[30]. Edward the Confessor was the first English king who touched for the Evil, but the foolish superstition has been wisely laid aside ever since the accession of the House of Hanover.
[31]. This superstitious notion is not confined to the ancients, but is even cherished at this day, in some of the more remote districts of the kingdom; and we find frequent allusions to it in the popular poetry of the seventeenth century.
“Tom Pots was but a serving man,
But yet he was a doctor good;
He bound his ’kerchief on the wound,
And with some kind words he staunch’d the blood.”
Sir Walter Scott, in his “Lay of the last Minstrel”—
“She drew the splinter from the wound,
And with a charm she staunch’d the blood.”
The reader will also find the enumeration of several charms for this purpose, in Reginald Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft, p. 273.