Page:History of the Fylde of Lancashire (IA historyoffyldeof00portiala).pdf/121

 from whose mouth it had been removed. A pair of shoes placed under the bed so that the tips of the toes alone were visible, formed a certain remedy for cramp. Warts were removed by rubbing them with a piece of stolen beef, which was afterwards carefully and secretly buried to render the charm complete; a snail hung on to a thorn was equally efficacious in removing these excrescences, which gradually faded away as the snail itself melted and vanished. A bag, containing small stones of the same number as the warts, thrown over the left shoulder, transmitted them to the person who had the misfortune to pick up the pebbles. People labouring under attacks of ague, jaundice, or other ailments, applied for relief to the wise-men of the neighbourhood, who professed to cure them by incantations. The two following receipts are taken from an old medical work, published as early as 1612, and in its time a highly popular authority on matters of "Phisicke and Chirurgerie" amongst our rural populations:—

"A good Medicine to staunch the bleeding of the Nose, although it bleed never so freely.

"Take an egg and breake it on the top, in such sorte that all the white and yolke may issue cleane forthe of it; then fill the egg-shell with some of the bloud of the party which bleedeth, and put it in the fire, and there let it remaine until it be harde, and then burne it to ashes, and it will staunch the bleeding immediately without all doubt."

"A very good Medicine to staunch bloud when nothing else will do it, by reason the veine is cut, or that the wound is greate.

"Take a Toade and dry him very well in the sunne, and then put him in a linen Bagge, and hang him about the necke of him that bleedeth with a stringe, and let it hange so low that it may touch his breaste on the left side neere unto his hart, and commonly this will stay all manner of bleeding at the mouth, nose, wound, or otherwise whatever. Probatum est."

A woman named Bamber, living at Marton, attained to con-*considerable celebrity amongst the peasantry and others by her skill in checking bleeding, which she is reported to have accomplished by the utterance of some mystic words.

The people of the Fylde were not exempt from the common belief in the miraculous power of the Royal touch in that particular form of disease known as king's evil, for amongst the records of the Thirty-men of Kirkham is a notice that in 1632 a sum of money was "given to Ricd. Barnes's child, that had the king's evil, to help him up to London," to be touched by Charles I.