On
March 14, 1895, relatives and neighbors gave Bridget
Cleary, an ailing twenty-six-year-old woman who
lived with her husband in an Irish laborer's cottage,
a cure that we today would consider decidedly odd,
if not downright criminal: they forced her to swallow
herbs that had been boiled in "new" milk
(the first milk a cow produces after calving) and,
while holding her over the kitchen fire, demanded
that she confirm she was indeed Bridget Cleary.
But as strange as it seems today, Angela Bourke
writes in her fascinating new account, The Burning
of Bridget Cleary, the ritual wasn't all that
peculiar in the rural Ireland of the nineteenth
century: "According to the kind of stories
often told at firesides and wakes, certain illnesses
were supposed to be the work of the fairies, who
could abduct a healthy young person and leave a
sickly changeling instead: herbal medicines and
ordeals by fire were both said to be ways of banishing
such a changeling." What happened the next
night, though, is unique in the Irish historical
record.
At first, it was a simple missing-person
case. According to one witness, Bridget Cleary simply
walked out of the cottage that second night and
didn't return. Many people, Bourke writes, said
"plainly that the fairies had taken her away."
Then Michael Cleary, Bridget's husband, claimed
he could get his wife back from the fairies if he
ventured out to a fairy gathering place on a particular
night and cut the cords tying his wife to a gray
horse there. It's a common image in rural Irish
legends, but it didn't work for Cleary. Instead,
on March 22, the police found his wife's badly burned
body buried eighteen inches under the ground in
a swampy field a quarter of a mile from the Cleary
cottage.
As it turned out, Bridget had
recovered sufficiently the night after that initial
herbal treatment to dress and sit in the kitchen
and talk with a large group of relatives and neighbors.
But her husband wasn't satisfied, and he again demanded
that she identify herself as his wife. After she
refused to eat a bit of food he'd offered her as
a test (she'd eaten two bits but refused the third),
he flew into a rage and set fire to his wife as
the final cure for her 'abduction.' She burnt to
death there in the kitchen while several of her
relatives cowered in a bedroom. As one eyewitness
later testified,
My mother and brothers and myself
wanted to leave the house when he flung her on
the floor, but Michael Cleary held the key of
the door in his pocket, and said the door would
not be opened until he got his wife back. My brothers
and I threatened to break down the door and call
the Peelers, but he said that no one would leave
the house till he got his wife back. When he held
the stick near her mouth, he wanted her to answer
her name three times. He said he would burn her
if she did not answer. She answered him, but the
answer did not satisfy him, and he got an oil
lamp and threw it over her. In a few minutes I
saw her in a blaze.
Remarkably, the Irish historical
record documents a number of people being burnt
to death in the process of being tested as potential
changelings. Oscar Wilde's father, Sir William Wilde
(an avid folklorist as well as a physician), documented
a case, for example, in which "a man in the
county of Kerry roasted his child to death, under
the impression that it was a fairy." And just
eleven years before Bridget Cleary's burning (and
less than fifteen miles from her cottage) two women
were arrested for "cruelly illtreating a child
three years old" after they forced the boy—whom
they believed to be a changeling—to sit naked
on a hot shovel (in the hopes that the fairies would
return the kidnapped child).
Most of the people accused in
such attacks were elderly women, Bourke observes,
"and the children killed or injured were usually
severely disabled." But, as Bourke writes,
"Among the documented cases of changeling-burning
in Ireland in the nineteenth century, Bridget Cleary's
is the only one that involves an adult victim."
Bridget's death, Bourke argues, was first and foremost
an instance of domestic violence, sparked by a complex
mix of jealousy (because she was attractive and
dressed better than her neighbors), power struggles
(Bridget was independent-minded in a male-dominated
society, and the Clearys were childless, a 'shameful'
condition that reflected poorly on both husband
and wife) and superstition (Bridget's independence
seemed eccentric and therefore suspicious to the
homogeneous, fairy-versed families around her).
And just as the victim's age set her death apart
from other changeling murders, so did the court's
response to it. While charges were often not even
brought against the perpetrators in other changeling
cases, eleven people were arrested and nine of them
convicted in the burning of Bridget Cleary.
In the extended passages where
Bourke establishes the principal characters and
reconstructs the moments surrounding Bridget's murder
and burial, The Burning of Bridget Cleary
reads like a well-paced suspense thriller. But Bourke
is clearly up to something much more profound and
complicated. She's an expert on the Irish oral tradition
(she originally intended the Bridget Cleary case
to be a chapter "in a projected academic work
on Irish fairy legend"), and she does brilliant
work deciphering the minutiae about fairy belief
that are vital to understanding the Bridget Cleary
case. But she doesn't stint the political elements
of the trial either (the British saw the case as
an excellent chance to demonstrate the 'savage'
nature of the Irish just as the issue of Home Rule
was reaching a critical moment). The motivations
that led to Bridget Cleary's murder and to the conviction
of the perpetrators were remarkably complicated
on several disparate levels, and Bourke has done
groundbreaking work in revealing these complexities
and explaining them at length.
It's hard to imagine a reader,
frankly, who wouldn't find The Burning of Bridget
Cleary fascinating, no matter what their general
interests might be, and Bourke has immensely enriched
the historical record about a turbulent time in
British and Irish history. |