Norfolk-born Ursula Shipton, eventually to be known…

1527 CE

Norfolk-born Ursula Shipton, eventually to be known as Mother Shipton, pronounces her multiple stanzas of prophetic verse, in which she appears to foretell automobiles; telecommunications; hydroelectric power; undersea exploration; air travel; iron vessels; gold rushes in yet-to-be-discovered lands; the readmission of Jews to England; the 1851 Crystal Palace; the Crimean War, France’s Capet, Bourbon and Napoleonic tyrannies and attendant bloodshed; the subsequent virtual union of France and Britain; England’s German dynasty; the adoption of “mannish” fashions, styles and modes by women; mechanized harvesters and the retirement of the horse-and-plow; the dissolution of love and marriage; falling birth rates as nations decline; pets as love objects; the planning of “mighty wars” in 1926; motion pictures; submarines; the twentieth century’s bloody world wars; a “fiery Dragon” signaling catastrophic earth changes and the near-annihilation of the human race; humankind’s reemergence amid benevolent alien visitation; and the dawn of a new “Golden Age.”

In a separate scroll, Mother Shipton seemingly predicts Europe’s bloody Wars of Religion; Chinese-Russian entente and the subsequent emergence of an Asian nation as a great power; and an incurable, man-made plague “worse than leprosy.”

The most famous claimed edition of Mother Shipton's prophecies foretells many modern events and phenomena.

Widely quoted today as if it were the original, it contains over a hundred prophetic rhymed couplets in notably non-sixteenth-century language and includes the now-famous lines: The world to an end shall come In eighteen hundred and eighty one.

However, this version did not appear in print until 1862, and its true author, one Charles Hindley, subsequently admitted in print that he had invented it.

This invented prophecy has appeared over the years with different dates and in (or about) several countries.

The 1920s (subsequently much reprinted) booklet The Life and Prophecies of Ursula Sontheil better known as Mother Shipton stated the date as 1991.

Among other well-known lines from Hindley's fake version (often quoted as if they were original) are: A Carriage without a horse shall go; Disaster fill the world with woe...

In water iron then shall float, As easy as a wooden boat.

Just who Mother Shipton was or what exactly she said is not definitively known.

What is certain is that her name became linked with many tragic events and strange goings on recorded all over the UK, Australia and North America throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries.

Many fortune tellers used her effigy and statue, presumably for purposes of association marketing.

Many pubs were named after her.

Only two survive, one near her supposed birthplace in Knaresborough (now renamed the Dropping Well) and the other in Portsmouth where there is a statue of her above the door.