Page:The New Forest - its history and its scenery.djvu/195

Rh then drunk at stated times in water. Hares' brains are recommended for infants prematurely born. Children suffering from fits are, or rather were, passed through cloven ash-trees. Bread baked on Good Friday will not only keep seven years, but is a remedy for certain complaints. The seventh son of a seventh son can perform cures. In fact, a pharmacopoeia of such superstitions might be compiled.

The New Forest peasant puts absolute faith in all traditions, believing as firmly in St. Swithin as his forefathers did when the saint was Bishop of Winchester; turns his money, if he has any, when he sees the new moon; fancies that a burn is a charm against leaving the house; that witches cannot cross over a brook; that the death's-head moth was only first seen after the execution of Charles I.; that the man in the moon was sent there for stealing wood from the Forest—a superstition, by the way, mentioned in a slightly different form by Reginald Pecock, Bishop of Chichester, in the fifteenth century. And the "stolen bush," referred to by Caliban in the Tempest (Act ii., sc. 2), and Bottom in the Midsummer Night's Dream (Act vi. sc. 1), is still here called the "nitch," or bundle of faggots.

Not only this, but the barrows on the plains are named after the fairies, and the peasant imagines, like the treasure-seekers of the Middle-Ages, that they contain untold wealth, and that the Forest wells are full of gold.

I do not mean, however, to say that these beliefs are openly 177