The British Library’s earliest listed publication about Mother Shipton is the anonymously penned

1641 The Prophesie of Mother Shipton in the raigne of King Henry the Eighth, fortelling the

death of Cardinall Wolsey, etc., with fifteen subsequent texts in the seventeenth century
(including a play), and dozens more published in the intervening centuries. One particular title

was crucial to the embellishment of her myth, her biography as written by the Irish novelist
Richard Head in 1667. Notes and Queries described Head as “the notorious Richard Head,
author of several works of loose description.”7 His oeuvre included the erotic poetry of Venus

Cabinet Unlock’d, the earliest slang dictionary The Canting Academy, a work of true crime about

a notorious highwayman called Jackson’s Recantation, and, most significantly, a picaresque

novel titled The English Rogue. That last title would become the first major fiction in English to

be translated into a foreign tongue and would influence authors such as Daniel Defoe, who was
inspired to write Moll Flanders based on Head’s example.

Head’s The Life and Death of Mother Shipton was responsible for the majority of invented
biographical details, building upon the bare narrative scaffolding of dozens of popular

pamphlets. From Head’s imagination came details such as Agatha’s demonic wedding feast with
Satan, accounts of magical feats performed by Ursula in front of worthies such as Cardinal

Wolsey, and, most enduringly, the graphic and purple description of Mother Shipton’s physical
appearance, which occupies hundreds of words, describing her as “very morose and big-boned”,

with “very great goggling, but sharp and firey eyes; her nose of an incredible and
unproportionable length”. Head then goes on for several sentences describing said nose in

magnificently baroque prose, its “many crooks and turnings,” and its adornment with “many
strange pimples of divers colours, as red and blue mixed, which, like vapours of brimstone, gave

such a lustre to the affrighted spectators in the dead time of the night, that one of them confessed
several times, that her nurse needed no other light” to assist her in the birth of the prophetess.

Head offers similarly purple descriptions of Mother Shipton’s cheeks, her teeth, her mouth, her
neck, her shoulders, her legs, and her toes, telling us that it was as if “her body had been screwed

together piece after piece, and not rightly placed”. In short, Head rather cruelly makes clear what
Mother Shipton looked like — a witch.8 Although not the origin of the Shipton myth, Head’s

portrait is its most enduring instance, and it has almost single-handedly propelled Mother

Shipton’s rise into full-on prophetic stardom.

 The Famous Mother Shipton, artist and date unknown — Source.

“The prophet is, first and foremost, a media phenomenon”, writes historian Jonathan Green

in Printing and Prophecy: Prognostication and Media Change 1450-1550, and if Mother
Shipton was anything, it was a veritable media phenomenon.9 A beneficiary of cheap print, her

stock soared with the collapse of the licensing laws of the 1640s, which enabled a deluge of
pamphlets ascribing to her any number of potentially contradictory predictions. Pamphleteers

during the years of the English Civil War took ample opportunity to enlist Mother Shipton as a
convenient authority in propagandistic causes, both Parliamentarian and Royalist. Scholar Harry

Rusche, in the English Historical Review, writes that

Virtually all prophecies possessed a potential propaganda value that could be exploited by
clever interpretation or a slight revision, and no prophetic utterance, ancient or recent, was so
innocent that it could not be ingeniously twisted to bear upon contemporary religious and
political issues.10

Such invoking of prophecies during times of crisis, writes historian Madeline Dodds, was

“usually to demonstrate that some drastic change, either desired or already accomplished, had
been foreseen by the sages of the past.”11 And this was often achieved by the retroactive

backdating of prophecies, something certainly true for Head writing during the years of
Restoration. Consider the explicitly Royalist gloss of the following, in which Mother Shipton

“predicts” the regicide of Charles I, all via the pen of Head writing eighteen years after the actual
event: “Then shall the Council great assemble, / Who shall make great and small to tremble, /

The White King then (O grief to see!) / By wicked hands shall murdered be.” Head informs his
readers that Shipton saw the rule of Charles’ son, “predicted” in this pamphlet published seven

years into his rule, for “fate to England shall restore / A king to reign as heretofore.”