Lucy goes on the trail of the 'Yorkshire Witch'

Swindlers, hustlers and women on the make - if anyone can tell their story it is historian and presenter Lucy Worsley.

- by Harriet Sutton

She has been back on the radio with her team of all-female detectives, travelling through time to meet women who didn’t play by the rules.

The second series of Lady Swindlers with Lucy Worsley - a follow-up to the Lady Killers programme - started on BBC Sounds and Radio 4 this week, with new episodes weekly.

In the latest show, Worsley heads to North Yorkshire to investigate a Leeds woman who claimed she has the powers to heal and to banish evil.

She is known as the Yorkshire Witch but her real name was Mary Bateman. She lived in the city, close to Leeds Parish Church (now Leeds Minster) in the first decade of the 19th century, a time when, despite huge leaps forward in science, many people still believed in the power of the supernatural.

She was famous for possessing a magic hen which laid eggs upon which were written the words 'Christ is Risen'

Mary, who according to York Museums Trust was born in 1768 to a small-scale farming family at Aisenby near Thirsk, carved out a living working as a 'wise woman' - selling magic charms and potions and showing off a prophetic chicken.

But, as Worsley discovers, there was a very dark side to Mary’s business too: "She was a purveyor of fake cures and medicines - and her superpower wasn’t so much actual magic as using her magnetic personality to get people to believe that she could cure their ills.