The focus of Tim Thornton's lively and informative monograph is on ‘ancient prophecies’; that is, those predictive utterances about future events which are non-biblical in basis, indeed not overtly Christian at all. It is a theme which (inevitably) supplied subject matter for a chapter in Keith Thomas's capacious Religion and the decline of magic, but one which has long deserved, and now gets, a fuller and more analytical treatment. While ranging widely, Thornton has a particular concern with three strands of the phenomenon: prophecies associated with Merlin and the Arthurian tradition, with ‘Nixon’ the Cheshire prophet, and with Mother Shipton, the putative Yorkshire seeress. Having myself once declined an invitation to write the entry on Mother Shipton for the ODNB, it is a relief to be told (p. 11) that, along with Nixon, such a woman ‘almost certainly never’ existed. The one sure thing about ancient prophecies, as Thornton ably demonstrates, is that their origins postdate the events they purport to predict. Their significance for the historian, Thornton argues, is threefold: their persistence illustrates the influence of non-elite groups on politics; it demonstrates the importance of distinctive regional political cultures; and it affirms the continuing power of ‘non-rational’ ideas in social and political life right through to modern times.

The book begins in the early Tudor period, with discussion of Galfridian prophecies often concerning dynastic instability, and of the parallel ‘Thomas of Ercledoun’ tradition predicting an eventual Scots conquest of the English realm. Some aspects of this are well-trodden ground, though Thornton makes a good case against the tendency to associate Tudor interest in prophecy and its potential solely with marginal or oppositional groups. Henry vii paid attention to prophecies, and discussion of them was ‘common currency’ at Henry viii's court. All this, however, is prologue to the real heart of the book, a detailed examination of the genesis and development of the Shipton and Nixon prophecies, in oral culture and in print. The Prophesie of Mother Shipton was first published in 1641, though the prophetess was supposed to have lived in Henry viii's reign, and much of the text concerns identifiable happenings from a generation and more earlier, such as the (non-fatal) stabbing of a Lord Mayor of York in 1618. Thornton does an admirable job of connecting its gnomic utterances to specific places and events in and around the city of York, showing in the process how an apparently random collection of non-specific prophecies in fact reveals a more coherent oral tradition, evincing pride in local figures and landmarks and a marked concern with the prosperity of the city of York. There is, however, a danger of circularity in drawing firm conclusions about the nature of oral traditions solely from their refraction in print: can we really assume that, because the printed prophecy of 1641 has little on religion or the fate of the Church, religion was ‘not a prime concern of York people in their understanding of the nature of past and present’? (p. 73). In the second half of the seventeenth century Mother Shipton underwent a series of textual transformations, becoming associated with the fall of Charles i and the Great Fire of London. In the hands of the London bookseller, Richard Head, she was detached from her city of York context, turned into a witch, and made a vehicle for monarchist propaganda. She also became associated with Knaresborough, and the ‘Dropping Well’ there was claimed as her place of birth. The expansion of Knaresborough and Harrogate as spa towns in the eighteenth century linked her irrevocably with the fortunes of the local tourist industry, and she managed to survive a minor Victorian scandal when Charles Hindley confessed to having fabricated new prophecies in his 1862 edition of her sayings, such as that the world was to end in 1881. Thornton submits the Cheshire Nixon tradition to a similarly rich and thorough contextualisation over a century and more, showing how prognostications of foreign invasion supposedly made in the late fifteenth century were appropriated by Whig propagandists for the 1688 Revolution, and circulated in both anti-Jacobite and Jacobite variants through the eighteenth century. The Merlin traditions, meanwhile, were a more obvious casualty of developing historical scholarship, and lost much of their valency in the seventeenth century.

Throughout all this Thornton is impatient with a historiographical school (exemplified by Margaret Spufford, Tessa Watt and Adam Fox) that emphasises the degree to which the printed word shaped popular thought and ideas. Instead, he makes the case for semi-autonomous oral traditions which could continue vigorously to hold their own against the imperatives of print. More broadly, he is suspicious of any sort of ‘modernisation narrative’ – associated here with Keith Thomas, and with the work of Bernard Capp and Patrick Curry on astrology. Belief in prophecies, and in their political potency, was a very long-lived phenomenon. But it is by no means clear that the evidence Thornton deploys entirely supports this interpretative framework. It seems very likely, for example, that it was Head's 1677 ascription in print of Mother Shipton's birthplace to Knaresborough that simply created a classic ‘invented tradition’. Nor can it really be doubted that the status of prophetic utterance in print was changing radically across the period. Thornton recognises the strong elements of satire and playful scepticism in accounts from the early eighteenth century onwards, but is inclined to rule, not entirely persuasively, that credulity retained the upper hand. The significance for his theme of the explosive expansion of print culture itself during the period is insufficiently weighed. The book's chief concern (p. 192) is to establish ‘the remarkable continuities in prophecy as a popular political language in Britain’. In fact, and against the grain of interpretation, what leaves the clearest impression on the reader is the plasticity of prophetic forms as a receptacle for social and cultural change.