This noble empress, full of grace, bade every bird take his station, as they were accustomed to stand always on Saint Valentine's day from year to year.
Geoffrey Chaucer
Faith is our earth in which we take root.
Hope is the water through which we are nourished.
Love is the wind through which we grow.
Knowledge is the light through which we ripen.
From the Gospel of Philip, Nag Hammadi Library
Anne Tenant has frequently been associated with Charles Walton, who was murdered on the 14th February 1945. The reason for this is the supposed method of execution, pinning to the ground with a pitchfork and carving a cross upon the chest with a billhook.
Sadly for the proponents of this theory, Anne Tenant was not murdered in the prescribed manner, often identified as the supposed local ritual to kill a witch. Rather, poor old Anne was brutally attacked and stabbed in the legs and head several times by the farm Labourer James Hayward.
Like Anne Tenant, modern speculation has assumed a degree of popular belief about their practices, including toad lore. In the Wikipedia article about Charles Walton, he is cited as having been known locally as possessing a way with horses and keeping Natterjack toads, a variety that might have been considered rare to Warwickshire even in the 19th Century due to lack of suitable habitat (i.e. coastal sand dunes). The reference here to the Horsemen seems a little tenuous given that they were mostly confined to East Anglia and up the North East to Scotland (following the most suitable habitat of the Natterjack, funnily enough). True, Horse Whisperers likely came across from Ireland and may have been introduced locally at the annual Stow horse fair. However, students of the Horseman's Word will identify the distinction between the Whisperer and Horseman proper, the former not being formalised and possessing ritual of the kind implied here.
What is critical in such instances is to understand rural village life in England, rare as it is today. That a belief in bewitchery existed South Warwickshire in the late nineteenth Century is testified to by a report in The Times following Anne Tenant's murder in 1875 becrying the ignorance of us bumpkins in such enlightened times! Moreover, reports from the time of Anne Tenant also confirm that the local superstition held with the idea that a bewitchment can be removed by drawing blood on the witch that caused it. Therefore, the killing of Charles Walton serves little purpose if bewitchment is cited as a motive for murder as blood letting would have sufficed in local belief.
All this seems like discrediting the belief in Warwickshire, or more precisely Long Compton, witches. While this may look the case, I am rather endeavouring to simmer down the facts and leave bare the truth. Therefore, a more interesting case is that of the Cunning Man and Water Doctor who introduced James Hayward to a diagnosis of bewitchment, and perhaps prescribed a cure of blooding the witch. More upon this man later...