Hi history lovers and welcome or welcome back to the channel where I bring you new videos every
Friday looking at the events of the past. Today is a Halloween special video looking at the events
surrounding the first Irish witch burning. This is the story of Alice Kyteler, a woman accused
of murdering four husbands using sorcery and Richard Ledrede, a fanatical English Bishop
who took it upon himself to bring her to justice. It includes accusations of heresy, inappropriate
relations with demons (not that there are ever any appropriate relations with demons!), some hideous
sounding spells and potions that involved the body parts of deceased children and criminals and an
apparent case of poisoning. For good measure, it also involves a paranoid, witch-fearing Pope
and the Knights Templar. You might think you can guess how it all ended, but spoiler alert,
the person who wound up being tortured and burnt at the stake isn’t who you might suspect. Before
I reveal all though, please remember to give this video a thumbs up and subscribe to the
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Today we’re travelling back to 1324 and to the town of Kilkenny, in the county of the same name,
in Ireland. In that year this man, the English-born Bishop of Ossory,
who was named Richard Ledrede, or Richard De Ledrede, was approached by the step-children
of a wealthy local woman named Alice Kyteler (I’m going to use her maiden name throughout as
she was married so many times it would be hard to keep track of her using her married names).
The story they told him was disturbing to say the least.
They contended that Alice, who was then on her fourth husband, had murdered her previous spouses,
having first ensured that they signed over their money to her son, William Outlaw Junior, whom she
had had during her first union. What was more, in the apparent absence of any evidence of murder,
they accused her of having become a serial black widow through the use of magic.
Alice had indeed had an unusually busy married life. As near as we can tell, she married the
prosperous William Outlaw senior in around 1280-85 by whom she had her son, who was fully grown by
1302. This would mean she was born no later than 1273 (if we assume her son was born by about 1286
and she married about a year earlier and no younger than 12, which was the minimum age for
wedlock for a girl at this time). She was likely somewhat older than that however and in her 60s by
the time of the events discussed in this video. In 1302, Alice was already married to husband
number two, Adam le Blund of Callan, who, like her first husband, was a money lender. There was a bit
of unpleasantness around this time as well as it was suggested Alice had killed William Senior,
but there was no conviction. In 1307, for reasons unknown, Adam cancelled any debts
owed to him by his stepson, William Outlaw Jn and handed over all his money and belongings to him.
By 1309, he was dead and his wife was married to a Tipperary landowner named Richard De Valle.
Once again her son benefitted financially from his new stepfather.
What exactly happened to Richard we don’t know, but he too was dead by 1316 when Alice had to
initiate legal proceedings against her stepson, also called Richard De Valle, to get her thirds,
or dower, which was the money a widow was granted from her deceased husband’s estates to live off.
In later centuries it would more commonly be called a jointure. We don’t know when
she remarried for the fourth time, but by 1324, she was the wife of Sir John le Poer and a very
wealthy woman, thanks to her long and profitable marital career. As for Sir John, sadly he wasn’t
in good health. He was described as totally emaciated, with no hair or nails left on his body;
symptoms highly suggestive of poisoning. And this is where we come to accusations of witchcraft.
Ledrede was unusually receptive to these accusations.
Although belief in magic was widespread in Europe at the time, just a few decades earlier, this
crime would have been considered a misdemeanour. However, in more recent years Pope John XXII
(who had a paranoid fear of witches, as he suspected they were trying to kill him),
had upgraded the offence to a form of heresy in his papal bull of 1316, Super Illius Specula.
Ledrede had studied at the papal court in Avignon earlier in his life, had been appointed to his
current post by the Pope in 1317 and was an ardent devotee of John’s fanatical beliefs.
He quickly decided that he had found a ‘diabolical nest’ of heretics in his diocese and had Alice and
11 other people associated with her, including her son and her maidservant, Petronilla De Midia
(also known as Petronilla De Meath) charged with 7 very serious and very lurid crimes. These were:
1. That in order to obtain their goals through their nefarious sorcery, they wholly denied
faith in Christ and the church for a month or a year, depending on if what they needed to obtain
through their sorcery was greater or lesser, so that during that time they would not at
all believe what the church believed, and they would not revere the body of Christ in any way,
nor enter a church, nor hear the mass, nor take the blessed bread nor blessed water.
2. That they sacrificed live animals to demons, then divided their body parts and offered them,
having distributed them at crossroads, to a certain demon who called himself
Son of (the?) Art from the dregs of hell. 3. That they sought aid and answers
from demons through their sorcery. 4. That in their nightly conventicles, they
usurped the jurisdiction and keys of the church, when with waxen candles burning they fulminated
sentences of excommunication even against their own husbands, naming one by one every part of
their body from the soles of their feet to the top of their head, and in the end they extinguished
the candles as they said, “fiat, fiat, fiat, amen.” [Fiat basically means let it be done]
5. That over an oaken fire they boiled the intestines and interior organs of cocks
sacrificed to demons, as aforesaid, mixed with certain horrifying worms, various herbs, and also
nails of the dead, buttock hairs, and frequently clothes of children who died without baptism,
as well as many other abominable ingredients, in a pot made from the head of a certain decapitated
thief, cooking up various powders, ointments, and potions, and also candles from greasy fat
left in the said pot, as they said various incantations, to arouse love or hatred,
to kill and also to afflict the bodies of faithful Christians, and for innumerable other purposes.
6. That the sons and daughters of four of the said lady’s husbands were pursuing public
complaints before the bishop, seeking remedy and assistance against her,
alleging before a public crowd that she had killed some of their fathers through such sorceries,
and had infatuated others and had led their senses into such stupor that they had given
all their goods to her and her son, to the perpetual impoverishment of their sons and heirs,
wherefor also her husband, the knight, Lord John le Poer, is now brought to such a state through
such powders and potions as well as sorceries that he is totally emaciated, his nails removed,
the hair gone from all his body, but he was warned by a certain maid of the same lady, and having
wrested the keys of the chests from the very hands of the said lady and opening the chests,
the said knight discovered a bag full of such horrifying and detestable things in them,
which he handed over with his discoveries to the aforeseaid bishop via two religious priests.
7. That the said lady had a certain demon incubus, whom she allows to know her carnally,
who calls himself Son of (the?) Art, and sometimes Robin son of Art; who also
sometimes appears to her in the form of a cat, sometimes in the form of a black and hairy dog,
other times in the form of an Ethiopian with two companions bigger and taller than himself, any one
of whom carries an iron rod in his hands; to whom she commits all her property and even herself;
from whom she admits that she has received all her wealth and all that she possesses.
This was quite the list of crimes and in it we can see many of the devices
and attributes associated with witchcraft in later centuries, such as potions, a cauldron
(made from a skull in this case), demons and cats. In addition, the mention of things like demons and
cats was also reminiscent of the charges laid at the door of the Knights Templar in France.
This was a militant religious group who were suppressed in the year 1312 by Pope Clement V
and whose name you might recognise from the book or movie, The Da Vinci Code. The historian Anne
Neary has argued that the similarities in how their case and that of Alice Kyteler were handled
was due to the influence of Ledrede’s French education and connections to Pope John.
Despite the severity of the charges against her, Alice, being wealthy and well-connected
was able to fight back. She called on a relation from her first marriage, Roger Outlaw, who may
even have been her brother-in-law and who was then the Chancellor of Ireland and the prior of the
Order of Hospitallers of St John of Jerusalem. In other words, he was a big deal. Ledrede had asked
Roger to have Alice arrested, but Roger stalled, saying that he could do no such thing until she’d
been publicly prosecuted, excommunicated from the church and 40 days had elapsed.
When Ledrede ordered Alice to appear before him, she promptly left her home in Kilkenny
(the supposed site of which is now the pub you see here) and went to Dublin and possibly to Roger,
who sent advocates in her place to answer the charges against her in Kilkenny.
Ledrede now excommunicated her in absentia and ordered her son,
William Outlaw Junior, to appear before him on charges of heresy and protecting heretics.
William turned for help to his friend, Arnold le Poer, who was a seneschal (which is a bit like a
local governor) and a relation of his most recent step-father. Le Poer had Ledrede imprisoned for 17
days in Kilkenny Castle until the date William was supposed to appear before the Bishop had passed.
Ledrede responded by placing his entire diocese under interdict, meaning no baptisms, marriages
or burials could take place, a serious problem for the deeply religious Irish of the time.
A game of tit for tat now ensued. William Outlaw discovered an old accusation of misconduct against
Ledrede which he attempted to use to cause legal problems for the Bishop by pretending that it was
new and had not been dealt with already. [court] Ledrede ordered Outlaw and his mother Alice to
appear before him again, only to find that he himself was suddenly summoned to Dublin to explain
to his superiors why he had imposed an interdict. He refused to go, citing the safety concerns of
travelling though Arnold Ie Poer’s lands to reach the capital and the interdict was lifted by those
same superiors there. Back in Kilkenny, Ledrede now appeared at the seneschal’s court in full
bishop’s regalia and carrying the host in front of him and demanded that the so-called heretics
be arrested. Arnold le Poer called him ‘an ignorant low-born vagabond from England’ and
tried to have him removed with violence, leading Ledrede to say that this amounted to violence
upon the body of Christ, because he holding the host. He then left under his own steam.
He was soon summoned to Dublin again, most likely in April 1324, this time to answer charges of
defamation of character and excommunication without due process levelled at him by Alice.
Ledrede sent a proctor to argue his case for him, but eventually he appeared in
front of the Dublin parliament in person in May and the tide began to turn in his favour.
The Justiciar of Ireland, John Darcy, who effectively ran the country on behalf of
the English King, now came to Kilkenny and at long last Ledrede started to get what he wanted
with regard to the accused. In early July, Alice was formerly found guilty of heresy and sorcery.
She was still in Dublin however and it’s at this point that she makes a sudden exit from the story.
She apparently fled Ireland, possibly to England or Flanders and in the company of Petronilla De
Midia’s daughter, Basilia, never to reappear. Her co-accused back in Kilkenny were not so lucky.
They were arrested and though the wealthier among them were able to effectively post bail,
as we would call it today, the others were held and interrogated, for which read tortured.
This by the way, also resembled how the Templars had been treated. William Outlaw (with whom Darcy
was actually staying during his trip to Kilkenny) was compelled to confess to heresy and harbouring
heretics and submitted to Bishop Ledrede. He was then imprisoned in Kilkenny Castle until
he agreed to do penance. This involved hearing 3 masses per day for at least a year, feeding the
poor and re-roofing St Canice’s Cathedral in Kilkenny with lead at his own expense.
When he failed to carry out this agreed upon penance, he was imprisoned again. We now come to
the most despicable chapter in this entire story; the first known case of witch burning in Ireland.
This occurred on 3 November 1324 here at the Tholsel in Kilkenny (though this isn’t
the original building), but it wasn’t Alice Kyteler, the woman who had been the focus of
so much of the drama that year, who was killed; it was her maidservant, Petronilla De Midia.
After being tortured into confessing to witchcraft and implicating Alice too,
she was flogged through six parishes and according to the Franciscan chronicler, John Clyn
‘Petronilla de Midia ... was condemned for sorcery, lot taking and offering sacrifices
to demons, consigned to the flames and burned. Moreover before her even in olden days it was
neither seen nor heard of that anyone suffered the death penalty for heresy in Ireland.’
We have no idea why Petronilla, of all those accused, was the only one who was killed. Even
if Alice Kyteler did have a hand in the deaths of one or more of her husbands, there is no evidence
surviving to show that her servant had anything to do with it and that is not what she was
convicted of. Once again however, we see shades of the Templars here, as they too were burnt.
Perhaps terrified by the prospect of following her to the stake,
William Outlaw fully submitted to Ledrede. His penance was increased as he had to put
more lead on the Cathedral roof and go to the Holy Lands on the first available boat, but
there is no evidence that he was killed. Instead he simply disappears from the records in 1326.
The bell tower of the Cathedral by the way, collapsed in 1332 under the weight of so much
lead. Arnold le Poer would go on to die in prison in 1329 while awaiting trial on heresy charges.
His body was left unburied for months in the Dominican Priory of St Saviour in Dublin.
As for Ledrede, he got himself into trouble with the royal administration in Ireland and
in 1329 was run out of the country for many years, returning to Avignon. He eventually made it back
to Ireland in 1347 and died in around 1360, thus this funerary monument in St Canice’s Cathedral.
So what can we make of this story? Alice Kyteler certainly seems to have been an attractive woman,
who had no problem in getting husbands, though greater difficulty in keeping them. This was the
14th century however, when life expectancy was much lower than it is today and medicine was,
by our standards at least, virtually non-existent. The condition of her 4th husband before his death
and the story that he found suspicious objects locked in a chest in their home, does suggest
that he might have been poisoned, but there isn’t enough evidence to be sure of that and certainly
not enough to accuse his wife of harming him. Nor, for that matter, does poison involve witchcraft.
What we can tell is that Alice had managed to accumulate a considerable amount of money
through her marriages and sometimes at the expense of her step-children, leaving her in
their bad books and in an era when magic and witchcraft were genuinely believed in, at the
mercy of any outlandish accusations they could dream up in an effort to get her money off her.
She, her son and her household were even more unfortunate to be living in Kilkenny at a
time when it was under the ecclesiastical control of a fanatic like Richard Ledrede
who had seemingly absorbed many of the worst ideas about heresy and how to deal with it
during his time in Avignon. Most of the charges against the accused and the confessions wrought
from some of them through torture are so bizarre that we can easily dismiss them and to my mind,
the only definite killer in this story, is the Bishop of Ossory himself, who brought
about the judicial murder of Petronilla De Midia, seemingly just because he could
and because he couldn’t get at Alice Kyteler and wanted a scapegoat to save his own face.
What do you make of this story though? Let me know below if you think Alice might have had a
hand in the deaths of any of her husbands, or if you believe she was the victim of the malicious
slanders of her step-children, who wanted her money. Remember to give this video a thumbs up
and subscribe to the channel and I’ll be back next week with a new video. Until then, keep learning.