Page:Notes on the folk-lore of the northern counties of England and the borders.djvu/327

305 CHAPTER IX.

OCCULT POWERS AND SYMPATHIES.

MONG occult powers exercised, or thought to be exercised, by certain members of the human race, none have been more widely credited than those supposed to reside in seventh sons. The seventh of a family of sons, no daughters intervening, has the reputation of healing scrofula and other kindred complaints with the touch. This belief has been universal in Great Britain as well as in France, and it still crops out here and there. In the village of Ideford, in South Devon, lived (perhaps still lives) a respectable farmer, who claimed to heal as a seventh son, and patients resorted to him from Exeter, Torquay, and other places at some little distance.

Persons thus gifted are called in France marcoux, after St. Marcoul, a holy man who died A.D. 658. His reputation for sanctity rests on his performance of many miracles in the cure of this disease, which is named after him St. Marcoul’s Evil. Louis IX. and other French kings his successors, who be it remembered used like our English monarchs to touch for the evil, were accustomed after their coronation to go on pilgrimage to Corbigny, 120 miles from Rheims, to perform a nine days’ devotion at the shrine of St. Marcoul. The Painted Chamber in the Palace at Westminster, which appears to have been the place where our sovereigns touched for the evil, was formerly called the chamber of St. Marcoul.