Anne Jeffries was a 17th century Cornish servant who claimed she was abducted by fairies and given the power to heal. Was she a witch, a healer or simply unwell?
In 1645, Anne Jeffries was 19 years old and working as a domestic servant in St Teath. One day, her employers discovered her collapsed in a fit in the garden, where she had been knitting.
When she came round, Anne claimed to have been visited by six small men, dressed in green, who had whisked her away to a fairy realm.
The occurrence, and events that followed, were described in detail by the son of the household, Moses Pitt, in a 1696 public letter to the Bishop of Gloucester. (Pitt was a child at the time and wrote his account around 50 years later.)
“She being one day knitting in an Arbour in our Garden, there came over the Gardenhedg to her six Persons of a small Stature, all clothed in green, which she call’d Fairies: upon which she was so frighted, that she fell into a kind of a Convulsion-fit.”
New healing powers
Once she had recovered, Anne began demonstrating extraordinary healing abilities. Moses Pitt noted that the very first person she healed was his own mother, the mistress of the household, who had suffered an injured leg.
“Ann took my Mother’s Leg on her Lap, and strok’d it with her Hand, and then ask’d my Mother if she did not find Ease by her stroking of it. My Mother confess’d to her she did.”
Anne told her mistress not to send for the doctor; she would cure her leg.
Word spread. People began travelling from far and wide to be healed by the teenager, who performed “strange and wonderful cures” with the aid of salves and medicines that she said the fairies gave her.
“People of all Distempers, Sicknesses, Sores, and Ages, came not only so far off as the Lands-end, but also from London, and were cured by her,” states Pitt.
Anne never took a penny from her patients.
Anne refused the family’s food for months, claiming the “airy people” fed her delicious bread and so she had no need for human nourishment.
“She forsook eating our Victuals,” writes Pitt, “and was fed by these Fairies from that Harvest-time to the next Christmas-day.”
Perhaps predictably, the healing gifts that made her popular with many also made her feared.
A stint in Bodmin Jail
It was an era of civil war, uncertainty and witch hunts.
In 1646, a local magistrate named John Tregeagle accused Anne of witchcraft, had her arrested and thrown into the gaol at Bodmin.
As described on Bodminjail.org, “Her fairy friends were interpreted not as nature spirits, but demonic familiars.” (The famous Bodmin Jail was built in the 1770s, so Anne would have been held in an earlier site.)
The teen was interrogated and held without trial. She was also denied food and yet she reportedly stayed healthy, insisting throughout that the fairies fed her.
The authorities were never able to prove Anne’s guilt and, eventually, she was released.
Her story lives on in Cornish folklore. Was she a witch, a healer, or a woman who was unwell and in need of medical help?
One thing is certain, Anne belongs to a much larger Cornish tradition of female healers, diviners, wise women and fae-seers.
Have you ever seen the fae, or little people?
TESSA HILLMAN is a writer in the field of yoga philosophy and mystical exploration. Memoir of a Sceptical Seeker: Searching Beyond the Veil is a deeply personal account of her journey from scientist and sceptic to believer in the supernatural, through a series of incredible, unexpected experiences Tessa lives in the Cornish countryside, writing and growing an artist’s palette of flowers to photograph and paint. She keeps an eye out for fairies and piskeys…
