The St Osyth prosecutions began, as so many did, with a falling-out between neighbours. In 1582 Ursula Kemp, a poor woman who worked locally as an unlicensed healer and midwife, quarrelled with Grace Thurlow over payment for treating Thurlow's child. When Thurlow later fell ill herself, she accused Kemp of causing it by witchcraft. Once questioned, Kemp implicated others in exchange for a promise of leniency that was not kept. By the time the assizes concluded, fourteen women from the parish and its neighbours had been formally accused, on charges ranging from causing illness to killing livestock and children by means of familiar spirits: cats, toads and other small creatures named and described in exhaustive, peculiar detail by the accused and their accusers alike.
The case is unusually well documented for its date because a pamphlet was printed shortly afterward, A true and just Recorde, of the Information, Examination and Confession of all the Witches, taken at S. Ofes (1582), reproducing what purport to be verbatim examinations. Historians treat it cautiously, since the examiner, Brian Darcy, had every incentive to shape the record. It remains, all the same, one of the fullest surviving windows onto what an ordinary Elizabethan village believed about familiars and malefic magic, precisely because the accused were encouraged to elaborate rather than simply confirm.
The case resurfaced in an unexpected way in 1921, when two skeletons were dug up in a St Osyth garden with iron rivets driven through the knee joints. This is a practice sometimes associated, in folklore rather than any documented Elizabethan legal procedure, with preventing a witch's corpse from walking. The find was widely reported as belonging to Ursula Kemp and another of the accused, though the identification rests on local tradition rather than any contemporary record connecting the graves to the 1582 trial, and the skeletons' actual date has never been independently established.
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