Breaching the Wall: The Archaeologies of Witchcraft and the Maternal Body in Early Modern England

In 1961 workmen were carrying out structural repairs to the first-floor interior of Lauderdale House, a late-sixteenth-century mansion situated in London's Highgate Hill. As they began to remove bricks near a chimney-breast in what is now the long Tudor gallery they made a grim discovery. They had stumbled upon a hidden compartment which had been blocked up for more than four centuries. One by one the old house gave up its long-held secrets as the workmen began to remove the curious artefacts concealed inside. The extraordinary hoard of carefullyplaced objects, which can still be seen at the Museum of London today (Fig. 3.1), consisted of four desiccated chickens, two of which, as forensic evidence suggests, were strangled while the other two may have been, gruesomely, buried alive; a candlestick with a yellow glazed border (Fig. 3.2); a glass drinking goblet; two odd shoes (Fig. 3.3); a cord of plaited rush-matting; and an egg, which may have been laid by one of the chickens while it was trapped inside its stony prison.