Leaving now the insane who were punished as witches, I pass on to remark that in Percy's "Reliques of Ancient English Poetry," it is stated that the English have more songs and ballads on the subject of madness than any of their neighbours. "Whether," the writer proceeds, "there be any truth in the insinuation that we are more liable to this calamity than other nations,[51] or that our native gloominess hath peculiarly recommended subjects of this class to our writers, we certainly do not find the same in the printed collections of French and Italian songs." Half a dozen so-called mad songs are selected. These refer to much the same period as that we have been considering; and, in fact, we come upon the "Old Tom of Bedlam," or Cranke or Abram man, who "would swear he had been in Bedlam, and would talk frantickly of purpose," so notorious in connection with the beggary which endeavoured to make capital out of the asylum most familiar to our ancestors of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In this light the Bedlam beggars appear in "King Lear"—
"The country gives me proof and precedent
Of Bedlam beggars, who, with roaring voices,
Stick in their numb'd and mortify'd bare arms
Pins, wooden pricks, nails, sprigs of rosemary;"
and these enforce their charity by lunatic "bans," that is, by licences to beg under the badge of the Star of Bethlehem.
Some doggerel from the most ancient of the Percy "Reliques" will serve for a sample of the rest:
"Forth from my sad and darksome cell,
Or from the deepe abysse of Hell,
Mad Tom is come into the world againe,
To see if he can cure his distemper'd braine."
Tom appears to have brought away with him some of his fetters, then sufficiently abundant in Bedlam:
"Come, Vulcan, with tools and with tackles,
To knocke off my troublesome shackles."
This method of treatment—by fetters—has not, it may be well to state, survived, like immersion, in the practice of the present Master of Bedlam.
We learn from Shakespeare how "poor Tom that eats the swimming frog, the toad, the tadpole, the wall-newt and the water [newt]; ... swallows the old rat, and the ditch-dog;" and "drinks the green mantle of the standing pool," was "whipped from tything to tything, and stocked, punished, and imprisoned....
Mice, and rats, and such small deere
Have been Tom's food for seven long yeare."[52]