Bridget Coldridge

A dyer’s widow whose late husband had supplied half the town, and the second of the two let go in 4457 with no reason entered. A name proposed, not found in the volumes.

Bridget Coldridge was the widow of a dyer who had supplied half the cloth of Sarrum with its colour, and she kept the dye houses after him with a harder hand than he had. In 4457 the town was a fulling town of about eleven hundred souls, and the dye houses stood at the bottom of the river below the fulling yards, where the water ran blue and red and nobody went who had no business there.

When the informations were laid that November she was taken with eight others for the practice of black rites and the procuring of persons. The county’s reckoning puts her at the heart of it. The dye houses had cellars that ran under the river wall, and the vats there were never emptied in the sight of the yard; the women who worked for her were all widows or foundlings with nobody to ask after them; and three of them, the county says, were not seen again after the winter of 4455. The account of the man at the assize, which names nobody, says that the persons had been supplied. The county has always believed it knows by whom.

She was released with Ware, without any reason entered in the roll. The one account written by a man who sat through the assize says that the four who hanged were the ones who could be spared; she was not one of them. The Wares and the Coldridges were the two families of standing who left the town afterwards, and the county has spent a century and a half reckoning why they were let go and who was owed the favour.

Sarrum does not discuss the Black Rites with strangers, and the Coldridge name is not used there now. A company working in the old river quarter will find the cellars bricked up, a Black Lantern house standing at Fleecegate since 4468, and nobody willing to say which house was hers.

In person

About forty-five, upright and composed, dark-haired, with indigo-stained fingertips. A long dark gown with a stiff, close bodice, a white linen cap and an apron, standing unapologetic among the steaming vats of a working dye house, skeins of blue and madder-red cloth hung above her.