Alice Truscot's Almanac

I find myself attracted to the Early Tudor period - roughly the time before Henry VIII began his wrecking work. There was the chance that anything could have happened. England could have become a great power (as she eventually did), or she could have stayed on the periphery of things, and remained culturally insignificant, her language unknown outside part of an island. And this would have been good, too. Later, Alice Truscot (who sounds like the first of the professional Northerners) would have been hanged as a witch, or suffered an even crueller death as a traitor for making political predictions.
The following is the kind of story that Borges might have selected for Extraordinary Tales or A Universal History of Infamy.

Mother Shipton was not the only prophetess of the Early Tudor period. In 1505, in the reign of Good King Henry VII, Alice Truscot (or Truescot) came to London from Lancashire and caused a sensation by intoning nursery rhyme-like prophecies such as, "When penguins do nest in t'ould clock tower/Then shall there be full many a shower". She was received at Court, and given money, and even featured in Court masques, where she played the part of the Wise Woman of the Woods. Outside Court, some accused her of witchcraft, and said that her prophecies were whispered into her ears by her familiar spirits, who infested her matted hair in the shape of fat lice. But at last it emerged that her prophecies, which sounded so much like nursery rhymes, were, in fact, nursery rhymes of her native county. This was revealed by a gentleman of Lancashire, who had learned them as a little boy from his nurse. Alice was given a whipping for her effrontery, and sent home to Lancashire. But her prophecies were printed in some of the earliest chapbooks, and enjoyed some currency, before they were eclipsed by Mother Shipton's bolder pronouncements. In the nineteenth century they were rediscovered, and some of them were added to the traditional stock of nursery rhymes.

(Henry Curtis: The History of Popular Prophecy in England)