Sometimes these invocations were accompanied by the administration of medicinal herbs which had been gathered before sunrise. A woman accused of witchcraft, in 1588, declared that she saw “the guid nychtbours makand thair sawis with pains and fyres, and gadderit thair herbis before the sone rysing as sche did.” Among the various remedies prescribed for “the trembling fever,” or ague, by Katharine Oswald, one related to plucking up a nettle by the root, three successive mornings, before sunrise. A favourite time for this herb-gathering rite was Midsummer; a relic of the old Pagan superstition connected with the sun’s position in the Zodiac. The metrical charm then made use of was popular also in England,—
“Haile be thou, holie hearte,
Growing on the ground;
All in the Mount Calvarie
First wast thou found.
Thou art good for manie a sore,
And healest manie a wound;
In the Name of Sweet Jesus,
I take thee from the ground.”
“Bleeding at the touch,” has been accepted in several countries as a revelation of guilt. A man suspected of murder was brought to the side of the murdered man’s body, and forced to touch it; if the suspicions were just, blood immediately oozed from the wound, or at the mouth, or nose. Even at the man’s approach this sign of crime would appear. It is easy to see how precarious and dangerous a test was this; how readily it might release the guilty, and betray the innocent. Naturally therefore it was not accepted without reluctance. A man and his sister had quarrelled; he died suddenly, and his body was found in his own house, naked, and with a wound on the face, but bloodless. “Although many of the neighbours in the town came into the house to see the dead corpse, yet she, the sister, never offered to come, howbeit her dwelling was next door, nor had she so much as any seeming grief for his death. But the minister and bailiffs of the town taking great suspicion of her in respect of her carriage, commanded that she should be brought in. But when she came, she came trembling all the way to the house; she refused to come nigh to the corpse, or to touch, saying, that she never touched a dead corpse in her life. But being earnestly entreated by the minister and bailiffs, and her brother’s friends, who was killed, that she would but touch the corpse softly, she granted to do it. But before she did it, the sun shining in at the house, she expressed herself thus: ‘Humbly desiring, as the Lord made the sun to shine and give light into that house, that also He would give light in discovering that murder.’ And with these words, she touching the wound of the dead man very softly, it being white and clean, without any spot of blood or the like, yet immediately, while her finger was upon it, the blood rushed out of it, to the great admiration of all the beholders, who took it as one discovery of the murder, according to her own prayer.”
It will seem astonishing to readers of the present day that a poor creature’s life could be taken away on such fanciful and uncertain evidence.
We read that a Sir James Standsfield was found lying dead in a stream. His body was interred precipitately. Two days afterwards it was exhumed and partially dissected, the neck in particular being laid open, in order to ascertain the cause of death. After being well cleansed, blood burst from that side supported by his son Philip, on returning the body to the coffin for re-interment—not an unlikely result from the straining of the incisions—and it deeply stained his hand. He was arraigned, on this slight ground, for parricide; and in the course of the trial it was gravely argued that it was the will of Providence to disclose by this peculiar incident a secret crime.
The preservation of health and the prolongation of life are necessarily objects of interest to all mankind, and it was natural enough that around them should flourish a rank growth of superstitions.
To ailing or diseased persons all kinds of potions, pills, and powders were administered in the past as they are in the present; but whereas we are now content with the mystic characters endorsed on his formula by the physician, our ancestors were not satisfied unless certain mystical words, numbers, or ceremonies accompanied them. The sign of the cross was in constant requisition; or the medicine was to be taken according to mystical numbers—thrice or nine times, as the case might be. For hooping-cough was prescribed a draught from the horn of a living ox, nine times repeated. The patient was also put “nine several times” in the miller’s hopper.
The importance ascribed to the figure of a circle is probably a relic of the influence of the old sun-worship. Consumptive invalids, or children suffering from hectic fever, were thrice passed through a circular wreath of woodbine, cut during the increase of the March moon, and let down over the body from head to foot. We read of a sorceress who healed sundry women by “taking a garland of green woodbine, and causing the patient to pass thrice through it.” Afterwards, the garland was cut in nine pieces, which were cast into the fire—generally an indispensable particular in ceremonies of this kind. Another passed her patient through a heap of green yarn, which the nurse shook, and then divided it into nine pieces, which were buried in the lands of three owners. A certain Thomas Grieve directed a patient to pass thrice through a heap of yarn, which he duly burned. He also cured the wife of a Michael Glanis by having a hole broken on the north side of the chimney, and putting a hoop of yarn thrice through it, and taking it back at the door; and thereafter compelling the patient to go nine times through the said hoop of yarn.
White of Selborne tells us of a custom, prevalent in his time in the south of England, of stripping feeble and diseased children, and transmitting them head foremost through an artificial cleft in a young tree, the several parts of which were held forcibly asunder. The wound was then bound up carefully, and it was expected that the child would recover as the tree healed. If the cleft did not unite, the remedy proved abortive; and if the tree were cut down, the patient relapsed or died.