The murder of three Banfield children is disclosed in Thomas Woolgar’s chronicle as a crime in which both Sister Einor and Woolgar participated. The children had trusted Einor as a revered healer; Woolgar’s account instead depicts their disappearance as the concealed consequence of her violence and his own complicity. Because the confession comes from a manuscript written by a frightened and self-accusing participant, it also makes the gap between private guilt and the community’s later version of events central to the episode.

Reputation and Disappearances

Einor was regarded by the villagers as pure and generous. She had treated ailments, received gifts from people who believed in her, and attracted children who came to her for blessings. That reputation gave the children reason to trust her, while making the truth of their disappearances harder for the community to recognize.

Woolgar places the killings amid a period when his relationship with Einor had become an increasingly visible fixation. In the second year of his involvement with her, he writes, his altered manner could no longer be concealed, and children began disappearing from the nearby forests over several months. He identifies three victims, though their names are not present in this surviving passage.

Woolgar’s Confession

The chronicle makes Woolgar more than a witness to the children’s fate. He says that he helped Einor harm them and had to stifle their screams. He also says that their graves were hidden and that he could not bring himself to pray over them. The account does not describe the killings in detail; its force comes instead from Woolgar’s admission that he was involved and then lived with the knowledge of what had happened.

Woolgar tries to explain his participation by attributing his weakened judgment to Einor’s influence and alleged potions. Yet his own account complicates that defence: he acknowledges that his will had first to come from him. The confession therefore records both an attempt to shift responsibility and an admission that the explanation does not absolve him.

Exposure and Public Retribution

The children’s disappearances became part of the suspicions gathering around Einor. After a novice confessed to the Prioress, the Prioress confronted Woolgar; he then confessed to his own wrongdoing but did not disclose everything he knew. Instead, he described Einor as a witch who had overcome his reason, and he joined the decision to denounce her to an ecclesiastical officer. The accusation was thus shaped not only by the children’s deaths but also by Woolgar’s effort to protect himself and his family’s standing.

Woolgar reports that he carried the accusation back to Banfield, where it spread among people whose children had been lost. Their grief and anger turned into a crowd’s demand for vengeance. When Einor was seized, she accused Woolgar of having been her partner in wrongdoing; he denied her charge and urged the crowd to treat her as a witch. The mob then tortured and executed her. In the chronicle, the public violence that followed the murders does not repair the harm: it adds another layer of brutality while leaving Woolgar’s own role obscured from the crowd.

Competing Accounts and the Chronicle’s Significance

After the execution, Woolgar says that his father and the Bishop told him the people of Banfield would describe Einor as having confessed to witchcraft and to the slaughter of the three children, and as having cursed them as she died. That account differs sharply from the confession in Woolgar’s manuscript, which implicates him as well as Einor. The distinction matters: the community’s version makes Einor the sole perpetrator, while the hidden chronicle preserves a witness’s admission of shared responsibility.

The manuscript also gives the confession a precarious route into the future. Woolgar says his father had obtained the chest containing the records of St. Joseph’s Church in Banfield and searched it for damaging material, but that the paper he was then writing would remain hidden until it was found. The children’s deaths consequently become more than a buried crime within the story: their later account depends on the survival of a private record that challenges the official narrative and exposes the guilt that public vengeance failed to settle.