The Pattern Under the Plough

by George Ewart Evans

  1 G.B., Part 1, Vol. 2, p. 216.

  2 v. Norwich and Ipswich Museums. The Suffolk finds were on the site of Ipswich Civic College and at the Duke’s Head Inn, at Coddenham. Later finds have been made at Ixworth, Eyke, Woodbridge and Stradbroke etc.

  3 The date is interesting as it was about this time that the modern scientific movement in Britain was emerging. What had previously been accepted as part of the rural complex of belief was now observed and questioned. Aubrey noted that civil wars ‘do not only extinguish religion and laws but also superstition’. Christopher Hill, Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution, London, 1965, p. 118.

  4 Quoted in Ralph Merrifield’s, The Use of Bellarmines in Witch Bottles, Guildhall Misc., No. 3, February 1954.

  5 A fairly recent find at Dover House, Ixworth, Suffolk appears to support this. The bottle was discovered in 1950 when a trench was being dug to insert a damp-course in this open-hall type of house. It lay just outside the threshold of a south-west door. A chip off the bottom of the stone-ware bottle probably indicates that the spade struck this part first. (For the house v. Sylvia Coleman, A Wealden House at Ixworth, Proceedings of Suffolk Institute of Archaeology, Vol. xxix, Part 3.)

  6 Geoffrey Dent, A Yorkshire Witch-Bottle, Gwerin, Vol. III, No. 4.

  7 The Times, 19th July, 1958.

  8 T. C. Lethbridge, Witches, p. 102.

  9 F. H. Groome, Two Suffolk Friends, London, 1895, pp. 27–8.

  10 Op. cit., pp. 121–2.

  11 Thomas Davidson, Gwerin, Vol. II, No. 1 (1958), p. 24.

  12 Robert Forby, The Vocabulary of East Anglia, 1830, p. 304.

  13 Folkways of Essex (Treasury of County Folklore), Douglas, I.O.M., p. 10.

  14 Edward Gepp, A Contribution to an Essex Dialect Dictionary (2nd ed.), Colchester, 1922.

  15 M. W. Barley, The English Farmhouse and Cottage, p. 144.

  16 Ellen Tarry, The Third Door, London, 1956, p. 158.

  7

  Magic and Disease

  IN THE old rural community, even up to this century, where a disease was unknown or its onset was in any way sudden or unfamiliar, the cause was often attributed to an evilly disposed person who had projected his evil thoughts on to the sufferer and reinforced them with magic. The sufferer and his friends did their best to repel this witchcraft, unconsciously using the same principle used by the witch – the primacy of thought. If a man wants a certain effect very strongly he can get the effect simply by imitating it. At no time is a man’s desire more strong than in a crisis of disease, especially is this so in a society where the material culture has not developed to the point where a scientific explanation of much disease is possible and a rational cure forthcoming. As Malinowski wrote:1 ‘… the healthy person suddenly feels his strength failing. What does a man do naturally under such conditions, setting aside all magic, belief and ritual? Forsaken by his knowledge, baffled by his past experience and by his technical skill, he realizes his impotence. Yet his desire grips him the more strongly: his anxiety, his fears and hopes induce a tension in his organism which drive him to substitute activity. Obsessed by the idea of the desired end, he sees it and feels it. His organism reproduces the acts suggested by the anticipations of hope, dictated by the emotion of passion so strongly felt.’

  At a critical time in a man’s life, in other words, hope and desire are much more powerful than reason; and we have only to remind ourselves of the comparatively recent acceptance of the germ theory of disease and the great advances – only a few years old – made in controlling infections by new drugs to realize that it was not only in primitive societies that substitute activities were practised. There was, indeed, adequate room for the exercise of hope even in such a common infection as pneumonia up to thirty years ago. A doctor friend of the writer was in practice in an industrial area of south Wales during the middle ’thirties and was successfully treating a woman for ‘double’ pneumonia with one of the new drugs. The patient soon responded to the treatment, but the doctor was puzzled by an unusual, fetid smell in the sick-room. At his next visit he discovered that the drug, although effective, had not been strong enough to carry all the hopes of the patient and the desires of her relatives to see her well again. They had, therefore, resorted to a substitute activity and had procured the lights or lungs of a healthy sheep and fixed them to the soles of the patient’s feet unknown to the doctor. This practice was once fairly widespread and is a good example of the old, pre-scientific fantasy-thought: it was known in Herefordshire2 where a fish, the tench – called the doctor-fish because other fish are supposed to rub themselves against it when they are sick – was tied to the feet to reduce a fever.

  Another example of pure sympathetic magic in the cure of disease comes from Suffolk. The disease is jaundice and the cure, practised only a few years ago, was ‘Fill a bottle with the sufferer’s urine. Place it in a running stream – uncorked, with the neck of the bottle facing upstream, against the current. After the lapse of some time the water in the bottle will become perfectly clear. When this happens the jaundice will disappear from the patient.’ The imitative or homeopathic side of magic underlies many other jaundice cures. They all include the use of yellow objects:3 a gold coin, a yellow rag, or a piece of amber. Yellow flowers were also thought to cure jaundice, particularly the celandine and the flowers of furze or whin.

  A magical cure from Ringshall in Suffolk was similar to a cure practised in many countries. If a baby had epilepsy a cure was attempted by means of an ash-tree. An ash sapling was split down and the baby was passed through the cleft in the wood. The cleft was then tightly bound up, and the sapling as far as possible restored to its former state. If it lived the baby would then grow up in normal health: if it died the epilepsy would persist, and nothing more could be done about it. Another recorded4 cure from East Anglia gives more colourful instructions to bring about the cure – this time for hernia in young children: ‘Split a young ash tree and pass the child (naked) through it at sun rise, each time with the head towards the rising sun. Then tie up the tree tightly so it may grow together.’ From the same source comes a reference to a man who later in life showed his friends the tree through which he had been passed when a baby.

  This custom was similar to the well-documented5 one of ‘passing under the arch’. The sufferer had to crawl under a bramble which had formed an arch by sending a second shoot down to the ground. It was a common primitive assumption that trees had a fertilizing spirit transferable to plants and crops and even to human beings. But it is likely that the above cures were analogues of re-birth. By being passed through a living substance the child was being born again, fortified by the fresh, living substance of the tree or the bramble, emerging free from all disease or deformity. Another custom of passing through a cleft stick to avoid the ghost of a dead man confirms this symbolism of re-birth: for by this action the living man came out an entirely different person and the pursuing ghost was, naturally, unable to identify him.

  A Suffolk cure for ague relied on contagious magic and partly, it seemed, on the potency of iron for its effect. The sufferer had to go at midnight to a cross-roads, turn round three times and then drive a tenpenny nail up to its head in the ground.6 There were other attendant conditions – the clock had to be striking the hour, and the sufferer had to walk backwards before the last note died away – but the purpose was quite clear. It was to leave the ague behind, embedded, as it were, in the nail; and the next person to walk over it would then take the disease. The driving of the nail into an aspen tree was perhaps a more certain cure, as the trembling of the aspen-leaves more than anything else resembled the symptoms of ague, and thus the two aspects of magic were invoked.

  The present writer has not himself come across an instance of the nail-cure, but the idea of transference of a disease is still alive, as he found out when talking to a countrywoman who believed that in ‘giving’ a cold to someone you were automatically cured yourself.

  Iron in the form of a tenpenny nail was o
ften used for charms or cures: to drive into the footprint of a witch; to drive into the bedpost of a woman in childbirth; or into the threshold of a bedroom to prevent the sleeper from having nightmares. A tenpenny nail was recommended so often for this sort of operation that we might suppose that such a nail had some special virtue for the purpose. But what is a tenpenny nail? It appears that tenpenny here denoted the size of the nail and that the word is equivalent to ten-pound, penny being a reversion to its original association with pound. The different sizes of nails used to be known by the weight of metal required to make a thousand of them, and the ten-pound nail was a fairly large one which was appropriated for these unusual services.

  Two magical cures for human infertility have come to light recently in East Anglia. A childless couple were recommended to place the dried testicle of a castrated horse under their pillow, and another couple were advised that they had no child because they had omitted to sleep with a pearl ring under the pillow. The principle underlying the first cure is obvious and needs no comment; but the pearl has a much more interesting significance. From early times it was the symbol of the generative powers; and like gold and jade, too, it was considered unchangeable and indestructible and, therefore, a symbol for vitality and immortality.7 This was one of the reasons for the use of pearls and gold in medicine: they imparted their indestructible vitality to those who swallowed them. The pearl also was considered an aphrodisiac and was taken as such; but as a cure for barrenness the pearl, with its implied setting in the oyster, was an analogue of the fertilized egg in the womb.

  Many cures are difficult to include under the heading of magic because they are compounded with some other method or substance that gives them some claim to be regarded as rational. Such a one is the curing of thrush or aphtha in a baby. This cure comes from the Hadleigh district of Suffolk and is linked with the blacksmith’s shop: water from the smith’s quenching trough was given to the baby to drink. The association with iron suggests that this metal’s reputation as a counter-force in magic was involved, as well as a possible curative element in the water itself. A similar practice recorded last year on the Suffolk and Norfolk border poses the same question. It used to be a custom here to give a new baby cinder-water with the purpose of ‘driving the Devil out of the baby’. In the room where the mother lay the midwife took an ember out of the fire with the tongs and placed it red-hot into a tumbler of water. She then gave some of this water to the baby.

  Whooping-cough cures, too, are often a combination of what appears to be nonsense and traditional medicine. Here are some: ‘Take a child with whooping-cough into the nethus. That’ll cure him.’ The nethus or neat-(cattle) house may contain something in the air, like ammonia fumes from the urine, and this may help to ease the cough: (compare the advice to a town mother to take the child to the gas-works): on the other hand there may be some forgotten reason why the cowshed was singled out, as in some ways it was regarded as a very special place. A Norfolk woman told the writer: ‘You mustn’t enter the nethus at midnight on Christmas Eve. The beasts are on their knees at that time and if you disturb them you’ll die before the end of the year.’

  Another common cure for whooping-cough was by giving the child fried mouse to eat. The cure is not one of those that work by suggestion because of the very necessary practice of introducing a part of the mouse (the liver is recommended) into the child’s food without his knowing. But in the Woolpit district of Suffolk the mouse-ear, a hawk-weed (hieracium pilosella) is advised as a cure. Possibly the supposed efficacy of the mouse-flesh is a kind of displacement from the properties of the plant itself. Culpepper confirms these: ‘There is a syrup made of the juice hereof, and sugar, by the apothecaries of Italy and other places which is of much account with them to be given to those that are troubled with the cough or phthisick.’ Since it has yellow flowers Culpepper also recommended the plant for jaundice. On the same principle owl-broth was once advised for whooping-cough.

  A common cure for a persistent cough in a child used to be: ‘Cut out a heart-shaped piece of brown paper. Cover it with Russian tallow or grease from the Michaelmas goose, and then sew it under the child’s shirt next to his skin. Leave it there till it drops off.’ This cure can be placed against the practice, here in East Anglia and elsewhere, of sewing up the front of a boy’s shirt ‘for the winter’.

  The following seventeenth-century recipe for a cough-cure, taken from the Blois family papers,8 is included as an illustration of the use of gold as a medicine:

  ‘A Resight how to make Lozenges for a Cofe or Consumption or any weeke body or for Rume

  Take half a pounde of double refined sugar, half a pinte of damaske rose water, two spoon fulls of sourupe of Gilyflowers, two drames of allaumes [allum?], two leaves of best Gold, three pennyworth of powder of pearle [?], as much Elecompany roote (ye powder) as will lie upon a Groate. Beat all this between two dishes upon a Chaffindish of CharkeCoale being always stirred, and when it is well boyled drop it upon a pewter plate and if they look of a dull Colour they bee anough.’

  *

  Under the third heading came those cures which can be confidently related to the tradition of folk medicine rather than to magic. But to list all the traditional cures still remembered if not practised would be tedious, as most of them are orthodox medicine now outdated but still used in rural East Anglia long after they had been forgotten in towns and the districts near them. There are, for instance, few cures in the old traditional medicine of the countryside that are not included in the seventeenth-century herbals. Yet there are some that have a much older provenance, as already indicated, and some that have escaped recording in the herbals themselves. One of these is the cure by moulds which has special interest for present-day medicine. The mould from a hot-cross bun used as a cure for a festering wound would, not so long ago, have been placed without question under the heading of a magical cure. Now, since the discovery of penicillin, it is in a more ambiguous position; though this instance seems to contradict the once widely held belief that bread baked on Good Friday would never go mouldy. Here are other examples, collected by the writer, of the traditional use of moulds in this region. A teacher recalls that she once rated a child who on her mother’s advice treated a septic cut with the mould from the top of an old pot of jam. A horseman from the Bilderston area of Suffolk used to put an old piece of boot-leather at the back of the shelf in an out-house until it had acquired a fine mould. He used this to put on a cut or wound. Another man from the same district applied the mould from a piece of old cheese for the same purpose. And a horseman from south Cambridgeshire hung up sliced pieces of apple in an old spare bedroom and used the resulting mould on the apples to give to his horses ‘when they had a bit of a cold or something’. ‘After the apples are all clung9 a mould will come on them.’

  Rather similar to the use of mould is the use of the spores of a puff-ball called bullfice10 in East Anglian dialect. Smiths sometimes kept a ball in their travus or forge and sprinkled the brown powder on burns and cuts. The fumes or spores of this large puff-ball are said to produce the effect of chloroform, and this seems to have been confirmed by a practice on the Norfolk border of Suffolk: spores of the bullfice were puffed round a hive to calm the bees. Like club-moss spores these are inflammable and were once used in the theatre to produce stage-lightning. Both varieties also did service as absorbents in surgery.11

  1 Magic, Science and Religion, p. 66.

  2 F.L.H., p. 80 and E.O.S., p. 339.

  3 Sir J. G. Frazer, Aftermath, p. 14, and E.O.S., p. 93.

  4 East Anglian Notes and Queries, Vol. II, p. 215.

  5 G.B., Part VII, Vol. 2, pp. 179 ff. Also, F. T. Elsworthy, The Evil Eye, p. 89.

  6 G.B., Part VI, pp. 57, 68.

  7 L. Levy-Bruhl, How Natives Think, p. 22; and Mircea Eliade, Images and Symbols, pp. 125 ff.

  8 Ipswich and East Suffolk Record Office.

  9 Cling to wither or shrivel up. cf. Macbeth, V, 5, 40: ‘If thou speak’st false, Upon the
next tree shalt thou hang alive, Till Famine cling thee.’

  10 A rendering of the seventeenth-century word, bull-fist: lycoperdon giganteum.

  11 Lloyd’s Encyclopaedic Dictionary, London, 1895.

  8

  Cures

  AS ALREADY indicated in the previous chapter most of the traditional remedies have gone out of use; but there is one sector where they still flourish in spite of scientific medicine and free prescription. This is the curing of warts. During the last twelve years the writer has visited dozens of villages in East Anglia, talking to groups about old country beliefs and practices, and also gleaning a great deal of information from them. With very few exceptions all the villages had a wart-charmer. He might be known to only a few members of the group; and, indeed, the others were often surprised to discover that Mr Smith could cure warts. This is probably due to his not accepting payment or advertising his gift.

  But in most villages, too, there were certain known and open remedies for curing warts. These were the physical – mostly herbal – remedies as opposed to the cures by charming or ‘magic’. Many of the herbal remedies are used very frequently. The juice of a celandine1 stalk is squeezed directly on to the warts, and this is repeated until the warts have disappeared. The milky juice of the dandelion is sometimes recommended for the same purpose. Sun-spurge is a plant used, only more rarely, in the same way. One informant told the writer that sun-spurge was very effective, but great care was needed in its use. He had cured his own warts with the juice of this herb; but some of it had inadvertently got on to his face. The cheek became most painful, swelled up and remained swollen for nearly two days. But one of the most effective of these herbal remedies is undoubtedly the broadbean pod. The beans are shelled and the furry inside of the pod is rubbed gently on the warts. Three well-attested cures by this method have come to my notice during the past few years: one was an architect’s wife whose hands were covered by warts. Orthodox treatment failed to cure them; but she heard about the bean cure and after rubbing her warts with the white fur of the pod they quickly disappeared.