Folklore of Sussex

by Jacqueline Simpson

  Similarly, wrapping flannel round the affected part is obviously a sensible treatment for rheumatism, bronchitis and sore throats, all of which are relieved by warmth; but to insist that the flannel must be red verges on the magical (red as a symbol of heat or of blood is presumably the underlying idea), and one is definitely over the borderline with such recipes as a skein of red silk round the waist to prevent lumbago, or a strip of red flannel folded seven times and drawn between the toes to prevent cramp in the feet – both of which were still current in the 1920s. In this chapter I shall not attempt to cover the many herbal cures and similar examples of old-fashioned practical country medicine (many of which have recently been described and assessed by Dr Andrew Allen in his Dictionary of Sussex Folk Medicine), but will concentrate on those where some form of magical principle or procedure is involved.

  The clearest cases are those where the cure is performed by virtue of some secret supernatural power believed to reside in particular people, the ‘charmers’, ‘wise women’ and ‘cunning men’ who played an important role in the old village communities. Several incidents quoted in the previous chapter showed how these were consulted in cases where witchcraft was suspected, but they were also often sought out in less dramatic circumstances. In Fittleworth, at the time when Mrs Latham was collecting folklore there, there were several women who performed cures by reciting certain charms, or, as they preferred to call them, ‘blessings’. One was for the healing of wounds caused by thorns:

  Our Saviour Christ was of a pure Virgin born,

  And He was crowned with a thorn.

  I hope it may not rage or swell;

  I trust in God it may do well.

  Another, for curing burns and scalds, could only be performed on a Sunday evening; Mrs Latham knew of a case where a scalded woman refused all medical help and insisted on waiting, in great pain, till the Sunday came round, when she sent for the charmer. The latter bowed her head, crossed two fingers over the burn, murmured some words to herself, and blew on the burn, whereupon the woman declared herself cured. The words were:

  There came two Angels from the north;

  One was Fire, and one was Frost.

  Out, Fire; in, Frost,

  In the name of Father, Son and Holy Ghost.

  The ‘wise women’ Mrs Latham met regarded their knowledge of such ‘blessings’ as a precious privilege by which they could help their neighbours, and would make no charge for using them. Similarly, in Lewes in the 1880s, there was a certain Janet Steer who kept a shop in Malling Street, and who was known as a ‘wise woman’ who could cure warts. Her method was to count the warts and then buy them from the patient for a halfpenny. People thought that she believed that if she sold her wisdom she would no longer prosper, and that that was why she used a method which left her financially the loser. Probably, to judge by similar cases in other parts of England, charmers who held such views might be tactfully thanked for their services by a gift of food or some other payment in kind, after a discreet lapse of time.

  ‘Professional’ healers of this type were still in practice in quite recent times. In 1939, Dr P.H. Lulham wrote in the Sussex County Magazine that a few years previously, during an outbreak of diphtheria, he had found out that some mothers were taking their children to a local ‘wise woman’. She would first tie a hazel twig round their throats, for which she charged a shilling, and then, if that failed, she would make them swallow a bit of stewed mouse while she recited an incantation, for which she charged half a crown. The doctor got the police to put a stop to her cures; what incantation she used he did not record. Indeed, it would not be surprising if a few charmers were still to be found quietly practising their ancient craft, for instance as healers of warts; certainly the memory of those who flourished a generation or two ago must still be very fresh.

  But it was not only these ‘professional’ healers who were credited with mysterious powers; certain specific cures could be performed by people who were peculiar in one particular respect, whatever their normal station in life. According to one of Mrs Latham’s informants, thrush, a disease of the mouth and throat in children, could be cured if a ‘left twin’ were to blow three times into the sick child’s mouth – a ‘left twin’ being one of a pair of which the other had died. If the sick child was a boy, the ‘left twin’ had to be a female, and vice versa. According to a later writer, the blowing had to be done by someone who had been born as a posthumous child, and must be repeated three days running, the patient being fasting at the time. In both cases, the healer’s peculiarity is that he has survived the death of someone very closely linked with him; perhaps he was imagined to be endowed with a double portion of ‘the breath of life’ in consequence.

  Even more macabre was a remedy for goitre or for a wen on the throat – the touch of a dead man’s hand on the affected part. The explanation lies in an older form of the charm, which required the touch to be that of a hanged man’s hand as he swung on the gibbet. Mrs Latham describes how her childhood walks on Beeding Hill in the 1840s were spoilt by her terror of an ancient gibbet which stood there, and by the gruesome tales concerning it which her nurse insisted on relating. One of these was about a woman who was cured of a wen on her neck by the touch of a dead murderer’s hand – ‘she was taken under the gallows in a cart and was held up in order that she might touch the dead hand, and she passed it three times over the wen, and then returned homewards’. The nurse was not romancing; there is a description of just such a scene at a public execution in the Brighton Herald in 1835. With the cessation of public hangings this gruesome procedure became impossible, and the appropriate magical symbolism whereby a hanged man was used to cure afflictions of the neck was extended to corpses of any sort.

  On 22 January 1935 a mummified hand, said to be that of a witch named Mary Holt from Pulborough, and to have been used for cures in the eighteenth century, was auctioned in London and fetched £3 15s. However, Mary Holt’s name does not appear in the records of those tried for witchcraft in Sussex, so it is unlikely that she was hanged and her own hand cut off; more probably, it was the hand of an ordinary criminal, acquired by Mary and used as a healing charm. At the same auction a heart stuffed with pins fetched £1 12s 6d; this was almost certainly an example of a counterspell used throughout England to put a stop to outbreaks of disease among farm animals where witchcraft was suspected to be the cause. The heart of a dead animal would be cut out, stuck with pins or thorns and either roasted or hung up in a chimney to dry in the heat; this was thought to give intense pain to the witch, forcing her to lift her spell and allow the animals to return to health.

  In other cases, it is hard to see any appropriateness in the peculiarity which confers a power to heal certain diseases. Whooping cough, it was once thought, could be cured by any remedy whatsoever which happened to be recommended by a man riding a piebald horse. Mrs Latham knew a man who had such a horse, and who was constantly being asked to suggest remedies; he would answer quite arbitrarily, and his advice was always taken. Another cure for the same trouble, recorded in 1931, was to feed the sufferer on bread and butter given by a family where the head of the household was called John, and his wife Joan. At Ringmer in the early nineteenth century, convulsions were thought to be cured by wearing a silver ring bought with six sixpences, each coin having been donated by a bachelor; it was important that the donors should not be thanked.

  The most famous example of personal healing powers, and one which runs deep through English history, is the sacred ability of a reigning monarch to cure scrofula by laying hands on the sufferer’s neck and giving him or her a gold coin to be kept as an amulet; the disease was, for that reason, called king’s evil. The first to ‘touch for the evil’ was probably Edward the Confessor (1042–66) and the practice was especially popular with the Tudor and Stuart dynasties (including the Queens Regnant, Mary, Elizabeth and Anne, but not Queen Consorts). Those who went to be touched had to present a certificate saying they did indeed have the disease, and had not bee
n touched before, to ensure that they were not simply after that gold coin. There are several examples of these certificates in Sussex archives, and the Sussex Archaeological Society holds one of the coins, dating from the reign of Elizabeth I. For many years Ashburnham Church held an even more poignant relic: the blood-stained shirt worn by Charles I at his execution, and the sheet that covered his body. People believed that these had absorbed the power of his royal blood, and hence that to touch them could cure the king’s evil.

  Certain charms did not require the intervention of a healer, but were administered by the sufferer himself. There was one against toothache which was thought to be so powerful that simply to have it written in one’s Bible or Prayer Book was enough, or so Mrs Latham was told by an old man who showed her his copy:

  As Peter sat weeping on a marvel [? marble] stone, Christ came by and said unto him, ‘Peter, what ailest thou?’ Peter answered and said unto him, ‘My Lord and my God, my tooth acheth.’ Jesus said unto him, ‘Arise, Peter, and be thou whole; and not thou only, but all them that carry these lines for my sake shall never have the toothache.’

  It will be noticed that this charm describes a miracle worked by Christ on St Peter – an episode which does not, of course, figure in any of the Gospels. Allusions to real or alleged incidents in the lives of Christ or the saints are quite frequent in charms, and gave them a religious status in the minds of those who used them; the charm for thorn wounds quoted above is of this type, and that for burns mentions angels who on some mysterious past occasion ‘came from the north’. The structure of such charms is very like that of many orthodox prayers which recall some divine act from the past in order to pray for a comparable grace in the present. Not surprisingly, therefore, the country people often called such formulae ‘blessings’ rather than ‘charms’.

  Another self-administered charm with an element of prayer in it is that recorded by the Revd W.D. Parish, against ague:

  Ague, ague, I thee defy!

  Three days shiver,

  Three days shake;

  Make me well for Jesus’ sake.

  There is an element of realistic prognosis here; ague is normally an intermittent disease, which may well clear up of its own accord after a few days, but the patient also assisted nature by the magical procedure of writing the charm on a three-cornered piece of paper and wearing it round his neck until it dropped off. Three, always a potent number, here probably more particularly symbolises the three days of shivering and shaking, though it might also be intended to invoke the Trinity, often symbolised by a triangle.

  A different, and purely magical, principle is involved in another ague charm which one Sussex writer’s nurse had seen in use in her own childhood (presumably towards the end of the nineteenth century): she had seen a man unwinding lengths of rope which he had coiled round his body onto a tree, as he ran round and round its trunk, singing:

  Ague, ague, I thee defy;

  Ague, ague, to this tree I thee tie.

  This is a clear case of transference magic; the disease was being ritually ‘given’ to the tree. The nurse who had seen this done firmly believed that one could indeed rid oneself of sickness by this method, or by standing in a pond, ‘if you knew the way’. Another writer records a different method of transferring ague to a tree, in this case specifically stated to be an aspen – an appropriate choice, since its leaves shiver in the lightest breeze. You must take clippings from the sufferer’s finger- and toe-nails while he is asleep, without his knowing (a difficult condition!), and also cut some hair from the nape of his neck; you must wrap them in paper and put them in a hole in an aspen tree.

  One well-known ague cure involved the use of a spider. Some said it should be swallowed alive, rolled in its own web, on an empty stomach; others, that it should be put in a bag with a few flies to keep it alive, and worn round the neck till ‘one of these days you’ll find the ague has gone’. The lapse of time makes this a safe prophecy, but why a spider? I would hazard the guess that this is once again a matter of like curing like; the shivers of an ague bout, so vividly described in the Sussex saying ‘Old Johnny’s running his finger down my back’, find a parallel in the shivers one feels when a spider runs over one’s flesh, so that the latter might be thought a good counter-irritant to cure the former.

  Symbolic appropriateness probably lies behind several other curious cures, though the point is not explicitly made in any of the sources. The use of adder’s oil for deafness is one that has already been mentioned; others are to carry a mole’s paw against rheumatism, cramp or toothache (moles are strong diggers, and will gnaw roots that are in their way); to make children with teething troubles eat rabbits’ brains or wear a baked shrew in a bag round their necks (both animals have sharp teeth); to give powdered human skull for epilepsy (a brain disease), or marrow and oil extracted from human bones for rheumatism (presumably the type which affects bones rather than muscles). On the other hand, there are many recipes which cannot be explained by this principle: take woodlice in wine for dropsy; eat boiled whelps and worms for gunshot wounds; grasp horseradish scrapings for headache; carry a potato in your pocket against rheumatism; swallow a live frog to cure or prevent tuberculosis; or go among a flock of sheep for the same complaint, as a shepherd recommended as late as 1936:

  They do say that if people with consumption walk about among the sheep in the morning when they are leaving the fold, it will do them a power of good. Sheep have a funny smell – not a nasty one, but a very healthy one, and they say that that is what does the consumptives good.

  Nor can one see any reason why mice should be a highly popular prescription for all sorts of ailments, apart from the practical fact that they are easily obtainable, and apparently quite palatable – tasting rather like chicken. They had many uses: cooked with onions, they would cure whooping-cough; baked to a cinder, powdered and mixed with jam, they would cure a child of bed-wetting; dried and powdered, they were good for diabetes; while to eat one roasted followed by two powdered was another recipe against whooping-coughs. They were such a standard feature of folk medicine that there was a joke current at one time about a doctor who was treating a young child with a high fever, who told the mother to put some ice in a bag on the child’s forehead; next day she reported gratefully, ‘He’s much better now, sir; the fever has gone down and the mice are dead.’

  This woman – if the joke is based on a real incident, which is quite possible – clearly believed in the transference of disease to an animal by contact. There is an undoubted instance of this in a cure for goitre briefly mentioned by the Revd J. Coker Egerton in 1884, and described in more detail by Miss L.N. Candlin as having been in use at Withyham ‘less than a hundred years ago’. It is to take a live snake and draw it nine times round the goitre, then to cork it up in a bottle and bury it deep in the ground; as it dried and shrivelled, so the goitre would disappear. Similarly, one might rub a snail on a wart and then impale it on a thorn; as the snail shrivelled, so the wart would shrink.

  Another type of magic cure depends on the opposite principle: that a living object, in these cases a growing plant, can transfer something of its ‘life force’ to those who come into contact with it. One dramatic example was recorded by the Revd Henry Hoper, Rector of Portslade from 1815 to 1859, who found that only a few years before his time, his parishioners used to believe that ‘a dying person will recover if carried round thrice and thrice bumped against a thorn tree of great antiquity on the Downs, ever ready to dispense its magic power to all believers’; the procedure had actually been tried not long before, but to everyone’s surprise it had failed. Later in the nineteenth century, Mrs Latham noted a widespread belief that the maple tree confers long life on any child that is passed between its branches; there was one in West Grinstead Park in her time, and she observed that much distress was caused by a rumour that it was to be cut down. Probably also to be classed here is the belief that one can cure oneself of fits (or, some say, of boils) by crawling three times through
the arch formed by a bramble shoot which has curled over and re-rooted itself at the tip.

  The most elaborate and interesting procedure of this type is one for curing a child of a hernia. The tree chosen for the ritual, the ash, is one that is regarded as having protective magic qualities (for instance, against snakes, witches and evil spirits); the splitting of the tree imitates the rupture from which the child is suffering, and hence its healing is designed, according to the principle of imitative magic, to promote the child’s; magic numbers are prominent; the act of passing the child through the tree may possibly mimic childbirth; and a permanent magical connection is set up between the child’s life and the tree’s. All these points emerge from Mrs Latham’s full account:

  A child so afflicted must be passed nine times every morning on nine successive days at sunrise through a cleft in a sapling ash-tree, which has been so far given up by the owner of it to the parents of the child as that there is an understanding that it shall not be cut down during the life of the infant that is to be passed through it. The sapling must be sound at heart, and the cleft must be made with an axe. The child, on being carried to the tree, must be attended by nine persons, each of whom must pass it through the cleft from west to east. On the ninth morning the solemn ceremony is concluded by binding the tree tightly with a cord, and it is supposed that as the cleft closes the health of the child will improve. In the neighbourhood of Petworth some cleft ashes may be seen, through which children have very recently [i.e. in the 1860s] been passed. I may add that only a few weeks since, a person who had lately purchased an ash-tree standing in this parish [Fittleworth], intending to cut it down, was told by the father of a child who had some time before been passed through it, that the infirmity would be sure to return upon his son if it were felled. Whereupon the good man said, he knew such would be the case; and therefore he would not fell it for the world.