Fig. 19. The Lee Penny.
When the Lee Penny was used for healing purposes, a vessel was filled with water, the stone was drawn once round the vessel, and then dipped three times in the water. In his Account of the Penny in the Lee, written in 1702, Hunter states, that "it being taken and put into the end of a cloven stick, and washen in a tub full of water, and given to cattell to drink, infallibly cures almost all manner of deseases. The people," he adds, "come from all airts of the kingdom with deseased beasts."
One or two points in its history prove the faith that was placed in the healing powers of the Lee Penny in human maladies of the most formidable type. About the beginning of last century, Lady Baird of Saughtonhall was attacked with the supposed symptoms of hydrophobia. But on drinking of, and bathing in, the water in which the Lee Penny had been dipped, the symptoms disappeared; and the Knight and Lady of Lee were for many days sumptuously entertained by the grateful patient. In one of the epidemics of plague which attacked Newcastle in the reign of Charles I., the inhabitants of that town obtained the loan of the Lee Penny by granting a bond of £6000 for its safe return. Such, it is averred, was their belief in its virtues, and the good that it effected, that they offered to forfeit the money, and keep the charm-stone.
About the middle of the seventeenth century the Reformed Protestant Church of Scotland zealously endeavoured, as the English Church under King Edgar had long before done, to "extinguish every heathenism, and forbid well-worshippings, and necromancies, and divinations, and enchantments, and man-worshippings, and the vain practices which are carried on with various spells, and with elders, and also with other trees, and with stones, etc."[229] They left, however, other practices, equally superstitious, quite untouched. Thus, while they threatened "the seventh son of a woman" with the "paine of Kirk censure," for "cureing the cruelles (scrofulous tumours and ulcers),"[230] by touching them, they still allowed the reigning king this power (Charles II. alone "touched" 92,000 such patients);[231] and the English Church sanctioned a liturgy to be used on these superstitious occasions. Again, the Synod of the Presbyterian Church of Glasgow examined into the alleged curative gifts of the Lee Penny; but, finding that it was employed "wtout using onie words such as charmers and sorcerers use in their unlawfull practisess; and considering that in nature there are mony things seen to work strange effects, qrof no human witt can give a reason, it having pleasit God to give to stones and herbes special virtues for the healing of mony infirmities in man and beast, advises the brethern to surcease their process, as qrin they perceive no ground of offence: And admonishes the said Laird of Lee, in the useing of the said stone to tak heed that it be used hereafter wt the least scandal that possiblie may be."[232]
FOOTNOTES:
[217] Natural History, Book xxx. chapters i. ii.
[218] "What we are going to say," observes Pliny, "is marvellous, but it may easily be tested by experiment. If a person repents of a blow given to another, either by hand or with a missile, he has nothing to do but to spit at once into the palm of the hand which has inflicted the blow, and all feeling of resentment will be instantly alleviated in the person struck. This, too, is often verified in the case of a beast of burden, when brought on its haunches with blows: for, upon this remedy being adopted, the animal will immediately step out and mend its pace. Some persons, also, before making an effort, spit into the hand in the manner above stated, in order to make the blow more heavy."—Pliny's Natural History, xxviii. § 7.
[219] Natural History, Book xxx. § 4. Archæologists are now fully aware of "the accord" of the ancient inhabitants of Britain with those of Persia and the other eastern branches of the Aryan race in many other particulars, as in their language, burial customs, etc. According to some Indian observers, stone erections, like our so-called Druidical circles, cromlechs, etc., are common in the East. Is it vain to hope that amid the great and yet unsearched remains of old Sanscrit literature, allusions may yet be found to such structures, that may throw more light upon their uses in connection with religious, sepulchral, or other services?
[220] Grimm thinks that the formulæ of Marcellus partake more of the Celtic dialects of the Irish, and consequently of the Scotch, than of the Welsh. As one of the shortest specimens of Marcellus's charm-cures, let me cite, from Pictet, the following, as given in the Ulster Journal of Archæology, vol. iv. p. 266:—"Formula 12. He who shall labour under the disease of watery (or blood-shot) eyes, let him pluck the herb Millefolium up by the roots, and of it make a hoop, and look through it, saying three times, 'Excicumacriosos;' and let him as often move the hoop to his mouth, and spit through the middle of it, and then plant the herb again." "I divide," observes Pictet, "the formula thus: exci cuma criosos, and translate it, 'See the form of the girdle.'" After a long and learned disquisition on the component words Pictet adds—"The process of cure recommended in this formula is of a character altogether symbolical. Girdles (cris), which we shall meet with again in formula No. 27, seem to have performed an important part in Celtic medicine. By making the eye look through the circle formed by the plant, a girdle, as it were, was put round it; and it is for this reason that the formula says, see the form (or model) of the girdle. The action of spitting afterwards through the little ring expressed symbolically the expulsion of the pain." The so-called Celtic word-charms in the formulæ of Marcellus are usually longer than the above; as, "Tetune resonco bregan gresso;" "Heilen prossaggeri nome sipolla na builet ododieni iden olitan," etc. etc.
[221] On this subject I elsewhere published, two years ago, the following remarks:—"The medical science and medical lore of the past has become, after a succession of ages, the so-called folk-lore and superstitious usages of times nearer our own. Up to the end of the last century, patients attacked with insanity were occasionally dipped in lakes and wells, and left bound in the neighbouring church for a night. Loch Maree, in Ross-shire, and St. Fillan's Pool, in Perthshire, were places in which such unfortunate patients were frequently dipped. Heron, in his Journey through Scotland in the last century, states that it was affirmed that two hundred invalids were carried annually to St. Fillan's for the cure of various diseases, but principally of insanity. The proceedings at this famous pool were in such cases an imitation of the old Greek and Roman worship of Æsculapius. Patients consulting the Æsculapian priest were purified first of all, by bathing in some sacred well; and then having been allowed to enter into and sleep in his temple, the god, or rather some priest of the god, came in the darkness of the night and told them what treatment they were to adopt. The poor lunatics brought to St. Fillan's were, in the same way, first purified by being bathed in his pool, and then laid bound in the neighbouring church during the subsequent night. If they were found loose in the morning, a full recovery was confidently looked for, but the cure remained doubtful when they were found at morning dawn still bound. I was lately informed by the Rev. Mr Stewart of Killin, that in one of the last cases so treated—and that only a few years ago—the patient was found sane in the morning, and unbound; a dead relative, according to the patient's own account, having entered the church during the night, and loosened her both from the ropes that bound her body and the delusions that warped her mind. It was a system of treatment by mystery and terrorism that might have made some sane persons insane; and hence, perhaps, conversely, some insane persons sane. Mr. Pennant tells us that at Llandegla, in Wales, where similar rites were performed for the cure of insanity, viz., purification in the sacred well, and forced detention of the patient for a night in the church, under the communion-table, the lunatics or their friends were obliged to leave a cock in the church if he were a male, and a hen if she were a female—an additional circumstance in proof of the Æsculapian type of the superstition. But perhaps, after all, the whole is a medical or mythological belief, older than Greece or Rome, and which was common to the whole Aryan or Indo-European race in Asia before they sent off, westward, over Europe, those successive waves of population that formed the nations of the Celt and Teuton, of the Goth, and Greek, and Latin. The cock is still occasionally sacrificed in the Highlands for the cure of epilepsy and convulsions. A patient of mine found one, a few years ago, deposited in a hole in the kitchen floor; the animal having been killed and laid down at the spot where a child had, two or three days previously, fallen down in a fit of convulsions."—See the Medical Times and Gazette of Dec. 8, 1860, p. 549.