Notes on the folk-lore of the northern counties of England and the borders/Chapter 9
CHAPTER IX.
OCCULT POWERS AND SYMPATHIES.
Seventh Sons or “Marcoux”—Twins—Aërial Appearances—The Schoolboy and Neville’s Cross—Sympathy between Bees and their Owners—Sacred character of Bees—The Old Woman and Spider—Marks on the Leg of the Pig—The Presbyterian Minister and the Fisher Folk.
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.[1]
The Orléannais is the district where the belief in the powers of the marcou is the strongest. “If a man is the seventh son of his father, no female intervening, he is a marcou; he has on some part of his body the mark of a fleur-de-lis, and, like the King of France, he has the power of curing the king’s-evil. All that is necessary to effect a cure is that the marcou should breathe upon the part affected, or that the sufferer should touch the mark of the fleur-de-lis. Of all the marcoux of the Orléannais, he of Ormes is the best known and most celebrated. Every year, from twenty, thirty, forty leagues around, crowds of patients come to visit him . . . . The marcou of Ormes is a cooper in easy circumstance, being the possessor of a horse and carriage. His name is Foulon, and in this country he is known by the appellation of ‘Le beau marcou.’ He has the fleur-de-lis on his left side.”[2]
On the Borders the sign of the seven stars marks the seventh son to be a channel of healing. If seventh sons thus marked are brought up as doctors they are in great requisition; in any case, people resort to them to be touched for the king’s-evil. The belief in their powers holds its ground firmly in the Western Highlands. There the seventh son lays his hand on the party affected, commonly, but not always, uttering an invocation to the Trinity. In the island of Lewis he gives the patient a sixpenny-piece with a hole in it, through which a string is passed to wear round the neck. Should this be taken off a return of the malady may be looked for. Dr. Mitchell adds, that when seven sons are born in succession the parents consider themselves bound, if possible, to bring up the seventh for a doctor. Seventh sons are also seers, having the privilege, if such it be, of secondsight. Their healing powers are, on the Borders, shared with twins and children born with cauls; but in all these cases the virtue is held to be so much subtracted from their own vital energy, and if much drawn upon they pine away and die of exhaustion. The Portuguese belief is widely different. A seventh son is declared in Portugal to be changed every Saturday night into an ass, and to be chased by dogs till morning light.[3] As to twins, a strong sympathy is believed to exist between them, so that what gives pain or pleasure to the one is suffered or enjoyed by the other as well. Should one die, however, the other, though weakly before, will at once improve in health and strength, the life and vital energy of his fellow being added to his own.
This curious belief recalls to the memory how, in Spenser’s “Faerie Queene,” Agapé, the mother of three brave knights,
Borne of one mother in one happie mold,
Borne at one burden in one happie morne,
visits the three Fates that she may learn the length of her sons’ lives, and finding the thread of their existence
So thin as spiders’ frame,
And eke so short that seemed their ends out shortly came,
finding also that no prayer of hers could avail to lengthen their allotted span, she asked and obtained the following request:
“Then since,” quoth she, the “terme of each man’s life,
For nought may lessened or enlarged be;
Grant this: that when ye shred with fatall knife
His life, which is the eldest of the three,
Which is of them the shortest, as I see,
Eft soones his life may pass into the next;
And when the next shall likewise ended bee,
That both their lives may likewise be annext
Unto the third, that his may so be trebly wext.”[4]
While speaking of twins, I may perhaps mention that in Sussex a “left twin,” that is a child who has outlived its fellow twin, is thought to have the power of curing the thrush by blowing three times successively into the patient’s mouth, provided this same patient be of opposite sex to the operator.
There is a strong tendency in the “North Countrie” to connect the past and the present, external nature and the history and destiny of man. Thus the aurora borealis is still well known there as “the Derwentwater Lights,” in consequence of having been particularly red and vivid at the time of that unfortunate nobleman’s execution. The death of Louis XVI. was fore-shadowed, too, by the aurora borealis; and myriads of fighting men were seen in the sky night after night, all through the county of Durham, before the French Revolution. The late Canon Humble informed me that he had heard people declare they had distinctly heard the cries of the combatants and groans of the wounded. Again, before the rising of either 1715 or 1745, appearances were seen in the sky as of encountering armies, which were, however, subsequently explained by a refraction in the atmosphere, causing something like the Fata Morgana. A few Jacobite gentlemen raised certain troops of horse, and exercised them on some of the high ground in Lancashire, and, these being seen reflected in the clouds, formed the apparition. Still, without doubt, wars have been ushered in by such aërial appearances. Armies were seen contending in the clouds before the destruction of Jerusalem, as well as before the battle of Ivry and the persecutions of the Waldenses in the seventeenth century.
But further: Our great battles have left an abiding impress on the imagination and heart of the Northern.
Thus to this day “a Nevell” means in Durham a knock-down blow, doubtless from the battle of Neville’s Cross.
The following incident, which occurred to my fellow-worker, is a further witness of this. She was teaching in a Sunday-school in the city of Durham, and the chapter (from the first book of Samuel) having been duly read in class, one of the pupils observed that he did not like that chapter as well as last Sunday’s, because there were no battles in it. On this the teacher thought fit to dilate on the blessings of peace and the horrors of war; to all which, like a truculent young northern as he was, the boy turned a deaf ear, only observing that there had been a great battle close to Durham once. “And where was it fought?” asked she. “At Neville’s Cross,” answered the lad, promptly. “I go there very often of an evening to see the place; and if you walk nine times round the Cross, and then stoop down and lay your head on the turf, you’ll hear the noise of the battle and the clash of the armour.” These were the young fellow’s exact words. The walking round the Cross I believe to be purely local; but the sites of other great battles of the world are in like manner haunted by echoes of the fight; and the Northamptonshire peasant on Naseby field, and the Greek shepherd on the plains of Marathon, alike listen for them with thrilling heart.
I may, perhaps, allude here to the sympathy supposed to exist between bees and their owners, a belief in which seems to have extended over every part of our island. It is said here and there that bees will not thrive in a quarrelsome family; that if a swarm alight on a dead tree there will be a death in the owner’s house within a year—
Swarmed on a rotten stick the bees I spied,
Which erst I saw when Goody Dobson died.—Gay.
but that a strange swarm settling in one’s garden brings good fortune; that stolen bees never thrive; that bees love children, “Bees have for thee no sting” (Lyra Innocentium); that if they make their nest in the roof of a house none of the girls born in it will marry; that bees must not be bought, they would thrive as ill as if they were stolen; they should be exchanged for another swarm in the following year, or bartered for something in kind; on the borders of Dartmoor the ordinary equivalent is a bag, i. e. half-a-sack of wheat; and, above all, that on the death of the master, or indeed of any member of his family, the bees will desert their hives, unless some one takes the house-key, raps with it three times on the board that supports the hives, informs the bees what has taken place, and fastens a bit of black crape to the hive. This last belief I know to be prevalent in Northumberland, Lincolnshire, Oxfordshire, Surrey, and Sussex, as well as Devonshire, and a Yorkshire lady speaks of it as follows: “When I came to F———, in 1847, everything was much as it had been when my husband’s mother was living. She had not then been dead a year. In the garden I noticed a row of bee skeps, to which were attached one or two pieces of black crape. The hives were empty. On inquiry, one of the servants said, ‘Ah! the bees are all flown, ma’am; they are offended because none of the family went to tell them of mistress’s death. I suppose the young ladies did not think of such things, and, though I put the bits of mourning on them, they all went away.’”
Precisely the same belief holds in North Germany, where they also maintain that when the master of the house dies some one must go into the garden and shake the trees, saying, “The master is dead,—the master is dead,” else they will all decay.
From the same Yorkshire friend I learn that bees further require a taste of every thing served at the funeral feast, and that an instance has lately come before her in which this had been done, and a small portion of each dish laid before the hives. In Lancashire the bees demand an announcement of marriage also, on pain of misfortune to the bridal pair. The same thing is done in Brittany, where a piece of red cloth is tied to the hives while imparting the information.
Bees have in many parts of France been regarded with religious reverence as the instruments for fabricating wax for the altar-lights, and it was considered a sacrilegious act to kill them. The same feeling existed in Wales. Thus the Gevantian code says: “The origin of bees is from Paradise; God conferred this blessing upon them, therefore mass cannot be said without the wax;” and it was once held in that country that bees were created white, but turned brown at the Fall. That strange writer, Charles Butler, in his Feminine Monarchie, A.D. 1634, tells how “A certain woman, having some stalls of bees which yielded not unto her her desired profit, but did consume and die of the murrain, made her moan to another woman, more simple than herself, who gave her counsel to get a consecrated host and put it among them. According to whose advice she went to the priest to receive the host, which, when she had done, she kept it in her mouth, and, being come home again, she took it out and put it into one of her hives, whereupon the murrain ceased and the honey abounded. The woman, therefore, lifting up the hive at the due time to take out the honey, saw therein (most strange to be seen) a chapel built by the bees, with an altar in it, the walls adorned by marvellous skill of architecture, with windows conveniently set in their places, also a door, and a steeple with bells. And, the host being set on the altar, the bees, making a sweet noise, flew round about it.” And, further, he relates that some thieves having stolen a pyx and cast the wafer under a hive of bees, the bees that night made another pyx of “whitest wax,” round which they sang most sweetly, as the owner of the hive found at midnight. Both these stories he takes from Bosius de Signis Ecclesiæ.
Mr. Hawker, of Morwenstowe, in his Echoes of Old Cornwall, versifies a legend of the same character, and connects it with Cornwall. Somewhat different is a narration given in an old French book by the Jesuit Father Toupain Bridoul, on “The miraculous respects and acknowledgments which birds, beasts, and insects, upon several occasions, have rendered to the Holy Sacrament of the altar.” It runs thus: “Bees honour the Holy Host divers ways, by lifting it from the earth and carrying it in their hives as it were in procession. A certain peasant of Auvergne, a province in France, perceiving that his bees were likely to die, to prevent this misfortune was advised, after he had received the communion, to reserve the host, and to blow it into one of the hives. As he tried to do it the host fell on the ground. Behold now a wonder! On a sudden all the bees came forth out of their hives, and, ranging themselves in good order, lifted the host from the ground, and carrying it in upon their wings placed it among the combs. After this the man went out upon his business, and at his return found this advice had succeeded ill, for all his bees were dead.”
Again, bees are said at Christmas to hum a Christmas hymn. Thus the Rev. Hugh Taylor writes: “A man of the name of Murray died about the age of ninety, in the parish of Earsdon, Northumberland. He told a sister of mine that on Christmas Eve the bees assemble and hum a Christmas hymn, and that his mother had distinctly heard them do this on one occasion when she had gone out to listen for her husband’s return. Murray was a shrewd man, yet he seemed to believe this implicitly.” It is mentioned by Hutchinson[5] that, in the parish of Whitbeck, in Cumberland, bees are said to sing at midnight as soon as the day of the Nativity begins, and also that oxen kneel in their stalls at the same day and hour.
One or two instances, in which popular belief glorifies the world around us with light borrowed from the days when Our Saviour walked on earth, have been given already. I add another of exceeding beauty which has come before me. In the little town of Malton, in Yorkshire, a few years ago, my friend the late Dr. Dykes, while visiting an old woman during her last illness, observed a spider near her bed, and attempted to destroy it. She at once interfered, and told him with much earnestness that spiders ought not to be killed; for we should remember how, when our Blessed Lord lay in the manger at Bethlehem, the spider came and spun a beautiful web, which protected the innocent Babe from all the dangers which surrounded Him. The old woman was about ninety years of age. I have never met with the legend elsewhere, but it may have originated the Kentish proverb—
He who would wish to thrive,
Must let spiders run alive.
The spider is curiously connected with the history of Mahomet. He is said during his flight from Mecca to have been saved by a spider and a pigeon. While he was concealed in a cave his enemies came up in pursuit of him, but, perceiving a spider’s web across the cave’s mouth and a pigeon in her nest just above, they concluded the place to have been undisturbed and did not enter it. There is a Hebrew tradition to the same effect concerning King David. While flying from Saul in the desert of Ziph, a web, it is said, was spun over a cave in which he rested, and thus the band in search of him were led to believe that no one could be concealed there. Accordingly in the Chaldaic paraphrase of Psalm lvii. instead of “I will cry unto the Most High God, even unto the God that shall perform the cause which I have in hand,” we find “I will cry unto the Most High and Mighty God, which sent the spider that she should spin her web in the mouth of the cave to preserve me.”[6]
It is well known that the Italian peasant maintains the John Dorée to have been the fish captured by St. Peter at our Lord’s bidding, and that he sees within its mouth the impress of the tribute-money, and on its sides the marks of the Apostle’s thumb and finger. I learn from Professor Marecco that on the inside of the foreleg of the pig six small rings are to be found apparently burned in, and that these are said to be the marks of the Devil’s fingers, made when he entered the herd of swine. The Professor confesses himself unable to assign the exact locality of this belief, but the following verse respecting the flounder and other fish comes from the county of Durham:
Haddock, cod, turbot, and ling,
Of all the fish i’ the sea herring’s the king.
Up started the flowk and said “Here am I,”
And ever since that his mouth stands awry.
Let me conclude this chapter with an incident related to me by the late Canon Humble, and which is remarkable as evincing in North Britain a tone of mind rather medieval than modern. When the Rev. G. J. first went to officiate in the remote seaside village of M———, where almost all his congregation were fisherfolk, he was far from popular among them. However, it happened that he was invited to go out to sea for a night during the fishing season. He went, and on the return home in the morning the number of fishes in that boat was found to be one hundred and fifty-three, the same as at the miraculous draught of fishes recorded in St. John xxi. 2. From that hour the people’s feeling towards their pastor changed. They one and all bowed to the will of Heaven thus made known in his favour, and acknowledged him to be a true fisherman in the bark of St. Peter.