In a book published in 1599 it is asserted that "if one eat three small pomegranate-flowers, they say for a whole year he shall be safe from all manner of eye sore." According to the same authority, "it hath been and yet is a thing which superstition hath believed, that the body anointed with the juice of chicory is very available to obtain the favor of great persons."
Wearing a bay-leaf was a charm against lightning. Robert Greene, Penelope's Web (1601), says: "He which weareth the bay leaf is privileged from the prejudice of thunder." In Webster's White Devil (1612) Cornelia says:—
"Reach the bays:
I'll tie a garland here about his head;
'T will keep my boy from lightning."
Burton, in his Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), remarks: "Amulets, and things to be borne about, I find prescribed, taxed [condemned] by some, approved by others.... I say with Renodeus, they are not altogether to be rejected."
Reginald Scot, in his Discoverie of Witchcraft, published in 1584, in which he exposed and ridiculed the pretensions of witches, magicians, and astrologers, tells an amusing story of an old woman who cured diseases by muttering a certain form of words over the person afflicted; for which service she always received a penny and a loaf of bread. At length, terrified by threats of being burned as a witch, she owned that her whole conjuration consisted in these lines, which she repeated in a low voice near the head of the patient:—
"Thy loaf in my hand,
And thy penny in my purse,