Encyclopedia of Superstitions

PREFACE

SOME years ago the idea occurred to us that there was need for a work containing as complete a collection as possible of British superstitions presented in encyclopædic form, giving easy and quick reference to the reader.

There were, and are, in existence many excellent books on Folklore which review customs and superstitions of our people, but none containing in one volume a comprehensive catalogue. Moreover, all have a laborious indexing system necessitating voluminous notes and research.

We accordingly began collecting and authenticating all the superstitions we could trace. The task occupied more than four years, and is brought to a conclusion with the presentation of this volume, containing more than two thousand superstitions of Britain ranging over the past six hundred years, and extending down to the present day.

Individual classification has been carried out, and the title headings enable the reader to obtain within a few minutes the list of beliefs attached to any one subject—and, where it is possible to present it, the origin, or possible origin, of the belief.

Care has been taken to distinguish between superstition and custom. Except in one or two instances, where the line of demarcation is barely distinguishable, customs have been omitted as lacking any spiritual origin. The maypole is an exception since, though more of a custom than a superstition, its origin, in all probability, lies in the ancient worship of the Tree Spirits by our people.

Early in our examination of beliefs prevalent in Britain, and of superstitions as a whole, we were confronted with a succession of coincidences in the form of exactly similar spiritual remedies for disease in these islands and in countries which, at the time, were uncivilized judged by Western standards. Deeper research was undertaken; as a result several hundred examples of this correlated belief are given in this volume.

They raise a topic of peculiar and fascinating interest—whether, indeed, there are such things as British superstitions, or whether, on the contrary, those superstitions are world-wide, inherent in all peoples of the world in exactly identical forms of fear, of avoidance, and of remedial measures?

Take, as an example, childbirth. To ensure easy labour for a woman it was the custom in North-west Argyllshire, Scotland, to open every lock in the house. Regard this in the light of the Roman custom of presenting women in labour with a key as a charm for easy delivery. The Argyllshire custom could be stretched into a corruption of the Roman key by reason of the occupation of these islands by the Romans, and the consequent copying of custom and beliefs; but what can be said in explanation of the beliefs of the natives of the Island of Salsette, near Bombay, and of parts of Java, or Chittagong in the East Indies where, from the earliest times, all doors were opened to ease a mother in her labour?

Equally with the days following the birth. Ancient Scottish belief, dating beyond the sixteenth century, entailed that the closest watch had to be maintained over the babe lest evil spirits wreaked their will; and no person must pass between the infant and the fire during the first eight days of its life. The Greeks held that a child must not be left alone for eight days after birth; the Danes that fires in the house must not be extinguished for eight days.

When Western man penetrated into the island of Saparoca and Hanockoe, and in Nyassaland, and delved into their ancient superstitions, it was found that so long as native memory had existed the people at childbirth had known that a light must be kept burning until the eighth day of a new-born babe’s life in order that the spirits should not harm the infant.

Even more marked are the examples of homœopathic magic. In Britain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries superstition encouraged the belief that a child could be relieved of whooping cough by its elders passing it through an arch of brambles formed by one branch of the parent stem having made root in the earth. The peoples of the area round about Lake Nyassa had, at the same period, a cure for such ailment of the chest: the sufferer was made to pass through an arch formed by bending down a branch of a bush and inserting the free end in the ground.

A child with a rupture was, in Britain, at one time passed three times through a sapling, the stem of which had been cleft longitudinally with an axe, and the halves of which were held apart for the ceremony. In Uganda, the Medicine Man from time immemorial had split a tree stem and held the two halves apart while a sufferer stepped through the opening.

The M’Bengas of Western Africa on the birth of twins planted two trees; henceforth, it was believed, the lives of the children were bound up with the trees; if the trees withered and died, the children withered and died with them. In Britain the belief existed in strong measure that the health, and even the life, of a child passed through a cleft tree for rupture depended upon the progress of the tree; if the cleft, bound together, would not heal, the rupture in the child would not heal. Should the tree wither and pine away, so would the child pine away.

In a Sussex village when a portion of land changed hands and the new owner announced his intention of cutting down a row of trees, the population protested in horror; for years their children had been passed through those trees, the sides of which showed plainly for all to see the scars left by the cleavings. They protested that to kill trees would be to spell the death of their children.

A farmer near Birmingham throughout his life would not have a bough lopped or a branch clipped of a tree through which forty years earlier he had been passed for rupture. He maintained that to do so would mean that the rupture would return, fortify, and he would die.

In the heart of darkest Africa, in the jungles of Central America, the Tree Spirits were the gods, beneficent or otherwise. British people for generations nailed their headaches to a tree in the shape of a lock of hair wrapped round a nail which was then driven into the bark; they lost their headaches, the tree gained it. The hill tribes of South Mirazapur, as did other races discovered long after the practice in Britain, in like manner believed that they could transfer their evils to the beneficent Tree Spirits.

What explanation can be offered of this correlation of superstition in civilized and uncivilized countries?

Communications of people?

In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries—and between countries some of which had not then been discovered?

Between the peasants of the Scottish Highlands and the wild natives of the M’Bengas?

Is the alternative the presence of a sameness of fear inherent throughout the human race; a mysterious sameness of escape also inherent from primitive times?

The authors in the following pages have given tabulated lists of superstitions immediately beneath the classified headings, and have enlarged and illustrated them in the text beneath.

Where no source is mentioned it may be assumed that the beliefs enjoyed general circulation. Where a county or area are named, the practices described were prevalent in the places mentioned.

Our thanks are acknowledged to the many people who have so kindly supplied us with details of superstitions and beliefs within their ken; to the authors of works mentioned in the bibliography; to Mr. C. E. Leese, for Cornish beliefs; to many correspondents; and last, but by no means least, to Sir John Hammerton, who not only wrote the foreword, but so kindly helped with suggestions.

E

DWIN

and M

ONA

A. R

ADFORD

Hampton Court

Surrey, England

1947

ACCIDENTS

Accidents are most frequent when the broad bean is in flower.—East Midlands.

For many years the people in the rural areas of the East Midlands held firmly to this belief, and they took special precautions to avoid injury during the few weeks that the broad bean was flowering.

In Yorkshire it was held by old country people that the beans contained the souls of the departed, and even to-day a bean shape is associated, in some connection, with death—a relic of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

As to the origin, it is likely that the belief or connection of beans with death is a revival, in the seventeenth century, of the earlier Roman occupation, for during the three days in May when the Romans held a festival in honour of the ghosts, the head of each family arose at the dead of night, and having made certain magic signs to ward off ghosts, he threw black beans over his shoulders without looking behind him. As he did so he repeated: With these beans I redeem me and mine. The ghosts, following unseen at his heels, picked up the beans and left him and his family alone.

Similarly in Japan, on the last night of the year, the head of the family, clad in his ceremonial robes, went through all the rooms of the house at midnight carrying a box of beans, from which he scattered a number in each room pronouncing a form of words, the meaning of which was Go forth, demons. Thus was the house rid of demons and ghosts, which latter are, of course, associated with death.

ACORN

If a lady carries an acorn in her pocket or bag, she will be blessed with perpetual youth.—Sussex.

For generations British people of rural areas, in reply to this superstition handed down by word of mouth, carried acorns about their person—and steadily grew old and wizened! But the failure of one did nothing to exterminate the belief; it seemed only to stir others to further efforts.

The belief is not yet dead. On 8th August, 1946, the authors received a letter from a woman living at Worthing in Sussex. It read:

Do you know that if women carry an acorn, they will never grow old? This is an old English custom dating back to the days of the Norman Conquest.

There seems nothing to link the Normans with the charm of the acorn. On the contrary, the superstition probably existed long before the Normans. The acorn comes, of course, from the oak, and the oak was a sacred tree to the Druids. No ceremony or rite of the Druids took place without the aid of the oak and the mistletoe.

Students, too, may remark with interest that there are in the Vatican and the Lateran statues of a figure, one of the decorations of which is a necklace of acorns. The figure, strangely enough, is that of the goddess Artemis. She was the Ephesians’ embodiment of the wild life of Nature, revered on the mountainside and in the swampy lowlands, in the rustling woods and the rippling springs. She was the goddess of fecundity, though not of wedlock; and it may be that it was in this sense of perpetual youth that the superstition was originally born.

ADDER

Kill the first adder you see in the spring and you will triumph over your enemies. —General.

Let an adder go alive and bad luck will attend you.

Hang an adder skin over the chimbly (chimney) and it will bring you good luck.—Leicestershire.

Hang an adder’s skin in the rafters and your house will never catch fire.

The authors doubt whether any insurance company, shown the hanging skin, would be prepared to accept a lower premium for the fire risk!

Most of the adder superstitions belong to those areas of Britain where forest land, interspersed with open common, abounded, particularly in the New Forest. It is probable that the origin of the hanging skin insurance against fire lies in the South European gipsies, who came to England about the year 1100.

It was a gipsy custom on the evening of Easter Sunday to place herbs and simples in a wooden vessel together with the dried carcase of a snake, which every person present must have touched with his, or her, fingers. The herbs were then burned.

By the ceremony which followed all evil was supposed to have been expelled from the tribe. Fire was an evil of the Fire God.

In many parts of England it was held that a cast adder’s skin drew out thorns from a body. The same people held that adders dreaded the ash tree, and a blow from an ash stick would kill an adder outright—which no other weapon would do. It any other wood was used, the adder would not die until sundown.

ADDER BITES

To cure an adder bite, repeat verses one and two of Psalm lxviii.

The dead body of an adder, bruised on the wound it has made, is an infallible remedy for the bite.—Cornwall.

In Devonshire the remedy resorted to was to kill a chicken and thrust the bitten part of the person into the bird’s stomach. There it had to remain until the chicken was cold. If the flesh of the bird, when cold, assumed a dark colour, then the cure was effected; if the flesh retained its natural colour, the poison had been absorbed into the system of the bitten person.

In this connection it is interesting to note that when a native of the Hottentots in the Kat River settlement, on the eastern frontier of Cape Colony, was bitten by a snake, feathers were plucked from the breast of a fowl and a small incision made in the skin. The wound was applied to the incision on several separate occasions until the fowl died. It was believed that the fowl gradually died as it absorbed the venom abstracted from the wound by its body.

How the superstition came to Britain from the Hottentots, or from Britain to the Hottentots—if it did—is a matter of interesting conjecture.

Wales had a rather remarkable method of overcoming the adder’s venom. It was held that if a person bitten could leap across the nearest water before the reptile vanished, he would lose the venom, and not die. By water was not meant, necessarily, a stream; if only over a small rain-pool in the roadway, the charm worked.

In Somerset the bite of an adder was best cured, it was believed, by tying a circlet of ash twigs round the neck of the patient (see ADDER, above), and in other parts of the country the remedy was the expensive one of wrapping the bitten person in the reeking skin of a newly killed sheep.

ADDER STONES

Adder stones, carried in the pocket, will cure all maladies of the eyes.—Wales.

To prevent a child having the whooping-cough, hang an adder stone round its neck.—Superstition recorded in Scotland as far back as 1699, and still extant in remote parts of the Highlands.

Adder stones are also called Serpents’ Eggs and Snake Eggs. They were held in high esteem by the Druids. According to them the peculiar virtue resident in the stones was that they secured success in law-suits, and free access to kings and rulers. Many adder stones are still preserved as charms in those rural areas of Britain where the Celtic population still lingers. In some parts of Wales the stones go by the name of Gleini na Droedh and Glaine nan Druidhe (the Magician’s or Druid’s glass).

The legend behind the properties of the stones is that they were believed to have been made by serpents. The snakes, it was said, gathered together in a wriggling, slimy mass to generate the stones from their slaver, and shoot them into the air from their hissing jaws. It is a curious omission in superstition that such stones, thus made, were never associated with the curing of a serpent’s bite.

The gathering time of the snakes was held, in Cornwall, to be on Midsummer Eve; in Wales, on the eve of May Day. So recently as the early 1900s the authors were told, in all seriousness, by people in the Principality that they had witnessed such a congress of snakes, and had seen the magic stones in the midst of froth.

The stones are of various colours—green, pink, red, blue and brown. There are a number still preserved in several museums in the country; and many of these are perforated. It was held that the perforation was caused, after the stone had been conflated by the serpents generally, by one of the serpents sticking its tail through the still viscous glass.

The test of the genuineness of an Adder Stone was to throw it into a moving stream; if genuine it floated against the current, and no weight attached to it could make the stone sink.

AGATE

If bitten by a poisonous insect, press an agate on the spot; and the bite will come to no harm.—General.

Put an agate on the head of a person suffering from the fever, and the fever will depart.

It is likely that behind this superstitious belief lies a portion of the world-wide belief, both in civilized and heathen countries, that evil can be transferred to stones.

See WARTS.

For superstitions concerning other precious stones, see GEMS.

AGNES

Persons named Agnes always go mad.

For many years in rural North Lincolnshire no native-born child was given the name Agnes, the result of this remarkable belief. Even in the authors’ lifetime the name was taboo in Lincolnshire.

When, or how, the superstition originated is lost in antiquity. It is, of course, as complete nonsense as the belief that any boy christened George will never be hanged. Yet this question has been asked of the authors a hundred times, the phrase going, as a rule, You can’t tell me of any person with the Christian name George who has been hanged for murder. In point of fact we can give the names of half a dozen Georges who have fallen at the hangman’s hands. George Smith, the Brides in the Bath murderer," was one.

AGNES’ EVE, ST.

(21st January)

Upon St Agnes’ Eve you should take a row of pins and pull out every one, one after the other, while saying a Paternoster. Stick a pin in your sleeve and you will dream of him you are going to marry. —General belief held in the days of Robert Burton (1577-1640) and mentioned by him in his Anatomy of Melancholy; and by Aubrey in Miscellanies.

Before going to bed say: "Fair St. Agnes, play thy part. And send to me my own sweetheart. Not in his best or worst array. But in the clothes he wears every day. That to-morrow I may him ken. From among all other men.—Durham.

And on sweet St. Agnes’ night. Please you with the promised sight. Some of husbands, some of lovers. Which an empty dream discovers.—Ben Jonson’s version of the old belief, generally prevalent (1573-1637).

The St. Agnes tradition was a little more strict throughout Yorkshire and other parts of Durham. There young girls desirous of dreaming about their future husbands had to abstain from eating and drinking or even speaking during St. Agnes’ Eve, and not even touch their lips with their fingers. They had, still in silence, together to make dumb cake, the ingredients of which—flour, salt, water, etc.—must have been supplied in equal proportions by their friends, who had also to take equal shares in baking and turning the cake, and taking it out of the oven. The cake had then to be divided into equal portions and each girl, taking her share, had to walk backwards up the stairs, finally eat it and jump into bed. She might then confidently expect to see her future husband in her dreams.

In Northumberland girls, after a day’s fasting and silence, boiled an egg apiece, extracted the yolk, filled the cavity with salt, ate the egg, shell and all, and recited a couplet to St. Agnes. Another Northumbrian husband vision (and also a wife vision) could be gained on this night by swallowing a raw herring, bones and all.

Finally, in the North, all these arduous pursuits in search of a glimpse into the future could be broken by a single kiss—and young wags had a lively time on St. Agnes’ Eve kissing all girls they suspected of being in preparation for husband-gazing.

The origin of the love portent on this night lies in the life and death of the saint. St. Agnes was a Roman virgin and a martyr to the Christian faith in the reign of Diocletian (

A.D. 245–313

). The Gospel for her day in the Missale ad Usum Sarum (1554) was the Parable of the Virgins.

St. Agnes, for her Christian belief, was condemned to be debauched in the public stews before being beheaded. But her virginity was, according to legend, miraculously preserved by thunder and lightning from heaven. The account, which appears in the Miracles of the Saints, states that when Agnes refused to marry Procopius, the son of a Roman Prefect, the Prefect gave her the choice of marrying his son or serving in the Temple as a Vestal Virgin. She declined both.

The Prefect then ordered her to be led naked through the streets, proclaimed a strumpet, and left in a brothel. God, says the account, sent his angels, who presented her with a white robe; and her chamber in the brothel was brilliantly illuminated with celestial light. Many entered the chamber with evil intent, but went away converted to the new faith. Last of all Procopius entered; as soon as he laid hands upon her he fell dead.

After her execution her parents, going to lament and pray at her tomb, saw a vision of angels, among them their daughter, beside whom was standing a lamb. As a result, St. Agnes is generally depicted accompanied by a lamb. The Portiforium ad Usum Sarum declares that Agnes was the daughter of immaculate parents, that she was deeply versed in magic, and that Christ was her spouse.

AGUE, CURE OF

To cure the ague, eat, fasting, seven sage leaves, seven mornings running.

Wrap a spider in a raisin and swallow. The ague will disappear.—Common in all parts of the country.

Take a good dose of elixir and hang three spiders round the neck, and the ague will be driven away.—Berkshire charm related by Ashmole, the English antiquary, as having been tried successfully by himself.

To cure the ague, visit at midnight the nearest cross-roads five different times, and there bury a new-laid egg. With the egg you will bury the ague.—A charm mentioned by Douce as prevalent in Exeter.

Break a salted cake of bran and give it to a dog when the fit comes on, by which means the malady is supposed to be transferred to the dog.—The Gentleman’s Magazine, 1787.

If you would be rid of the ague, go by night alone to a cross-roads, and just as the clock is striking midnight turn round three times and drive a large nail into the ground up to the head. Walk backwards from the nail before the clock has finished the twelfth stroke. The ague will leave you, but will go to the person next to step over the nail.—Suffolk superstition of the 1600s.

Down the ages and in many lands this nailing and pegging of evils, and their transference to objects, animate and inanimate, has been regarded as a powerful charm against witchery—and nearly all the ills in mediæval times were attributed to bewitching. Ague has always been a disease deemed peculiarly open to the influence of charm. In Central Africa natives who could have had no knowledge whatever of the charms practised in Britain neverthelesss nailed the disease into trees in order to rid themselves of it. Pliny, in his Natural History, xxviii, 63, records it as a practice of the early Romans. More will be said of this transference of evil later in this volume. Meanwhile, mention may be made here of a North Country cure of the ague, recorded by Henderson. On the advice of an old farm labourer she took his knife, cut off a lock of her hair, wrapped the tress round a large pin and put the pin in the bark of an aspen tree, saying : Aspen tree, aspen tree, I prithee shake instead of me. She explained: I’ve niver had t’shakking fra that day to this.

Henry Wickham describes a document cure which was found round the neck of a dead man at Hurstpierpoint, Sussex. It was inscribed on a paper and is given here in the original spelling:

When Christ came upon the cross for the redemption of mankind, he shook and his Rood trembled. The Chief Priest said to him Art thou afraid, or as thou an ague? He sid unto them I am not afraid neither have I an ague, and whosoever believeth in these words shall not be troubled by anny feaver or ague. So be it unto thee.

The date on the paper was 1708; and the charm was prevalent in the Border and northern counties of Britain at the time.

Another document was described in Notes and Queries by a clergyman who, having heard a woman had been subject to the ague, but had had no return of it since she had worn a spell for the cure, explained to her the sinful nature of such superstitions, and asked her to put away the spell. For a long time she refused, saying that if she removed the spell the ague would return. At last, however, she yielded to the priest’s exhortation, took off the spell and handed it to him. He opened it and read the contents to her as follows :

"Ague, farewell.

Till we meet in hell."

The woman, a respectable widow, was horrified and declared that she would rather have the ague.

It was a belief in Devonshire that you could give away your ague by burying under your neighbour’s threshold a bag containing the parings of a dead man’s nails and the clippings of some of the hairs of his head; the neighbour would be afflicted by your ague until the bag was removed.

In Somerset and the adjoining counties the sufferer shut a large spider in a box and left it there to die. As it died, so did the ague. In Flanders the spider, imprisoned between the two halves of a walnut, was worn round the sufferer’s neck; and still is in the more remote parts.

In Wales the remedy was to cross water to a hollow willow tree, breathe into the hollow three times and then stop up the hole and go home without looking round or speaking a word. You would be cured.

In Lincolnshire the ague was charmed away by nailing three horse-shoes on the foot of the bed of the sufferer, with a hammer placed cross-wise over them. The idea was that when the Old ’Un came to shake the patient the horse-shoes plus the charm would fix him safe as a church spire. The charm was to take the mell (hammer) in the left hand, tap the horse-shoes with it and say:

"Father, Son and Holy Ghost,

Nail the Devil to the post.

Thrice I strikes with holy crook.

One for God, one for Wod,

And one for Lok."

The remarkable combination of Christianity and heathenism in the charm will be noticed, for Wod and Lok stand for the old Scandinavian gods, Woden and Loki.

An extraordinary story of an ague charm is related of Sir John Holt, Lord Chief Justice of the King’s Bench in 1709. Holt, who was a wild youth in early days, on one occasion visited with some friends a country inn. There he found the daughter in an attack of ague, and the mother anxious at the recurrence of the attacks in spite of the fact that she had spent much money on doctors. Holt, promising her that the attacks should never occur again, wrote a few words on a piece of parchment, rolled it up, and directed that the child should wear the parchment on her wrist, it to remain there until she was well. The child had no more attacks during the week that Holt and his friends remained at the inn. The mother, duly thankful, refused to accept any payment for the accommodation given to Holt.

Many years later, when Holt was a Judge, he went on circuit in the county, and one case before him was that of a reputed witch, charged with practising witchcraft. The prosecution stated that she had a spell with which she could either cure cattle which were sick or destroy those that were well. She had, it was said, been detected using the spell which was now at the convenience of the Court. Upon this Judge Holt asked that it should be given to him. The spell was in a dirty ball, wrapped in several rags, and bound with pack-thread.

He opened it, to find inside the parchment of his own boyhood joke.

After a moment’s thought, he told the jury of the incident, and explained that the so-called witchcraft charm was the parchment he had written. The result was that not only was the woman freed, but it was the last prosecution for witchcraft undertaken in the county. The account is given in Pettigrew’s Medical Superstitions.

We will conclude the cure of ague with a quotation from A Closet for Ladies and Gentlewomen, published in 1611:

Make a posset with white wine and take away the curd. Take horse-dung from a stone horse as hotte as you can get it from the horse and strain it with the posset drink, and put a little methridate and cardus benedictus and unicorn’s horne—and if you have no unicorn’s horne then put ivorie or seahorse tooth and give it to the sicke to drink fasting in the morning. Use this two or three mornings.

ALL SOULS’ DAY

If two people walk round a room at midnight and in the darkness going contrariwise, they will never meet, and one of the two will be spirited away.

All souls in Purgatory are released for twenty-four hours from this eve. On this night they are free.—Gaelic belief.

A soul cake, a soul cake. Have mercy on all Christian souls for a soul cake.—Old chant to visitors calling at any house on 2nd November.

This is the day of remembrance for the dead. It was believed by Catholics of mediæval times, and the superstition became general throughout Europe, that on this day the dead returned and for a time lingered among their living kin. Throughout the country, as late as the end of the nineteenth century, soul cakes were baked and given to all callers at a house, the invitation to eat being couched in the chant given above, making it virtually impossible to refuse to pray for the departed members of the household.

In Shropshire, up to the end of the seventeenth century, it was the custom to have on the dining-table a large pile of soul cakes, and visitors to the house, of whatever degree, took one on leaving.

In Staffordshire, Cheshire, Lancashire and Monmouthshire peasants spent the day a’Souling, proceeding from one house to another. In Herefordshire the soul cakes were of oatmeal, and any who received one had to reply to the giver: God have your soul, beens (has beens?) and all.

In Wales poor people spent the day begging for bread. This, a custom within a superstition, was a survival of the Middle Ages when the poor begged bread for the souls of their departed relatives and friends. Down to the middle nineteenth century Whitby, in Yorkshire, made soul mass loaves—small, round loaves which were sold for a farthing each, and bought mostly as presents for children. In Aberdeenshire soul cakes were called Dirge Loaves, and were presented to visitors.

In the island of St. Kilda a large cake was baked in the form of a triangle, furrowed round.

This thought for the dead is almost world-wide in its application. In Caichi (Ecuador) Indians prepare provisions and set them on a table in the local Catholic church. They become the property of the priest who then says Masses for the dead. After the service, the Indians proceed to the cemetery. There, with pots of Holy Water and burning candles, they prostrate themselves in front of the graves of their ancestors.

Now note, for comparison, how similar is the Festival of the Dead in Cambodia (Indo-China). On the last day of the month Phatrabot (Sept.-Oct.) cakes and sweetmeats are put out. Incense is burned and candles lighted to ancestral shades, who are invited: Oh, all you our ancestors who are departed, deign to come and eat. A fortnight later tiny boats made of bark are loaded with sweetmeats, coins and smoking incense and, each with a lighted candle, are set floating as the sun goes down. The souls, it is believed, embark in them to return to their own abode. In Cochin-China ancestral spirits are similarly propitiated. Even the Dahomans of West Africa set a table on one given day. In Persia, on the five days called Farwardajan, the people put food and drink in the halls of the dead. Thus, savage and civilized remember their dead.

The soul cakes survived in Britain until the late nineteenth century; the day itself is still celebrated by prayers for the dear departed in both Roman Catholic and Anglican churches.

Its origin? Like most of these Christian feasts it is a survival of a much earlier pagan feast—in this case the pagan Festival of the Dead. The early Christian Church, unable to suppress it and keep their converts, connived at it, but gave to it a religious turn. It was Odilo, the Abbot of the Cluny Benedictine monastery who, in

A.D. 998

, ordained that a solemn Mass should be said on 2nd November each year for the dead who sleep in Christ. That was the start of the Christian festival. Generations before in ancient Egypt, on the 17th of the month of Athyr (corresponding to our 13th-16th November) the dead Osiris was feasted.

ANDREW’S WELL, ST.

To know if a sick person will die of the sickness send a woman with a wooden dish to St. Andrew’s Well. If the dish, laid softly on the surface of the water, turns round sun-ways, the patient will recover. If otherwise, the patient will die.

The St. Andrew’s Well mentioned is in the village of Shadar, Isle of Lewis. And the superstition of the verdict of the waters was widely held and practised.

In a French version of the romance of Bevis of Hampton, there is an allusion to the pilgrimage on foot to St. Andrew’s Well as of equal efficacy to that of Mont St. Michel in Brittany for the cure of certain physical troubles.

ANGELS

The fossil bones of the Saurians, found in Northern Yorkshire, are called Fallen Angels.

The bones are supposed to belong to the angels who were cast out of heaven for their rebellion.

ANIMALS

If fruit trees are planted without a dead animal being buried under their roots they will not bear crops.—General.

Incredible though it may seem this absurd belief was still held in parts of this country as recently as the year 1946. The authors were approached in August of that year by a Middlesex woman who had just purchased a house and was proposing to stock the garden with fruit trees. She had, she said, been assured by a neighbour that the trees would come to no good unless a dead animal was buried under the roots.

The authors’ researches suggest that the belief arose not from any superstition, but from the practice, in Derbyshire, of burying dead animals under fruit trees in the orchards. They do not, however, put this forward as an origin, though it may be held that there is some truth in the assertion that the trees might bear better crops from the practice, not from superstition, but from the value of the manure!

See CAT, DOG, HORSE, etc.

ANTS

It is unlucky to destroy a colony of ants.—Cornwall.

When ants are unusually busy, foul weather is at hand.—General country belief.

If you place a piece of tin in a bank of Muryans at a certain age of the moon it will be turned to silver.—Cornish tin miners’ belief.

Ants’ eggs are an antidote to love.

The Cornish peasants’ name for the ant is a muryan. They were held to be the small people (fairies) in their state of decay off the earth.

In what way ants’ eggs are applied to the person desiring to fall out of love has not, so far as the authors know, been handed down.

APOPLEXY

Place a sharpened hatchet on the threshold of the house of a sufferer from apoplexy, and he will be cured.—Wales.

APOSTLE SPOONS

He was born with a silver spoon in his mouth.—General saying.

In other words his parents, or relatives, were wealthy. The superstition, if superstition it may be called, arose from the ancient custom (15th-16th century) of sponsors at a christening giving spoons as presents to their god-child. These were usually Apostle Spoons, so-called because the figures of the Apostles were chased or carved on the tips of the handles.

Opulent sponsors gave the whole twelve spoons, and silver ones at that. Those in middling circumstances gave a lesser number; and the poorer classes aped their wealthy neighbours by giving a single and metal spoon.

It is in allusion to this custom that Cranmer professes to be unworthy of being sponsor to the young princess. Shakespeare makes the King reply: Come, come, my Lord, you’d spare your spoons.

APPLE

Stand in front of a looking-class with an apple. Slice the apple into nine pieces, stick each piece on the point of a knife and hold it over the left shoulder while looking into a mirror. The spectre of your future husband will appear—to take the apple.—General country Hallowe’en belief.

N

OTE

: A variation is to eat eight slices of the apple and throw the ninth to your expected husband—in the mirror.

Let a girl pare an apple on Hallowe’en and fling the skin over her left shoulder. She will read in the twists the initials of her future husband’s name.—General.

To cat an apple without first rubbing it, is to challenge the Evil One.—Surrey superstition.

The authors have for many years followed the last superstition. Not from any superstitious belief, but as a matter of simple hygiene, since the apple while on the lice has been exposed to all the impurities of the air and insects, as well—in modern times—as the spraying with insecticides of a poisonous character The origin of this superstition would seem to be the sound common sense of some sensible person

Apples played a large part in Sussex Christmas festivities in the olden days. Single people of either sex fastened each an apple to a string which had, then, to be twirled in front of a hot fire. Whichever apple first fell off, its owner was held to be on the point of getting married. This, it may well be believed, in mixed company caused not a little heartburning. The owner of the last apple to fall was doomed to remain a spinster, or bachelor, for life.

While the origins of the apple twirling and the paring are not known, that of the throwing over the shoulder the parings and reading the twists would seem to have come from the bloodstained smoke of Baal’s fire. The oakwreathed Druids drew conclusions of the future by watching the writhings of their victims, whether animal or human. under their knives, and the way they fell in their death agony. So a less bloodthirsty age deals in apple skins, in the placement of tea-leaves in a cup, or molten lead poured into water to reveal the future by its fallen shape.

It is passing strange that in this country the apple is not associated with fecundity—a superstition that has been held in other hands from earliest times.

APPLE HOWLING

See APPLE TREES.

APPLE PIPS

A maid should take an apple pip, and, naming one of her avowed lovers, put it in the fire. Should the pip make a noise in bursting from the heat, it is a proof of love. If it is consumed without a crack, the avowed lover has no real regard.—Old Suffolk.

Identically the same superstition prevailed in Durham and the Border Counties. The belle of the village could occupy an entire evening in this form of love delineation!

APPLE TREES

If the sun shines through the apple trees on Christmas Day, there will be an abundant crop the following year.—Derbyshire.

To ensure a good apple crop, a piece of toast should be placed in a fork of the biggest tree in the orchard.—Somerset and Cornwall. This rite was supposed to propitiate the spirits which watch over apple trees.

If an apple remains on the tree until the spring, a member of the family owning the tree will die.

Should an apple tree bear at the same time blossom and fruit nearly mature, there will be a death in the family.

The placing of toast in a fork of an apple tree was part of the ceremony of Wassailing the Apples, observed for many years at Carhampton, near Minehead, Somerset. (It was still preserved up to shortly before the World War of 1939-45). Men of the village formed Wassail parties, and proceeded to certain orchards, where they were joined by the farmer and his men. These, standing round the trees, sang the old wassail song, the last verse of which ran:

Old apple tree, old apple tree,

We’ve come to wassail thee.

To bear and to bow apples enow,

Hats full, caps full, three bushel bags full,

Barn floors full, and a little heap under the stairs.

The superstition was followed, also, in Sussex, Devonshire and Cornwall, with the difference, in Cornwall, that the apple crop being intended for cider, that beverage was drunk by the wassailers, the dregs afterwards being thrown over the trees. The wassail time, in each case, was the Yule-tide season—usually on Twelfth Night. It was known, locally, as apple howling (or yuling).

At Keston and Wickham, however, similar ceremonies took place during Rogation Week, at which young men met together, and with an outcry of noises ran into orchards, encircled trees, and chanted:

Stand fast root, bear well top;

God send us a yowling sop.

Every twig apple big

Every bough apple enow.

In return for the incantation the men expected money or drink. In the unlikely event of neither being proffered, they returned and anathematized the trees!

Now the origin of all this seems to belong to age-old perambulations of pagans, who made prayers to their gods for the blessing of fruit. We have referred to the local name given to wassailing in Sussex and Devonshire as apple yuling. The pagans supplicated Eolus (sometimes written Æolus, in Greek and Roman mythology, the God of the Winds) for his favourable blasts. The festival of Eolus was the winter solstice—about 25th December. From Eolus to Yule is a short step.

Hereford, another cider country, has a saying, or it had, that unless the orchards are christened on St. Peter’s Day the crop will not be good.

The christening was the pouring of a glass of cider over the apple trees, or the orchard.

Two other superstitions associated with apples are: that apple blossom flowing in Autumn means death to someone in the house of the owner of the tree (this is a Cheshire belief); if a crab apple overhanging a well blossoms out of season there will be more births and marriages than deaths, say the people in Welsh country areas. Lastly, is an old general belief:

A blossom upon the apple tree when the apples arc ripe,

Is a sure termination to somebody’s life.

It may be of interest in passing to point out that many German peasants think that the after-birth of a cow must be hung in an apple tree, otherwise the cow will not have a calf next year; and in connection with this should be mentioned an old Yorkshire belief in Cleveland that when a mare foals the placenta must be hung in a thorn tree, or bush, to secure luck with the foal.

See TREE WORSHIP.

APRIL

A cold April gives bread and wine.—Old country belief.

If the first days of April be foggy, it prognosticates that there will be floods In June.

A cold April was regarded by our country forefathers as luck for farming operations. One of their beliefs was that A cold April the barn will fill.

Thunder on April the First (All Fools’ Day) was welcomed on the principle that

If it thunders on All Fools’ Day

It brings good crops of corn and hay.

And, of course, we all know the rhyme that March winds and April showers bring forth May flowers.

APRIL FOOL

On the first day of April,

Hunt the gowk another mile.

—Scotland.

"April fool … April fool.—Everywhere.

Hunting the Gowk represents the more elaborate 1st April custom. It is more common in Scotland, but occasionally prevalent in England. The fooled youth was dispatched with a couplet in a sealed envelope to a particular person. That person, opening the letter, and reading the joke. rewrote it, or merely enclosed it in a fresh envelope, and dispatched the messenger to another address, and so on, ad infinitum until the fool realized his predicament.

In England the more popular fooling was to send a youth for some pigeon’s milk; to a bookseller for the History of Eve’s Mother, or a left-handed knife from the ironmonger. The vogue has nowadays pretty well died out, modern young people being a little too wide-awake.

The origin? The practice seems to have come to Britain from France, which country took the lead (in 1564) in moving the new year from what is now known as Lady Day (25th March) to the present 1st January. From the earliest period of history people of all nations made a practice of bestowing gifts upon their friends on New Year’s Day. As the old New Year’s Day, 25th March, fell so often in Holy Week, the Church uniformly postponed the celebrations until the Octave—1st April. When, therefore, New Year’s Day was transferred to 1st January people in France paid mock visits to their friends on 1st April, with the object of fooling them into the belief that that date was still the first day of the new year. That is the usually accepted origin.

But an immemorial custom among the Hindus at the Huli Festival (held about the same time of the year—1st April) was to send people on errands that were bound to end in disappointment. Even before this was the ancient practice of celebrating with rites and merriment the period of the Vernal Equinox on the day when the new year of Persia anciently began.

Readers may be interested in the story of the most tragic April Fooling of any time—the rape of the Sabines by the Romans. The latter, finding that they could not obtain women from their neighbours by peaceful addresses, made use of stratagem. They initiated certain games to be performed in the beginning of April (according to the Roman calendar) in honour of Neptune. Upon receiving notice of the games, the bordering inhabitants flocked to Rome to see the celebrations, whereupon the Romans went out into the country, seized a great number of the Sabine virgins, and ravished them.

APRON

For a fisherman to meet a woman wearing a white apron as he is walking to his ship to go to sea will bring bad luck during the voyage.

The ill-luck can, however, be averted if the fisherman returns home, and waits for one tide.

This was a widely held superstition along the Yorkshire coast; and at such times as tides were favourable, and smacks and trawlers were like to put out, fisherwives eschewed white aprons.

The suggestion still pertains in certain villages of the county.

ARCHES

Throughout the superstition practices of almost every country, use of an arch is universal. In Britain the passing of a child, or person, under an arch of brambles, was regarded (together with certain words of ritual) as a certain cure for whooping cough, blackheads, boils, and rheumatism, among other diseases. A child with rickets was passed through a split trunk of an elder or ash tree, kept open with a wedge, forming, again, an arch. For whooping cough in a child, another remedy was to pass the child underneath the belly of an ass, once more the arch theory.

Now compare the superstitions of, first, Bulgaria, where when whooping cough is prevalent in a village, an old woman will scrape the earth from under a willow tree, after which, all the children creep through the opening thus made. In the Lake Nyassa country, when sickness is rife, sufferers crawl through an arch formed by bending a branch down and inserting the free end in the ground.

In Uganda, a tree stem is split and the split held open by the Medicine Man while the sick person steps through. There are certain directions as to clothes, but it is the arch which is the main theory of the operation.

In France, in Germany, among the Ovambo of South-West Africa, the arch is paramount. Highlanders of Strathspey used to force all their sheep and cattle through an arch of rowan tree, on All Saints’ Day, and Beltane. In Oldenburg, a cow giving little or no milk is passed through a hole made by a branch.

The instances can be multiplied in a hundred countries. When the Kayans of Borneo are returning from a journey which has been dogged by ill-luck, they fashion an archway of boughs, light a fire under it, and pass through in single file.

What is the origin which made the arch so universally accepted a safeguard? The authors suggest that it was, in all probability, the acceptance of the idea that all illness is an evil spirit, pursuing the sufferer; and that the arch was what a door has become to-day—something that can shut out a pursuer. Thus, to pass through the arch, having made certain ritual preparations beforehand, is to give the slip to the dangerous pursuer and reach sanctuary on the other side.

ARVALS

Come, bring my jerkin, Tubb, I’ll be to the Arvil

Yon man’s dead seny scoun, it makes me marvil.

The Arval was a thin, light and sweet cake (called Arval bread) distributed in the North of England at funerals—in other words, a funeral loaf. It was sometimes distributed to the poor by the relatives of the deceased; but its real reason was to sustain the friends and relatives of the dead to whom the corpse was exposed, as Hazlitt puts it, "to exculpate the heir and those entitled to the possessions of the deceased from fines and mulcts to the Lord of the Manor, and from all accusations of having used violence; so that the persons then convened might avouch that the person died fairly and without any personal injury." The people of the older days were a suspicious lot.

N

OTE

: Arthel (corrupted to Arval) is a British word. In Wales it was written Arddel. It signified, according to Doctor Davies’s dictionary, asserere, to avouch.

Origin: The origin of these funeral feasts has been stated to be the Roman occupation of Britain. The authors question the likelihood, since the Roman Arvals were ceremonies intended to ensure the fertility of the soil, and particularly in relation to the corn crops, the Fratres Arvales (Roman Brethren of the Ploughed Fields) being a college of priests whose business it was to perform the rites deemed necessary for the growth of the corn.

On the other hand, Cecrops, the mythical founder of, and first King of, Athens, is said to have instituted funeral feasts for the purpose of renewing decayed friendships among old friends. Whether there exists any connection directly between the funeral feasts of Cecrops and the arvals of the North Country of Britain, history has failed to show.

A Northern Britain funeral feast of nearer affinity to Cecrops is that more recent than the Arvals, known as buryin’ him’ w’ ham.

ASCENSION DAY

If it rains on Ascension Day, though never so little, it foretells a scarcity that year, and sickness, particularly among cattle.

If it be fair, then, to the contrary, there will be pleasant weather, mostly till Michaelmas.—Weather superstition, generally held.

The figure of a lamb appears in the sky in the East on this day.—Old Devonshire superstition.

To hang an egg laid on Ascension Day in the roof of your house preservers the house from all harm.—Rife in the early sixteenth century throughout Britain.

If work is continued on Ascension Day, an accident will occur.—Superstition once widely held in Bangor (Wales) and other areas.

Superstition dies hard; but on two occasions the management of Lord Penrhyn’s slate quarries, near Bangor, succeeded in overcoming the belief that there would be accidents if work continued in the quarries on Ascension Day. But for two years in succession an accident did occur. The holiday was then resumed at the insistence of the workmen. It is not, of course, persisted in in these more enlightened times.

The belief that the figure of a lamb appears in the sky in the East on this morning appears to have been prevalent mostly in the Exeter area of Devonshire. It was so deeply rooted that (says an authority of the time): It hath frequently resisted, even in intelligent minds, force of the strongest argument."

It was the custom of many villages around Exeter to Hail the Lamb on Ascension morning, expeditions being made at dawn to a high spot where the sky was unobstructed by trees.

An Ascension Day superstition in the villages near York in the early nineteenth century was for children to lay rushes (or .sehhs) on their doorsteps. It is of passing interest to note that in Cologne (Germany) in pre-Reformation days, the streets on this day were strewn with short twigs of fir branches and other green things for an annual procession.

At Tissington, Derbyshire, the inhabitants are wont to dress their healing well on this day. It seems on a par with the practice in parts of Switzerland, where girls climb the towers of their churches and ring all the bells in order to ensure a good harvest of flax. The girl who swings her bell the highest will get the longest sheaf of flax.

In Sicily Ascension Day was believed to hold marvellous charms of healing. People who suffered with goitre gathered at midnight to bite the bark from the trunk of a peach tree. The biting had to be done at the moment that the clocks struck midnight. The malady, it was believed, was passed into the sap of the tree, and the subsequent behaviour of the tree—whether its leaves withered or not—was a guide to whether the patient was to be cured or not.

See GOITRE, WELLS.

ASHEN FAGGOT, THE

Since time immemorial it has been a Christmas Eve custom in Somerset and Devon to burn the Ashen Faggot, in local inns and taverns, as in King Alfred’s time.

Custom ordains that the faggot—it must be of ash wood—should be hooped round with nine bands of the same wood. Each time a band cracks with the heat, the watching company regale themselves with a mixture of cider and egg. In 1945, and the five years previous, the egg was mostly missing.

A superstition attached to it was that nine of the unmarried company might each choose a hoop band. The band which first bursts indicated that whoever had chosen it would be the first to be married. These last two points—the refreshment and the marriage—may account for the emphasis laid on the necessity for watching the faggot during the burning. The breaking of each band was the signal for a fresh toast.

As for the origin: Legend has it that the Blessed Virgin, being cold in the scanty shelter of a stable on the first Christmas Eve, St. Joseph collected a bundle of sticks to make a fire, and chose ash twigs because he knew they were the only green ones that would burn. This, however, has nothing to do with Devon or Somerset; and local Somerset tradition says that King Alfred’s men, being cold and weary on the night before the battle of Ethandune, were overjoyed at finding ash, common in that particular neighbourhood, as it would burn easily, although green. They accordingly cut and tied faggots of ash, and burned them.

ASHES

Before going to bed on New Year’s Eve spread the ashes of the raked-out five smoothly over the floor. Should the toes of a footprint next morning be seen pointing to the door a member of the household will die during the year; should the toe be pointing away from the door, there will be an addition to the family.—Manx uplands.

Ashes from the May Beltane fires, placed in a person’s shoes, will protect the wearer from great sorrow or woe.—Wales.

From the earliest times the charm of ashes has been a powerful one. People of all nations, civilized and savage, have seen in them the germ of fertility.

Not only were the ashes of more or less sacred fires gathered and mixed with the seed at sowing—this was a practice in many parts of Britain, at the great fire festivals—but they were also scattered on the fields after the seeds had been planted, and when it was growing

The Hallowe’en and Midsummer Fires of England and Scotland in earlier days were used for this purpose.

In the Isle of Man on Midsummer Eve fires were lighted in the villages, to the windward of the fields, in order that the smoke and ashes might blow over the crops and magnify them.

In the North of England, particularly in Northumberland, down to the middle of the nineteenth century, when the Midsummer Fires were lit, villagers ignited torches at the blaze, and with them made a circuit of their crops, letting the smoke and the ash from the torch fertilize their lands and crops.

Braemar Highlanders performed the same evolutions at the time of the Hallowe’en fires, the lighted torches ensuring, they believed, the fertility of the crops. In other parts of Scotland ashes from the fires were scattered round the borders of the fields, a symbolic scattering on the crops.

In most of the Catholic countries of Europe, ashes of the Easter bonfires were mixed with ashes from the consecrated palms and then mixed again with the seed to be sown for the next harvest.

In Germany the ashes of the bonfires were mixed with the drink of animals in order to make the animals thrive. In Auvergne on the first Sunday in Lent bonfires were kindled and the ashes were scattered by villagers across their