed Anne in two tears. He seems to delight in telling her the details of what she's to suffer

when she's executed because she was convicted as a petty traitor. She was to be burned at the stake. John Quick is quite a disturbing individual, but by no means a strange or unique individual. He would have been one of many working the prisons and doing this particular job. He reminds me a little bit, I suppose, of the 17th century witch finders and the men who set themselves up as these interrogatory figures of authority. As you say, the account that he gives, first of all, it's called Hell Opened. It's the most the account that he gives, I mean, first of all, it's called hell opened. It's the most hyperbole ridden, ridiculously misogynistic text, but sort of on steroids. And I'm trying to grab here in front of me some of the phrases that he uses. My personal favourite, he says,

oh, hell, hell, hell. Woman is a place and state of unspeakable or unsufferable horror and torment. I mean, this guy needs to calm down. I suppose with the benefit of historical distance, he's a laughable figure. And I think it's really fascinating that Philip is the one who kind of goes up against him. But Anne being the younger and more vulnerable, I suppose, capitulates to him almost immediately. But if one was to stand in that cell with those women and with John Quick, I think he would be, as you say, a really deeply troubling individual to come across. It just seems to me so fascinating that at a sort of institutional official level, men like this were allowed to have access to and to terrorise women, albeit women who

committed crimes. But there is no protection for these women who have been convicted, or indeed who are suspected of crimes, that they are laid bare and open to these predators, essentially. DL it was essential for someone like John Quick to get these post-trial confessions. And no matter his method, it would have been looked on as a good thing that he was leaning so heavily on these women and frightening them and torturing them with visions of hell and things like that. For the early modern justice system, penitence was a part.

It was so important that your criminals were penitent before execution, because it sort of like completed the circle of justice. In the early modern mindset, you had to understand that people had to reconcile the idea that terrible murders took place and families were poisoned and these things were allowed to happen by a benevolent God. So in order for them to write that wrong, they have to imagine that God was also present in the process of justice. It was God that exposed these crimes. It was God that was working in the courts to bring justice, and then it's God that will finally give them penitence and then forgiveness.

And it's that process of sin, repentance, and forgiveness that was so important in the justice system. And if you missed that vital step at the end, it was really disconcerting and really, it just didn't work. So it was really important for someone like John Quick to serve, to play his part in this system of justice in order to get penitence and then redemption for these prisoners. Someone like Philippa Carey, who refused to be penitent and went to her death refusing to admit her crimes,

I believe he says quite some ghastly things to her as she's waiting to be hanged. I think he says, you're now going to hell, you're going to burn forever and all these sorts of things. He was quite disgusted with her for not giving him that post-trial confession. But at the same time, he was also quite ghastly to Anne. I don't think John Quick was a nice man at all. Just to also point out that these two women have murdered half of the family as well. That's also important to bear this in mind. Anthony's sticking up for the torture. No, but I noticed this an awful lot. I've heard it on other podcasts that look at female

killers where female killers are looked at in a very different way, particularly in a modern mindset. And the kimming also almost becomes secondary to the womanhood, whereas I just don't quite get that and I don't even get it in a modern mindset as opposed to in a 17th century mindset. So I think it's too easy to go down that route. He is the good guy in this. I mean, we may not interpret him as that, but in terms of the context of the time, these two people are the murderers and that context remains so now. And they do go to their death. I mean, that's a really interesting blessing what you're saying there about the goading Philippa when she's on the scaffold and yes that sounds mean and yes

that sounds inhumane but not in the context of the 17th century and not in the context of what he believes he's looking at as this demonically possessed and she is headed to hell because that's what happens in this ordered world and now she is going to be part of that order. But listen, just to finish with this particular case, we always say on After Dark that we try to make true crime work harder. And I'm just wondering what you think we can take from this history? What do you think it offers us in this day and age when we're looking back at this particular case?

I think what I find most interesting about these particular cases are the responses to these female killers, how they were perceived, how they were written about, and how they became so notorious in the aftermath of their crimes. And I'm always drawing parallels with modern true crime in the fact that there is still an enduring fascination with female killers. And that's sort of what you were saying before as well, is that these sort of attitudes are pervasive and they persist. Sometimes I'm walking through the supermarket and I'm looking at the true crime section of the magazine aisle. If there has been a woman who has killed someone or there's been a suspected female killer, she will dominate the newspapers and the magazine and the true

crime press to an almost excessive degree. So that's sort of like what I find quite interesting is how we still perceive women who kill and the rhetoric we use when we talk about them and how they absolutely dominate the news media when they do crop up. So to sort of like come to the end of that long ramble is I often think to myself how little things change and I guess reflecting on how little things change is quite interesting. Is it useful? Maybe? Well, we certainly think so here at After Dark.

Blessin, it's been absolutely fascinating to talk to you and thank you for listening along to this episode. If you've enjoyed hearing this scandalous tale then may I suggest that you also check out Kate Lister's Brilliant Betwixt the Sheets, a podcast about the history of sex, scandal and society. If as ever you have episode suggestions for After Dark you can email our producers at afterdark at historyhit.com