The Wansdyke & District Forums

Since we dabble in the strange here, we ought to claim our most celebrated case, which is genuinely important in the history of these things. The Drummer of Tedworth, 1662, at the house of one Mr Mompesson in what is now Tidworth. He had confiscated a vagrant drummer's drum; thereafter his house was tormented for months by drumming with no drummer, scratchings, moving objects, lights, and the children's beds lifted from the floor. It was investigated by Joseph Glanvill, a Fellow of the Royal Society, who wrote it up in all seriousness as evidence of the supernatural, and it became one of the most famous and most argued cases in England, cited for and against the reality of spirits for a century. Pepys read of it. The King sent men. Whatever one believes, it is a remarkable thing that the founding age of modern science took a Wiltshire haunting that seriously.

https://archive.org/details/saducismust ... 7/mode/2up

It is a fascinating case, Edmund, precisely because of when it sits, right on the seam between the old world and the new. Glanvill and his circle were defending the reality of spirits not out of superstition but because they feared that if you denied spirits you were halfway to denying the soul, and God after Him. So the Drummer of Tedworth became a battlefield for something a great deal larger than a haunted house. The drumming was almost beside the point. What was really being fought over was whether the world had room in it for the unmeasurable. I find that argument has not gone away. We are still having it. We are having it on this forum.

That is exactly it, Margaret, and far better put than I managed: a battlefield over whether the world has room for the unmeasurable. The Drummer himself, the actual vagrant, was tried and transported, blamed for the whole business as a witch, which is its own sad footnote. A man lost his liberty over a drum and a story. The strange is never only strange; there are always real people underneath it, paying for it.