‘They Stole Little Bridget’: Fairy Belief, Criminal Responsibility and the Killing of Bridget Cleary
Professor Jonathan Doak, Associate Dean for Research at NLS https://www.ntu.ac.uk/staff-profiles/law/jonathan-doak
In March 1895, a young woman named Bridget Cleary was burned to death in her own home at Ballyvadlea in County Tipperary. Her husband, Michael Cleary, was responsible for her death. Yet this was no ordinary nineteenth-century domestic homicide. Michael appears to have believed, or at least claimed to believe, that the woman before him was not Bridget at all. Fairies had taken his wife and substituted a ‘changeling’ in her place. To modern ears, the explanation sounds almost incomprehensible. But the possibility of human beings being abducted by fairies was deeply embedded in nineteenth-century Irish folklore.
William Allingham captured something of that world in his famous poem The Fairies, written in 1849. Beginning with the evocative "Up the airy mountain, / Down the rushy glen", the poem depicts fairies not as the benign creatures familiar from children's stories, but as supernatural beings whom humans should fear. One passage is particularly eerie when read alongside the Cleary case:
They stole little Bridget
For seven years long.
The coincidence of the name is striking. Allingham's Bridget is carried into the fairy world, from which she eventually returns. Several decades later, Michael Cleary apparently became convinced that another Bridget had similarly been taken. Certainly this cultural context cannot excuse what happened at Ballyvadlea, but for lawyers it raises an important normative question: What should the law do when someone intentionally commits a terrible act because they profoundly misunderstand the reality in which they are acting?
The Killing of Bridget Cleary
Bridget was literate, economically active and comparatively independent for a rural Irish woman of her time. She worked as a dressmaker and sold eggs, and lived with Michael and her father in a relatively modern labourer's cottage. In March 1895, she became seriously ill. A doctor diagnosed bronchitis, and a Catholic priest attended her. But alongside these conventional responses to illness, another explanation began to take hold among Michael and some of Bridget's relatives.
They came to believe that the poorly woman lying in bed was not the ‘real’ Bridget, but rather a ‘changeling’: an otherworldly being that had been substituted in place of a human abducted by the Aos Sí (fairies). Attempts were subsequently made to force the supposed supernatural entity to leave. Bridget was restrained, repeatedly questioned about her identity and forced to swallow a concoction involving herbs and milk. She was subjected to frightening and degrading rituals, including being held over a fire.
On the evening of 15 March, the violence became fatal. Michael demanded that Bridget demonstrate that she really was his wife. During the confrontation, he knocked her to the ground and set her clothing alight, using paraffin to intensify the flames. Bridget died from her burns. Her body was subsequently concealed in a shallow grave. Her burned body was discovered a week later.
The Aftermath and Trial
Michael's behaviour after the killing makes the case stranger still. He apparently continued to believe that the real Bridget would return from the fairy world. He visited a nearby 'fairy fort' where he expected her to appear riding a white horse, at which point he hoped to recover her. Nevertheless, Michael was prosecuted for murder. At the time, murder was a common-law offence in Ireland, conventionally defined as the unlawful killing of a human being under the Queen's peace with 'malice aforethought'. This latter expression was a technical term which, despite its wording, did not require premeditation. It encompassed an intention to kill or cause grievous bodily harm, but could also extend to cases where the defendant appreciated that death or serious injury would probably result from their actions. Yet Michael Cleary was ultimately convicted not of murder but of manslaughter, when he appeared before Mr Justice O'Brien at the Clonmel Assizes in July 1895, and received a sentence of twenty years' penal servitude.
Michael's actions would seem capable of satisfying the nineteenth-century requirements. Deliberately pouring paraffin over someone who was already on fire is conduct from which an intention to kill or cause grievous bodily harm could readily be inferred. Even if Michael lacked such an intention, the prosecution might potentially have established that he appreciated that death or grievous bodily harm would probably result. Yet Michael was ultimately convicted not of murder but of manslaughter. His counsel sought permission to substitute a guilty plea to manslaughter. The Crown agreed, the judge assented, and the jury returned a verdict accordingly. Thus the jury did not hear the case in its entirety; the proceedings were instead resolved through acceptance of a plea to the lesser offence. He received a sentence of twenty years' penal servitude.
The precise reasons why the prosecution accepted the plea remain uncertain. The surviving material includes an intriguing letter written shortly afterwards by R. Bagwell, who identified himself as foreman of the jury. Writing to Edward Clodd, president of the Folklore Society, Bagwell suggested that the evidence was sufficient to sustain a murder conviction. He speculated, however, that the Crown may have accepted manslaughter rather than risk an acquittal. Such observations need to be treated cautiously - his explanation was expressly speculative, and his correspondence reflected contemporary prejudices concerning Irish rural society and religion.
Nevertheless, the letter raises an important possibility: the outcome may have reflected pragmatic considerations about securing a conviction rather than any particular legal doctrine concerning supernatural belief. From the prosecution's perspective, accepting manslaughter may have offered the advantage of securing a substantial custodial sentence without the uncertainties associated with pursuing a contested capital charge.
Could belief in fairies negate criminal intent?
The case nevertheless presents an intriguing problem concerning mens rea. Modern criminal lawyers might instinctively approach it through the doctrine of mistake of fact. In R v Tolson (1889), decided just six years before Bridget's death, a woman was prosecuted for bigamy after remarrying in the mistaken belief that her first husband had died at sea. Although her husband was subsequently discovered to be alive, the Court for Crown Cases Reserved quashed her conviction, holding that an honest and reasonable belief in circumstances which, if true, would render the conduct innocent could provide a defence. The principle was significant because it recognised that a defendant might deliberately perform the physical act constituting an offence without possessing the necessary mens rea. Yet its application to Michael Cleary would have been problematic. Unlike Tolson's reasonable belief, his conviction that Bridget had been replaced by a changeling was objectively implausible. More fundamentally, even accepting his supernatural beliefs would not necessarily negate an intention to kill or cause grievous bodily harm. The distinction between an extraordinary motive and an absence of criminal intent would therefore have remained central.
Michael Cleary's supposed mistake was exceptionally unusual. If we take his account literally, he believed that Bridget was elsewhere and that the creature occupying her physical form was a supernatural substitute. On his perceived version of reality, he was therefore not killing Bridget Cleary. Perhaps more radically, he may not have believed that he was killing a human being at all. That produces an uncomfortable collision between objective and subjective approaches to criminal responsibility. Objectively, Michael deliberately subjected a human being to lethal violence. Subjectively, however, he may have genuinely believed that the object of that violence was something other than human.
But would that necessarily negate the mens rea for murder? Not automatically. An intention to kill or cause really serious injury is not necessarily displaced by a mistaken belief about the victim's identity or supernatural characteristics. Suppose someone deliberately kills another person because they believe the victim is possessed by a demon. Their supernatural explanation for the victim's behaviour does not alter the fact that they intended to kill the person standing before them.
There is arguably a distinction between believing that Bridget had been possessed by fairies and believing that Bridget had been physically removed and replaced by a non-human entity. The distinction may sound absurdly metaphysical, but it gives rise to the key question as to whether a mistaken belief concerning the nature of one's victim can affect the intention required for murder. The fact that Michael may have regarded Bridget as a changeling does not necessarily mean he lacked an intention to cause death or serious injury to the being before him. An extraordinary motive for intentional violence is not the same thing as an absence of intention.
Was Michael insane?
There is another obvious possibility. If Michael genuinely believed that his wife had been replaced by a supernatural creature, was he insane? The M'Naghten Rules, formulated in 1843, provide a defence where, because of a disease of the mind, a defendant does not know the nature and quality of their act or does not know that what they are doing is wrong. A belief in changelings might look to a modern observer like a delusion. But a culturally shared supernatural belief is not necessarily evidence of mental disorder. Michael had not invented an entirely private imaginary universe. He was drawing upon beliefs that were relatively commonplace within his community.
This creates a problem that remains relevant today. Courts may encounter defendants whose conduct is influenced by extreme religious, supernatural or conspiratorial beliefs. A belief can be demonstrably false, even bizarre, without necessarily resulting from a recognised mental disorder. The law must therefore distinguish between mental illness and culturally acquired irrational belief. There is no indication that Michael's manslaughter conviction resulted from a successful insanity argument.
The Darker Side of Folklore
There is a danger that modern fascination with - or even romanticisation of – the fairy story to obscure a much darker dimension of the case. Bridget was subjected to sustained violence in her own home. She was restrained, interrogated, forcibly treated and eventually killed by her husband.
Viewed through a modern lens, much of what happened before her death would readily be recognised as domestic abuse. Indeed, her relative economic independence from her husband has attracted considerable historical attention. She earned her own money and enjoyed a degree of autonomy unusual for some women in her social position. Angela Bourke's influential study, The Burning of Bridget Cleary (1999), explores how fairy belief intersected with questions of gender, social expectations and power. It is legitimate to ask whether Michael's assertion that Bridget had been replaced by a changeling also provided a means of exercising control over a woman whose independence challenged conventional expectations.
At the same time, however, we should resist replacing one simple explanation with another.. The killing need not have been either superstition or domestic violence. Fairy belief, illness, gender, coercion, community pressure and marital conflict could all have interacted. The continuing fascination with Michael's state of mind should not obscure Bridget's experience, or the responsibility of those other members of the community who participated in her abuse.
Whose reality does criminal law judge?
More than 130 years later, the Cleary case remains compelling because it exposes tensions at the heart of criminal responsibility. Criminal law operates in an objective physical world: Bridget Cleary was a human being, and Michael Cleary killed her. Yet culpability also involves a subjective inquiry. We ask what defendants intended, knew, foresaw and believed. Usually those two perspectives coexist reasonably comfortably, but occasionally they collide.
Allingham's 'little Bridget' belonged to a poetic world in which fairies really could carry human beings away. For Michael Cleary and at least some of those gathered in the cottage at Ballyvadlea, that possibility did not belong entirely to the realm of poetry. The historical proceedings do not resolve the resulting legal questions. The prosecution's acceptance of a manslaughter plea meant that the jury was never required to determine whether Michael's supernatural belief prevented him from possessing the mens rea for murder. That makes the case particularly interesting in contemporary times. It illustrates not only the conceptual difficulties posed by profoundly irrational beliefs, but also how prosecutors may resolve difficult criminal cases without obtaining definitive answers to the underlying legal questions. It leaves us with an enduring question: If a person intentionally kills another human being while genuinely believing that the victim is not human, what exactly have they intended to do?
References and further reading
Allingham, William, 'The Fairies', in Poems (Chapman & Hall, 1850)
Bourke, Angela, The Burning of Bridget Cleary: A True Story (Pimlico, 1999)
Bourke, Angela, 'Reading a Woman's Death: Colonial Text and Oral Tradition in Nineteenth-Century Ireland' (1995) 21(3) Feminist Studies 553–586
Hoff, Joan and Marian Yeates, The Cooper's Wife Is Missing: The Trials of Bridget Cleary (Basic Books, 2000)
Law Reform Commission (Ireland), Consultation Paper on Homicide: The Mental Element in Murder (LRC CP 17–2001), paras 1.01–1.09.
R v Tolson (1889) 23 QBD 168
The Tipperary (or Clonmel) Witch Case (1917), a compilation of contemporary newspaper accounts of the investigation and trials, held by McGill University's Osler Library. Includes R. Bagwell's correspondence of 27 July 1895.
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