The Ghost of Mrs. Adkins: A Holborn Midwife Story from 1680

In the spring of 1680 Londoners could buy two cheap printed accounts of the same strange event. One was a short prose pamphlet with a long title beginning Great News from Middle-Row in Holbourn. The other was a broadside ballad, A New Ballad of the Midwives Ghost, to be sung to the tune of “When Troy Town.” Both reported that the ghost of a recently dead midwife, a Mrs. Adkins (the ballad spells it Atkins), had appeared to a servant, directed her to the hearth, and so brought to light the bones of children buried beneath it.¹²

Neither text can tell us what happened in that house. What they can show is how a ghost story was put together and sold in Restoration London, and how it drew on two fears that the law and the church had been sharpening for decades: fear of hidden infant deaths, and suspicion of the women who attended births.

What the pamphlet reports

The prose account opens with a statement of its moral before it gives any facts. Murders that “pollute the world,” it says, force restless spirits out of their “dire Mansions” to reveal the deeds their hands have done.¹ Then comes the story. Mrs. Adkins, “late a Midwife,” had died in Scroop Court in Holborn about half a year before. She had formerly lived in Middle Row and practised there, and neighbors remembered her as “a Woman of an extraordinary subtilty and private policy” who liked to say that “her Head-piece had ben still her chiefest Friend” and had kept her out of danger. The pamphlet presents these remarks as dark sayings whose meaning only became clear after her death.¹

Since her death, it continues, the house in Middle Row had been troubled by noises, groans and apparitions in her likeness, which the household had kept quiet. On Tuesday, 16 March, at about nine in the evening, a maidservant sent upstairs to fetch her mistress’s night clothes saw the figure sitting on the head of a cupboard. It appeared “with gastly Countenance” and “seemed to belch flames of Fire,” and the servant cried out, “O Mistress, The Chamber is all on Fire.”¹ The spirit told her not to fear, since “its Commission was not to injure her,” and charged her to tell a woman named Mary, “since supposed to be her Grandchild,” to take up two tiles in the hearth, lift the board beneath, and bury what she found. It then vanished “in a Flash of Lightning.”¹

The master and mistress at first refused to believe her. Because there had been earlier rumors of an apparition, they agreed to dig. About four inches down they found a board, and beneath it, the pamphlet says, “the Bones of two children, as it is supposed, but of one ‘tis certain.” The remains were dry and much reduced, and could be seen “at this time” at the Cheshire Cheese in Middle Row. In the opinion of several surgeons, the pamphlet adds, they had lain there a long time. It ends the narrative with a conjecture, not a finding: the remains were thought to be those of “Children Illegitimate, or Bastards,” killed to protect their mothers’ reputations.¹

A note on the date. The pamphlet’s title gives the year as 1679, while the ballad says 1680. In England the legal year then began on 25 March, so a March date before the 25th could be written either way. The two texts describe the same night.¹²

The ballad version

The ballad, printed “for T. Vere, at the Sign of the Angel in Guiltspur-Street,” survives in the collection of Samuel Pepys at Magdalene College, Cambridge, where Pepys filed it among his tragedies.² Pepys gathered more than 1,800 ballads into five albums, and murders and executions were among the subjects he collected.³

The ballad tells the same story with sharper edges. Its long heading promises that the maid, by lifting “two Tiles by the Fire-side,” would find “the Bones of Bastard-Children that the said Midwife had 15 years ago Murthered,” and it advertises the bones as on show at the Cheshire-Cheese “for the satisfaction of those that believes not this Relation.”² Where the pamphlet leaves the killer unnamed, the ballad names her at once. “Mistris Atkins,” it says, was “of Reputation good alway” until death came for her, and she was bound for the Styx “For murthering Babes for Parents sake.”²

The ghost in the ballad also speaks more. She asks that Mary, “whom I love most,” see the bones decently buried, and adds: “And let the World to know my Crime, / and that I am most sorry for’t: / Desiring Midwives to take heed, / How they dispose their Bastard-breed.”² The ballad also calls Mary a kinswoman and “a Religious Maid,” where the pamphlet supposes her to be a grandchild.¹²

The two texts also differ on place. The ballad’s heading puts the haunted house in “Rotten-Row in Holbourn,” while its verses say Atkins lived in “Scroop-Court”; the pamphlet has her dying in Scroop Court but haunting her former home in Middle Row.¹² Scroop’s Court, later Union Court, lay opposite St Andrew’s Church, Holborn.⁴ Middle Row was a block of houses that stood half across the street at the south end of Gray’s Inn Lane. As early as 1657 James Howell called it “a mighty hindrance to Holborn,” and it was finally pulled down in 1868.⁴ The disagreement over addresses is a reminder that these were quickly written commercial products, not depositions.

The law behind the story

The pamphlet’s conjecture about illegitimate children did not come from nowhere. In 1624 Parliament passed an Act to prevent the murdering of bastard children (21 Jac. I c. 27). Its preamble complained that unmarried women secretly buried or hid the deaths of their newborns and then claimed the children had been born dead. The Act provided that if a woman delivered of a child who would be a bastard tried to conceal its death, by secret burial or any other means, she would suffer death as for murder, unless she could prove by at least one witness that the child was born dead.⁵ As Farnell puts it, the statute in effect reversed the ordinary presumption of innocence, placing the burden of proof on the mother.⁶

The Act was very much alive in 1680. That same year the City printer Samuel Roycroft reissued it as a single sheet, together with an order from the justices that it be printed and read in the parish churches of the City of London.⁷ Londoners who bought the Adkins pamphlet that year could also have heard the law against concealment read from the pulpit. The texts do not show a direct connection between the two, but they belong to the same moment.

The statute’s logic gave a midwife a dangerous double role. She was the most likely witness who could prove a stillbirth and so save a mother’s life. She was also, in the eyes of suspicious neighbors, the person best placed to help hide a birth or a death.⁶

Midwives under suspicion

Distrust of midwives had a longer history in church discipline. In 1554 Bishop Edmund Bonner’s visitation articles for London asked whether any woman practised as a midwife before being “examined and admitted by the bishop,” and whether any midwife at a birth used “any witchcraft, charms, sorcery, invocations or prayers, other than such as be allowable” under the church’s laws.⁸ Those were the articles of a Catholic bishop under Mary I, but the concern survived the change of religion. Articles of inquiry for the province of Canterbury in 1576 again asked about anyone using charms or unlawful prayers, “and namely midwives in the time of women’s travail of child.”⁸ Midwives were licensed, examined and watched because they worked in a space, the birthing room, from which men were largely absent and where life, death and baptism were all at stake.

Farnell argues that this background made a midwife an obvious candidate for a ghost troubled by a child’s death. She also points out that infanticide was more strongly associated with mothers than with midwives, and that in the pamphlet Adkins never confesses to killing anyone; she only asks that the remains be buried.⁶ The ballad, by contrast, puts a confession in her mouth.² Read side by side, the two texts show the story taking a harder shape in song than in prose. Which of them was printed first is not known.

A Protestant ghost with a purpose

Ghosts were an awkward subject in Protestant England, which had rejected the doctrine of purgatory, but a ghost who returned to expose a crime could be read as an instrument of divine providence. The Early Modern Worlds blog describes the return of a former resident to reveal a secret or a crime as a hallmark of Protestant hauntings.⁹ The Adkins pamphlet fits that pattern closely. It frames the whole affair as the work of “Omnipotent Providence,” insists that God’s sight penetrates “sable-night and veils of darkness,” and teaches that “Murther bears a lasting stain” on the conscience, driving the guilty to betray themselves in life or to wander after death until their crimes are known.¹

The ghost, in other words, is less an independent agent than a messenger. She does not threaten the maid. She comes, as the pamphlet says, under a “Commission,” and her task is disclosure. The ballad closes the same way, telling skeptics who “condemn (most) strange things as lyes” to go to the Cheshire-Cheese and see the bones for themselves.² Physical remains on public display served as the proof that a supernatural tale needed.

Guilty, accomplice, or neither?

Most scholars who have written about the case have taken the texts largely at their word. Farnell reports that Laura Gowing, in her study Common Bodies, read Adkins as guilty, though with some caution, and that an earlier Wonders & Marvels post appeared to agree.⁶ Farnell proposes other possibilities that the pamphlet’s own wording leaves open. Adkins might have helped dispose of bodies she had not harmed, perhaps offering her own home as a burial place to divert suspicion from a mother whose lodgings might be searched. Or the children might have died naturally and been hidden out of fear of the 1624 Act, which made concealment itself a capital matter.⁶ As she writes, “feelings of guilt do not make someone guilty.”⁶

A second line of reading looks at the street rather than the woman. The Early Modern Worlds post suggests that a lurid haunting may have added to the bad reputation of Middle Row, which commentators had wanted demolished since at least the 1650s.⁹ That is a speculation, and the blog presents it as one, but it is a useful caution against assuming that a ghost pamphlet had only one audience or motive.

What can be said with confidence is narrower. No court record, inquest or parish entry for the case has been identified in the sources used here, so the surviving evidence consists of two cheap prints that disagree on addresses, on who Mary was, and on whether the ghost confessed, and that are vague about how many children were found. The pamphlet itself admits that only one child’s bones were certain.¹ Mrs. Adkins may have been a killer, a helper in someone else’s concealment, or a woman whose name attached itself after her death to a find under a hearth. The texts record what her neighbors and printers were prepared to believe about a midwife, and the law that stood behind that belief.

Footnotes

1. Great News from Middle-Row in Holbourn (1680), EEBO-TCP A41924. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹

2. A New Ballad of the Midwives Ghost (1680), Pepys Ballads 2.145, EBBA 20763. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰

3. EBBA, “The Pepys Ballad Collection” and Fumerton, “Recollecting Samuel Pepys.” ↩

4. Thornbury, Old and New London, vol. 2 (1878), pp. 526-542. ↩ ↩²

5. 21 Jac. I c. 27, Statutes of the Realm, vol. 4, pt. 2. ↩

6. Farnell, The Many-Headed Monster, May 18, 2021. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶

7. Grub Street Project, ESTC R42145. ↩

8. Cardwell, Documentary Annals, vol. 1 (1844), pp. 164-165, 413-414. ↩ ↩²

9. Early Modern Worlds blog, March 20, 2019. ↩ ↩²