1687.
Being Sunday, a young woman of noted piety, Janet Fraser by name, the daughter of a weaver in the parish of Closeburn, Dumfriesshire, had gone out to the fields with a young female companion, and sat down to read the Bible not far from her father’s house. Feeling thirsty, she went to the river-side (the Nith) to get a drink, leaving her Bible open at the place where she had been reading, which presented the verses of the 34th chapter of Isaiah, beginning—‘My sword shall be bathed in heaven: behold, it shall come down upon Idumea, and upon the people of my curse, to judgment,’ &c. On returning, she found a patch of something like blood covering this very text. In great surprise, she carried the book home, where a young man tasted the substance with his tongue, and found it of a saltless or insipid flavour. On the two succeeding Sundays, while the same girl was reading her Bible in the open air, similar blotches of matter, like blood, fell upon the leaves. She did not perceive it in the act of falling till it was about an inch from the book. ‘It is not blood, for it is as tough as glue, and will not be scraped off by a knife, as blood will; but it is so like blood, as none can discern any difference by the colour.’
Showers of blood are amongst the familiar prodigies by which mankind were alarmed in days of ignorance and superstition. A writer of our time remarks that it is most probable that these bloody waters were never seen falling, but that people, seeing the standing waters blood-coloured, were assured, from their not knowing how else it should happen, that it had rained blood into them. ‘Swammerdam,’ he goes on to say, ‘relates that, one morning in 1670, great excitement was created in the Hague, by a report that the lakes and ditches about the city were found to be full of blood. A certain physician went down to one of the canals, and taking home a quantity of this blood-coloured water, examined it with the microscope, and found that the water was water still, and had not at all changed its colour, but that it was full of prodigious swarms of small red animals, all alive, and very nimble in their motions, the colour and prodigious numbers of which gave a reddish tinge to the whole body of the water in which they lived.... The animals which thus colour the water of lakes and ponds are the pulices arborescentes of Swammerdam, or the water-fleas with branched horns. These creatures are of a reddish-yellow or flame-colour. They live about the sides of ditches, under weeds, and amongst the mud; and are therefore the less visible, except at a certain time, which is the beginning or end of June. It is at this time that these little animals leave their recesses to float about the water, and meet for the propagation of their species; and by this means they become visible in the colour which they give the water. The colour in question is visible, more or less, in one part or other of almost all standing waters at this season; and it is always at the same season that the bloody waters have alarmed the ignorant.’—Encyc. Brit., 7th ed., xix. 59. If we can suppose some quantity of the water so discoloured to be carried up by a whirlwind, transported along, and afterwards allowed to fall, such a fact as the depositing of blood-like stains on Janet Fraser’s Bible might be accounted for.
1687.
Medieval history is full of stories of blood being found on or in the host, and of dismal misinterpretations of the phenomenon being accepted. Several massacres of Jews have arisen from this cause alone. Modern science sees the matter in its true light. In 1848, Dr Eckhard, of Berlin, when attending a case of cholera, found potatoes and bread within the house spotted with a red colouring matter, which, being forwarded to Ehrenberg, was found by him to be due to the presence of an animalcule, to which he gave the name of the Monas Prodigiosa. It was found that other pieces of bread could be inoculated with this matter. It is curious to reflect that, if Ehrenberg had been present to examine a certain spotted host in Frankfort in 1296, and supposing his rational explanations to be received, the lives of ten thousand unhappy descendants of Abraham might have been saved.
July 6.
In compliance with ‘a general outcry and complaint’ from the public, the magistrates of Edinburgh called up the butchers and vintners, and fined them for extortion. It was in vain that these men set forth that there was no rule or law broken, and that when they bought dear they must sell dear. It was held as a sufficient answer to the butchers, that they did exact large profits, besides using sundry arts to pass off their meat as better than it was, and they regrated the market by taking all the parks and enclosures about Edinburgh, so as to prevent any from ‘furnishing’ but themselves. It was alleged of the vintners, that they exacted for a prepared fowl triple what it cost in the market; they sold bread purposely made small; they charged twenty-four pence for the pound of sugar, while the cost to themselves was eightpence, ‘and even so in the measure of tobacco.’—Foun.
1687.
Though the butchers formed one of the fourteen incorporated trades of Edinburgh, their business was of a limited description, and indeed continued so till a comparatively recent time, owing to the generally prevalent use of meat salted at Martinmas, a practice rendered unavoidable by the scarcity of winter fodder for cattle before the days of turnip husbandry. Of the animals used, cattle formed but a small proportion. John Strachan, a ‘flesh-cady’ or market-porter, who died in 1791 in the 105th year of his age, remembered the time—not long after that now under our attention—‘when no flesher would venture to kill any beast [that is, bullock] till all the different parts were bespoken.’[319] It may also be remarked that Pennant, in his Tour in Scotland, 1772, tells us that ‘the gentleman is now living who first introduced stall-fed beef into Perth.’ He adds, with strict truth: ‘Before that time the greater part of Scotland lived on salt meat throughout the winter, as the natives of the Hebrides do at present, and as the English did in the feudal times.’