In the mid-1990s the historian James Sharpe, who has died aged 77, wrote Instruments of Darkness, a book on witch-hunting in England that reopened a field of research that had been in the doldrums for a generation after the Welsh historian Keith Thomas’s brilliant Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971). Published in 1996, Jim’s book helped to make the study of British witchcraft what it is today: one of the most lively areas of historical writing.
Earlier historians had argued that whereas witch-hunting on the European continent was fantastical, dominated by beliefs about the devil, English witch-hunting was comparatively rational and down-to-earth, centred on beliefs about the practical harm that witches caused to people and animals. Jim showed that this was nonsense, and that English witch-hunting was also powered by fear of the devil and followed much the same pattern as many other European countries.
An archival hound, Jim surveyed every possible paper-trail in the course of his research, uncovering valuable sources for those who have come after him, including via his copious footnotes and bibliographies. In addition, he went to many conferences on the continent and made it his business to meet the leading scholars of crime and witchcraft, always developing the European dimension of his work.
He loved the detail – he was fascinated, for instance, by the phenomenon of familiars in English witchcraft, creatures who suckled on witches and carried out their bidding, one of the few features that do indeed set English witch-beliefs apart from the continent. He noted them all: Bid the ferret, a lamb, another creature that was carefully kept in a basket with wool, and a white-spotted cat ominously named Sathan.
Perhaps his most appealing book is his history of Anne Gunter, published in 2000, about a 17th-century girl who claimed to be possessed but was unmasked as a fraud. It is a classic of its kind, a marvellous micro-study that reveals the inner world of an unhappy individual who found herself used for other people’s agendas and who, Jim argued, just wanted love and attention. The book, Bewitching of Anne Gunter, explores the mindsets of the doctors, ministers of religion and even the monarch himself, James I, who did not believe Anne’s stories.
As Jim was well aware, at another level it is also a story about fathers – and patriarchal figures of all kinds – who fail their children. It is a gripping read, with lots of humour, and along the way speculates on the origins of football. In the style of a 17th-century broadside Jim gave the book the wonderful sub-title, A Horrible and True Story of Deception, Witchcraft, Murder and the King of England – wording that led the Bavarian State Library in Munich to refuse twice to buy it, on the grounds that it simply could not be an academic book.
Jim followed up with Dick Turpin: the Myth of the English Highwayman (2004), another fantastic read, and then A Fiery and Furious People: a History of Violence in England (2016), which upturned the idea of the peaceable phlegmatic English character.
This was a return to earlier preoccupations, for Jim started out as a historian of crime. From 1983 on he wrote a series of path-breaking books on the history of crime in the British Isles in the 16th and 17th centuries, inspiring others to follow in his wake.
In a field dominated by Tudor and Stuart monarchs and their courts, Jim brought ordinary people into history, in all their variety, by showing just what could be done with court records of crime. These rich sources have revolutionised how we write history because they take us as close as we can to the voices of the lower classes in the past, and Jim was one of the first to realise this.
Jim was born in Lewisham, south-east London, to James, a labourer, and Margaret, a cleaner. At Colfe’s school, in Blackheath, he won a place at Oxford University, where he did a history degree and then a doctorate under Thomas’s supervision. He spent all his career, from 1973, as a history lecturer at the University of York, where he was a marvellous and generous teacher and rose to be professor before retirement in 2016.
York became the go-to place for social history, with the three Jims, Jim Walvin, Jim McMillan and Jim Sharpe, all doing exciting new work on slavery, women’s history and crime respectively. He adored teaching and had a wonderful line in dry humour; his students all knew how proud he was of them.
He is survived by his wife, Krista (nee Cowman), whom he married in 1993, and their children, Guy and Freddie.
🔔 James Anthony Sharpe, historian, born 9 October 1946; died 13 February 2024
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The Killing Jar -- Chapter 3 -- a “Crimson Peak” fan fic
-Summary:
Lucille Sharpe murdered her mother when she was 14 years old, but her first victim was four years before that. After their father leaves Thomas in the forest to die Lucille saves her brother’s life and ensures that James Sharpe never is never able to endanger his son’s life again.
Warnings:
Child abuse, violence, blood, illness, murder, death, frostbite, rape mention (notinvolving Thomas or Lucille), discussion of burgeoning sexuality, mention of ghosts, general Crimson Peak creepiness
Genre:
General
Rating:
M
Characters:
Lucille Sharpe, Thomas Sharpe, Beatrice Sharpe, James Sharpe
James Sharpe could not explain what was happening to him. He refused to admit how bad it had gotten over the past weeks to anyone, even himself. But he knew he could no longer pretend it was just a stomach illness. It wasn’t getting better. It wasn’t going away.
It was only getting worse.
He felt dizzy most of the time now and relied on his cane for more than just fashion. He needed it to stay upright. As humiliating as it was, James found he was as dependent on his cane as that bitch he married was on hers.
He could barely keep any food down; he felt himself wasting away. And when he wasn’t throwing up his gut was in such pain he couldn’t even think of food. Yesterday there had been something dark in his piss, something disturbingly like blood. He tried to tell himself it wasn’t, that it was just a trick of the light, and flushed it all away.
But now…
James stared into the basin. He stood back as if afraid of the contents of the sink. One shaking hand clutched his razor, the other was white-knuckled as it gripped the edge of the sink. Shaving cream was still spread across his cheeks and throat, a single strip of pale skin exposed and cleaned of hair.
He had barely begun the process of shaving when he felt lightheaded, sweaty. That familiar ache and wave of dizziness overwhelmed him and for the...he’d lost track of how many days this had been happening to him...nth time, he vomited. He didn’t know how he had anything left in his stomach beside the tea he drank in the hopes of calming his gut. He started fasting entirely when he tired of constantly having to leave his work to throw up down the mines. The act exhausted him; but, then, it seemed everything exhausted him now.
This time it wasn’t yellow bile but blood. He had thrown up blood. He was only beginning to truly register this shock as the haze of queasiness passed when he heard a sound behind him. At first he thought it was Mary, whom his illness had caused him to neglect. He had been so sick he hadn’t even wanted her near him, let alone to fuck her. Under normal circumstances just the sight of her walking, the thought of the body beneath the uniform, was enough, but as of late his body seemed only capable of feeling dizzy and ill. He hadn’t even made her help him dress, ashamed of how thin and frail he’d become. He turned, ready to angrily send the maid away before she saw too much, but instead of Mary he found Lucille.
He hated her nearly as much as he hated the girl pretending to be his son. He remembered the boiling rage he’d felt when the doctor – brought in all the way from London to ensure that the Sharpes’ future heir would be delivered safely and not murdered by some country doctor’s negligence – announced the child was a girl. What good, James Sharpe thought then – as he did now – was a girl? He hadn’t even held the child, knowing full well he’d just dash its brains out on the ground for what it was.
Beatrice didn’t want the thing either and they passed it off to the wet nurse who cared for Lucille as well as his second disappointment two years later. That was years ago now. He remembered the wet nurse, vaguely; she was a St. Bees woman in her early twenties, ugly, unmarried. Her own child had died in the process of being born. What was her name again? Theresa? Something like that. She was fired when Beatrice caught Lucille disgracing herself by sleeping in the servants’ quarters to be closer to the damned woman.
Lucille stood in the doorway silently staring at him. Lucille was strange. Mad, James suspected. He’d have nothing to do with her, maybe even sent her away, but she was cheaper than any servant and she made excellent tea.
He had no interest in dealing with Lucille when he felt like this. He took a weak swat at her, further enraged by how limp-wristed the strike was. She took the hit without even flinching. The last bruises he’d given her had nearly faded, only a light dusting of purple across her cheek like rouge. For the first time in her life he hadn’t given her new ones to replace them. He felt rage and shame bubbling like vomit in his gut.
Lucille seemed to be everywhere over the past two weeks. She was waiting behind corners, peering out windows, peeking in keyholes, clinging white-knuckled to railings. Wherever he looked, there she was. Her green eyes locked on him, huge, unblinking, like a praying mantis’s. He half expected to see her when he awoke in the dark; cold, clammy, alone. She had even started appearing in his dreams. He woke up every night remembering only those bug’s eyes.
“What do you want?” He snapped. She must have noticed the change in him, even that cunt of a wife had through her haze of laudanum and ether. And if she noticed, the walls themselves probably did.
Lucille didn’t answer, she just raised the tray she was carrying.
His tea.
Of course.
How could he have forgotten? Being this sick, he had to drink. He had to keep his strength up somehow. He had already lost so much weight that the peasants were beginning to whisper. He snatched the cup from the tray. “Leave it,” he told her.
Lucille put the tray on the table in the hall but did not leave. She stayed silent. He never hated her more. Was that a smile? Was she smiling?!
“GO!” he screamed as loudly as he could. He felt his gut writhe and the world spin as he rounded on her. He clung to the sink for support.
“Feeling ill?” Lucille asked in response.
“How dare you, you little bitch!” He roared, finding a new wave of strength in his outrage.
He grabbed her by the hair and yanked. He relished the fact that he was still strong enough to cause her pain. He couldn’t knock her off her feet but the jerk was enough to make her shout. He released her and she ran off casting a final look back over her shoulder.
But it took so much out of him. James was breathing hard from doing something that once came so easily to him. He once barely broke a sweat while shattering his wife’s leg so badly the bitch would never walk straight again even if she lived to be a hundred. He could hold the brat off the ground by her hair like a rabbit by the ears. He could break through skin with the single whip of a riding crop. But now a simple swat at her left him panting and staggering.
His vision blurred. He turned and threw up in the sink again. More blood. He wiped the blood and bile from his lips. He ran the water, clutching the tap, to wash the vomit down the drain. His hands were shaking, blurry in his vision. The world spun. He felt his limbs give out. His skin felt like it was on fire. And he fell.
He knew nothing else for some time.
When he awoke he was lying in bed. Three of the girls (Mary, Elizabeth, even Jane), the butler, Fredrick, and – damn her – Lucille stood around him. Mary was wiping his forehead. “Master Sharpe? Sir James? Can you hear me?”
He went to swat her hand away, but he found his arm weighed a thousand pounds. “Get away from me!”
“Sir, you were having some kind of fit. Lucille found you on the bathroom floor,” Fredrick nodded towards the girl. She was staring at him, the same unblinking wide-eyed stare.
She nodded. Didn’t she? It may have just been how badly his own head shook when he attempted to lift it from the pillows. Was she smiling?
He fell back against the bed, but managed to scare them all away from him with a few harsh words. All except Lucille. She stood in the hallway just beyond the door peering in through the crack. He didn’t have the strength to chase her away.
He never rose from the bed again.
He lasted three more days but didn’t have the strength to so much as lift a finger by the end.
He saw Thomas limp past his door arm in arm with Lucille. Damn that boy, thought James, the ponce. How dare he survive. Thomas grew stronger the weaker his father became, like he was taking his strength. Damn that weak pathetic child…but now James was hardly better than he was. Thomas didn’t pause to look in at his father, he simply walked by, toddling like he was learning how to walk again. The look of terror, the look of fear that James always saw on his son’s face, was gone. Lucille dared to glance in and James swore she was smiling.
Lucille.
Then there was Lucille.
By the final day James swore she was always there. Always. She was in the room with him, waiting just out of arm’s reach as if she was counting down the final hours of his life, like the Grim Reaper with his hourglass. And now he knew she was smiling. Now there was a terrible excitement in her eyes like she was the devil himself, relishing James’s discomfort, his slow death. He could not even call out to force her away.
She never spoke. She never blinked. She was just there like a silent horrible specter. It made him think that perhaps the rumors about the ghosts were true…
There were those who said Allerdale Hall was haunted. Many, who did. James Sharpe grew up here, lived here all his life with the exception of the brief respites he had at school as a boy or on business in the colonies now, and he had never seen a single thing one might call a ghost.
His mother claimed she saw her own mother-in-law dressed in red, hollow and hungry and broken-limbed as she had been when she died. The two women, his grandmother and mother, hated each other. When James’s father was away fighting in Africa the old woman died in James’s mother’s care after falling down the stairs.
No…no that wasn’t right. That was what his mother trained James to say. His grandmother wasn’t dead when she fell, regardless of what James’s father was told.
His mother found her there, alive, writhing, in the wine cellar at the base of the stairs. She had broken her bones and could not get up on her own. His grandmother called out to her daughter-in-law, demanded she help her. But James’s mother did not. James remembered her staring down the stairs, eyes wide. Then she took a deep breath and slowly closed the door, locked it, and left her there. Young James was calmly told to ignore his grandmother. It took days for her to die. But once the screaming stopped the cellar door was unlocked and the body was “discovered.” By the time his father returned from fighting the Ashanti she was long dead.
James’s mother killed herself years later while James was at university. In the suicide note she claimed her mother-in-law’s ghost drove her to it. But she was mad.
Since then he heard his own brats mutter about seeing dead miners and kiln workers and a woman with a rope around her neck. But he always assumed they were perhaps just as mad as his mother had been. Jane screamed about a man made of clay who stood over her bed and Fredrick refused to go into the wine cellar alone, but the lower class were always superstitious and stupid.
But now he wasn’t so sure. Now Lucille seemed very much like a ghost, worse than the broken grandmother his mother swore she saw.
She was a ghost or an angel or perhaps an immense hungry moth, a human-sized version of the dark moths he’d seen since his youth.
He would not have believed Lucille was real if she didn’t keep feeding him, giving him tea, taking away his sick when he was able to get his head over the bucket. She never touched him, not with her bare fingers, but she continued to care for him as attentive as any doctor.
Was this what Lucille did for his drunkard cunt of a wife whenever she took to her bed? A few years ago, when he’d crippled Beatrice she locked herself up in the master bedroom for weeks, months even. She never let Lucille far out of her sight. She managed to save Beatrice but he didn’t think she would do the same for him. He would die here under those staring insect eyes.
Lucille was there, silently looming over him.
Lucille was there at the very end.
It was the middle of the night. He hadn’t slept. The past two days he had done nothing but sleep; it made him feel like he was already dead. But now, as he lay there in an agony he could not describe, he wished sleep would take him again. He wished for death.
And just as that thought formed there was a sound, a floorboard creaking just beyond his consciousness, and he opened his eyes. It took a moment for his vision to clear. At first all he saw was a light. He thought for a mad moment that he was already dead and this was the light so many professed to see when they were close to death.
But his eyes focused and he realized it was Lucille standing there holding a small lit candle. The children were not allowed candles; they were too valuable to be wasted on the likes of Lucille and Thomas. Had he been well he would have snatched it from her and burned her with the wax for what she’d done.
How could she have gotten it?
His sick mind began to whirl. Maybe it wasn’t Lucille at all. As she stood there, enshrined by her halo of light, she looked like the angel of death. Her face was shadowed by the low flame and it looked like a skull. Her eyes were cold and shining. She looked impossibly ancient, with those eyes that had seen everything, far more than she could have being…how old was Lucille? Ten? Eleven?
She was there, watching silently.
His breath was coming now in short bursts, rattling through him. Each breath hurt. His stomach was in agony. His mind felt foggy.
Lucille was there, watching silently.
He coughed, choked, bile rising in him. She didn’t move. She didn’t blink. What did she know that he didn’t? What was she waiting for? Fear gripped his ailing heart, writhed in his ruined guts.
Lucille was there, watching silently.
He tried to call out to her. To say her name, whether that was Lucille or Death or Lucifer, he did not know. He wasn’t sure which he said, if he said anything at all. There was a ringing. A bell. A death toll. He could hear it.
All was dark but for that aureola around the creature. Was it really Lucille? He wasn’t so sure. What he had thought was her hair became wings sprouting from her back, folded behind her head, as black as a crow’s. The thing he thought was a scar was a crack in ivory white bone. The red he thought were lips was blood smeared across the skull. Her eyes, as green as his own, found his. He tried to scream for help.
Lucille, or whatever it was, was there, watching silently.
The world closed in on him, collapsed, falling away like a loose stone underfoot. There was fog. Gloom. Darkness. Dimming even the candle flame.
James Sharpe was never a praying man. He did not believe in God or in an afterlife. It never bothered him before. He could laugh at the fools who prayed for the souls of their dead. But now, faced with this dark angel, he was no longer so confident.
Perhaps his lifetime of self-indulgence and violence was leading to this, his death and his damnation, alone but for this specter by his bedside. He spent all of his adult years – and many of those before – whoring, gambling, taking what he wanted, and indulging even his basest and most violent desires. He had enjoyed life, would he be able to say the same about death?
The angel was there, watching silently
.
No!
Oh God, no!
What could he do? There had to be something. Something. Some hope of salvation. He would pray. He would try to confess all those thousands of sins. But he could not even speak to beg for forgiveness.
There was no one who would pray for him.
He tried to say something, to plead, but it only came out as a low groan.
The angel’s blood lips spread in a smile, showing all its bright white teeth. Its mouth moved but he could hear nothing. And that grin and those unblinking shining eyes were the last things he ever saw.
The BBC Music Video festival is taking place over the next few weeks in Norwich and up and down the UK via the power of the BBC Big Screens. A video I directed last december for Bearsuit's single "When Will I Be Queen" has been selected for the festival and has been playlisted alongside many other great videos.
Check out the site and some of the awesome videos on show: http://bbcmusicvideofestival.tumblr.com/
My music video for Bearsuit's single Princess, You're A Test was featured on PromoNews this week. Click here for the article and a mini interview with myself.
