"Dummy" was the name locally given to a deaf and mute fortune teller who had lived in Sible Hedingham for decades by 1863, earning a living from the same kind of cunning-folk trade practised by James Murrell in Hadleigh a generation earlier. In September that year, a woman named Emma Smith of nearby Ridgewell accused him of having cursed her with a disease. When Dummy failed to lift the supposed curse, a drunken mob dragged him from The Swan tavern and subjected him to an ordeal by water, throwing him into a nearby brook to "swim" him, a traditional test in which a true witch was believed to float. He was also severely beaten with sticks in the process. He was eventually taken to the workhouse at Halstead, where he died of pneumonia brought on by the assault and immersion.
What makes the case remarkable is not the accusation itself, since ducking and swimming a suspected witch was a well-established piece of folk practice with roots stretching back centuries, but how late it occurred. The last legally sanctioned English witch trial had taken place almost a century earlier, and the practice of formally testing for witchcraft by water had been illegal since 1736. Nonetheless the belief, and the willingness of an English village to act on it violently, persisted into the reign of Queen Victoria, in an era of railways and telegraphs.
The law did respond, if not as forcefully as the crime might suggest. Emma Smith and a man named Samuel Stammers were charged with unlawfully assaulting Dummy, thereby causing his death, and tried at the Chelmsford Assizes. On 8 March 1864 they were convicted and sentenced to six months' imprisonment each, a verdict of manslaughter rather than murder that reflected contemporary courts' general reluctance to treat mob violence against a suspected witch as fully deliberate killing, whatever the actual outcome for the victim.
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