in Portsmouth. The latter has a statue of her above the door. A caricature of Mother Shipton was used in early pantomime. Her appearance in pantomime was mentioned in a song from Yorkshire that was transcribed in the 18th century, and which reads (in part): "Of all the pretty pantomimes/ That have been seen or sung in rhimes,/Since famous Johnny Rich's times,/There's none like Mother Shipton." The Mother Shipton moth (Callistege mi) is named after her. Each wing's pattern resembles a hag's head in profile. A fundraising campaign was started in 2013 to raise £35,000 to erect a statue of Shipton in Knaresborough. Completed in October 2017, the statue sits on a bench in the town's Market Square close to a statue of John Metcalf, an 18th-century road engineer known as Blind Jack. Mother Shipton is referred to in Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year'' (1722), referring to the year 1665, when the bubonic plague erupted in London: "These terrors and apprehensions of the people led them into a thousand weak, foolish, and wicked things, which they wanted not a sort of people really wicked to encourage them to: and this was running about to fortune-tellers, cunning-men, and astrologers to know their fortune, or, as it is vulgarly expressed, to have their fortunes told them, their nativities calculated, and the like... And this trade grew so open and so generally practised that it became common to have signs and inscriptions set up at doors: 'Here lives a fortune-teller', 'Here lives an astrologer', 'Here you may have your nativity calculated', and the like; and Friar Bacon's brazen-head, which was the usual sign of these people's dwellings, was to be seen almost in every street, or else the sign of Mother Shipton...." See also 2012 phenomenon Notes References External links Mother Shipton's Cave and Dropping Well Mother Shipton, Her Life and Prophecies, Mysterious Britain & Ireland 1488 births 1561 deaths 15th-century English people 15th-century English women 16th-century English women Legendary English people English psychics People from Knaresborough Prophets Witchcraft in England Witches in folklore Women mystics Yorkshire folklore