Nixon, the Cheshire Prophet and his Interpreters

AFTER a lengthy period of oral transmission the prophecies of Robert Nixon, the Cheshire seer, which, unlike those of Mother Shipton, had not been printed during the prophetic explosion of the Interregnum, were committed to manuscript in the later 17th century, and copies began to be preserved in the great houses of the county. Several of these early texts still in fact survive.2 Popular prophecy is the result of the cross-fertilization of officially-inspired propaganda and folklore. In the Middle Ages and even later, as Keith Thomas has shown,3 such prophecies by their intrinsic nature and widespread appeal played a serious role in successive political and social crises, but by the time of the Restoration period they were rapidly deteriorating into stories for the credulous, a form of popular entertainment. If any were subsequently to enjoy usefulness as propaganda rather than merely to linger on as a delight for antiquarians, it would only be because their content was sufficiently ambiguous and adaptable to meet the requirements of later generations of apologists for the established order-or of the enemies of the same. Such appears to have been the case with the prophet Nixon. 4 At first reading, plain unvarnished Nixon seems to constitute no danger to established authority; rather the reverse. Many ancient prophets inculcated a rough, collective morality which could be socially dangerous. Nixon is an individualist, appealing to individuals with the divining urge. Many again complained of injustices borne by the honest poor; Nixon is free from grudges, if there is discounted in his prophecies the vicarious satisfaction which might accrue from contemplating the mutable fortunes, childlessness or sudden deaths of the mighty. Many too are heterodox, appealing to the Englishman's wellattested dislike of clerical pretensions and theological orthodoxies, within or outside the Established Church: Nixon is brazenly secular, unconcerned with religious matters of any kind, refusing to regard the world as a vale of tears, hopelessly corrupt and shot through with evil, averse too to the kind of healing miracles with which the prophetic tradition abounds, to imagined visits to other worlds, or heavenly visions vouchsafed in dreams and trances. His enthusiasms are far more mundane: wars, collapsing walls and sinking stones, strange deaths and births, freaks, and mysterious birds, the stock-in-trade of leisure-time conversation among what the Cheshire historian Ormerod was later to refer to scornfully as 'the lower orders in the North.' 5

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