"There was a certain parishe priest, a very honest and godly man, whom I knewe well, who in the plague time, could tell before hand, when any of his parishe should dye. For in the night time he heard a noise over his bed, like as if one had throwne downe a sacke full of corne from his shoulders: which when he heard he would say: Nowe an other biddeth me farewell. After it was day, he used to inquire who died that night, or who was taken with the plague, to the end he might comfort and strengthen them, according to the duty of a good pastour.
"In Abbeys, the Monks, servaunts or any other falling sicke, many have heard in the night, preparation of chests for them, in such sorte as the coffin makers did afterwards prepare in deede.
"In some country villages, when one is at death's dore, many times there are some heard in the evening, or in the night, digging a grave in the Churcheyarde, and the same the next day is so found digged, as these men did heare before."[362:A]
The next class of superstitions which we shall notice in this chapter, is that depending on CHARMS and SPELLS, a fertile source of knavery and credulity, and which has been chiefly exercised, in our poet's time and since, by old women. Of this occupation, and its attendant folly and imposition, the bard has given us a sketch, in his Merry Wives of Windsor, in the person of the Old Woman of Brentford, who is declared by Ford to be "a witch, a quean, an old cozening quean!—We are simple men; we do not know what's brought to pass under the profession of fortune-telling. She works by charms, by spells, by the figure, and such daubery as this is; beyond our element: we know nothing."[362:B]
That women of this description, or as Scot has delineated them, in one instance, indeed, deviating from the portly form of Shakspeare's cunning Dame, "leane, hollow-eied, old, beetle browed women[362:C]," were, as dealers in charms, spells and amulets, a very numerous tribe, in the days of Elizabeth and James, we have every reason to believe, from contemporary evidence; but it appears that the trade of fortune-telling was then, as now, chiefly exercised by the wandering horde of gipsies, to whose name and characteristic knavery, our great poet alludes, in Antony and Cleopatra, where the Roman complains that Cleopatra,
"Like a right gipsy, hath, at fast and loose,
Beguil'd him to the very heart of loss."[362:D]
Of this wily people, of the juggle referred to in these lines, and of
their profession of fortune-telling, Scot thus speaks in his thirteenth book:—"The Aegyptians juggling witchcraft or sortilegie standeth much in fast or loose, whereof though I have written somewhat generallie already (p. 197), yet having such opportunitie I will here shew some of their particular feats; not treating of their common tricks which is so tedious, nor of their fortune-telling which is so impious; and yet both of them meere cousenages."[363:A] He then describes two games of fast and loose; one with a handkerchief, and the other with whip cords and beads; but as these much resemble the modern trick of pricking at the belt or girdle, explained by Sir J. Hawkins, in a note on the passage just quoted from our poet, it will not be necessary to notice them further in this place.
To palmistry, indeed, or the art of Divination by the lines of the hand, Shakspeare has allotted a great part of the second scene, in the first act, of Antony and Cleopatra, no doubt induced to this by the topographical situation of the opening characters, the play commencing at Alexandria in Egypt.