Page:Notes on the folk-lore of the northern counties of England and the borders.djvu/167

Rh boy had been getting milk, in the village for some days, and thus giving our ferret half of it.”

For toothache there is remedy also. The inhabitants of Stamfordham, the Northumbrian village named already, have been accustomed to walk to Winter’s Gibbet, on Elsdon Moor, some ten or twelve miles off, for a splinter of the wood to cure toothache, as those of Durham and its neighbourhood to “Andrew Miles’s Stob,” i. e. the gibbet near Ferry Hill, on which the wretched boy of that name was executed for the murder of his master’s three little children A.D. 1683. Our county historian, Mr. Surtees, relates that a portion of the gibbet still remains, but is in a fair way to be carried off piecemeal for use as a charm against ague and toothache. How in either case the wood was to be applied we are not told, but the remedy sounds almost as ghastly as that resorted to for the same purpose at Tavistock in Devonshire—biting a tooth out of a skull in the churchyard, and keeping it always in the pocket. There is a ferocious character, too, about the Staffordshire mode of cure. It consists in carrying about a paw cut off from a live mole. A mole catcher stated to Mr. B—— S—— that he had been often asked for moles’ paws for this purpose.

Nor is weakness of the eyes uncared for. Where the teasle is grown for use in the manufacture of broad-cloth, a remedy for weak eyes is found in the water which collects in the hollow cups of that plant. Again, I have myself seen and handled a talisman from the Tweedside, which, in the hands of an old witch-woman, was deemed powerful to heal them. It was called a lammer-bead, lammer being the Scotch for amber, from the French “l’ambre;” and wondrous were the cures it wrought, in the witch-woman’s hands, when drawn over inflamed eyes or sprained limbs. It is apparently of amber, and probably was dug out of an ancient British grave or barrow. The old woman has recently died, but the bead is cherished in her family as an heirloom.